Nicola Sturgeon has told her party what it doesn’t want to hear on a second independence referendum

Nicola Sturgeon is a brilliant politician, possibly the best in the UK, but even she cannot conceal the weakness of her position. Today, she unveiled with great fanfare her plan to hold a legal second independence referendum, on 19 October 2023: her plan is to ask the UK Supreme Court if she is allowed to.

The answer to that ought to be no, as the law on devolution was crystal clear: the Scottish parliament could hold a referendum on independence only with the agreement of the UK government.

Still, the law can be unpredictable, and there must be a chance that the Supreme Court will rule in her favour. It is not clear what the legal arguments for that would be, and they certainly weren’t spelt out in Sturgeon’s statement today. She tried to pretend that because it would be a consultative referendum (rather than a “self-executing” one), the court might agree to it. But then she gave the game away by admitting that the referendums of 1997 (devolution), 2014 (independence) and 2016 (Brexit, UK-wide) were consultative too.