YOU might think of them as the odd couple. Kezia Dugdale, erstwhile Labour leader in Scotland, former director of the John Smith Centre and now a professor at Glasgow University’s Centre for Public Policy.

A woman who has co-written a new paper on whither devolution and independence with a certain Stephen Noon.

Noon, erstwhile lead strategist for the umbrella Yes campaign, former top spad to Alex Salmond when the latter was first minister and now a research associate at the selfsame CPP. As I say, ostensibly, the oddest of couples. Not least as Kezia is ­married to an SNP Cabinet Secretary.

READ MORE: Gerry Hassan: 10 lessons Yes needs to learn 10 years on

The pillow talk doesn’t seem to have led to a full-scale conversion, however, as Kezia makes clear she is still thirled to a future within the UK, whilst Stephen sticks to a pro-indy line.

What is fascinating about their paper, however, is that it’s a million miles from the facile suggestion that Scottish Labour and the SNP should fall into a left-of-centre embrace for the sake of Scotland’s future. (There’s as much chance of Kamala Harris becoming the next Mrs Trump …) Instead, Dugdale and Noon start from the Jo Cox-style mantra that we have more in common than that which divides us.

I was particularly struck by the ­suggestion that those of us passionate about Yes, failed to realise that some No voters felt both frightened and threatened. Similarly, many No voters couldn’t grasp that many in the Yes camp were entirely motivated by the thought of their country becoming an ­independent nation, “something joyful and inspiring”, writes Noon.

Whereas Dugdale is more motivated by macro politics like solving child poverty.

Both contend that the constitutional ­debate shouldn’t have descended into a ­polarised either/or – or, worse still, a them and us.

They take a considered look at all ­previous attempts to tinker with the ­constitutional settlement observing that the Jeremy ­Corbyn-­inspired Trickett review and the Keir Starmer-inspired Brown paper were both (not unexpectedly) UK-centric. While they note that the post-referendum Smith Commission sat for an “­astonishingly” brief six weeks.

Only Gordon Brown’s efforts made any kind of appearance in Labour’s 2024 manifesto; his Assembly Of The Nations And Regions morphing into a council of the same.

They also take a canter around other movements from Quebec and Catalonia, to Wales and Northern Ireland. The ­latter seems to have been the most fruitful in terms of forging a pathway for Scotland.

While the histories differ markedly – not least in terms of sectarian violence – the authors note that the NI agreement allows for reunification of Ireland when it can be demonstrated that a majority of voters want it. (There’s also the ­possibility of a poll on the same with a gap of just seven years from the last one.)

READ MORE: Expert weighs in on controversial indyref2 report from Kezia Dugdale and Stephen Noon

They make a fair point that the most successful referenda campaigns have been bottom-up rather than top-down, but where we part company is the ­suggestion that if a sustained majority for Yes can be demonstrated, the hand on the lever ­producing the means would belong to the Secretary of State for Scotland.

They may argue that this would be the product of a legal mandate based on ­sustained public opinion and that the ­Secretary of State would have no choice but to accede to another so-called Section 30 order in that eventuality.

Yet I find it difficult to believe a pro-Union Secretary of State would imbue the kind of rigorous integrity they ­envisage. In a Holyrood Sources podcast, Dugdale hoped that commentators wouldn’t fixate on this one issue. Kinda difficult not to, Kez.

There is an interesting cameo from ­Ciaran Martin, the top civil servant who was director of the constitution in 20ll and became the chief facilitator of the Edinburgh Agreement between Salmond and Cameron a year later.

His view is, that since nobody has come up with new ground rules for a ­referendum, 50% plus one would be good enough. However, as Noon and ­Dugdale point out, any post-­independence success would be strongly influenced by how it came about. They argue – and I’m sure they’re right – that any settlement would need to make the No camp feel they hadn’t been cheated or excluded.

There have of course been game-changers along the way. In 2019, 55% of us cited Brexit as very important. That fell to just 4% this last July, which in my book means we missed an open goal.

Independence was cited as important by 34% at the 2019 election, and that also fell to 17% this year, which tells a tale. And of course, the pandemic changed ­almost everything.

There’s a fair concentration on what works and what self-evidently doesn’t in the current set-up – most obviously the fact that the Scottish Government can underspend – for which it usually gets pelters – but can’t overspend. And has very limited capacity to borrow forbye.

The paper suggests the budget should be looked at over the parliamentary term as a whole, rather than as a one-off, and that it’s obviously nonsense to expect a Scottish budget to be announced just three months after the UK one when a) the period in question between them ­often covers the Christmas and New Year holidays and b) the issues affecting the block grant take years to bleed through rather than months and weeks.

READ MORE: Christine Grahame: I've never wanted to be a minister, I like freedom

They also suggest that it’s all very well having tax-varying powers, but not when savings and dividends are excluded and still the prerogative of the exchequer. And the very wealthy are not daft. They’ll just shove their dosh into areas which have more modest tax rates. (Or maybe ­squirrel it away entirely offshore. My ­suspicion, not the paper’s!) There’s also a chunk on how the Sewel Convention – which stopped Westminster from interfering with Holyrood policies without express permission – got steamrollered by, inter alia, the notorious Internal Market Act.

However, it’s also their contention that after the Supreme Court ruled that Holyrood didn’t have the capacity to run a referendum of its own – meaning of course that Westminster remains “sovereign”, at least in its own eyes – that ruling was a kind of watershed moment in the debate.

The kind of before and after which necessitates a new conversation about where we go from here and how we get there, they argue. Of course, “there” means different things to each of them, just as it does for what currently seems like two halves of Scotland.

It may be that after the 2026 Scottish election, the tectonic plates shift yet again. The recent lessons of politics suggest that everything is fluid; nothing is certain.

Yet the current polling makes all too clear that those who think they can pack matters constitutional away in a sealed box labelled “sometime, never” are ­kidding themselves and fooling ­nobody else.

The 2014 referendum may well have been “accidental”, as the paper ­contends, insomuch as the then UK ­Government thought the risk of blocking a ­democratic referendum outweighed the risk of ­holding one. But that was then.

That was when the pro-independence camp had less than a third of the popular vote.

We are in an entirely different place on the electoral map. The 45% hasn’t gone away.

Like Scottish solutions to Scottish problems, Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands is a mantra which doesn’t date.