THERE was a wee guessing game Scottish politics nerds used to play. Who, they would whisper over pints or coffees, were the secret “nats" inside Labour?

Think back to those heady days and months ahead of the 2014 vote. There was almost an expectation that one big ScotLab beast or another would put their head above the parapet for Yes. It never happened.

Sure, there had long been a good few “former” Labour people campaigning for independence – such as ex-MP Dennis Canavan.

But nobody significant in the then party hierarchy chose to break ranks publicly. Even if there were at least one or two who – privately at least – admitted they were far from hostile to Scottish sovereign statehood.

Speculating about Yessers in Labour feels a pastime from another age, if not another generation. The party, after all, can now look solidly, maybe even stolidly, unionist. At least in Scotland.

But what about Wales?

This week the new leader of a cross-party pro-independence umbrella group called YesCymru sat down with Cardiff’s Western Mail to set out his political stall. And at its heart was an aim to lure some Labourites to his cause. Or, at the very least, for their party to indulge a debate on its merits.

The hopeful new chief executive of YesCymru is a 48-year old called Gwern Gwynfil. His group, effectively rebooted after it collapsed in to infighting, was inspired by the official independence campaign here in 2014. Its Yes logo is even the same as Scotland’s, just red rather than blue.

His aims? To get YesCymru and its cause talked about. Mr Gwynfil told the Western Mail that within a year or so he wanted the group to make so much noise that, say, the BBC’s soundbite-generating talking head show Question Time could not ignore it.

And he added: “If all three-million-plus people in Wales are talking about independence then I am happy, even if more than half of them are disagreeing.

“And that is the key, getting that conversation and broadening that conversation.

“If we could also persuade Welsh Labour to officially make independence an open question within Welsh Labour, which they haven’t done yet, to try and get one leading Welsh Labour figure to break cover and come out in favour of independence once that has happened.”

Mr Gwynfil’s remarks, for me, underline that the Welsh and Scottish independence movements are in very different places.

Here Yessers are trying to win a debate. Mr Gwynfil and his campaign are merely trying to have one. These are two very different aims, reflecting two very different national histories.

Welsh nationalists – it is often said – have been on a long journey of nation-building, creating, justifying and sustaining national institutions.

Their Scottish counterparts are arguably trying to do something different: state-building. Even if the SNP and its allies have as yet failed to convince a meaningful and sustained majority of us that this is the right course.

Me? I think it is worth zooming out and thinking about why Labour is so important to Welsh – and Scottish – nationalism. In many ways the party has been a core vehicle for the movement in both countries.

We have become used in Scotland to talk about “nationalists” when we mean what the Catalans rather more elegantly and accurately call independentistes. But, at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, nationalism takes many forms, including a non-separatist variety in substate nations.

Welshness and social democracy

In Scotland we have a long history of “nationalist” unionists, home rulers or devolutionists who pursue the national interest and build national institutions while still wanting to keep the UK. This tradition was baked in to Scottish Labour. It is still there, laced, albeit thinly, through the party like chocolate in a marble cake.

This is even truer of Welsh Labour, which has won every election in its nation for a century. Its trick? Selling a potent cocktail of Welshness and social democracy.

Last year its leader, First Minister Mark Drakeford, came up with a twenty-point plan to save what he called the “fragile” Union. He called for a “reset”, for a new UK, a voluntary, constitutionally guaranteed “partnership of equals”.

The Conservatives in power in Westminster, increasingly appealing to a more British nationalist base, were not interested.

Will UK Labour or another administration embrace some of Mr Drakeford’s ideas to re-imagine the union state?

Mr Gwynfil sees Britain as unreformable and therefore, I guess, thinks Mr Drakeford’s gambit will fail.

In his Western Mail interview, the YesCymru boss suggested that the sheer size of England in the UK meant that Wales and its interests would always be come second. That message will resonate with plenty of Scottish “nationalists”.

But how will it play with the soft nationalists of Welsh Labour if Mr Drakeford fails to convince English politicians, even Labour ones, to reimagine Britain?

Back in the run-up to 2014 there was one name those Scotpol nerds kept whispering: Henry McLeish.

The former first minister, rightly or wrongly, was seen as a possible Labour Yesser. It was only a year ago this week, in the excellent Herald podcast hosted by Brian Taylor, that Mr McLeish said he would vote for independence if there were another referendum. But his remarks came with a rider: his Yes would only come if there was no meaningful re-engineering of Britain, something he does not expect to happen.

Labour dismissed Mr McLeish as a yesterday’s man. The veteran has been out of power in the party and the country for two decades. And so may no longer feel in tune with a party faithful battle-hardened by indyref politics. But the former First Minister may be more like some of those Welsh Labour leaders in Cardiff. That, at least, is what Mr Gwynfil and YesCymru will be hoping. Wales, it is always worth watching.