Last week, Nicola Sturgeon delivered her farewell speech at Holyrood. She’s also hinted that she wants to update last year’s memoirs with a fresh chapter. Here, Kevin McKenna imagines how it might read.

"You know, people always ask me why the SNP never seemed to have a Plan B to unlock the door to Scottish independence. This has caused me to do a lot of soul-searching. I think I’m now in a position though, to offer a solution to John and my former cabinet colleagues.

You see, my severance package has given me the economic freedom to travel the length and breadth of the UK to solicit the views of the ordinary people in our country’s book festival sector. These stalwart souls are the backbone of Scotland and the UK in their pashminas and red corduroys. They are well placed to provide a street-level analysis of the challenges people face in their everyday lives.

Someone cruelly suggested last week that I must have needed a satnav to find my way back to Holyrood last week to deliver my farewell speech, so seldom have I actually been there in recent years while representing the good people of Govanhill. This misses the point, though.

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My constituents know that I’m promoting their neighbourhood everywhere I go and seeking inward investment from the influential literary communities of Cambridge and Stratford. I’m constantly seeking to identify areas of common interests between these places and Govanhill.

Why, at the Cambridge Literary festival last year, I was approached by a local lady who’d heard of the daily challenges the young folk of Govanhill must overcome. She wanted to invite some local pupils down and perhaps put on a wee show about their experience of cleaning chimneys and working down the pits before starting their school day.

Scotland must find innovative, fresh and freshly innovative ways of securing our independence. It’s now become clear to me that we’ve been approaching this from the wrong direction.

So far, we’ve been framing the independence debate in a dull and uninspired binary fashion. Scotland is a progressive, inclusive and progressively inclusive country. It astounds me why we insist on looking at independence in such a restricted and, quite frankly, discriminatory way. We need to become more constitutionally fluid in our thinking and explore a more powerful matrix of possibilities.

You see, independence isn’t binary. It shouldn’t conform to outdated and damaging stereotypes about what independence really means. You might have thought that independence means possessing all the old and often discredited accoutrements pertaining to the state of independence.

These have included patriarchal concepts such as having your own currency;  being recognised as independent by the community of nations and the discredited notion of unstitching the devolved settlement. Scotland must become constitutionally non-conforming.

If the SNP become Scotland’s government in May then they should simply declare that we have become independent. Basically, if we feel independent and walk around the place looking independent we should demand access to the spaces where independent nations gather.

We should be forming mass protests outside the UN and at the Olympics and the World Cup. Our banners should carry messages like "Scottish Rights are Human Rights" and "Respect my Existence or Expect my Resistance". I’d add my own one: "Feel a Little Independent Every Day". Who are you to tell me I’m not independent when I feel independent with every fibre of my being?

I’ve also had time to reflect on some of my choices in government. In particular, my perceived failure to reduce the educational attainment gap. But you know what? I think I did much more to bridge that gap than people are happy to admit. Once more, as with our binary approach to independence, I think we’ve been coming to it in the wrong way.

You see; there was a reason why I promoted politicians with no discernible talents and possessing no record of achieving anything of substance in their previous careers. You might ask why people like Mairi McAllan, Shona Robison, Neil Gray and Angela Constance now run huge spending departments, despite having done little but count the takings in their local constituency tombola stall. Pete Wishart and John Nicolson? Discuss. 

But, yet again, ordinary people who don’t know how politics works are too easily encouraged to think in binary ways about political achievement. By promoting people of no proven expertise or ability, I was striving to demonstrate innovation in how the attainment gap can be reduced.

When children who have been struggling academically see all these people reaching the top of their profession it inspires them. I know these people and how they speak. They can march into their schools the next morning and say: “I’m goany be wan o’ them politishuns, by the way.”

This is the life that I wanted to unlock for all of Scotland’s children.

My legacy is showing you don’t really need fancy qualifications and be brilliant at numeracy and literacy. You just need to pop down to Matalan or George at Asda and get yourself a shiny suit; a wee North Face rucksack; a pair of pronouns and voila: Bob’s your uncle and maybe your auntie too.

Nicola Sturgeon during the Scottish independence campaign in 2014 (Image: Newsquest)

Instead of always moaning about drugs deaths and homelessness and ferries, I would organise a sort of national Hunger Games. All of Scotland’s top SIMD communities (Scottish Index of Multi-Deprivation) could choose a local champion to engage in a month-long series of physical and mental challenges.

The winner’s community would get a few million in inward investment; some smart affordable housing and a brand new drug rehab centre. It would all be funded by the global live streaming rights. It would tick all the boxes on private and public investment. It would unlock resilience. There would be outcomes.

My favourite ever classical quote defines the way I feel about Scotland. It’s from one of the letters of Pliny the Younger. It’s when the emperor Marcus Aurelius says to Russell Crowius: “There was once a dream that was Rome.”

Well, I believe there was once a dream that was Scotland and that we’re on the verge of recapturing it. "

Kevin McKenna is Feature Writer of the Year

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