I FIRST began to consider the prospect of an independent Scotland in October 2011 at the SNP’s annual conference in Inverness. It was in one of those windowless function suites where carpet designs go to die and the chairs can’t comfortably accommodate a human rear for more than 30 minutes. Activists were still pinching themselves at the SNP’s Holyrood landslide a few months earlier and there was much discussion on what to do with it. There was a pervasive degree of old-fashioned Presbyterian rectitude in the manner of a child being admonished by a fur-lined auntie not to spend the one pound note she’d given him “all in the wan shoap”.

Angus Robertson was our host for this event and I thought it might offer a couple of paragraphs for a conference diary I was compiling for the New Statesman. If, on learning that your last ship had sailed and wouldn’t be returning, you’d want the news to be broken to you by the SNP deputy leader , a mellifluous and elegant speaker whose delivery always elicits in me a vow immediately to correct my own haggard elocution.

During his 45-minute speech Mr Robertson stitched together a vision of an independent Scotland that was at odds with what I had previously imagined. Looking back, I suppose it was the first time I had encountered the notion of “civic nationalism’; a movement that was outward-looking and comfortable in its own skin rather than choosing to be defined by the faults and errors of the UK Government. With me was my friend, the journalist Stephen Khan, now the UK editor of The Conversation, the international analysis, commentary and research organisation. It struck us both for the first time that there could be an independent Scotland within our own lifetimes.

A further year was to elapse before the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement, but we all knew that the campaign for an independent Scotland had really started in Inverness in the autumn of 2011. The referendum campaign that followed was to be one of the most thrilling and defining periods in modern Scottish history. The historian, Professor Sir Tom Devine, has since called it the most important event in Scotland’s history since the Reformation.

More important than the constitutional fall-out though, was the extent to which hundreds of thousands of people who had previously felt disenfranchised from the political process now felt that they had to engage. It remains the biggest fiction from the campaign, one propagated by the Unionist side, that the referendum had been a spiteful and divisive campaign. More than three and a half million people voted in the referendum, the highest turn-out for an election or referendum in the UK since the introduction of universal suffrage. The independent Electoral Commission which oversaw the process regarded it as the international gold standard in civic engagement. Yet, each malodorous incident both verified and unverified was magnified by Better Together and distorted to besmirch millions of Scots.

Such was to be expected from the Tories, a party that thrives on preserving power in as few hands as possible and who have always been repelled by the notion of the hoi-polloi getting ideas above themselves. Not so the Labour Party in Scotland, whose conduct during the first referendum and its failure to learn lessons from it has brought it to its knees. To witness John McTernan, a key Labour strategist during that time, attempting to patronise and belittle the SNP activist Suzanne McLaughlin on STV on Thursday night suggested that some old habits die hard.

This time around the Yes movement is starting from a far stronger position. Their arguments have been unexpectedly reinforced by the foolish intervention of Theresa May in summarily rejecting Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a second referendum between the autumn of 2018 and the Spring of 2019. This is despite the fact that such a timetable dovetails with Ms May’s own projections for a conclusion to the Brexit negotiations. The UK Prime Minister is a woman under siege and has chosen to come out biting and scratching when a wiser head would have taken cautious counsel.

Her hard Brexit strategy is in chaos and this has merely stiffened the resolve of the remaining 27 EU member states not to give an inch during negotiations. The reputation of her Chancellor Philip Hammond is in tatters over his pantomime Budget proposals on National Insurance increases for the self-employed. Meanwhile more than 20 of her MPs are facing criminal prosecution over electoral fraud during the 2015 UK election, a farrago that stretches all the way into the inner sanctum of Number 10.

Her injudicious intervention has left her Scottish representative, Ruth Davidson, clutching at thin air. On Thursday at First Minister’s Questions the leader of the Scottish Tories pledged to put Holyrood first. Next Wednesday as the chamber seeks to trigger Article 30 for a transfer of powers to hold a referendum she will put Holyrood a distant second, a mere footstool for the UK Parliament and a party which has treated the Scottish Government with contempt as it sought to have its voice heard on Brexit. Ms Davidson, in a speech we can all see coming, will claim there is no mandate and cite opinion polls. Thus she will ignore the million or so votes the SNP secured last year on a manifesto that included a pledge to seek a referendum if there has been a material change in circumstances.

I expect the Yes movement to dig deeper into the GERS figures (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland) and expose the major flaws in their design and I expect them to produce a far more temperate and realistic White Paper which will spell out some sacrifices that may have to be made. Such sacrifices as there may be, though, are sure to be offset by the probability of an economic tsunami in the wake of Brexit.

Already, on social media, the scarecrow element on the Unionist side is becoming belligerent and shrill. Other Unionists I’ve spoken to recently now admit to the inevitability of independence following Brexit. Their opposition is spent and they’re becoming tired of defending an obsolete constitutional arrangement which has long out-lived its purpose. Yet, according to Liam Fox, a new British Empire is about to rise as “the UK is one of the few countries in the EU that doesn’t need to bury its 20th century history”.

When the referendum comes again Yes activists must acknowledge that the Union is an important element in the lives of many Scots, and for sound and viable reasons. This must be respected and not denigrated. The first task of an independent Scotland will be to reach out to these people; heal their wounds and be sympathetic for their loss.

One of the key issues will be the conduct of Yes activists on social media and at public events. Their every move and syllable will be scrutinised and magnified 10,000 times by the last remnants of the UK as it seeks to defend the last corner of its empire.