Year-ahead predictions are – as much as I salute those willing to put their credibility on the line to make them – a fool’s game. To predict the biggest political events of the past three years – the Truss-Kwarteng fiscal fiasco, the protracted Russian invasion of Ukraine, the pandemic – you’d have to have been clairvoyant.

But I think it’s safe to say that 2023 will be a crucial year for the Yes movement and the SNP, one in which it – if it wants to muster over 50 per cent of the vote in the next election – must pivot from arguments about process to establishing its vision for a new Scotland.

We are nearing the peak of the latest iteration of a perma-crisis that bedded in after 2008, during the Great Recession. Since then, living standards have plummeted as wages have stagnated, and over a decade of ideologically driven austerity has gutted the public realm.

A brittle economy with a deep-seated productivity problem and exploding inequality, tied with an atrophied state, put the UK in a dreadful position to deal with a major shock like the pandemic and in an even worse place to recover from it.

The war in Ukraine plays a significant role in the latest iteration of the crisis, but it too is arguably a result of the 2008 financial crisis. Power has shifted away from democracies towards autocracies, and autocrats like Putin came to see Western democracies as weak, decadent, and liable to fold under pressure.

With the Great Recession, decades of consensus behind neoliberal economics – propped up by growing house prices and positive, if anaemic, wage growth – collapsed. Political convulsions followed, most notably the vote for Brexit, a right-populist project that was unthinkable a decade earlier.

The rise in support for Scottish independence, from 28% in October 2012 to 44.7% in the 2014 referendum, was similarly driven by a clamouring for political change (notably most robust among the economically worst-off).

But despite the deeply felt and loudly expressed need for fundamental change, no new political project has achieved societal consensus 14 years since the Great Recession. Instead, a succession of Conservative attempts to preserve the old order has deepened the perma-crisis and weakened our ability to resolve it.

As Antonio Gramsci, a communist political theorist imprisoned by Italy’s fascists opined from his prison cell as the Great Depression gripped the world, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”

In the struggle for the new to be born, all sorts of outsider politics can gain a hearing from people disaffected with ineffective, impotent, insipid governing institutions.

There is no doubt that this is how most Scots view Westminster. Successive polls since July have found most think the Conservative government has done a bad job of running the UK, are convinced that Westminster governments cannot be trusted to act in Scotland’s interests, and agree that no matter who they vote for, nothing will ever really change in the UK.

These are crucial and, frankly, justified grievances of the Scottish electorate on which the SNP and the independence movement have built their argument – the repositioning of the movement as “Scotland’s democracy movement” is a case in point.

The old Scotland, a unionist nation with its economic prosperity and political confidence built on the bedrock of the Union (and Empire) is dying, if not dead. But the new Scotland cannot yet be born.

Despite the electoral dominance of the SNP, the independence movement commands only minority support, and no unionist vision for Scotland’s future has managed to attract the votes of more than a quarter of Scots since 2010.

But it feels like this stalemate is slowly coming to an end. The Conservatives look to have vacated the Scottish field – the fight for the new Scotland is now between the independence movement and the Labour Party’s flavour of unionism.

Stack Data’s polling in July, for Gordon Brown’s Our Scottish Future, found that most Scots who would vote Yes want to keep a common welfare system and pension, do not want a hard border with England, and want continued joint working between the Scottish and English NHS. Those preferences make little difference to their desire to leave the Union.

This tells us a great deal about the field on which the political fight for Scotland’s future is being fought. The independence movement will not establish majority support for secession by convincing Scots on specific policy areas like currency, nor will Labour build consensus behind a new British political project by fearmongering about them.

If the independence movement wants to win majority support in the next general election, 2023 must be the year in which it mobilises behind a bold vision of an independent nation capable of bringing solutions to bear on the perma-crisis that has gripped us for the past decade-and-a-half.

No number of policy papers, party conferences, or 2014-style prospectuses will achieve this. It is a battle for hearts, not minds. Activists will have to take to the streets and the doorsteps of Scotland as the long campaign for the next general election begins. Their leaders, not just political but cultural also, will have to follow up the SNP’s March conference on the future of the independence movement by making, daily, the emotive argument for secession.

To win, they will need to build momentum. To win majority support in the next general election, that task must be undertaken in 2023.

Matt Qvortrup, professor at Coventry University and world-leading expert on democratic independence movements, wrote this year that if you want an easy life, rather than pursuing your nation’s political independence, you might want to try something less demanding, like becoming an astronaut or an expert in quantum physics – but that “new states have been created, and it can be done.”

The old is dying, and the new yet struggles to be born. If the new is to be an independent Scotland, 2023 is the year that the independence movement must mobilise to do the near-impossible.