LIKE Jim Fairlie (SNP's 2011 election landslide deserved more than indyref1), I was a relative newcomer to the SNP, compared to those like Alex Salmond who mined at freedom’s coalface for many decades.

I became fully active in 2010 when I realised that a dynamic SNP Government in Edinburgh was capable and willing to challenge the newly installed Tory/LibDem Government in London. This was across a range of issues.

An example of this was the hated and unjust “bedroom tax” which Westminster imposed and Holyrood promptly swept away in Scotland. No doubt prime minister Cameron could have dragged first minister Salmond to the Supreme Court. He did not dare. It would have been fast-action political suicide.

Above all, I realised that Salmond was serious on the constitution. No-one was left in any doubt in the 2011 Scottish election that victory for the SNP would mean the delivery of an independence referendum. In the event, Salmond swept all before him, achieving the unprecedented, and yet to be repeated, result of an overall majority of 69 in a proportional Parliament, adding an incredible 22 seats to the first SNP election winning total from 2007.

Before Westminster could recover its balance, the newly installed Scottish Government presented its democratic demands to Cameron and chancellor Osborne. It was clear that any attempt to frustrate the vote or (more likely) hobble Scotland’s democracy with a 40% rule or some such chicanery would be met with the response of a home-grown referendum. Salmond was well aware that, even under the liberal-leaning Supreme Court of Lord Phillips, such a proposition would have to be made robust enough to withstand inevitable legal challenge and had framed an embryo Scottish Bill accordingly.

In the event, the threat was enough. Cameron caved in and the Edinburgh Agreement was signed, paving the way for Scotland’s opportunity to vote by referendum for freedom. SNP politicians, including the current first minister, should note the “Section 30” agreement did not make the referendum “legally binding”. There is no such thing in the UK. It merely put it beyond challenge in the domestic courts and made the referendum “consented”, which on success would have been crucial for early international acceptance and EU membership.

The Edinburgh Agreement was a masterpiece of negotiation from a Scottish perspective. It ceded control of the question and the franchise to the Scots Parliament. That is why 16-year-olds had the opportunity to vote “YES” for Scotland. Above all it created a precedent for the future that a majority for a referendum in our Parliament would result in such a vote and on such terms.

There was one fly in the ointment. On the day the Edinburgh Agreement was signed, support for independence was below 30%. It is in that light that the failure of the movement to win a majority in 2014 should be seen. The referendum experience did not change the constitution but it did transform Scotland’s attitude to independence and since then support has continued to hover around the 50% mark.

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It could, and should of course, have been much higher. Boris Johnson, Brexit, Liz Truss and fuel and food poverty in our land of energy and produce plenty. The past seven years of Westminster-inspired political famine makes the patrician Tory rule of David Cameron look like a golden age. Support for independence should have soared to unprecedented levels. And yet chance after chance, and mandate after mandate, has been missed or totally wasted.

And in that very same period SNP internal democracy has been deliberately dismantled and many fine nationalists, including myself, paid the price with their membership or worse. The SNP’s greatest traditional strength, its unpaid army of principled volunteers, were to a substantial extent supplanted with an entitled and self-proclaimed political class every bit as questionable as the Labour version which had preceded it.

It was a period where the locust dined unhindered.

This period culminated in Nicola Surgeon’s ill-fated expedition to Lord Reed’s conservative Supreme Court asking for advice and permission to dissolve the United Kingdom and with it the Supreme Court! In comparison to this folly, James IV’s fatal charge at Flodden would be considered a sensible military manoeuvre.

Jim Fairlie attempts to lay responsibility for this last seven years of inaction at the door of Alex Salmond and the Edinburgh Agreement. What utter guff. I know of very few people who do not believe that given the circumstances since Brexit, a politician of Salmond’s calibre would have led this country to national independence.

If Alex has responsibility for anything, it is only in his principled, selfless but unnecessary resignation statement of September 19, 2014 and making way for someone who, despite her undoubted communication skills, has let the movement down, utterly.

So what is to be done? The Alba proposal of a single Scotland United candidate in each seat should be discussed and properly considered democratically. If the SNP drift into the next election eyes closed, they risk being met with a tsunami of similar scale to that which engulfed a complacent Scottish Labour in 2015.

The key to success is not just a single candidate in each seat and the necessary downplaying of party politics at a time when the SNP brand is tarnished. The real impetus comes from the proposed joint declaration that the independence parties will jointly treat the election (and every subsequent one if necessary) as a popular mandate to negotiate independence for Scotland.

I have a Scottish Sovereignty Bill before Westminster right now which would repatriate referendum rights to the Scottish Parliament, exactly as Jim Fairlie proposes. And yet such are the tribal loyalties which put Scotland second, it has been backed by only a handful of SNP MPs, and my pleas to the new First Minister for support have gone ignored.

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Instead of further discord, we should come together for the election, collectively recognise that the referendum route has been blocked, and seek other ballot-box opportunities to demonstrate the Scottish people’s right and will of self-determination.

That proposition has support and, as I will demonstrate this week, substantive and influential international legal backing. Scotland has many friends abroad but there must be a plan to enforce Scotland’s democratic choice at home through a convention and popular peaceful agitation as well as international appeals. We are not powerless. We have a government and a parliament and a nation waiting to be led.

No-one claims it will be easy. But our nation has never lacked courage in the past. Nor have we lacked pride. And the days of Scotland dancing to the Westminster tune should be brought to a close.