THREE and a half years ago, when I started writing this column, it felt as if a people’s army was gathering for a Europe-wide assault on the fortress of austerity.

The movement was uneven, multidimensional, and leaderless. But at its heart was Greece, where a psychotic social experiment in debt bondage and public sector cuts set new boundaries for financial sadism.

With teachers facing 30% pay cuts, two in five young people unemployed, and no hope of escaping a downward spiral of recession, Greek voters decided enough was enough, and voted in a leftist government committed to pro-poor reforms.

Syriza’s programme was modest, in historical terms, but in their emergency circumstances, modesty and decency had a revolutionary aura. In July 2015, they held a referendum and the Greek people rejected the blackmail imposed on them by French and German bankers. I was in Athens to celebrate a result that (briefly) felt as if it had overturned the worldwide austerity consensus.

The “oxi” vote showed that austerity was losing the battle for popular legitimacy. It showed that ordinary people’s courage could defy extraordinary blackmail, even when “project fear” was raised to a planetary scale. And if Europe’s most victimised country could do it, anyone could. In Spain, there was Podemos; in Germay, Die Linke; in France, Jean-Luc Melenchon.

Even in England, Europe’s most right-wing social democratic party had somehow elected Jeremy Corbyn as it leader. DIY insurgencies were turfing out a morally compromised establishment, and the radical left seemed capable of winning the battle of ideas. Scotland, of course, was central to that. The referendum of 2014 inspired anti-austerity campaigners across the continent.

After initial hesitation, Europe’s serious thinkers came to understand the Yes movement for what it was: a left populist force of enormous energy, concentrated in post-industrial small towns and working class urban estates, which had successfully united swathes of anti-establishment resistance without yielding to xenophobia.

The grassroots campaign for independence, back then, showed how a radical European left could emerge seemingly from nowhere. Certainly, we never had a coherent programme, but it was genuinely popular and genuinely menacing to elite interests, from banks and energy firms to the deep state and the Royal Family. In the days before The National, Yes was widely denigrated by the press and the broadcasters.

In retrospect, given what we now know about populist movements, this almost certainly added to the respect and the legitimacy of the independence cause. A sneering establishment was clinging to failed ideas when the people wanted change. The movement for independence captured that.

Scotland’s radical left definitely played a role in this, although this shouldn’t be exaggerated. We were, comparatively, a tiny group of people, and tiny groups alone don’t change history. In 2014, we were inexplicably influential for one simple reason: we realised, before Yes Scotland, that people didn’t want politics as usual and more of the same. Eventually, when a well-oiled SNP machinery cottoned onto this, it became one of Europe’s biggest parties.

The SNP’s victories in 2015 felt like an anti-establishment uprising. Scottish Labour was a byword for sitting back, doing little and expecting its core vote to turn out. Its moral compromises with the British state, from the Iraq war to welfare cuts, had slowly eaten away at any lingering reasons for loyalty. Their heaviest losses were among “heartland” voters, Irish Catholics and people in post-War housing estates. It was a deserved drubbing. And, for Europe’s genuinely progressive movements, it was part of an optimistic mood.

But three and a half years later, as 2018 draws to a close, there is only one pressing question. What went wrong? Austerity has almost vanished from the agenda: it continues on, silently, eating away at the legitimacy of the political mainstream, but radical, oppositional movements have not capitalised. Instead, the populist right have monopolised the protest vote. Trump, Farage, and Le Pen are making history and winning democratic arguments, exploiting anti-austerity sentiment for their own ends.

In Scotland, independence has retreated from the agenda, during the biggest geopolitical crisis of the British state in generations.

Now, to be clear, I am instinctively hostile to the European Union.

I was heavily invested in events in Greece, and what I learned from the failure of Syriza is that real change was impossible within the EU’s undemocratic structures.

I have never denied this. I have also never denied that Scotland voted overwhelmingly to stay, and I admit that Nicola Sturgeon had to do something to defend the nation’s popular will.

Nonetheless, the railroading of the pro-independence movement behind the People’s Vote campaign is indicative of everything that went wrong with the Left across Europe. We have folded behind a Blairite, centrist crusade to restore the status quo, having extracted no concessions for Scottish independence (I can’t imagine that Chuka Umunna would ever allow Scotland its own “People’s Vote”). Scotland thus has no autonomous stake in Britain’s crisis. And the mandate and the momentum for independence is draining away.

Meanwhile, domestically, a generation has grown used to SNP government. Nationalist leaders are part of the furniture. In another era, having the aura of power could be an advantage. But in the current global context, parties that grow accustomed to ruling are unusually vulnerable to left-wing and right-wing challengers.

After a decade of austerity, pay rises are almost keeping up with inflation. This is what passes for progress. And, of course, maybe Derek Mackay has a point: compared to the UK, almost anything looks progressive. But this steady, small-c conservative agenda is unlikely to satisfy the radical impulses of the independence movement, which is once again on the streets in huge numbers.

Back in 2015, a cliché was doing the rounds, one which I advanced: “Scottish politics has changed forever”. Today, that isn’t clear. At best, the independence movement has become defensive, a shield against populist impulses operating in England. At worst, our movement risks falling in behind the Blairites (including the butcher of Baghdad himself) who are orchestrating the People’s Vote campaign.

And this isn’t just about Scotland. Syriza, the acknowledged leader of the radical left in 2015, now passively administers austerity and even operates internment camps for refugees at the behest of the European Commission.

Corbyn’s role in Labour is receding. Sporadic outbursts of popular frustration, such as the Gilet Jaunes, point to the potential for a radical movement, but also the risk that the far right might monopolise legitimate grievances.

I’m not pessimistic. Ultimately, I have faith in popular power. I believe that working class people will eventually discard the charlatans of the populist right and the establishment centrists. My worry isn’t about the working class, it’s about the Left. We’ve got to design a radical leftism that’s genuinely transformative and fit for the needs of working class people in Europe. The movements that converged in 2015 have fallen back, and, for a while, it’s back to the drawing board. But the need for a popular revolution is more pressing than ever, and we will be back.