THERE is now clearly a debate about referendum timing among the independence movement and it is becoming polarised and heated. I want to argue that both sides are looking at this in slightly the wrong way, that we need to be a bit more clear-sighted on where we are just now but that this helps us to identify a path forward which is capable of unifying us all.

On one side are those who want to have a referendum soon and who believe that only then can we start to turn the polls. On the other are those who want to wait until it looks like we can win a referendum before we call it.

I suggest we need to start somewhere slightly different. When producing political strategy I always advise that it is good to start by role-playing your opponent. The debate so far has revolved around when WE want to hold a referendum, what WE should do. We need to think for a minute about what the other side will do.

Put bluntly, calling a binding referendum is not in our hands. Even if the Scottish Government (perhaps with another parliamentary vote to back it up) formally requested a referendum from Westminster, Westminster would almost certainly say no.

That is because at the moment it still has the stronger hand; we have barely ever crossed the 50 per cent support threshold, there is still no public majority to hold another referendum and, politically, we’ve played “chicken” on this one once already and it was us who blinked.

Westminster will be confident it can ride out any such request without paying any substantial political price, at least until 2021. And it will feel that there is at least a real possibility of the Scottish election not returning a pro-indy majority. This means that if it can ride out calls for a referendum for what will be less than three years it might put this issue to bed for a generation.

That would leave us with only one option – to “go Catalan” and hold a non-binding, non-mutually agreed consultative referendum. Here is where I would ask you to role play our opponents – what would you do if you were the Unionist media and the Unionist political parties and probably the BBC?

If it was me I’d just ignore it. I’d call for a boycott. If I was the media I’d barely cover the story and whenever I did I’d focus on the process, the divisiveness and under no circumstances the actual issues. I’d probably call it an “illegal referendum” over and over whether it was true or not.

The Yes side would then win the referendum by an unfeasibly large margin, but very probably end up with a lower number of total votes for independence than we achieved in 2014 (because the nature of the campaign would substantially depress the turnout).

I’d then ignore the result and wait another year until the election. Holding a referendum and it not going well (even if we won) would be unlikely to strengthen the hand of the SNP in the 2021 election, potentially increasing the chance of losing that pro-indy majority.

In any case, I think it vanishingly unlikely that the SNP leadership would consider something as risky as going down the same road as Catalonia, so it’s hard to see how this is a realistic option.

We should be honest with ourselves – if we held a referendum next week we’d probably lose. If we ask for one we’ll probably be knocked back. If we ran it anyway there would probably be a pretty nasty and co-ordinated plan to derail it. Saying “go now” and hoping somehow it will work out is optimistic.

But I despair just as much at the other side; at the idea that our role is to sit and wait until a moment when it looks like we’re going to win. If the “go now” camp is overestimating the power we have, the “wait and see” campaign is greatly underestimating it.

So let’s take a step back. Scotland has no constitutional power to compel a binding referendum or (probably) to declare independence unilaterally. We therefore need to consider what we can use to compel Westminster to give us a referendum – or make it very politically painful not to.

I think there is only one way to do this; we need to be asking from a position of strength, and that has to come from being ahead in the polls and also having a majority in favour of holding another referendum. And it is going to have to be more than achieving 51 per cent in a single poll – we’re going to need to create a sustained lead.

BUT this won’t happen if we’re passive, if we just wait. What a lot of the “go now” people I know really want (I think) is to get going with a proper campaign for independence.

And that’s what we need to do – it’s just that we have to start thinking about this campaign as about GETTING a referendum rather than WINNING a referendum.

We don’t need to call a referendum to do that, and it has the added advantage that when we do get a referendum we’ll be in a position to win (we should be expecting a reasonably long pre-campaign of a year or two if we start now – but a short official campaign of three or six months). I think that involves us doing three things.

First of all we need to get the infrastructure in place – we need to support the grassroots in getting organised and we need to set up a professional campaign organisation. I think there is very little chance that we can achieve this with an SNP-only campaign.

Second of all we need to sort out our case. We simply cannot go back to people this time carrying with us only the now slightly threadbare case we took last time. I think that we need to hold a summit, a gathering of experts and representatives of the broad movement to agree a shared plan for what we offer.

In effect, we need a White Paper pitch which answers the questions and gives us good stories to tell. We need to be ready. But we need to be fast – time is slipping by and we’re deluding ourselves if we think we can win this without better answers on currency, pensions, division of debt and so on. (Common Weal has tried to do as much of the “pre-thinking” on this as we can in our book How To Start A New Country, but whatever case is produced has to be shared, one everyone is comfortable with.)

Then we need to let people know there is a campaign. One of the most worrying findings in the public opinion research work that the Scottish Independence Convention did is that almost no-one has any awareness of any campaigning we’ve done since 2014.

I know we think we’re reaching people, but the research we’ve done so far suggests that the voters most likely to change their minds aren’t even aware that we’re TRYING to reach them. I know some of you reading this will think this research is wrong. But it’s not what we think that counts, its what those we need to convert think.

We need to send out a big, unmissable signal that “we’re back”, that we’re talking to them again. We need to draw a firm line under the last campaign, put it properly to rest. We can’t just refresh the old campaign – we need to start a new one.

I propose that we take the prospectus, the case we develop at the “summit”, and we distill it down to a clear set of promises to the people of Scotland. “We will create a new, independent country called Scotland. We will set up our own currency. We will create a new and better pensions system ...”

Perhaps we can come up with 12 promises that capture what the Scottish people are being offered. We give it a name – the “New Covenant” perhaps – and we have a mass signing ceremony along the lines of the signing of the Claim of Right in 1989 (which led directly to winning a Scottish Parliament).

This draws a line under the “old” campaign and signals a new one. That is what we need to “springboard” off, to give ourselves momentum. Then we need to go hell for leather and deliver it, change people’s minds, get to 55 per cent or more in favour of independence.

With that in our pocket we can go to Westminster in a position of strength. From there, we can make it very much more uncomfortable for them to say no – if we get a big enough lead we could make it impossible. And if they do say no, we create exactly the kind of constitutional crisis which makes a consultative referendum feasible.

I know that some people will think this is the long way round, or that people will only change their minds during a referendum. But I don’t see how that’s an option for us right now. So either we wait or we act, and I’m very much in favour of the latter.

We need to pull the movement back together not through soothing words but through decisive action. We need a plan we can all share which helps us to focus on the future and not dwell in some of the unpleasantness which is happening now. These are risky moments for us all. But they don’t have to be.

A plan around which we can all unite is capable of turning this moment around. But we can’t just talk about it, and we can’t just all run off and do our own thing and hope it amounts to more than the sum of its parts.

We’ve been a strong and united movement and we must be again. Let’s focus on that.