What does Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation mean for Scottish independence?

Nicola Sturgeon wants to leave the stage before the failure of her leadership becomes too obvious. As one of the most able politicians in the UK, she will have recognised that her push for independence has failed. It turned out that, when the Supreme Court ruled that she needed the agreement of the UK government to hold another referendum, she didn’t have a back-up plan.

Her plan B was to treat the next general election in Scotland as a referendum, and declare that the people had voted for independence if the parties supporting it won more than 50 per cent of the vote.

There are two problems with this plan. One is that the Scottish National Party, the Greens, and Alba (her predecessor Alex Salmond’s party) might not win 50 per cent. The second, more fundamental issue, is that a win for independence parties would not change the constitutional position. Independence could still come about only if the UK parliament agreed to it, and the overwhelming majority of the House of Commons takes the view that now is not the time.

No wonder, then, that Sturgeon’s device of pretending that an election was a referendum was unpopular. What was striking about Lord Ashcroft’s poll of Scotland published yesterday was that, even among SNP supporters, more were opposed to the policy than supported it.

And no wonder that, if this wasn’t the straw that broke the back of Sturgeon’s eight-year reign as first minister, the unpopularity of her policy on gender recognition might have been. She makes much of how the Labour Party in the Scottish parliament supported her bill to make it easier to change gender, but that doesn’t absolve her of responsibility for finding herself on the wrong side of public opinion on the question.

She could not have known that the passage of the bill would be followed within days by two high-profile cases of transgender rapists who had been put in women’s prisons. That happened under the existing legislation, but it destroyed the credibility of the bill, and left the hyper-articulate, fluent and persuasive Sturgeon stumbling over her words in TV interviews.

Without falling entirely for the Great Woman thesis of political history, Sturgeon’s departure is a huge blow to the independence movement. It was extraordinary that Scotland should have produced in succession two leaders of such exceptional ability as Salmond and Sturgeon, but it should have been predicted that even exceptional ability blows itself out in the end.

In Salmond’s case, his personal conduct with women caught up with him after he left office, but he also disgraced himself politically with his Putin apologism and his work for the propaganda channel Russia Today.

Finally, his attempt to game the Scottish proportional voting system by setting up a “shadow SNP” to maximise pro-independence representation in the Edinburgh parliament was a miserable failure. All he succeeded in doing was to divide the SNP contingent in Westminster, as two MPs defected to his outfit.

Sturgeon’s career will not end in such ignominy, but her special powers were failing, too. The SNP’s fabled discipline was breaking down. Sturgeon failed to protect her ally Ian Blackford, leader of the party’s MPs in the Commons, when Stephen Flynn challenged him for the leadership and won it before Christmas.

She has been first minister for eight years, and the SNP has been in charge of the devolved government in Scotland for 16 years. That is a remarkable run. Those of us who want to keep the UK together have complained that it defied the gravity of the SNP’s dismal performance on everything from education policy to drugs, but Salmond and Sturgeon recognised the power of identity politics and worked out how to make it look progressive.

But gravity cannot be overcome for ever, and although Kate Forbes – the SNP finance secretary – is also talented, it may be that the independence deadlock is finally asserting itself. Forbes, who is still on maternity leave, and opposes Sturgeon’s policy on the gender recognition bill, must be the favourite to take over, but she will face the same fundamental dilemma as Sturgeon herself.

Sturgeon is resigning because independence is not going to happen in the foreseeable future, and her resignation makes it less likely to happen. And that is because there simply isn’t sufficient support for it among Scottish residents – a phrase I use as a non-resident Scot who thinks that “the Scottish people” are more than those with a Scottish postcode.

If support for independence were consistently above, say, 60 per cent, it would be harder for the UK government to resist the argument. And support did rise during the coronavirus lockdowns, when anti-outsider sentiment was at its highest, not just in Scotland but in Manchester, Wales and elsewhere.

But it has long been at just above 50 per cent or just below – and a dash for independence on the mandate of getting lucky with a 50 per cent plus one referendum would be too divisive and unstable, as many SNP supporters recognise in the Brexit context.

It may indeed be a generation – as Sturgeon once accepted – before the independence question is again put to the Scottish people.