SHE RAN OUT OF ROAD All possible paths to independence are blocked

against. The more the SNP argued for a second referendum, the more a clear majority of Scots said they weren’t interested, for at least the next five years.

This was a daunting prospect for Sturgeon. Already First Minister for eight years (and Deputy First Minister for nearly eight years before that), independence, whatever her public bravado, seemed as far away as ever.

Recently, the polls started hardening further against independence: the latest shows a 12-point margin against separation. Even if Sturgeon could somehow engineer a second referendum, there was every chance she could lose it.

The return of the Labour Party to a semblance of sanity under Keir Starmer has also played its part. Sturgeon shares the consensus view that Labour will win a five-year Westminster majority at the next general election. That’s another nail in the coffin of independence: the SNP always finds it much harder to make headway for its core cause when Labour rather than the Tory party is in power in London.

This was all starting to take its toll on Sturgeon’s hitherto untouchable standing. For almost a decade she has dominated Scottish politics. Leaders of the other parties would come and go, forgettable pygmies who made no headway against a political colossus.

Her SNP didn’t just control Holyrood with an iron hand and account for an overwhelming majority of Scottish MPs in the Commons. Her party’s influence pervaded every nook and cranny of Scottish life, bankrolling and populating all the agencies, lobbies and vested interests of civic society, cowing much of the Scottish media as it went and creating many of the characteristics of a one-party state.

But, much as the SNP faithful loved all the status, money and jobs the Sturgeon ascendancy brought with it, there was one fatal flaw: it remained unclear how she would deliver independence.

For Scottish nationalists, it doesn’t matter in the end how much you deliver on every other front: if you can’t show a convincing pathway to independence then it’s probably time you moved on.

Sturgeon reached that point towards the end of last year. The rumblings about her had been rising for some time, significant in a party once famed for its iron discipline. Her inability to say if a convicted double-rapist who had subsequently self-identified as a woman was a man suggested she was losing her touch. It highlighted the flaws in her government’s plans to make gender self-identification easier, especially when it was revealed the rapist had been incarcerated in a women’s prison.

On economic issues Scotland might lean left, but it remains pretty socially conservative. Radical reform of gender self-identification is not the stuff of Scottish breakfast table conversations, especially during a cost-of-living crisis. Sturgeon, surrounded by like-minded acolytes and woke activists, impervious to other points of views, had uncharacteristically misjudged the mood. Polls showed Scots two to one against her gender ID reforms.

Her resignation is a huge blow to the nationalist cause. None of her likely successors can bring anything like her appeal, charisma or stature to the argument for independence. None has any better idea about how to achieve independence. They will also inherit a legacy of failure which goes way beyond an inability to resolve the impasse over an independent Scotland.

Under SNP rule, life expectancy for men and women has suffered its steepest fall in 40 years, and worsened during the Sturgeon years. The inequality is staggering: huge swathes of Glasgow, including Sturgeon’s own constituency, remain riddled with some of the worst poverty in Europe.

Males born in its poorer areas live 14 years fewer than those born into affluence.

Drug-related causes of deaths have hit record highs each year for the past seven years. Scotland’s death toll from drugs is the worst in the developed world.

In 2015, Sturgeon said, ‘I want to be judged’ on reducing the attainment gap between poor and affluent students. She said it was her ‘defining mission’. Eight years later the attainment gap is as wide as ever. For the first time in recorded history, someone from a poor background in England has a better chance of getting to university than in Scotland.

In the second half of the 19th century many of the world’s greatest ships were built on the Clyde. Now, under SNP tutelage, Scotland can’t even manage two ferries anywhere near on time or on budget. The economy is stagnant, its financial services and technology bases not what they were. Other than a new road bridge across the Firth of Forth, the SNP has done little to repair or replace its crumbling infrastructure (as driving on the old two-lane motorway between Glasgow and Edinburgh quickly illustrates).

Even though spending on public services is almost 30% higher in Scotland than in England, it’s hard to see the benefits of all this largesse. NHS waiting times are even worse than in England. In supposedly ‘socialist’ Scotland, the number ‘going private’ for their medical procedures is up 68%.

THAT’S despite the income tax squeeze on middle and uppermiddle Scottish incomes. They now pay considerably more income tax than their English counterparts, raising the danger of a Scottish brain drain to the south.

That doesn’t make for better public finances, however: the most recent Scottish budget deficit was 12% of GDP (twice the overall UK deficit and close to the highest in Europe).

Inevitably, as happens with all parties that have been in power too long, sleaze and scandal raised their ugly heads.

There was her epic battle with Alex Salmond, once her mentor, now her worst enemy, the disclosure of loans from her husband to the SNP (where he’s chief executive, for now), the police investigation into a ‘missing’ £600,000 in donations given to finance a second referendum campaign. Much of this has still to play out, almost certainly not to the SNP’s advantage.

Sturgeon’s departure means there is little doubt the union between Scotland and England lives to fight another day. If she could not achieve independence, lesser politicians are unlikely to succeed where she has failed. The SNP will remain Scotland’s dominant party but it will become more fractious as its core cause becomes impossible to achieve. And, eventually, it will be held to account for all the ills that have bedevilled Scotland under its watch.

Those London chattering classes who decided the break-up of Britain was the price the country deserved to pay for having the temerity to vote for Brexit will be almost as disappointed as the Edinburgh blethering classes. The UK’s unionist majority should be quietly satisfied that a serious threat has been seen off.

As for Nicola Sturgeon, her pole position in the SNP hall of fame is guaranteed and deserved, as a political leader of the first rank. But a lasting legacy that touched the lives of the people of Scotland for the better will be harder to detect.