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The Guardian view on Scotland’s indyref2: Sturgeon has faced reality | Editorial

Nicola Sturgeon addresses the Scottish parliament on 27 June.

Nicola Sturgeon has announced a delay in any attempt to hold a second Scottish independence referendum. This is no more than a recognition of new political realities in Scotland and the UK. Although her Scottish National party remained the largest in Scottish votes and seats after the general election, the SNP took two massive hits, seeing its vote lurch from 50% in 2015 to 37% on 8 June and losing 21 of the 56 seats it won only two years ago. This was the SNP’s worst electoral reverse in a generation, and it has inevitably caused the party to rethink its immediate political priorities. At the same time, however, the election of a hung parliament and the weakening of Theresa May’s Brexit position provide the SNP with a changed UK landscape too. This is the background to the first minister’s statement.

Even during the election, the SNP had allowed its original plan for a new, pre-Brexit independence referendum to slip until after the completion of the article 50 process. Now it has become clear that the Brexit process may be longer than originally anticipated. Today’s announcement takes the postponement further: Ms Sturgeon has said she is “likely” to revisit the issue in autumn 2018, setting out her thinking on the case for a referendum then. There was no firmer commitment than that, although she insists she does believe a referendum may well be justified before the next scheduled Holyrood election in 2021. That allows her to keep the threat on the table as the Brexit process, in which the Scottish government and the Holyrood parliament will be significant players, evolves. In reality, it surely means a second referendum is now an open question, and the issue is not the daily priority for her government that it might otherwise have been.

The continuing ambiguity reflects the uncertainty of Brexit, but also the competing pressures of the electoral reverse and continuing pressure from SNP activists not to abandon the party’s animating goal. Support for independence and for a second referendum have both been in decline, so it clearly makes sense not to chance the issue. But the Brexit process and wider politics may generate more promising situations for the SNP to exploit. With that in mind, the party launched a new “mobilise.scot” campaign to build up support for a new vote and keep the faithful engaged. This week’s deal between the Conservatives and the DUP creates an instant grievance against preferential treatment for Northern Ireland, for example. A Catalan secession vote later this year might have an effect too.

Yet the mood has not just hardened against independence. It has also, to a degree, turned against the SNP and Ms Sturgeon. The message from the doorstep and ballot boxes in the local and general elections is that many voters are fed up. They want the Holyrood government to focus on the day job, delivering on issues like health, schools and infrastructure, and spending less time trying to provoke a second referendum. It looks as if Ms Sturgeon has listened. If she is to lead her party to a fourth term in government in 2021 she must buckle down and deliver.

Behind all this lurks the larger historical issue of whether the challenge to the union may now have peaked. It is clearly premature to be certain. Nor should one ever underestimate the capacity of Anglo-dominated Conservative governments in London to provoke – as David Cameron did after the first referendum in 2014. But the pro-independence tide that made so much political running in Scotland between 2011 and 2015 may have reached its limits. If that is so, today may have marked not just a recognition of reality but a watershed.