DON’T mourn, organise! These, of course, are the elegiac dying words of Joe Hill, the Swedish-American labour activist and rebel songwriter, just before his infamous execution in 1915. Today, in Boris Land, Hill’s call to action takes on a fresh political resonance. Let’s by all means have a post-mortem about the General Election, but we also need a blueprint for popular resistance in Scotland.

Let me cut to the chase: the new Tory populist regime will never willingly grant a Section 30 order to allow a legal second Scottish independence referendum. So how do we respond? I totally respect the First Minister’s current project to use moral suasion to force Boris to give the sovereign Scottish people (through their elected Parliament) the sole right to hold an independence plebiscite. Yet what happens when the colonial power in London – and colonial it now assuredly is – refuses to be swayed by any such moral argument?

And if there is a modern British politician who singularly lacks an ethical antenna, it is Prime Minister Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

I believe Nicola Sturgeon has always known there was no chance in Hades of an indyref2 in 2020, regardless of the outcome of last Thursday’s election. Her plan is to go into the 2021 Holyrood contest with Westminster’s refusal of a Section 30 order safely in her political bank account.

Meanwhile, the SNP leadership plan to take the UK Government to court to try to force the granting of such a Section 30 Order, on the grounds that a refusal would be legally “unreasonable” if there is a proven popular majority for holding indyref2. After all, the Good Friday Agreement already gives the people of Northern Ireland the implicit right to a border poll if there is a popular demand for such.

READ MORE: Without Section 30, the law won't help Scottish independence

Yet there are numerous problems with Nicola’s strategy. Primarily, it assumes the SNP will maintain their popularity in a fourth, successive Holyrood election. I hope they do. But by May 2021 we will have had 16 months of a Boris-style populism being directed at Scotland, with the sole intention of destabilising the SNP government. And that’s without the potential fallout from next year’s trial of Alex Salmond, which – rightly or wrongly – is sure to embroil the FM and senior party officials.

Expect Boris, Dominic Cummings and their compliant media propaganda arm to put Scotland in their sights, with the aim of denying the SNP government an independence mandate in 2021.

Even if the pro-independence forces gain a majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2021, there is no chance whatsoever of a Section 30 order. Just the opposite in fact, as by re-electing an SNP government the uppity Scots will have raised the stakes on the eventual break-up of the UK. For by 2021, the final shape of any Brexit deal will be clear. That must involve Northern Ireland becoming a semi-detached part of Britain and heading for a vote on its future. To head off calls for an Irish exit, Boris will have to double down on Scottish secession.

The SNP leadership will console themselves that the courts will ride to their rescue. Again, I can conceive of the Scottish bench ruling in favour of a Section 30 order. But I doubt if the UK Supreme Court will have the balls to take on Dominic Cummings after he has destroyed the UK establishment governing machine from the inside – including “traitorous” judges.

And even if the Supreme Court ordered Boris to grant a Section 30 order, his phalanx of new, right-wing MPs would simply legislate otherwise. The General Election was a parliamentary coup against the traditional British establishment. SNP appeals to that establishment are a waste of time.

The National:

Equally, don’t expect international intervention in support of Scotland’s right to self-determination. For starters, we will be out of the EU – and, anyway, the EU has proven singularly unwilling to intervene in Spain to oppose the imprisonment of elected members of the Catalan government on bogus political charges.

As for the White House calling on Boris to defend Scottish democracy, Trump is more likely to ask Number 10 for British troops to defend his golf courses.

So, what do we do? The answer is to replicate the tactics of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, and their invocation of mass, non-violent civil disobedience to force an unwilling political foe to grant civil rights. Espousing a moral case without turning it into a genuine moral crusade in the streets is whistling in the proverbial wind.

Moral suasion only becomes an unstoppable force when people are prepared to go to prison for their rights. The world only takes notice of a democratic cause when TV screens show old ladies being carted off to jail by policemen wearing dark visors. Tiny but brave Hong Kong is standing up to the Xi regime in Beijing, in defence of its right to elect its own government. In similar fashion, Scotland will have to march, chant, sit down or occupy if it is to force London to grant our right to determine our own constitution.

READ MORE: Tories have proved they couldn’t run a whelk stall, far less the UK economy

Of course, civil disobedience has to be trained for, organised and disciplined, or it risks alienating more people than it gathers in support. The goal is not disruption per se but to prove to the world the unwillingness of a people to be denied their rights and freedoms.

Civil disobedience is a bearing of witness that, in the end, exposes the self-serving lies of those who would deny democracy. It is not a matter of an annual sit-down outside Westminster or getting wet occasionally on a damp march through Edinburgh.

Mass civil disobedience demands non-violent confrontation on a daily basis till you sap the opponent’s will to continue. It is swamping the courts and police cells, it is refusing to pay taxes, it is hounding Tory politicians at every meeting they go to on any subject, and it is making the colonial Scotland Office unworkable. In short, it is being a damned nuisance till we drive Boris bonkers. Ultimately, a successful campaign demands that the people of Scotland refuse to recognise the writ of a Tory regime in any form.

That could involve blockading the Scotland Office in Edinburgh or occupying the Satanic Border and Immigration HQ in Glasgow. It could mean mass demonstrations to stop Scots EU citizens being deported. It could mean a refusal to pay your TV licence or car tax.

Certainly, it requires a parliamentary counterpart, with our new SNP MPs disrupting Westminster business. But there’s no point in such actions being undertaken by a tiny minority. It will require tens of thousands to take part and millions to sympathise with them, as in Hong Kong.

Mass civil disobedience is no easy option. It takes consistency of effort to turn the political tide in this way. Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience took nearly 30 years to bear fruit, in the teeth of extreme British violence. From the Montgomery bus boycott to the first genuine civil rights legislation being passed, it took Martin Luther King more than a decade of continuous campaigning.

Yet as Dr King famously remarked: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”