My preference would have been that Nicola Sturgeon combine her role as Scotland's political leader and her role as de facto figurehead of the independence movement with a role as the 'face' of the campaign - with the SNP managing that campaign.
Why ask if 'Plan B' might be a panacea anyway? Has anybody claimed that it might have the power to cure all ills? Come to that, has anybody claimed that it might be the "solution to all our indy woes"? Or that it could "break the constitutional stand off and get us swiftly and easily to independence"? Who has described 'Plan B' in such terms? When? Where?
Nicola Sturgeon is an astute and highly experienced politician. As a political operator, she is undoubtedly outshone by her predecessor. But that leaves her plenty of scope for putting into practice whatever tricks she may have picked up.
I am generally in favour of sympathy. If I say society has deteriorated over recent decades largely due to a declining capacity for human empathy, this may be more than just the tendency to rose-tinted hindsight which often comes with age.
The SNP leadership has seized on the Ashcroft poll with the eagerness of someone accused of a serious crime who has suddenly been offered an alibi. At last! Something they can represent as vindicating the relentless waiting that has become their only discernible strategy.
The anti-democratic British Nationalist 'One Nation' project is behind schedule - by about a year. The Article 50 extension granted by the EU gave us a year's grace. A year in which we could have acted to save Scotland. A year which has been wantonly squandered.
This is dominance behaviour. It is political scent-marking. It is a blunt and imperious message from the British state reminding us that they own devolution. They own the Scottish Parliament. They own Scotland.
Does anyone else entertain niggling doubts about their own mental state as they listen to the increasingly brazen lies and the ever more fantastical claims? Do you, betimes, catch yourself thinking, is it me?
A political union which can only be maintained with lies, deceit, denigration and intimidation is not a political union which can sensibly be described as a success.
When Hunt, or another of his British ilk, throws a custard pie in Nicola Sturgeon's face, the audience screams with amused delight as they see in their lumpen imagination Britannia's bold favourite asserting dominance over her possessions and inflicting defeat and mortification on those who dare challenge her divinely-ordained status.
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A blog by Iain Lawson
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