The SNP went from 48 MPs to nine on 4 July — a date Swinney had rashly forecast would be “independence day” for Scotland. The nationalists had been the third-largest party in Westminster; not any more. While the SNP still dominates the Holyrood parliament, polls are now forecasting that it could lose that advantage too. Party membership has halved in the last five years.

SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn blamed the coalition with the Scottish Green Party for much of the lost support. If the Greens hadn’t been shown the door in April, he said, the SNP would have lost even more than 39 seats. That’s hard to believe. But it is a measure of the party’s regret over the power-sharing arrangement which Sturgeon formed in 2021.

We argued about bottle banks instead of public services, said Flynn. He might have added that the Greens’ loathing of the oil and gas industry, which employs 100,000 Scots, was a major factor in Flynn almost losing his Aberdeen South seat two months ago. The Greens were also the driving force behind the Gender Recognition Reform Bill which collapsed after a double rapist, Isla Bryson, was installed on remand in a women’s prison.

But in reality, the SNP can’t really blame the Greens for its misfortune. Nor can the Nationalists blame it all on Operation Branchform, the investigation into party finances which led to former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, otherwise known as Mr Nicola Sturgeon, being charged with embezzlement.  The problem is more fundamental than that. It isn’t “process”, but the independence project itself.

Scots, especially younger voters, have simply turned their backs on nationalism. Having been through Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, war in Europe and above all the cost-of-living crisis, voters are in no mood for the monumental hassle of setting up a hard border with England, creating new currency and trying to rejoin the EU. It’s just over.

It doesn’t seem to have fully dawned on the UK political establishment that the break-up of Britain, which seemed a real possibility only a few years ago, has evaporated. After the 2014 referendum and successive SNP landslides, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, civil servants such as Philip Rycroft and even Tory MPs were saying that independence might be inevitable. It wasn’t. The implosion of the SNP since Sturgeon’s resignation has changed the landscape of politics. The Union is probably safer now than at any time since the Jacobites waved their claymores 300 years ago.

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Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022. He is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland.

iainmacwhirter

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