DURING the 10 days or so since the report from Andrew Wilson’s Growth Commission was published, I’d say it had weathered the storm and come through in good shape.

It is rare for any document on the Yes side to attract favourable comment from south of the Border, but this time that has happened on a big scale. Wilson himself reports how senior Unionist figures privately admit the case for independence is now stronger. A typical view was voiced by a son of Edinburgh, John Kay, today a professor at the London School of Economics and a columnist in the Financial Times.

There he wrote a piece under the headline: “Nationalists ditch the wishlist in favour of credible plans for life outside the UK.” His is not a rave review, but it is fair and accurate.

Inside stroppy Scotland, of course, we could not expect the same kind of measured response. Even so, from reading the letters to The National over the past week, I’d say there were a lot of people who did not like every single word of the report (I’m one of them) but who all the same saw it was the best we have or are likely to have. For our own good, it would be preferable if we all united behind it, focused on victory in the second referendum and only afterwards went back to picking bones with one another. How many Scottish battles of the past have been lost because we preferred to settle old scores before turning to fight the enemy?

I’ll apply this lesson to the contentious issue of the currency. It would in my view be impossible to have a separate pound (or whatever) from the first moment of a free Scotland. We cannot tell how the general political environment will look in one or two years from now, let alone in five or 10, but I guess we would still have a sovereign Parliament at Westminster and a devolved Parliament at Holyrood.

Could the devolved Parliament draft and pass beforehand the legislation needed to set up a currency and central bank? I have my doubts, since it is a reserved power needing permission under Section 30 of the Scotland Act. Why bother with such detail if the Union is being dissolved anyway? Surely it would be better to wait till Independence Day and start with a clean sheet that cannot be blotted by English interference. What that day promises us is not instant answers to everything but the opportunity at last to do things our own way.

That’s why even afterwards I’d prefer not to rush, but to seek the right solutions rather than the quick solutions. We might need a year for a commission to decide the basic questions around a Scottish currency, another year to legislate and then another year for the transition. So practicality dictates the currency could not be launched in less than about three years after Independence Day. Is this the end of the world?

The freedom of the nation will already impose tasks demanding enough. We should just see the currency for what it is on a globalised planet, a second-order problem worthy of a proper but subsidiary place amid the awesome responsibilities of a new era of Scottish history.

During the debates of the past 10 days, one major objection to this scenario has been that it does not go far enough to satisfy the aspirations of the Scots working class. Without enough support there, critics say, independence is never going to happen anyway. And Andrew Wilson is reckoned likely to have put the proletariat off through not offering enough socialism.

The first retort I would send these critics is to construct for themselves a socialist counter-case to the 354 pages of the commission’s report.

I think they would find the task beyond them. As I wrote last week, Scottish socialism is a corpse, or at most a zombie – almost devoid of substance, a scrapheap of simplistic slogans rather than of brave blueprints. I don’t believe its advocates could even begin to tackle, let alone solve, the main economic problems for an independent future identified by Wilson: raising the growth rate, sustainable public finance, monetary policy and financial regulation. If I’m wrong, let them go ahead and try.

Besides, it is a gross distortion to identify the convictions of the proletariat with so-called progressive nationalism. The last time the workers had the choice, in the Scottish election of 2016, its two representative parties, Solidarity and Rise, scored just over 1% of the total vote between them. The Britnat Ukip did twice as well. Workers of this third persuasion may not normally like to advertise themselves, yet on the day after the independence referendum they had appeared in force in George Square, Glasgow, waving their Union Jacks and taunting the crestfallen Nats still hanging around unable to believe it was all over.

I don’t think the bullies had come in from Bearsden, rather from tenements and council schemes – in other words, they were punters too, if of a rather repulsive kind. They must represent the last remnant of the historic Unionist vote, based in a skilled, Protestant, sectarian labour force, that was still winning Glasgow parliamentary seats for the Tories as late as the 1960s.

The working class is altogether more diverse than progressive socialists give it credit for – especially in Scotland, where these seem unable to think in any but the hoariest Marxist terms.

In less backward political cultures, even the orthodox have moved on from the crude contradiction of capitalists and proletarians expounded in Das Kapital. I’ve written before about the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu who sets out from the far greater cultural diversity of today’s society, compared to the early days of the industrial revolution. He defines six classes: the super-rich, the professional bourgeoisie, a new middle class that has education but no money, the skilled working class, the unskilled working class, the underclass. Even taken together, the last three form only a minority of the population, so they are never going to win power through the ballot box.

In which case it seems to me astounding that most critics of the Growth Commission have condemned only the alienation they claim it will cause on the left of the Scottish political spectrum, rather than acknowledging its possible attractions to the right. After all, at the UK election of 2017 the SNP may have lost six seats to Labour in the central belt but it lost 12 seats to the Tories, mainly in the north-east. Considering this region had been a bedrock of nationalism ever since the 1980s, it was surely a blunder of the party leadership to carry on as if nothing had happened up there and to concentrate fire on the west of Scotland with its supposed support for intensified tax-and-spend.

Now we learn, thanks to Andrew Wilson, that Nicola Sturgeon recognises this strategy has failed to inspire the new impetus the SNP needs to carry it successfully through the difficult period of Brexit.

By the end, it must have readied not only its own activists but also a much wider spectrum of the people to launch a fresh bid for independence. The party has its policies to deal with specific problems, which members may agree about or disagree and which they may amend from time to time. But it needs to keep in mind that it has only one unchangeable ideology, the freedom of the nation, and that this is meant for all of us, left or right, rich or poor.

Only by appealing to as many as possible of us – which is what the Growth Commission does – will the prize ever be won.