As Alex Salmond’s flagship referendum bill sank beneath the waves last week, there were precious few mourners at the quayside, even amongst the SNP. There were even fewer criers of ‘betrayal’ - though the godfather of fundamentalism, the former SNP deputy leader, Jim Fairlie, remarked that: "at the mention of the word 'independence', a shiver ran through the ranks of the SNP, frantically searching for a spine to run up."
The opposition parties snorted about broken promises and nails in the coffin of Alex Salmond’s credibility, but it was pretty routine stuff - as if the abandonment of the independence referendum bill was just another item on the list of lost manifesto commitments along with local income tax, the Scottish Futures Trust and abolishing student debt. But it is much more than that. Only two years ago, at the height of the SNP honeymoon, people were seriously talking about the momentum towards Scottish independence becoming unstoppable. August bodies like the Constitution Unit at UCL in London were holding conferences on the mechanics of separation - one referendum or two? how to split the national debt? It was more or less assumed that an independence referendum would happen, somehow. Not any more
