Whoever wins the SNP leadership race, independence has already lost

‘Now is not the time,’ successive Tory prime ministers told Nicola Sturgeon following her persistent calls for another independence referendum. It’s simply too soon after the last one, they said. In August, the Scottish secretary, Alister Jack, caused fury in nationalist circles after he stated there would need to be at least 60 per cent support for independence in opinion polls before the UK government would respond to further Section 30 referendum requests.

Strange, then, that this Tory message appears to be exactly what the SNP leadership candidates were parroting in Tuesday night’s now infamous STV debate. So transfixed were commentators by the blue-on-blue attack lines – or perhaps ‘yellow-on-yellow’ – used by Kate Forbes and Humza Yousaf, they didn’t quite pick up on the remarkable change in nationalist rhetoric. The candidates were saying, in essence, that now is not the time for an independence referendum.

Forbes’s take was that independence would only happen when the SNP had persuaded the majority of Scots to vote for independence.