YOU will find Willie Adamson’s grave in Dunfermline Cemetery. Unheralded and largely forgotten, Adamson was a tough Fife miner. He led the Labour Party into the 1918 general election as an independent force, resisting blandishments from Lloyd George to fight under the wartime coalition “coupon”.

His judgment proved to be correct. Labour gained more than two million votes and won 57 seats, establishing them as the largest opposition party in the House of Commons. It was this great move forward which paved the way for Labour to enter government for the first time in the 1920s under Ramsay MacDonald. That, of course, was not an altogether happy experience.

Of course, Adamson only became leader of the opposition (and a Privy Councillor) because Sinn Fein fought and won 73 seats and the election in Ireland on an abstentionist platform. They claimed their seats but stayed put in Dublin. Their strategy also worked, albeit after a war of independence and then a civil war.

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The changes heralded by the 1918 election were seismic. The Liberal Party plunged into division and permanent decline. Labour were on the rise to become either the natural party of government or opposition for the rest of the 20th century. The south of Ireland became a Free State and left the House of Commons for good. The long-dominant Irish Parliamentary Party was swept aside by Sinn Fein and, after the 1922 UK election, their sole remaining representative sat for the Liverpool Scotland constituency!

The 1918 election was called as soon as the armistice was signed to end the Great War in November. It was fought in mid-December when the country was pulling out of the second wave of the “Spanish Flu” –

a contagion even more deadly than the current pandemic. However, as with Covid-19, just when the virus was thought to be over and done with, it came with a vengeance.

It was also the first election in the UK with any claim to be “democratic”. All women over 30 and all men over 21 (19 if you were wearing khaki) were entitled to vote for the first time. The sharp shifts in electoral fortune can partly be attributed to the fact vast numbers of the electorate were marking their cross for the very first time.

The lessons from the 1918 election history are there aplenty for the national movement in Scotland of today.

Sinn Fein won their landslide campaigning on the single issue of establishing an Irish Republic. The UK Government were unimpressed by the formation of the first Dail Eireann which promptly declared unilaterally for its mandate early in the New Year. This was the British Empire at the height of its pomp and power but it was relatively quickly forced to treat with the Irish insurgents.

When Lloyd George subsequently entered negotiations with Michael Collins, he did not dispute the Sinn Fein mandate, although it was achieved with 47% of the vote and not all seats were contested.

Scottish nationalism is not unique in refusing to go down anything other than an entirely constitutional path to independence. However, it is comparatively rare and has been based on the accepted belief that Scotland is a nation in a voluntary union with the rest of the United Kingdom.

No-one in Scotland would ever contemplate anything other than peaceful routes forward but it is an obvious fact that if Unionism closes off all the previously agreed constitutional paths, then innovative and novel ways will have to be found to force democracy down the throats of the lowlifes who occupy high places in the Palace of Westminster.

That should be happening right now with Boris Johnson’s veto over a Section 30 order. He should be faced with a sustained campaign outside and inside Parliament to change his mind, backed up by international diplomatic initiatives.

That will require a great deal more imagination than has been on display on the SNP benches over these last few years but hopefully at some stage MPs from Scotland will understand that if you always play the Westminster game, then you will always lose.

There is a second lesson from 1918 which may come in handy, given that no-one really thinks there is any salvation to be sought or gained from the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom meeting in Middlesex Guildhall just across the road from the House of Commons.

And that lies in Lloyd George’s innovative tactics to protect his position as prime minister. He developed the system of “coupons” by which preferred candidates – Tory, Liberal and Labour – stood with a coupon or letter from him identifying them as supporters of the coalition government.

As a political exercise, it worked brilliantly. Coalition “coupon” candidates won a landslide against divided opposition.

If we are forced into a “plebiscite election” by Westminster intransigence, and the benchmark has been set by the SNP on the incredibly high bar of votes not seats, then probably only a Scotland United “coupon” attached to a single candidate in each seat could carry this off. It is often said that only the Tories in 1955 have succeeded in winning a majority of votes in a general election in Scotland.

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In fact they didn’t. They won their majority with an arrangement with the “National Liberals”, who took 8% of the vote. The bar has indeed been set high and the danger of falling agonisingly short in a normal party election is obvious.

The SNP could win a landslide and then Scotland be hoisted on the petard of the 50% target. It will take something really special to galvanise and inspire Scotland to reach it.

This could be having our own “coupon” election with candidates standing as SNP-Scotland United, Green-Scotland United or Alba-Scotland United or indeed Independents-Scotland United, and all on the manifesto that Scotland should be an independent country.

Now that would be an election worth fighting.