LIVING through a pandemic –and we should never forget that we are, as the First Minister reassured us on Tuesday, going to make it past this difficult period – it is understandable and indeed right that we keep our eyes firmly on the path we are treading lest we slip or fall.

But sometimes we also need to look up and use the experiences we are having to feed our desire for something better.

Outward-looking, civicly minded Scottish independence will before long triumph over a halfway house devolution settlement grafted on to an archaic unwritten constitution being operated by an arrogant gang of aggressive but not very talented British nationalists ... and that must be the goal we pursue with unremitting focus.

But independence is about more, as they used to say in Ireland, than altering the colour of the postboxes. Much as we need it we also need to remember that our job is not just to change the state we are in but to make something new so that life is better for the present and our country made fully fit for the future.

One of the key lessons of the lockdown has been the importance of localism. Many communities have embraced that spontaneously, as I have seen across my own constituency. Resilience groups have sprung up to supplement existing structures and sometimes pass them by.

The provision of food for those who need it, enhanced collective shopping, support for prescription deliveries and hospital visits and the diversification of local businesses into new niches are all visible signs of individual concern being made collective and producing beneficial outcomes.

Localism is about applying the resources of a place to the needs of that place. So is independence of course, but there is one issue above all that exacerbates the problem for many rural communities and that is the inequitable ownership of land. Over the years there have been many attempts both to address that scar upon Scotland – a country which has the smallest group of private individuals owning the largest amount of land in the whole of Europe – as well as to try and explain it away.

I myself, when I was environment minister, was for a while almost persuaded that the real matter to be tackled was land usage, and that if those who possessed it used the resource wisely then that was progress.

The fallacy of that position has been brought home to me again by Lesley Riddoch’s new book on Hutting.

Lesley is not only a fine journalist but also a very persuasive advocate for radical change.

I was delighted, more than a decade ago, to persuade her to help the Scottish Government sell the Island of Rum to its inhabitants, where she did a great job in overcoming a range of previously intractable problems.

Her book – a version of the thesis that recently earned her a PhD – is an entertaining as well as a cogent argument for the development of a hutting culture which is common place in other countries of the north and which would bring us into better balance with our natural environment at a time when we need that more than ever.

But underpinning her case is an even more important argument which connects our indefensible pattern of land ownership with our failure to develop truly local structures for decision-making and community support.

Last year the Scottish Land Commission estimated that 1125 individuals – a number that includes public bodies such as Forest Scotland – owned 70% of Scotland’s rural land, with 87 private owners being responsible for almost half that figure.

It went on to call the situation “socially corrosive” and expressed the view that this situation was leading to “significant and long-term damage to the communities affected”.

LESLEY goes further, suggesting that our inability to remove inequality in ownership and social structures (Norway abolished noble titles in 1821) has led to an inability to imagine and then put into operation effective and really local decision-making .

Unionist enemies of devolution and independence try to use this argument to disempower the Scottish Parliament but they would in reality transfer nothing to anyone from their own centralised hoard, as the destructive Internal Market Bill presently at Westminster demonstrates.

Only an independent parliament in an independent state would have the vision and the determination to change these fundamental matters as change they must.

That message is a good one to add to the armoury of indy arguments, particularly at a time when, for most, keeping close to home is what really matters.