The indyref sometimes caused feelings to run rather high, and people on both sides made themselves very unpopular with those on the other side. But four years of water has flowed under the bridge since then, and not everyone is still in the same trenches.

Some high-profile names have switched to from No to Yes (often but not exclusively as a result of Brexit), and the reception afforded to floor-crossers like Murray Foote, Eric Joyce, Jackie Kemp, Mike Dailly, Tom Morton and Simon Pia hasn’t always been an entirely warm one, with some unable to keep a lid on their old grudges.

And in a similar vein, some of the remarks in recent days on the reported switch to Yes of Billy Connolly – a few from people I thought better of – are deeply offensive and potentially deeply damaging.

I was born and brought up in Glasgow in the same community as Billy Connolly , am the same age as Billy Connolly and had I gone to St Gerard’s as I should have, I’d quite likely have been in the same class as Billy Connolly.

I understand the complicated politics of west central Scotland from my years in the SNP since I left school in 1959. I contested five elections in Lanarkshire for the SNP, all of them against Labour incumbents from a party already rotten to the core.

Labour actually approached me to stand for them at one point. That was nothing to do with my political commitment or socialist beliefs but because I was a Catholic teacher in a Catholic school. Many people on this site will understand what I’m about to expand on but many from wider Scotland will not.

From the end of WW1 and right through to sometime after WW2, the Catholic population of Irish descent in central Scotland was subjected to sectarian bias and discrimination that some people today would find hard to believe. In the 1920s the Church of Scotland’s National Assembly actually debated the repatriation of the Irish.

The Depression saw the height of it, as work became very scarce, but don’t imagine that it’s completely gone away even today. We have a generation growing up now, however, that knows little of it.

The Labour Party, or major figures in it, came to the rescue of Scotland’s Catholic community in the 1920s and by the following decade the Catholic community and the Labour Party in many parts of central Scotland became one and the same thing.

And as the Labour Party gained power in these areas it redressed the balance (I should say over-redressed it, but that’s another story). Suffice to say that a major reason for me taking up an education post in Nigeria was a head teacher (and Labour councillor) explaining that the reason I wasn’t getting on to shortlists for promotion was my SNP membership, and that joining Labour would see me home.

In the 60s, as the SNP started to take votes in areas in which Labour thought they would be in power effortlessly forever, Labour fought back by pulling in the debt it believed the Catholic community owed it.

So it went round the doors in all the schemes at every election with one major mantra for any family with a “Catholic“ name: the SNP was an Orange, Masonic organisation and if it got into the councils it would be back to the bad old days when Catholics couldn’t get a job (or a promotion if they did).

And of course they were said to hate the English as well as the Irish, in areas where that might have useful effect. It was insistent and incessant. And the Catholic community in large part believed it for years. I remember at my adoption meeting in Hamilton the audience (made up significantly of ex-colleagues from the school in Hamilton I’d taught in) crowding round after the speeches to ask questions like “Did the SNP know you were a Catholic when they chose you?”

The reason that this could have such an effect was really very simple. That generation of Catholics remembered the very real and vicious sectarian discrimination they and their parents had faced. It happened in Scotland. And there had been some evident anti-Irishism in the SNP despite the continuous efforts of the wiser element in the party to remove it.

This is where Billy Connolly came from. When he left Scotland this was what the Labour Party was up to (with the Tories pandering to the anti-Irish/anti-Catholic Orange vote at the same time). He was merely reflecting what many of his contemporaries also believed. That he’s taken rather longer to shake off the worry many of his generation felt about their place in an independent Scotland is probably due to the fact he’s been away for such a long time.

But he’s now tentatively treading a path that many thousands have already walked, and that’s why – if we don’t blow it now – Scotland will be independent sooner rather than later. The major impediment to independence has never been the Tories. It has always been the Labour Party. Labour relied on the Irish vote for its dominance in Scottish politics, until the modern SNP came along and kicked over its applecart.

Its reaction was to stupidly adopt a position contrary to the principles of its founders in a crude attempt to see off the SNP. In doing so it sowed the seeds of its own destruction, as a community not at all enamoured of Union Jacks saw the light and joined the right side while Labour increasingly went the other way.

So what we don’t need now is idiots on the independence side bellowing insults at converts and potential converts like Billy Connolly, unless we want to drive away a community that’s been steadily walking towards us and with us for years.

But also in the broader sense, what on Earth is the point of slogging away for years and years to persuade people round to our point of view if we’re just going to scream pent-up bitterness at them when they do? As this site pointed out years ago, nothing should bring us greater joy than once-bitter enemies coming over to our team.

The people of both parts of Ireland put far greater crimes behind them in the name of peace and progress than a few snarky interview comments. If we rage at those who would join us just when victory is within our reach, we’ll be the minority forever.