When you are called Robbie the Pict, you get used to people thinking you are a bit of a joke. When you've been stuck in Estonia because you refuse to travel under a British passport, people think the joke is justified. When you have single-handedly exposed a flagship government policy as possibly extortionate and the men behind it as incompetent, then people stop laughing.

Only a fool takes Robbie the Pict for a fool. He served in the British army before beginning a fascinating life of protest. He changed his name when he realised that, with each successive version of the British Nationality Act, Scots were demoted from being subjects of their own land to citizens of the UK. In the 1980s this appeared like the act of a crank. As independence beckons, it seems a legitimate gesture.

His most recent target has been the Skye Bridge. The Conservative government pioneered a mechanism of rebuilding infrastructure without using public money. It was called the Private Finance Initiative and has since been adopted by Labour. In essence it is simple. A private company builds the bridge or school and the public pay it off later, like a mortgage. The Skye Bridge was the first scheme to be built this way.

It wasn't the way the bridge had been built which irritated Robbie and others at first. They were simple annoyed that a reliable ferry service to the populous island was being replaced with a toll bridge that would cost more than £5 sterling a crossing. A campaign of non-payment began, with the toll booths clogged with protesting drivers.

It was when the non-payers were prosecuted that Robbie began to discover a bit more than any politician had hoped. A bridge estimated originally at £7 million sterling to construct would now take more than £120 million in toll revenues before the mortgage was cleared. Most of that money was going directly to the Bank of America in interest payments.

He then discovered that a vital document making the tolls legal had never been signed by the appropriate government minister. This meant the tolls were not legal. For the past four years he has been fighting in the Scottish courts not only to clear the names of the non-payers, but also to prove that the bridge is an extortion illegally imposed on the Scottish people.

Cranks would have fallen at the first hurdle. Robbie's case has won the support of the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party. His arguments have been declared sound by respected legal experts. A written judgment on his case will be issued at the end of the month, by which time Robbie may have proven once and for all that you should never judge a man by his name.