On Wednesday it will be the tenth anniversary of the independence referendum…

Brains don’t recover but the good news is that political parties do recover from their electoral reverses, sometimes surprisingly quickly, and also that support for independence appears to be unaffected by the travails – which are all too often own goals – of the SNP.

The SNP will eventually get its act together, the sooner the better. It will be aided by the rapidly growing disaffection with the Labour party, which won 37 Westminster seats in Scotland in the recent general election. However Labour’s recovery in Scotland has very shallow roots. Labour piled up seats due to the vagaries and unfairness of the first past the post system so beloved of Westminster but did so while winning just 36% of votes cast.

The SNP will not achieve independence by itself but rather as a core component of a broad based independence movement which is centred on the grass roots. The party is needed to create a political presence for independence, and it’s needed as a placeholder for independence votes, which, being denied access to a straight referendum by a Westminster which is terrified of the independence question, is how that wider movement will express majority support for independence.

The question of independence has been politically normalised in Scotland. In the interminable and often bitter debates about process which have occupied the independence movement over the past ten years we sometimes forget just what a monumental achievement that is. Labour politicians and their allies in the Scottish media might like to tell themselves and us that an electoral defeat for the SNP means a permanent defeat for the cause of independence, but they are delusional.

Labour’s electoral honeymoon is already over. Starmer’s promise of change is already revealed as being as hollow as the fine promises made by the Better Together campaign in that referendum campaign ten years ago.