THE lady on Musselburgh High Street was adamant. She had voted SNP forever but now she had a twinge of doubt. She had voted to leave the EU because she didn’t want “to be run from Brussels any more than from London”. True, she wasn’t about to vote Tory or Labour. But she was worried the SNP leadership was taking her vote for granted.

She is not the only one. Most of you probably haven’t heard of Gerry Fisher, one of the grand old men of Scottish Nationalism. A party activist for almost half a century, if you cut Gerry in two you would see SNP written inside.

His star turn at every conference is to hold the party leadership to the letter of the SNP’s constitution, which asserts the right of the membership over policy-making. Gerry is from a generation of SNP members who were never enamoured of the European Union project. They included the late Stephen Maxwell, one of the SNP’s greatest intellectuals.

Neither Gerry Fisher nor Stephen Maxwell could be accused of being parochial nationalists or anti-European. But they had concluded – on principled grounds – that a centralising EU project, dominated by a few big states, was not in the best interests of Scotland or the peoples of Europe as a whole.

Gerry Fisher remains unreconciled to the EU. Last week he put out this message on his Facebook page: “I am faced with a dilemma. On June 8th I am being asked to vote for the continued membership of the EU by my Party whose fundamental aim, which was why I joined 49 years ago, was to regain our independence as a Nation. How can I do this?”

I want to try to answer both Gerry and the woman on Musselburgh High Street. However, I will begin by deploring some of the comments put up in response to Gerry’s honest acknowledgement of his dilemma – one shared by not a few working class Yes supporters.

Telling Gerry to hold his nose and vote SNP because “there is no alternative” is not, in my opinion, a very strong argument. If the SNP is anything, it is a moral movement that promotes the collective good of the Scottish people. Ergo, we need a positive argument to vote SNP, not one premised on being the lesser evil.

Let’s start with Gerry’s key point: the SNP exists above all to win the sovereignty of the Scottish people as expressed in their own political institutions.

Gerry would say - if he’ll forgive me the liberty of paraphrasing his views – that sharing Scottish sovereignty, once achieved, with EU institutions is a contradiction in terms. And certainly a violation of the SNP’s historical mission.

For Gerry, therefore, turning the 2017 General Election into a quasi-referendum on EU membership is wrong in principle and risks splitting the electoral coalition the SNP has built up over recent decades.

Here’s where I start to disagree with Gerry. The SNP has had a pro-EU membership position for decades. I am unclear why Gerry feels that now in particular he faces a dilemma in voting for the party rather than at previous elections. Especially as Scotland voted last June by 62 per cent to 38 per cent to stay in the EU – which seems a good indication of the popular will.

OF course I understand that Gerry wants to remain free to challenge future Scottish membership of the EU, especially as the exact nature of an independent Scotland’s treaty obligations are yet to be determined. He and the late Stephen Maxwell – if I surmise correctly – favour a Norwegian model, with Scotland having a close economic and trading partnership with the EU, but not ceding any sovereignty to European institutions.

Fair enough. However, Norway’s membership of the Single Market does involve a commitment to implement European Commission directives. And while formally Norway isn’t subject to rulings from the European Court of Justice, it is obliged to obey the equally supranational EFTA Court as a substitute.

All of which is to say that no nation involved in trade, or having close links with other European states, can entirely escape ceding some sovereignty. We are talking degrees, of course, but the picture is not as black and white as Gerry Fisher is trying to paint it. And certainly not so stark as to justify abstaining in this General Election.

On the other hand, none of this technical stuff gets us anywhere in reaching out to potential SNP voters who are pro-Brexit. We desperately need to understand their motivation. It is not enough to rely on them having nowhere else to put their cross, when they get into the polling station.

Let’s look at why many ordinary working folk – including many core SNP voters – put their cross for Brexit. At root, popular resistance to the remoteness of the EU was a cry for a safe harbour in a globalised world – one where real incomes have flat-lined, jobs are under threat from robots, young folk can’t afford a house, and where decent care in old age comes at a financial premium.

Where can such a safe harbour be found? In dangerous times, folk want a community they can identify with – a common home, a nation state responsive to their needs.

For nation states are how we organise and protect ourselves, and grow our wealth. Theresa May is offering a return to the “cosy” 1950s, complete with grammar schools and fox hunting – a “British” fantasy that will evaporate as the harsh economic realities of Brexit start to bite. Yet voting for Brexit was a convenient (if distorted) way of expressing people’s desire for economic security.

These sentiments should be ones the SNP provides a political home for. The party has always favoured an inclusive state based on civic values not bogus ethnic claims or fear of “the outsider”. The SNP is a strong social democratic party with a history in government of welcoming refugees, caring for our elderly and poor, and providing opportunity for all. We want to create a nation state free of elites and whose institutions are close to those who are governed. Our Scottish culture and values are at heart communitarian. I can’t think of a better alternative to the London metropolitan elite or faceless Brussels bureaucrats.

So why are some potential voters feeling alienated? Perhaps we need to tell voters that the SNP is always ready to listen and learn. That we can always do better. That a decade in power dedicated to fending off Tory austerity (successfully) should not lead the SNP to promote “efficiency” over local decision-making. And that in negotiating our future relations with the EU, the interests of the Scottish people are absolutely non-negotiable – and really mean it. In short, that an independent Scotland will never again yield up its sovereignty as it was forced to do in 1707. We can be pro-Europe but abundantly clear Scotland comes first. I’m sure Gerry Fisher could vote for that.