Nicola Sturgeon succeeded Alex Salmond as First Minister of Scotland in 2014. She recently passed him to become the longest-serving holder of the office. Breaking up the United Kingdom has been the cause of her political life.
Given all that, one might have expected her to have had time sufficient to put together a more convincing case for it by now.
Yet judging by the SNP’s performance this week, it looks more than ever as if Sturgeon has been pushed into action by her restive grass roots and the clock ticking down towards the end of her front-line political career.
What the Scottish Government has done is draw up a draft bill to authorise an independence referendum, and then seek a ruling from the Supreme Court on whether or not it would be legal to pass it.
There are several shortcomings with this strategy, not least that they are asking the judges to rule on legislation which has not yet been enacted and could be modified in its passage through the Scottish Parliament. But politically, it has the big upside of bypassing the Scottish courts.
Had she proceeded with plans to hold a vote without the proper constitutional authority, anyone could have mounted a legal challenge to the move in Scotland, and unionists were reportedly prepared to do so. The optics of that – and there is nothing to this latest drive beyond optics – would not have been especially helpful for whipping up resentment against Britain.
The Supreme Court is extremely unlikely to hand Sturgeon a victory either, of course. No country on Earth gives a constituent part a completely free hand on whether they secede or not. Vesting that authority in the Scottish Parliament would mean the SNP could set the timing, question, and franchise, assuming they didn’t simply decide winning a straight vote at Holyrood would suffice.
So when Lord Reed and his colleagues say no, as they probably will, Sturgeon can direct the ire of her increasingly angry base towards another target for a while. In theory.
But refusing to proceed with legislation for an unauthorised referendum only makes sense as part of a strategy committed to doing things through the proper constitutional channels. Yet the Nationalists have also said that, if they don’t get a referendum, they plan to treat the next general election as an unofficial one instead.
This is a return to SNP policy from the good old days when they barely won any seats at Westminster, which is probably not a good sign for the confidence of the party’s modern leadership.
Nor did they seem entirely clear on the specifics when they launched it. John Swinney, the SNP deputy leader, suggested several times on the radio that they might declare victory merely with a majority of seats, which they could do on a minority of the vote. He has since claimed to have misheard, and clarified that they want a majority of the votes cast.
But of course, there is no such thing as a referendum by proxy. No sensible British Government would accept it as a basis for independence, nor would the international community on anything so close to a unilateral declaration of independence. So it looks again like just an effort to shore up the SNP base vote at the ballot box.