YOU can say what you like about Brexit and plenty of us have done exactly that over the years. But one thing arguably we have yet to do as a movement is to properly come to terms with just how Brexit rendered parts of our 2014 prospectus for independence completely obsolete.
Of course, all the democratic arguments for independence still stand – how could they not?
If you believe that the best people to govern Scotland are those who make their lives here and that only those elected from within Scotland should govern Scotland, then that’s a fundamental principle which being in or out of the EU makes not a jot of difference to.
The same goes for a large extent to the economic and social arguments for independence. If you already think that Scotland can only achieve better outcomes by being fully in control of its own resources and constrained only by the limits of our own choices, then once again, being in or out of the EU isn’t going to sway you at all.
So, for those of us already persuaded, it’s pretty much as you were in terms of our own preferences. But what about those Scots who either were or who are now “persuadable”, who will want to have more certainty over what an independent Scotland might look like, and how it might relate to the UK we’ll have just left, at least on day one?
Some of that is still pretty straightforward for us to answer, at least in terms of the things that either are or will be under our control. But while Brexit was being “negotiated”, for a few years at least that became a whole different story.
For so long as successive UK prime ministers remained completely tangled up as to what Brexit actually meant and uncertain as to what they were able to deliver upon, that future Scotland-UK relationship became a set of questions which through no fault of ours, supporters of independent Scottish EU membership could not easily answer.
Although – monarchy aside – we could say that we’d go on to have much the same political and economic relationship with the UK as would the Republic of Ireland, the trouble was that until Brexit was in fact “done”, not even anyone in the UK Government could say what that relationship was going to look like in practice.
I can hear the impatience from the “just get indy done” commenters already. At the risk of further incurring their wrath, the fact is that independence could not happen and will not happen without clear majority support.
And no matter how enthusiastic people’s personal support for independence is – mine included – there are plenty of voters in Scotland who needed then and who still genuinely need to be persuaded if we’re to get there.
That's not to say that more couldn’t have been done to advance independence over that time that wasn’t. However, those adamant that some golden opportunity was missed over the past few years to actually secure independence have yet to explain how any ballot box-based campaign for independence would be able to be won, in the absence of the certainty that Brexit denied us over what Scotland’s relationship with the UK and the EU would be.
Now that particular hornet’s nest has been well and truly poked, the good news is that a lot of these questions are now better able to be answered.
For one thing, Brexit has deprived Unionists of the argument that independence will place Scotland outside of the EU.
Thanks – if that’s the word – to the UK, we now already are.
So there’ll be no more wrangling in future debates about whether it’s possible for Scotland to tee up a seamless EU accession head of the formal moment of becoming legally independent. Whoever the heir to Blair McDougall is at the next referendum will just have to find a better story to try to scare people with next time round.
And let’s not forget that in terms of the Border itself, there’s a delicious irony in that after all the fears and smears from 2014 about barbed wire, barriers and bogeymen if Scotland were to dare to become independent, the UK has since then managed to impose a trade border down the Irish Sea with itself.
You can take a bow for that one, Brexiteers.
If we want to rejoin the EU, then not only will we first have to be independent – we’ll also have to get ourselves re-aligned in several key respects with EU law and practice.
And with that, once Scotland is back in, if that’s what we choose to do, then to a large extent, what that future economic relationship between Scotland and the UK looks like is one which will be entirely imposed on the UK by Scotland’s new status as an EU member, rather than the other way about.
Can we ever resolve every single uncertainty that people might have about independence? Clearly not, and there’s certainly work to be done on what that transition to membership might look like. But in our favour, there is a certainty of UK decline.
In light of the experience of the past few years, the certainty that we can start to deliver is that all of the imponderables and unknowables in the world are far better navigated when it’s our own hand that’s on the tiller and when, like Ireland, we have the solid backing of our European allies.
