Unionists hoping Nicola Sturgeon would use her statement today to call off her plans for IndyRef2 have been left disappointed. Instead, the First Minister simply said she would ‘re-set’ her proposal in light of her party’s disastrous election result, which saw the SNP lose 21 seats and half a million votes.
Sturgeon’s concession is simply that the party no longer plans to call a referendum on Scottish independence ‘immediately’. She said plans for a second referendum bill would be shelved until autumn 2018 at earliest – to when ‘it is clearer what Brexit will involve’.
What’s striking is Strugeon’s insistence that she still plans to call one in this Parliament – so before the next Scottish Parliament elections in 2021. This delay of a year doesn’t appear to be much of a concession for the SNP to make seeing as were they to call one now, they would be expected to lose.
This will be one of the reasons she wants to push it down the road. But there is also another factor at play. Although many Scots rejected the SNP’s plans for another independence referendum in the snap election, there are still a lot of SNP voters who back the party specifically for this reason. After all, independence is the reason the SNP exists in the first place. Today’s announcement is a bid to keep both camps on side for now.
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