1. UK is statistically more fractured than at any time since 1922. Only 58% voted for the two main parties. Starmer / Labour are the most unpopular group ever to be elected (and on a landslide). It’s going to be a short honeymoon. It may already be over. See fuel allowance.
2. Labour Rises. Only they didn’t. They polled terribly until quite recently. Even when the Tories were selling the ventilator contracts to their pals the numbers didn’t move. The start was when Johnson failed to sack Owen Patterson. But without partygate the Tories would still have been in power. Probably.
3. Liz Truss proved that no government can ever survive a financial crisis. By being so shit she essentially killed any chance of a hung parliament that would have given the SNP the leverage to force a second plebiscite. So the revival of Scottish Labour is everything to do with Johnson & Truss and absolutely nothing to do with Anas Sarwar.
4. On the question of independence I’m not surprised by the polls holding up when the SNP vote has collapsed. Scotland has always made this distinction. It’s nothing new. What the independence parties – and the wider movement – has to do is to move away from the binary yes/no of 2014 to – what kind of union do you want to be part of? We have I think three main questions to ask. Should Scotland be an independent Country? Who should be our head of state? And what should be our relationship with the EU? No serious party can ignore these questions, but until they engage with them we cannot move forward. It falls on all of us to make sure that we do.

It’s weird though. In 2014 I was at an event down south and I remember thinking – wow, England are pretty cool about us leaving. This is entirely a question for Scotland.

My hunch is that the anniversary of the first independence referendum won’t register much in a conference hall in Telford tomorrow. And in truth it might not register much in Scotland either. But I remember thinking in 2014 that an awful lot of folk in Scotland don’t remember a time when we didn’t have a parliament.

Today I’ll go you one further.

There’s now a generation of young people – my weans included – who can’t remember a time when the kind self-determination enjoyed by democratic countries around the world was a mainstream conversation.

That, more than anything, should give us hope.

Keep the faith good people. I’ll meet you further on up the road.