That is a mark of both triumph and failure
joined the Scottish National Party as a 16-year-old schoolgirl, the party was a minnow and the prospect of independence a distant dream. It held two seats in the Westminster parliament. No more than a third of Scots supported divorce.
Such a solid electoral bloc in favour of independence is not a given. After the referendum of 2014 went decisively in favour of the union, support for breaking away might have fizzled. Instead, Ms Sturgeon ensured the question remained the dominant divide of Scottish politics;Scots now hold their views on the constitution more firmly than any party identification, note Ailsa Henderson and her colleagues in “The Referendum that Changed a Nation”, a new study of the consequences of the 2014 vote.
But populist, because in the years since the referendum of 2014 the case for Scottish independence has still not been fleshed out. Fundamental questions, such as how an independent Scotland would switch to a new currency, remain unanswered. The movement still relies heavily on appeals to national pride, denunciations of Tory perfidy and the rhetorical jiu-jitsu in which Ms Sturgeon is a black-belt.
More recently, when a bill passed by the Scottish Parliament to make it easier for people to change their gender in law was vetoed by the Scottish secretary in Westminster, Ms Sturgeon accused him of behaving like a “governor-general”. Allusions to colonialism are the preserve of the hairier fringes of the movement.
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