DUNDEE held Your Party Scotland’s founding conference last weekend. A momentous occasion, after all the ups and downs. The active Scottish left is a small place and on arrival at the Bonar Hall, it was clear that a fair chunk of it was in attendance.

All the groups, sects, parties that you may expect were there, without any hint of falling out, but that was in the lobby.

In the hall itself, around two or three hundred were there, and more online, I gather. Not the kind of mass event people may have dreamed of when over 800,000 signed up to the possibility of a new party last year, but not to be sneezed at either. There was a buzz in a room where I could spot former Green, Labour, SNP and SSP members sitting alongside past and present members of the SWP. It’s a funny old world.

On the stage as I arrived, the hustings for the reserved Scottish place on the executive committee of the party was about to begin. Jim Monaghan, Ian Drummond and Niall Christie — three white men, as they had the good grace to point out — battled it out. I know them all to be decent people, and that’s exactly how the debate unfolded, even after a few pointed digs from Christie at the end.

The comradely display couldn’t be further from what passes for the wider CEC debate. The most online debate in the history of the British left; not so much a bonfire of the vanities as a bin fire for the far right and the extreme centre to gather round and mumble their cliches about the Life of Brian from their popcorn-stuffed mouths.

The Corbyn tribe and the Sultana tribe, and tribes not openly affiliating with either, destroying their own and each other’s credibility over political differences which become almost negligible on any rational examination. Of course, there are fundamentals to be hammered out, that’s the nature of founding a new organisation, but at some point — theoretically — everyone is going to have to sit down and work with one another again if this thing is to have any chance of survival, never mind actually winning the influence or even the power to improve a single life.

It’s hard to think of a more obvious example of the tragically online absolutism that stalks sections of the self-identified left than seeing Jeremy Corbyn — a man who has been outrageously hounded by mainstream media for years with fabricated claims of anti-semitism — being labelled a zionist, but it is the natural end-point of the idiotic rhetorical one-upmanship that dominates discourse in that medium.

Was all that visible on the conference floor? Thankfully not, and people seemed to mix quite happily, but it lingered there in the air crystalising only in the odd moment when a speaker openly declared their tribe.

On the practical stuff, it is clear that the nationalist impulse is the dominant force in Your Party Scotland. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone paying attention. It has, after all, been the dominant framing of all elected politics in Scotland for what feels like an eternity, and support for independence remains strong among the active left.

Nonetheless, it is a major disappointment to those of us who yearn not to ignore the national question, but look for opportunities to unite the left in a country where parliamentary politics is functionally dead and class barely gets a look-in.

The party in Scotland has decided to back the creation of a separate Scottish state and in the meantime to transition to being independent of the UK-wide YP. When seen through, the latter makes it identical to the Scottish Green Party many of its activists just left, and the former ensures it is just another party supporting Scottish independence.

Any real interest in challenging the suffocating narrative in Scottish politics that forces people into camps that either claim independence would either solve all the world’s problems, or be hell on Earth (both obviously nonsense), was launched into the silvery Tay when the merest compromise of simply supporting the right to hold another referendum could have bridged it.

The real tragedy is that the proto-leadership in Scotland that cannot admit its own existence knows this perfectly well, but have chosen the path of least resistance rather than taking the risk of making the case with fellow members. These are decent, honest and committed people, and I know as well as anyone that compromise is a necessary part of being in a political party, but so is debate.

An undoubtedly fundamental question came down to a choice between making no decision at all and backing independence. To see such a classic railroading technique deployed in so young a party is sad, but not a surprise.

From the first tweet, Your Party has been a series of statements of commitment to democracy, swiftly followed by lines handed down from individuals. Promises of votes on everything are not promises of democracy though — if they were, we’d be voting for dog-catchers.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to hold a hundred votes to decide if good things are good or bad things are bad, on opposing welfare cuts or to confirm your own views on the constitution of party or nation, but there’s a world out there left untouched by any of it.

It is of course unfair to expect a party in its founding conference to have a fully developed policy to respond to the world around us when most parties in existence for decades haven’t bothered, but if it wants to have an impact on May’s Holyrood elections, sooner or later that policy must come.

When it does, if it is to have the slightest hope of steering politics away from chauvinism, of inspiring the millions abandoned by politics and now returning the favour, it must find a way of putting humpty back together again.

Has the moment passed? It’s too early to tell, but the clock is ticking.