This week, both the leader of the Scottish National Party, Nicola Sturgeon, and its former leader Alex Salmond launched a coordinated campaign to revive the question of Scottish independence. Salmond has decided that last year's referendum had not been, after all, a once-in-a-generation event, as he had previously claimed, and Sturgeon is already counting the final days of the Union.
The pretext, a year on from the referendum, is that David Cameron has failed to deliver on the famous "Vow" he made with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg that Scotland will be given a devo-max style settlement, which would have meant effective Home Rule for Scotland.
Problem is that, as Cameron pointed out at PMQs, the SNP is unable to point to a single area where the Vow has not been delivered, or is not on course of being delivered through the agreed processes. Far be it from me to defend the Prime Minister out of hand, but implementing these agreements was always going to take time and I have seen no evidence that they are in any way deliberately or mischievously delayed by the Tories.
I strongly suspect that the motivation for the recent headlines is more to do with the need to make headlines - and not the kind of headlines they would be making if we were to focus on their performance in government in Scotland.
So I believe that there are two things in play here. The first one is that the SNP's thunder was stolen by the Jeremy Corbyn story. The SNP's "brand difference", the claim that they are the largest and most authoritative anti-austerity party in the UK, has been completely blown out of the water by Corbyn's victory in the Labour leadership contest. And polling has already found that over a third of people who voted SNP in the last general election would be quite inclined to switch to the Corbyn-led Labour party. So now the SNP has been left defending the bases. The only drum they have left to beat right now is the secessionist one.
Not that this is an illegitimate drum to beat. Popular sentiment in Scotland has not moved much in either direction since last year's referendum. Passions on the issue still run high, and a significant minority are still very strongly animated by the quest for an independent Scotland. But the timing of this is very suspicious. The first SNP gambit on a second referendum, that it would take a significant change in circumstances in the UK for them to propose a re-run, but that they reserve the right to call for a second referendum if such a change of circumstances does occur, even that seems to have been abandoned. There has not been, as of yet, any political development at Westminster which could legitimately prompt the question of a second referendum. The general election where the Tories returned with a majority would have been the only such event so far, but at that election the SNP has also seen its best performance ever, and they decided not to fight that battle then.
The second thing that might have prompted these interventions now is the upcoming Holyrood elections due next year. The SNP still very much need to define their brand and their politics against "the Westminster establishment" because if attention were to be drawn to their own record in government in Scotland, they would receive far less positive coverage - to put it mildly. I have already written many pieces on their record of under-investment in health, education and justice (worse even than Osborne's in the last 5 years), and the resulting poor and declining outcomes in these areas comparative to the rest of the UK. And the SNP is still, after all has been said and done, treating any talk of the precarious fiscal condition of Scotland, dependent on both global oil prices and the UK Barnett subsidy, as conspiracy theory talk.
Does this talk about a second referendum actually do any good to Scotland now? No. And even Ms Sturgeon seems to agree. I can report that in private, Sturgeon has been telling worried business leaders in Scotland she has no plans for another referendum less Scottish businesses consider emigrating south in the same way businesses did in Quebec with their repeated referendums and uncertainty. So I have no reason to believe that this is anything other than empty politicking. I have no doubt that she and Salmond are still playing a long term game with the ultimate goal of Scottish independence, but these recent interventions are merely short term tactics. We shall have to return to the SNP and the Scotland problem when there will be some genuinely new developments, but that is not what we are seeing now.
Dr Azeem Ibrahim is the Executive Chairman of the Scotland Institute
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