Ten years since the independence referendum. So what do I remember? Watching Gordon Brown in Kilmarnock doing one of his last-minute, save-the-Union speeches. Joining a Yes march on a wet and windy day in Glasgow and getting tangled up in a big soggy saltire (I know a metaphor when I see one). Voting No and noticing a dead black cat by the side of the road on the way back from the polling station (I know a bad omen when I see one). But ten years? Hard to believe.

Inevitably, the anniversary is making some people feel all nostalgic, and thoughtful, and regretful, and other emotions. There’s also going to be a ten-years-on rally in George Square just ahead of the anniversary itself and the poster for it shows a little girl in a tutu and angel wings, presumably contemplating a future where Scots like her can be free at last. The poster reads “the dream will never die” and is a pretty good example of why Yes lost ten years ago and is unlikely to win again any time soon.

The problem is the mawkishness of it, the over-sentimentality, the appeal to the heart rather than the brain, a tactic that was always going to win over some Scots and repel others. Emotions play a part in politics obviously, a big part, and fear and concern influenced the decision of some No voters, of course they did. But it seems to me the problem often with the Yes campaign is that, faced with the failure of emotion to win the fight for them, their response is to do more emotion. Teary eyes. Clenched fists. One last push.

You can detect, I think, a little bit of that in Alex Salmond’s latest remarks on independence. Kicking at the rubble of the SNP’s general election campaign, the former First Minister said the response of his old party to defeat had been “brain dead” and that membership had fallen to half of what it was five years ago because people didn’t think the party was really trying to get independence any more. “It’s not the winning and losing,” he said, “it’s the lack of fight.”

I can see why this would appeal to some independence supporters because it’s another variation of the emotional argument: the reason we lost is the lack of fight so we must fight! Mr Salmond also said the SNP had failed to get across the urgency of independence, which is another variation of the argument that No voters are wrong but haven’t realised it yet (You Yes Yet? No Actually, I’m Not). The truth is that neither approach properly deals with the fact that people can see the potential effects independence would have on their finances, and the border, and public services, and so on. Heart says yes. Brain says no.

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What the last ten years have proved, if they’ve proved anything, is that there are no straightforward solutions to any of those issues for Yes campaigners (and if Nicola Sturgeon couldn’t win it, who can?) However, I do still think there’s a better way that the Yes movement could do things that would be more effective than angel wings or calls to fight, fight, fight. One of the other things Mr Salmond said was that there’d been no signs from within the SNP of any kind of analysis about what’s gone wrong for them. So we should try and do it for them.

The first and most obvious issue is that the SNP is still prone to doing the thing that hasn’t been working for them for ages now: blaming stuff on the monster of Westminster. It involves a kind of panic (emotion again) that Scottish identity, or Scottish democracy, or Scottish values (whatever they may be) are under threat. But the Scots’ sense of identity was strong before the Act of Union, it was strong after, and it’s strong now. No one is really scared of the monster anymore, so stop doing it.

The other bit of re-tuning that’s required is going to be even harder because it involves accepting that you can fight all you like but the only legitimate and workable route to independence is to stop fighting and start cooperating to build a consensus. The SNP could try to punch and scratch its way to 50.1% but what the party needs to do is return to the idea of a “settled will” – in other words, a solid majority (certainly over 60%) that could be confirmed in a referendum, as it was with devolution in the 90s.

(Image: Yes and No campaigners win 2014)

And finally, the SNP needs to tackle the facts on finances, and the border, and public services in a mature and intelligent way (no angel wings). There was an attempt to do it quite a long time ago now with the Growth Commission report of 2018 which warned that Scottish independence was not a magic wand. It also made a stab at getting people to accept that independence would result in financial pain and austerity, but it never really took off with the SNP for obvious reasons (it doesn’t look good on the posters).

Which only leaves one option in the end, which is to try and sell a more moderate, more realistic form of independence that might attract Middle Scotland. What you’d call it I’m not sure, but it involves more self-government and an extremely close relationship with England analogous to the UK’s former relationship with the EU but even closer, because that’s what makes economic and political sense.

I’m not suggesting it’s something a lot of nationalists would necessarily want to fight for, but I am suggesting that the fighting hasn’t got them very far. So time for something different no?