IF you asked me when I want Scotland to become an independent nation, I would say “tomorrow”. But as I sit down to write for The National every week, I try to separate my personal preferences from my rational assessment of what is actually going to happen. While some readers seem to find this deficient in patriotism, I reply that being realistic is the best contribution my wee column can make to the national cause.

Alasdair Galloway expanded on the issues round a second Scottish referendum in an excellent letter to the editor published on Sunday. He found that Ruth Wishart and I, who have both written about these issues in the past week, “make clear the difference of opinion with which we must grapple”. This will be useful in the run-up to the SNP spring conference in Edinburgh, due to take place on the two days immediately preceding the original Brexit date of April 29. Even if Brexit is now being postponed, it will leave behind it a supercharged atmosphere for the debates.

READ MORE: Jim Sillars: ‘SNP should back deal to get referenda and more tax powers’

The difference of opinion features on the one side the gung-ho, hell-for-leather advocates of the second referendum at the earliest possible opportunity, exploiting the chaos of Brexit while it wreaks havoc in everyday life. Eventually things will settle down, perhaps, but that gives us a couple of years in which we might win over the vital margin of voters needed to turn the defeat of 2014 into victory next time around.

In her column, Ruth pressed on us some other evidence in favour of urgency. Malta and Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Croatia and Slovenia were all smaller than Scotland, yet capable of playing their roles on the European stage along with much bigger and more powerful partners. It is extremely frustrating that they are allowed to, while we remain locked in a distant dressing room where nobody can even hear us banging on the door.

“I do know we have to get going. I do believe there is passion and energy and pent up frustration that can be harnessed,” wrote Ruth.

A telling retort came from reader Rod Mackenzie: “Only thing missing, Ruth, is how do we do it? I’m hearing this cry from many in the Yes movement, but none have actually set out exactly how we do it. Give us a flow chart plotting out the way ahead with all possible options.

“But remember it has to be practical and realistic and carry the voting public along with it.”

Of course people can agitate and organise, hold marches and meetings and so on. But none of it actually gets them nearer a voting booth, so it may just be displacement therapy.

Here, I step in on the other side of the difference of opinion. I do not doubt Scotland is as capable as Malta and the rest of being a fully-fledged EU member. The point in my column last week was much narrower, the same one as Rod raised about the practical steps needing to be taken from dependence inside the UK to independence outside it. I reckoned it was unlikely they could be taken before 2023/4.

Here is one aspect of the whole business that the government of Scotland has been able to define for itself, under no kind of duress from elsewhere. It takes the procedure for launching the referendum of 2014 as the gold standard for launching any future referendum. This means we need first to seek consent under Section 30 of the Scotland Act 1998 from the UK government – which in effect, therefore, retains a veto. We can be in no doubt the present UK Government would use its veto. But in the post-Brexit confusion, consent could plausibly come from a minority Labour government at Westminster supported by the SNP in the same way as the Tory government is supported by the DUP. With British politics in breakdown, other future opportunities will arise.

The gung-ho, hell-for-leather school may still wonder why the First Minister lets her hands be tied in this way. The obvious answer is the precedent set in 2014. Maybe it already counts as a constitutional convention, in which case a change in it might need to be pursued ultimately through the courts (as the Sewel convention had to be). A Referendum Bill would have had to be introduced at Holyrood, and to have survived a judgment by the presiding officer on whether it fell within the powers of the Parliament: I suspect he would say no. The Lord Advocate, a member of the government, might refer the Bill to the Supreme Court, which could at length summon the First Minister to explain why she now sought to overturn a convention she had earlier followed. What would she say? – presumably something like “because that’s what a lot of my supporters want”. Not, in law, a strong argument.

In any case, it is naive to assume the opposition parties would just be sitting on their backsides while all this went on. A wildcat referendum would be a temptation they could scarcely resist to sabotage it, for instance by a boycott. If the only voters in the referendum were the 45% of the electorate already committed to Yes, the whole business would turn out a farce – or worse, a stalemate like the one in Catalonia.

“I understand the desirability of getting Section 30 permission for a new referendum,” said Ruth Wishart, “but not why it should be a deal-breaker.”

READ MORE: Why it’s time to seize the moment and push for independence

Here, precisely, is the reason why it is a deal-breaker: everybody, Yes and No, government and opposition, nationalist and Unionist, would accept as valid a result achieved under Section 30, whereas otherwise they would have no need to.

Not a single poll since 2014 has shown a majority for independence, and to expect one to materialise out of an emotional spasm in the next few months seems to me simple-minded, not least because a large minority of nationalists support Brexit. No, the only sensible course still lies in the slow and steady work of building support, frequently frustrating as it is likely to be.

It is, after all, what other political movements do and they are often successful! If it does result in a vote of 60% for independence by 2024 (Nicola Sturgeon’s own stated aim), the wait for a second go at it would have been merely 10 years, compared with 20 years for devolution in 1999. Not quite so galling.

Let me suggest once again some aims for this job of careful political construction being overlooked by the SNP just now.

READ MORE: New poll finds majority of Scots want another independence referendum

The party is too fixated on the interests or attitudes of the west of Scotland and should stop ignoring the rest of the country – especially the north-east, which it threw away so casually in 2017. For a party of conscious feminism – it is remarkably unpopular among women, who are only half as likely to vote for it as men – the remedy might be a new stress not on purple hair and elective gender but on kirk, kids and cakes (I translate a slogan of the highly successful women Christian Democrats in Germany).

And, the SNP should finally realise that the industrial working class now forms only a minority of the population. In opinions, aspirations and modes of consumption this has become a middle-class nation, and will remain so, perhaps even more so, after independence day.