Watch a heavily edited down 12 minutes from the session HERE

On Saturday I spent a day in Dunfermline at a conference organised by the Scottish Sovereignty Research Group. To be honest I hadn’t ever heard of it, but its director, David Henry, approached me after one of my Edinburgh Fringe shows in August. He explained that it was a group who were not part of the SNP, but existed to provide some intellectual ballast for the case for independence. So far, so good. Anyway, I said I’d be happy to do it.

Saturday did not get off to a good start. Having booked pre-parking a Gatwick, I arrived at 6am to find out I’d booked it for the following weekend. So instead of paying £62, 29 hours of parking actually cost me £140, despite them telling me it would be £100. Scandalous.

Anyway, I arrived at the venue in time for my session, which was billed as Meet the Authors. The other two participants were supposed to be Ron Culley and Mariana Mazzacato. She pulled out and was replaced by Yvonne Ridley.

It soon became clear that this was a gathering of the independence diehards. There were around 100 people there, most of whom were fairly elderly. I spotted onto two people who could have been described as young. It was a mixture of a 2009 UKIP conference, and a meeting of the ERG.

They seemed obsessed with the thought that the United Nations could be persuaded to describe Scotland as a “colony”. Their case for this was shaky in the extreme, but so sure were they of the rectitude of their case, that they consistently barracked me as I tried to argue the opposite. It is an historical fact that the Scottish Parliament voted for union with England, which led to the 1707 Act of Union. It is a fact that Scotland was on the verge of bankruptcy. But oh no, it was the wicked English who forced the poor downtrodden Scots into submission. Apparently, we English won’t allow the Scots to determine their own future, which rather ignores the fact that the Westminster parliament voted to allow an independence referendum in 2014. But apparently, that wasn’t fair and there was a lot of “jiggery pokery”. I was told it was all the BBC’s fault as they were so biased against independence. I pointed out that the BBC was also biased towards Remain in the Brexit referendum two years later, but Leave still won. Perhaps Yes lost in the independence referendum because their campaign was a bit, well, crap. Oh no, they shrieked. It was all down to postal votes! How so, I enquired? David Henry alleged the turnout was 98.3 per cent in postal votes, a figure, he said, that was not possible as people would have died. Er, OK. He is wrong. The postal vote turnout, according to the Electoral Commission was 90.6%, only four per cent above the whole turnout. I then asked how David Henry knew that all the extra postal votes were cast for No. Answer came there none.

This conference was essentially a gathering of the Provisional Wing of the SNP. I didn’t meet a single person who said they supported the SNP. Most of them seemed to have been members of the now bankrupt and more or less defunct Alba Party, founded by Alex Salmond, but which more or less died on the same day that he did. Spectacularly ill-timed to coincide with the SNP conference in Aberdeen, there wasn’t a single SNP activist or politician on the speaker programme.

The problem for the Independence movement is similar to the one affecting the Right in the whole of the UK. It has splintered into different factions. And never the twain shall meet. The SSRG enthusiasts hate the SNP with a passion they normally reserve for Margaret Thatcher. Unless these factions can put the past behind them, the independence movement will continue to weaken.

I did enjoy the session, and it took me back to my university days, where I would delight in debating the hard left and end up laughing at them, due to their pathetic arguments. The arguments of the zealot are quite something to behold.

Before I finish let me inform you that the Bank of England is completely controlled by “drug money” and it would collapse without Scotland. Yes, that was seriously put forward by one of the questioners.

As soon as the session finished, I returned to the real world and hotfooted it to East End Park to watch Dunfermline Athletic play Livingston. It was a drab 0-0 draw. Part of me wished I’d stayed at the SSRG conference and had a few more heated debates!