FIRST out of the traps in the race for a new strategic plan for independence was Believe in Scotland. Even before the new Westminster Parliament had been sworn in, the organisation published its report on a Scottish Citizens’ Convention, heralding it as a new route map.

Although reference is made to the election result, this report takes no account of it and was clearly drafted well before July 4. That is its first problem.

The report suggests that the Scottish Government’s mandate from 2021 is intact and we should move towards the 2026 Scottish Parliament election as being a “de facto referendum” on independence.

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Hold on a minute. Didn’t the Scottish Government try to implement its mandate, only to be told by the Supreme Court that it couldn’t? Didn’t the SNP just fight the General Election asking for that mandate to be reaffirmed and for the constitution to be changed to allow Scottish people to choose their own future?

And didn’t we just lose that election? We can’t pretend that didn’t happen.

Believe in Scotland is an organisation I admire. It has done a lot of valuable work in making the case for independence and co-ordinating disparate local campaign groups. Respect. It styles itself as the national grassroots Yes campaign, claiming more authority and legitimacy than political parties.

This anti-politics infuses this report to an unhealthy degree. Of course, we need people of all political persuasions to be involved in the movement for national autonomy. Of course it will be bigger than any political party. But politics is how we change society without warfare. It is about making choices.

This report throws the political baby out with the bath water, stating “politics shouldn’t be anywhere near the constitutional question”. It talks of the 2014 case being “overly politicised” and even suggests that support for “independence has not risen dramatically in the polls, due to its connection to politics”.

So, the Scottish Citizens’ Convention is seen as an alternative to, rather than complementary to, the existing political process. At times this is dressed up in flowery quasi-academic language which is less than helpful.

We are told that the convention will solve Scotland’s fundamental problems “by facilitating a more positive mindset change and socioeconomic paradigm shift”. Mmm?

The report doesn’t say exactly how the Scottish Citizens’ Convention should be established but in a valuable appendix it considers the lessons from earlier attempts at a similar thing including the Scottish Constitutional Convention of the 1980s, Ireland’s Citizens Assembly, and the Welsh Government’s Constitutional Commission. The implication is the convention could borrow elements from all three.

The big difference from the 1980s is, of course, that the notion of Scotland becoming an independent country is way more divisive and contentious now than devolution was then. The Scottish Constitutional Convention was established with the support of every party bar the Tories and commanded massive public support.

Believe in Scotland acknowledges this difference and suggests that the way to deal with it is to be clear that a new convention will not be about independence, or the method of Scotland’s government.

Instead, it will be charged with coming up with policies for a “better Scotland” centred on a wellbeing economy.

This remit, the report rightly suggests, would allow a number of key players – trade unions, churches, charities – to get involved in a way an explicit focus on independence would not.

It is an idea worth exploring. But there’s a danger that it all becomes a bit too vanilla and ends up with everyone agreed on the type of fairer, nicer Scotland we want but no further forward on how to get there. Believe in Scotland claims that any conclusions the convention might reach will self-evidently only be achieved by independence. But if we are not linking the two, that seems something of a stretch.

Besides, I can’t help feeling that while certainly we need to illustrate the powers that independence offers, prescribing the details of a wellbeing economy is surely a matter of political debate to be resolved once it is achieved.

At no stage is there a suggestion that the outcome of the Supreme Court case needs to be challenged, not by rejecting its decisions, which are technically correct, but by rejecting the constitution which it was charged with interpreting.

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The lesson we do need to learn from the 1980s is that policy comes from principle. Before working out the details of devolution the Scottish Constitutional Convention drew up the Claim or Right for Scotland.

That asserted that the people of Scotland had the right to choose their own form of government. It built a consensus upon that principle.

And that principle is currently being denied. That is the first order of business. To challenge and change the British constitution so that Scotland’s right to choose its own future is enshrined.

It is in that context that the notion of a civil society convention might be best deployed.