Scottish independence: What next for the SNP?

Alex Salmond has resigned as First Minister of Scotland, bringing the country’s nationalists to an ever greater point of despair. He held a news conference this afternoon from which several national newspapers, including the Telegraph, Mail and Guardian were barred. He told the audience of journalists that “others were best placed,” to “hold Westminster’s feet to the fire.” It is the end of a remarkable career and a stunning day for nationalist politics in Scotland. He will step down in November.

This capped a day of extraordinary reversals for the Yes campaign. As dawn broke this morning in Glasgow, the sight of the small, dejected and exhausted crowd of independence supporters in George Square in the centre of town was a sorry sight. They had been there all night and looked spent. Several hours earlier, the scene had been one of jubilation as Yes voters gathered in a spontaneous rally to mark the closing of the polls. Towards midnight, the carnival atmosphere in the square had turned the gathering into something like a Yes campaign victory party. But it all came cruelly to an end as the results started to come in.

There was a profound sense of gloom this morning among Yes supporters. Polling data in the closing weeks of the campaign had suggested that the Yes campain was gaining in strength, including one opinion poll which gave the SNP-led Yes campaign an outright lead. The Yes camp seemed to have all of the momentum, a fact not lost on the Westminster parties, and which prompted the last minute offering by Cameron, Miliband and Clegg of more devolved powers to the Scottish government in Holyrood.

But last night, the SNP discovered that this surge had been illusory. That there had been no last-minute swing in the polls and the end result was a 55 per cent vote for the No campaign, and 45 per cent for Yes. Pro-independence voters were shocked by the scale of this loss.

One Edinburgh voter who supported independence, told me: “I am embarrassed to be a Scot.” He lambasted those No voters who were “content to be the regional backwater of North Britain.”

Other pro-independence voters complained about the media’s coverage of the campaign and the unequal treatment given to the SNP. But this increasingly feels an inadequate excuse for the defeat, especially in the face of such a huge turnout—more than 84 per cent of those eligible to vote did so. Painful though it may be, the Nationalists cannot but accept the result as the settled will of the majority of Scots. Paranoid notions that England’s press is out to smear the SNP is counterproductive at best.

In his concession speech, made early this morning, Alex Salmond made clear that he still felt there was a strong case for another referendum to be held in future, and the fact that nearly 1.6m Scots voted for his party gives this sentiment some force. But it would be unthinkable for there to be another referendum in even the medium-term.

Not only has the SNP lost its leader, but its position in UK politics has changed. It has returned to being what it was during the 1990s: a party with strong support, but whose central and defining policy—full independence—is not a live issue.

Instead, the party’s role is now that of Scotland’s negotiator. Salmond made clear in his concession speech that he will hold the leaders of the Westminster parties to the promises they have made during the campaign. Now it seems that he will not lead the SNP in those negotiations with Westminster.

The SNP’s biggest victory last night came when it won a majority of the vote in Glasgow, where Salmond’s deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, is an MSP. Sturgeon, who has been involved in Nationalist politics in the city since her student days, is regarded as having “delivered” Glasgow for the Yes campaign, a feat that Salmond could not match with his home turf of Aberdeenshire.

She is now the favourite to succeed Salmond.

The SNP can take heart from the large numbers of Scots who voted for independence yesterday. Since the opening of the Scottish parliament in 1997, its support base has increased substantially and that too is cause for optimism among supporters of independence. But the SNP is today coming to terms with not only the resignation of its leader, but a political outcome that falls well short of what it set out to achieve. For anything more than that, it will have to wait—not only for a new leader, but for the divisions created by this referendum to heal. Only then will Scotland be able to face the independence question again. That time feels a long way off.