THE opponents of independence thought that they had achieved a milestone victory with last month's Supreme Court ruling, which found that the Scottish Parliament does not have the legal right to hold an independence referendum.
They must be thinking again now.
A new poll from the traditionally No-friendly YouGov became the fourth in a row to give a lead to independence. Every single poll since the court handed down its ruling has shown a rise in support for independence and put support for independence in the lead over opposition to it. One poll can be dismissed as a statistical blip … four in a row points to a real change happening in public opinion.
Whoever could have thought it? People in Scotland don't like being told by judges sitting in London that they cannot determine Scotland's future for themselves, and they certainly don't like being lied to by generations of British politicians who have always insisted that the people of Scotland have the right to choose Scotland's future, only for them to wheech away that right the moment that the people of Scotland have decided they want to exercise it.
It's not the judges who have lied to Scotland – it's those British nationalist politicians who have always asserted that Scotland is a member of a voluntary Union and Scotland's people have the right to determine Scotland's future, even as they put in place a legislative framework which denied Scotland that right and ensured the claim that the United Kingdom is a voluntary Union is as meaningless and deceptive as Gordie Broon's "read the small print" Vow.
All the polls also confirm a pattern which has been evident for a long time. It is only among the oldest cohort of voters that there is consistently majority opposition to independence. Younger voters opt for independence by a significant margin, and among 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds and the youngest voters, support for independence is overwhelming.
Given this well-established pattern, combined with the rise in support for independence following a ruling which establishes that in the eyes of the British state it's not up to the people of Scotland to decide Scotland's future for themselves, an intelligent and thoughtful British politician would understand that simply saying “No” to another referendum is merely a short-term tactic which is unsustainable in the longer term. Moreover, it is a tactic which if continued indefinitely more or less guarantees Scottish independence.
The intelligent British strategy therefore should be to facilitate an independence referendum as quickly as possible, while there is still a realistic chance that the opponents of independence could win it and long before the shifting sands of Scottish demography make support for independence the settled and unarguable will of the people of Scotland.
But, of course, we all know that they won't do this. Westminster is ruled by short-termism. It always has been and always will be. It is written into the very foundations of the Westminster system, which is predicated on the principle of the absolute sovereignty of Parliament – a doctrine which means that no government can bind the hands of its successors.
All any Prime Minister needs to do is kick the can down the road long enough so that the entire thorny question becomes a matter for his or her successor and they are off the hook. And who knows … in the meantime, something might turn up, some SNP-bad story might succeed in doing what none of the many others in the constant barrage of SNP-bad stories over the years have succeeded in doing and put support for independence into substantial decline.
So what we will get is more “muddling through”. We will get more British politicians insisting that the UK really is a voluntary Union despite all evidence to the contrary, and refusing to explain what the democratic route to another independence referendum might be in order to maintain the tattered fiction of a voluntary Union until, like a game of pass the crap parcel, the nasty question can be fobbed off to someone else.
In this travesty of Scottish democracy, they will be aided and abetted by a Scottish media that tries to downplay, ignore, or discredit the warnings given by the polls.
But with every poll that shows a majority for independence, we get closer to the music stopping for good.
