Scotland has been a one-party state in all but name – so what now?

A meltdown, an implosion, a trainwreck: however you describe what has happened in Scottish politics over the past eight weeks, it is hard to envisage any rapid return to pre-eminence for the SNP. It is hard, too, to feel anything other than sympathy for Scottish National Party’s new leader, Humza Yousaf, who has been unceremoniously left with a shattered inheritance.

The dawn raid by police at the house shared by the former SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, and her husband, the party’s former chief executive Peter Murrell, signified the latest nadir. A neighbour saw the blue tent erected in the garden and feared there had been a murder.

There had not been a murder – but a death of a kind there had been. The dream – for some Scots – of independence is over, probably for at least a generation.

From the timing of her resignation, which came out of the blue when she announced it nearly eight weeks ago, to the handover to the new leader six weeks later, Sturgeon managed her departure as adroitly as she could have done, given the circumstances as they are now known. Whatever happens next (and it is only fair to record that Murrell was released without charge after 11 hours of questioning), the former first minister will go down as a capable politician – until suddenly she wasn’t.

It is true that specific misjudgements can be singled out as contributing to her fall. Her call for a second independence referendum seemed both premature and ill-founded, given the direction of opinion polls. And her effort to be more progressive than the rest of the Union on the self-identification of trans people played into the hands of her adversaries, not only in Scotland, but in London. Her considerable powers of persuasion were to no avail over the move – and the government in Westminster acted with unusual dispatch to assert the existing limits of devolution.

With seat losses looming in the 2024 general election and her control of the Scottish Parliament dependent on support from the Greens, as a political realist she drew the appropriate conclusion.

To view her departure as just about her, however, I think would be wrong. Her fate cannot be separated from that of her party, and it may be here that many of seeds of the current unravelling lie. The SNP is a single-issue party; that is how it began and how it grew. Its fortunes mirrored those of the cause of Scottish independence; was its flourishing as a party cause or effect?

Look around the world and single-issue parties that win close to monopoly power, either through devolution or actual independence, have a tendency to outlive their welcome. In the absence of real political opposition, they become complacent. They become inbred; their leadership breaks into cliques. They disregard public sentiment (because they think they know better). They take power for granted, and that includes the power of patronage and money, too.

Consider the ANC in South Africa as a classic example: a noble cause that was won and an opportunity – so many opportunities, in fact – that was squandered. Such is the fate of many a single-issue party that wins power, but then sooner or later struggles with government.

Scotland in the heyday of the SNP has been a one-party state in all but name. What might be considered the “normal” cut and thrust of politics often went by the board. Indicators for Scotland’s once-lauded school system, as well as for its health service and its public services, have been falling.

Sturgeon won praise for her up-front leadership during the pandemic, but Scotland’s actual performance – in rates for deaths and infections – was little different from England’s. With the pandemic over, day-to-day concerns once again came second to the glorious goal of nationalism, and the drive for a second independence referendum was fatefully revived.

It is easy to look back and ask why all recent prime ministers – from Tony Blair all the way to Liz Truss – were so worried about Scottish nationalism. All they had to do, it might be said – certainly after the lost referendum in 2014 – was to sit back, offer (quiet) periodic reminders of the financial and judicial limits on devolution, and watch the party of Scottish nationalism consume itself.

Looking back, even Brexit – when Scotland’s vote diverged so widely from that of England – may not have exerted quite the centrifugal force it appeared to at the time. Scottish independence looks unlikely to return as a serious threat to the Union in the near future. Indeed, the unity of Great Britain looks safer now than at practically any time since the process of devolution began. If any part of the UK is going to break away, it looks more likely to be Northern Ireland.

Here, let me add a possibly perverse footnote. The potentially fatal troubles of the SNP will not end the quest for Scottish independence – nor should they. I travelled around Scotland before the independence referendum, and spent Saturday, 6 September, in Glasgow. That was the day, it may be remembered, before the Sunday papers reported a poll showing that there could be a majority for independence.

That poll caused consternation in Westminster. On the Tuesday, all party leaders hared up to Scotland. Gordon Brown gave a series of speeches defending the Union. The Queen proffered her own gentle nudge. On 18 September, the Union emerged safe, by a margin of 10 per cent.

What I remember, though, is the enthusiasm, the hope and the sense of purpose on the part of the independence campaign, and especially among its many young supporters. Scotland has a history and traditions that are all its own. It has a strong sense of identity that could sustain not just nationhood, but flourishing as an independent state. Nor need less-than-stellar economic prospects as a bar. Where there is sufficient will, there are ways.

Which is why, one day, a new generation of Scots could claim their independence through what would, I hope, be a peaceful and gracious separation. Historians might then be called upon to judge how far the Scottish National Party of Salmond and Sturgeon had hastened – and how far it might have hindered – their cause.