Scottish nationalists need a plan B – but so do Unionists

The SNP has become so accustomed to setting the agenda that the situation in which it presently finds itself – one of uncertainty tinged with the mildest dose of ennui – is modestly disconcerting. Nicola Sturgeon played all the right notes during her conference speech yesterday but there was still something perfunctory about her address. The delegates liked it but it wasn’t greeted with the kind of joyous rapture prompted by Ms Sturgeon’s previous conference speeches. She still believes in a place called independence, of course, it’s just that she doesn’t know – and, worse, cannot say – when it will next be glimpsed. It exists, of course, but seeing how you get there is harder than it used to be. 

From 2011 to 2017, the nationalists set the agenda. It was they who made the running. If Westminster did not always, as Alex Salmond had promised, ‘dance to a Scottish jig’, it remained the case that relations between Edinburgh and London were largely and most of the time dictated from the Scottish capital, not the great imperial metropolis. 

That is no longer the case.