The SNP and the Yes movement are faltering—what comes next for radical Scotland?

In the damp heat of Scottish summer, a storm has been brewing that threatens to wash away the last feelgood remnants of Scotland’s pro-independence campaign.

The official campaign for Scottish independence, and the associated Yes brand, were established by the SNP and launched at a surreal and hastily-organised event in an Edinburgh multiplex cinema in 2012. That the campaign very nearly succeeded was close to miraculous; its popularity aided by a ham fisted pro-UK counterpart that made a number of unforced errors and masked the division in the Yes side's own uneasy coalition of Greens, existential nationalists and Nordic welfarists.

The Yes movement, as it came to be known, carried on after 2014 in the form of cafes, public meetings and a commercially opportunistic pro-independence newspaper, whilst the SNP hoovered up members and kept the Yes brand on ice in Companies House in case it needed to be reactivated.

Since the SNP zenith of the 2015 general election, and the modest success of Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Conservatives, lazy and sometimes self -interested columnists have begun to forecast the end of independence. The existential disdain many people hold towards self-government and Davidson’s ability to say anything have both proven valuable electoral tools—but they have done so in a more general atmosphere of political entropy, in which the “Yes” alliance has begun to split.

Social democrats and progressives who nailed their colours to the Yes mast in 2014 have since expressed disappointment at the SNP’s reticence to engage in confrontational politics and its fondness for focus groups and demographic targeting over serious reform. The bright flash of Scotland’s self-proclaimed “democratic moment” looks increasingly like the precursor to intellectual heat death.

The SNP have become expert at exploiting this atmosphere. Like Davidson’s rebranded Tories, they have learned to operate in the vacuum of a notional middle Scotland, in a country where increasingly skeletal newspapers pump out headlines and recycled opinion pieces in lieu of meaningful discussion of the problems faced by the nation.

Sturgeon’s party increasingly criticism with headline-grabbing announcements—using referendum tactics in government. A recent scheme to retrain Syrian doctors to work in NHS Scotland, for instance, was trumpeted as an example of the Scottish Government’s progressive agenda. But the small print revealed that it had stumped up just 160,000 pounds for the project.

Meanwhile, SNP ministers and backbenchers alike have become masters of the anodyne tweet, welcoming pilot projects and engaging community stakeholders on an almost daily basis. When policy problems are identified in areas from poverty to climate change, the Scottish Government often cloaks its inaction in the sterile language of civic responsibility and cooperation.

The SNP mission to govern for all of Scotland has seen the energy of Yes transferred to a neutered coalition of interests often referred to as “civic Scotland,” the group of business, institutional and cultural figures across all parties that imagines Scotland as a homogenous place of consensus and moderation in which their opinions are especially valid.

Eyebrows were recently raised when the SNP elected former investment banker Ian Blackford as their new leader at Westminster, as well as by the appointment of lobbyist and former Royal Bank of Scotland economist Andrew Wilson to head its growth commission. Charlotte Street Partners, the lobbying firm founded by Wilson, has contacts across the Scottish political spectrum but refuses to disclose its client list.

Unfortunately for Scottish democracy, any criticism of the party in power and its more problematic power brokers is often construed as unionist mischief making.

The blogger Stuart Campbell, who has built up a small empire under the alias “Wings over Scotland” with loyal readers numbering in six figures, seems intent on fighting an internet air war against the unionist establishment. He is currently engaged in a defamation lawsuit against Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale after she accused him of homophobia. The case has proven a neat litmus test separating those willing to back pro-independence voices to the hilt and the section of the Scottish left for whom independence and SNP loyalty is not a hill they are necessarily willing to die on.

Antipathy and ambivalence towards the SNP vision of Scotland does not, however, translate into a ringing endorsement of the union or the UK. None of the pro-union parties have yet presented meaningful plans for constitutional and economic reform that will fix the underlying sociological drivers of Scottish nationalism.

The SNP-spawned Yes movement is shedding followers—but by falling out of love with the party, its former allies might yet build something more constructive and durable than the Yes campaign was ever intended to be. Just as dissatisfaction with the Scottish Labour party allowed the SNP to make hay, a new chapter in Scottish politics is opening up in which the SNP clearly represent the status quo and increasing numbers of people are unprepared to settle for it.