When general election dealing is done, will SNP’s independence bet prove an unwise gamble?

For all her bravado in government, Nicola Sturgeon wasn’t much of a gambler – at least not a successful one. She bet against the UK government and the Supreme Court that she could hold another referendum on independence – more commonly referred to as indyref2 – and she failed on both counts.

First, Downing Street said she wouldn’t be allowed to do it legally, and when she pressed her case, a unanimous verdict of Britain’s most senior judges agreed that she’d be breaking the law if she tried it on her own.

She then staked a great deal on being responsible for making Scotland a world leader in terms of gender reform legislation, and cajoled and browbeat her party and parliament into agreeing with her controversial measure to give effect to that change.

But on this occasion it was killed off first by public opinion, led by the country’s best-known author, and by the Scotland Act, which had given effect to the Holyrood parliament and declared that what she was planning was unconstitutional.

These were signal defeats but it would appear that the SNP leadership doesn’t want to know when gambling doesn’t pay.

Just about the sole weapon in current leader John Swinney’s campaign war chest is that he will be able to declare that he has a mandate for Scottish independence if the SNP win the majority of the constituencies in Thursday’s election. In other words, if he leads his troops to triumph in 29 seats or more out of Scotland’s 57, he will be entitled to say to whoever is prime minister on Thursday night that it’s time to begin the independence negotiations to break up Britain.

However, just because Swinney repeats this claim at every opportunity doesn’t mean that he’s likely to achieve that aim – it’s a gamble, pure and simple.

The opinion polls are very much against him getting anywhere near that total, with some suggesting he could lose more than half the 48 seats that the SNP won at the last election and a number predicting that he might be down to a tiny total – perhaps in single figures.

Such losses would in themselves be a total humiliation but wouldn’t they also mean that if a majority of seats meant independence was well and truly on the cards, then wouldn’t a minority mean the opposite, i.e. that independence was a dead letter?

The First Minister was asked this question time without number, most recently by the Today presenter Mishal Husain, but he ducks and weaves and refuses to answer this straight question. Instead, he havers on about how in the last Scottish Parliament election, in 2021, the SNP won 64 and the Greens eight of the 129 seats.

These 72 votes, he continues to insist, constituted a majority in favour of independence and therefore provided a mandate to begin talks on taking Scotland out of the UK.

But he refuses even to discuss the possibility that if his party gets less than a majority of Scottish seats on Thursday, then it’s “goodbye independence” for the foreseeable future.

However, it’s one thing for political leaders to pretend that all is well – there are others doing it, after all – but entirely another when they refuse to admit that there’s another side to the argument they’re putting before the electorate.

John Swinney is not noted for being a gambler. It’s a bit late for him to be starting now.