Sturgeon comes to the wrong conclusion

In March, Nicola Sturgeon dropped a bombshell into the already febrile political atmosphere by proposing another referendum on Scottish independence. Yesterday, following the setback for the SNP in the election on June 8, she put the plan on hold. Ms Sturgeon said she had been thinking long and hard about the implications of her party’s disastrous showing at the polls, in which they lost 21 seats and half a million votes.

But her conclusion from suffering such a setback is the opposite of what everyone else has reached. Since the campaign in Scotland was dominated by the prospect of another referendum, the success for the pro-union parties, especially the Conservatives, clearly indicated that most people consider the matter settled.

Ms Sturgeon, however, still wants to revisit the idea once the full implications of the Brexit deal are known some time in 2019. As it looks like the SNP is gradually losing popular support, she needs to move before the next Holyrood elections in 2020 while her party still has the votes to carry the legislation for another independence referendum.

For now, Miss Sturgeon has effectively adopted the position that Theresa May urged upon her in March – to avoid complicating the Brexit negotiations even more by running an independence campaign almost alongside. She remains determined to hold another referendum after the deal, especially if the UK crashes out without agreement. Ms Sturgeon drew incredulous laughter at Holyrood when she claimed she wanted to govern for the entire country and was anxious to seek greater consensus. She has become too divisive a figure for that.

Indeed, for such a politically astute leader, it is surprising that the First Minister did not take independence off the table entirely and invite Ruth Davidson, the Tory leader, and Labour’s Kezia Dugdale to join a pan-scottish effort to keep the UK in the EU single market, as they all appear to want. Scotland voted by a wide margin in the referendum to stay in Europe.

The other parties in Scotland would prefer the separatists to stop obsessing about independence and focus on governing the country. But since breaking up the Union is the raison d’être of the SNP and sustains its activist base, the leadership simply cannot abandon it until the electoral arithmetic eventually makes it apparent that the people of Scotland no longer want it.