Sturgeon gamble could backfire

BOXED into a corner of her own making, Nicola Sturgeon punched clever yesterday by setting out her path to an IndyRef2.

It was smart politics from the First Minister to sidestep the legal quagmire surrounding the legitimacy of a second vote and going straight to the law experts who will decide the issue.

Instead of asking her own Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain if she has the powers to stage a referendum and risk rejection, Sturgeon is going to the bar of the Supreme Court.

That may or may not work, and in legal circles opinion is that the odds are stacked against the First Minister getting the outcome she desires.

A lawyer herself, Sturgeon has added a rider that if she cannot stage a referendum on October 19, 2023, she will turn the following general election into one.

This has – in the jargon of business consultants – both risks and opportunities.

It means Sturgeon can keep punching away on the independence issue, keeping it and herself relevant even if she lets down the SNP by not delivering on her manifesto promise.

But she won’t be the only one buying time and the strategy could backfire, not least in the regard that her self-declared independence election could be ignored by a UK prime minister.

The possibility that the prime minister might be Keir Starmer is also a risk.

While many Scots vote SNP with the comfort that it ticks independence without consequences, they might become convinced that a better way of getting rid of Boris Johnson will be to vote Labour.

A Labour comeback is an SNP danger – which only goes to show that the case for independence has to amount to more than turning Johnson into a Margaret Thatcher scarecrow.