The winds of change may be a long way off yet for Nicola Sturgeon but don’t expect any calm before the storm
The battle for IndyRef2 has begun
I assume the weather round your bit on Thursday was much the same as mine – absolutely foul.
Horizontal rain never arrives as a surprise during the second week in December on our windblown lump of North Atlantic rock.
What was surprising though was the number of Scots prepared to pull on their wellies to vote in the most important General Election since the last one.
Some things are worth getting wet for.
Sean Batty couldn’t have forecast such an outcome. A deluge of votes from the Western Isles in the north to Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock in the south saturated Scotland’s political map with SNP yellow.
There are still a few puddles of Tory blue and LibDem orange while Labour’s Ian Murray manfully steers his red ark in Edinburgh South.
That colour- coded electoral map is a startling visual representation of the constitutional crisis facing Britain. Two of the constituent nations are increasingly different political countries.
And while it confirms that stormy weather won’t halt Nicola Sturgeon’s surge, what she can’t control is the political weather now being set by Boris Johnson.
Sure, the vote was about more than just Scottish independence. But anyone arguing that many Scots lent their vote to the SNP purely as a rejection of Johnson without considering they were also tacitly endorsing IndyRef2 does those voters a disservice.
Sturgeon’s core message that Scotland’s future should be decided in Scotland clearly cut through.
It can’t be stymied in definitely by even a man as deaf to Scotland’s voice as Britain’s emboldened Prime Minister. Something has to give.
So the matter of IndyRef2 must surely come down to timing.
For SNP strategists, the optimum time would be when support for independence consistently polls north of 50 per cent, preferably nudging towards the 60 mark.
And while 50 per cent occasionally hoves into sight, the polls continue to fluctuate just below that tipping point.
Time is both an ally and an enemy to Sturgeon. Its march will change the age demographics of Scotland, with the more pro-Indy Alpha Generation replacing pro
Union Baby Boomers. And she will anticipate more Scots will desert the Unionist parties as the negative effects of Brexit begin to bite.
But Sturgeon is also under acute time pressure from party activists to deliver a referendum immediately (if not sooner).
Knowing that Brexit is her material change argument for calling another tilt, she has to make the running, even if she privately fears the country is not yet ready to say Yes. Losing again is too horrific for her to contemplate.
So over the next few weeks and months, she will announce and push her legal and political mechanism of securing that referendum while tackling the fiendishly difficult task of converting 10 per cent of soft No voters. That legal mechanism is important not just as a method of countering a stubborn refusal from Johnson to bend to any form of SNP mandate but as a vehicle for keeping her Indy show on the road and her activists on the march.
Johnson w ill argue he has a valid reason to justify saying no. It is entirely a problem of his own making but Brexit negotiations and preparations will gobble up all available government bandwidth over at least the next 12 months. The one thing you can predict about Johnson and his Downing Street tacticians is they’re unpredictable.
Dominic Cummings may take a look at those same polls and tell his boss now is very much the time, knowing a Sturgeon defeat would put independence off the agenda indefinitely.
Of course, Brexit won’t get done in 12 months. But it is a convenient excuse to say no to IndyRef2.
That means the autumn of 2021 looks increasingly the most likely opportunity.
So we will enter a phoney war, with Johnson saying no and Sturgeon making pol i t ica l capi ta l by justifiably cranking up the rhetoric that democracy is being denied. Privately, however, I believe she will be more than a little bit relieved she won’t be facing that storm any time soon.