One political party is not necessarily the same kind of animal as another. One party develops and exists in order to advance a cause; to secure acceptance by others of a principle, and, with the growing help of converts, create a community based upon that principle. Having achieved this objective the founders assume that future measures will accord with these principles, and are content to leave the running of the show to others.

But there is another kind of party, one for whose members the goal is power. Because our party has experienced very little power at local level, and none at all at national level, we tend to find power distasteful. Certainly to see how the pursuit and enjoyment of power affects others would make decent folk shudder, but there is truth in the argument, long put forward by Labour leaders, that without power good intentions get you nowhere.

Our Party was first of all envisaged, and then slowly and painfully developed, on the first model. Events and passing time have forced it into a franker pursuit of power. We have lost our first innocence, and we have learned something of the squalors with which our competitors have been long familiar and to which they have been permanently addicted.

You can put a time to this process of change. After 1967 and Hamilton some organisers of adult education classes began to offer their classes and audiences insights into this strange new notion that Scotland might aspire to self-government. For this reason, and greatly daring, Mr Alex Robertson of Dundee University sent me off to carry enlightenment around this region under the title "A Parliament for Scotland?" The question mark on the printed syllabus was very important, because the most probable response was laughter, a start of surprise, a lofty and dismissive sweep of the hand. Most audiences, admittedly bourgeois and Tory, saw the question as offering a harmless enough way to pass a couple of hours on a winter evening, comfortable in the certainty that nothing of the sort would ever happen.

It was a measure of modest progress that within two or three years the Dundee Extra-Mural programme offered the more neutral title of "The Scottish Home Rule Movement". Thanks to Alex Robertson there once were a few dozen folk around Fife and Tayside who became better informed on these matters than most currently in Party membership.

One programme I remember with some affection. In the Fife village of Freuchie the audience who came to think about "A Parliament for Scotland?" were to look forward in the following week to considering "Is there life after death?"

One question always asked was "What do you see happening to the SNP if you get Home Rule?"

The answer always had to start with the calming of expectations but the honest answer, at the time, was that many saw Home Rule as fulfilment, and assumed that the Party members would have perhaps a farewell rally, a winding-up conference, a round of handshakes and Auld Lang Syne as they dispersed to pursue whatever political enthusiasm they now fancied.

This must all seem so incredible to current members, and some of our top brass dismiss these facts as never having been, and of course nobody under, say, forty-five has any adult memory of those days. Our transformation into a party in pursuit of power has been as complete as it had to be. But something of the old model is to be remembered and cherished with respect and affection rather than dismissed with testy disbelief. Our present involvement after all, sees us having to cope with a First Minister and an Executive, whose main priority, even in a post-Home Rule country, is to ensure that the reserved powers of Westminster must and shall remain absolutely inviolate. The hopes of gradualists can be achieved only over Mr McConnell's politically dead body.

The selfishness of our early days gives us something of a moral advantage over him and his colleagues and we should learn how best to use it.