I WAS tidying old papers when I came to a faded “1979” folder. Remember what a bad year that was, for those who believed in a self-governing Scotland?

In March, a referendum for a “Scottish Assembly”, its terms skewed to ensure failure. Then a General Election, which slaughtered the SNP down to a mere two MPs and brought Mrs Thatcher to power. End of a dream?

Two things fell out of the folder. One was a giant paper rosette, all blood-red tartan and ribbons, inscribed “Have yourself a Dreich Decade!” The rosette came from irrepressible Murray Grigor, whose films and happenings still teach Scots to find self-confidence through self-mockery.

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Get a grip, he seemed to be saying, and you can turn these dreich 1980s into what they did in fact become – the most intense eruption of Scottish literature, drama, painting and history-publication for a hundred years.

The other thing was a note from the late Tom Nairn. It began: “Dear Neal, the incorrigible optimist strikes again …”

It was dated May 12, only a week after the General Election. And it was clipped to a draft article of – in retrospect – astonishing prophetic insight. Tom looked at the SNP floundering in utter disaster, and wrote that the party would now abandon its “peculiarly bland, all-purpose nationalist ideology”, move to the left and find a new base in “the actual, class-bound folk of Scotland’s industrial heartland”.

And by the end of the “dreich decade”, driven on by the cunning leadership of Alex Salmond, exactly that was beginning to take place.

The point for today – salute that steady optimism in disheartening times. The tide will inevitably turn in the apparently dreich years ahead, and some political formation will emerge with the vigour to mobilise hopes for an independent Scotland and discontent with the Union.

That formation may or may not be a rejuvenated SNP. There’s no sign as yet of an impatient, rebel movement bursting up through the SNP floor. But that at least gives space to stand back and imagine – if not fantasise – possible futures.

Assume, first of all, that the future will bring another energetic and confident Scottish government, navigating towards independence. It’s confident because it’s popular, and because polls keep the independence preference somewhere in the 60% area. Westminster, however, remains firmly opposed to independence, continuing to refuse another Section 30 referendum. So what do you do?

The first thing you don’t do is appeal to the courts. But five years ago Nicola Sturgeon, now reviled for “over-caution”, was absolutely right to take the Scottish Government’s case to the Court of Session and then to the Supreme Court.

She knew that, at that point, the Scottish public would simply not have respected a claim of independence based on a “wild” poll held on her authority alone.

But, being a lawyer and intelligent, she must also have known that the chances of a Supreme Court appeal getting past Westminster’s doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty were zero.

Still, she had to be seen to be going through all those expensive, futile hoops – if only to prove that the official road to independence via an approved Section 30 referendum was now blocked. So different kinds of pressure must be explored. Over to you, Scottish people!

But “Scottish people” didn’t rally. They had done that already in 2014, in the wake of the referendum, when their unexpected Yes tsunami trebled the SNP’s membership in a few weeks. But the SNP, bewildered, had no idea how to train this volunteer horde into a fighting force. And the moment passed.

Let’s go back to the future. Two things are pretty certain. One is that the option of independence, made plausible in 2014, will stay popular. The growing dysfunction of the devolved Union will see to that.

The other certainty is that when that wish grows urgent, there will be some sort of political vehicle – maybe the old blue-white SNP bus, maybe some dazzling new electric wagon – to carry it forward.

And the question is still there. What does that sort of Scottish government do when London says no?

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Scotland isn’t Catalonia. We are not going to see half a million men and women roaring “Freedom!” as they march down Princes Street. Instead, leadership must think about provocation.

That means a strategy of calm but firm confrontation, on battlefields chosen by Scottish authorities and on policies clearly attractive to the public.

Call the policy “institutional disobedience”. That’s not the same as “civil” disobedience, which so many of us in Scotland practised when we refused to pay the poll tax.

It means that a Scottish government might enact – and deliver – legislation which the Scotland Act forbids as “reserved” – outwith the powers of the Scottish Parliament. In the same spirit, a Scottish government might decide – after approval by Holyrood – to impede or block the application of Westminster measures which the Act reserves to the United Kingdom parliament.

One challenge can be called “As If”. A popular Scottish government, committed to ending the Union, should learn to behave “as if” Scotland were already independent. (As in some ways it already is. Devolution is the big machine with a row of shiny untouched levers.)

The default position on law-making should be that Westminster can only use persuasion, not the letter of the Scotland Act, to make Holyrood change a decision.

Europe is one obvious area for “As If”. For example, Scotland should drive ahead with expanding “mini-embassies” in the EU and elsewhere. Whitehall’s efforts to push Scottish missions back into British embassies should be quietly ignored.

Right now, the Scottish Government should be putting more energy into replacing the EU’s Erasmus academic exchange scheme with something even better, pushing aside the feeble substitute proposed by London.

The second kind of challenge merely says: “Gonnae no dae that!” It means a Scottish cabinet refusing to apply a Westminster law or taking action to frustrate it, if a Holyrood majority considers it wrong for Scotland. One recent candidate for “no dae that” would have been the late Tory government’s proposal to restrict the right to strike even further.

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Or take the famous “battle of Kenmure Street” in 2021, when Glasgow crowds forced a Home Office snatch van to free two immigrants seized for deportation. Nicola Sturgeon and other leaders condemned the Home Office.

But an “As If” government would have required Police Scotland not to protect the snatch squad and declared that from now on, Home Office powers over immigration in Scotland would be taken over by Holyrood. Deportation of Scotland’s refugees by Whitehall order? Retain the “hostile environment” barriers against the European immigrants Scotland so desperately needs? “Gonnae no dae that.”

So head-on collision. It could happen over other issues: energy policy, inshore fishing control or radical land reform which affected property rights in the rest of the UK. Its intention would be to confront Westminster with two equally dire alternatives.

The first option is to give way. In effect, that would be showing Scotland that London was dragging aside the barbed-wire checkpoints across the motorway to independence. The second choice is to stand by the Scotland Act and fight.

But here we enter a dramatic landscape unvisited since Britain gave up the struggle over Ireland in 1922.

Imagine, if you can, the removal – perhaps detention – of a First Minister if he or she sticks to their guns. Or emergency legislation at Westminster to suspend the Scottish Parliament. Or an appointed “Provisional Authority” of Unionist high-heid yins to replace the Scottish Government. Unthinkable? Not a bit.

It’s all within the sovereign powers of Westminster, and it’s how imperial Britain treated obstreperous protectorates in living memory. But the outcome, in Ireland or the Empire, was always the same – a broad, irresistible surge of opinion towards independence.

We are living through a theatre of despair. The Unionist media gloats that everything optimistic – independence, honest government, better health and social care, a growing economy – is as dead as yesterday. Petty malevolence replaces steady hope. But a longer view of Scotland shows tidal rhythms, each return of political energy higher than the last.

A third thing fell out of that old file. It’s a 50-year-old paper called “Statistics against Scotland’. The worst teeth in the world, the highest cardiac mortality in the world among young people, house overcrowding twice the UK average, male psychiatric admissions for alcoholism seven times the English and Welsh figure, and 85% of people in the Strathclyde Region found to have no educational qualifications whatever.

Compared to Greenock, the standard of living in Rostock, then in Communist East Germany, was higher in every way – except freedom.

That is where Scotland has come from. Fighting down those terrible figures took all the courage of the Labour movement, the Lib-Lab and SNP governments at Holyrood and a hundred protest movements. But so much social damage still remains.

It needs the heavy-lifting gear which only full self-government can bring to the site. Somewhere not too far off, it’s on its way.