Two stories were starkly juxtaposed on The Herald’s website this weekend.

One announced that the SNP could be on course for an outright majority in Thursday’s election following a mega-survey by Stonehaven Polling. The other revealed the appalling gap of 35 years in healthy life expectancy between those living in the richest and poorest areas of Scotland.

The two together illustrate the paradox at the heart of this election: that a party in power for nearly two decades, a party with a decidedly lacklustre record, is somehow still on course to emerge dominant, perhaps so dominant that they won’t need any other parties to get votes through parliament.

The SNP have been an OK government with a firm commitment to social justice. They have had their proud achievements, particularly in trying to tackle child poverty, but on the bread-and-butter electoral issues for which they are solely responsible the prevailing mood is disappointment. Long-suffering resignation pervades the national psyche. Difficulties getting GP and hospital appointments, the diminished standing of Scotland’s education system, health inequalities, drugs deaths and overbudget, overdue infrastructure projects, can’t be palmed off on the UK government. The party promises yet more spending, but with a £5 billion budget deficit now looming over the next three years – a black hole of the SNP’s own making – cuts, higher taxes, broken promises or a combination of those all seem much more likely.

Read more by Rebecca McQuillan

Support for the SNP has dropped by around 12 per cent in national polls since 2022 so a good result for them won’t be a sign of wild voter enthusiasm. Other factors are at work. One is tactical voting in head-to-head contests with Reform, which could result in gains for the SNP. The party may also benefit from being a contender for seats in the Borders, following a collapse of Tory support there. But above all, they are helped by the enduring constitutional question and the SNP’s strong command of the pro-independence vote, contrasting sharply with the disastrous four-way split of the pro-UK vote.

John Swinney has been talking up his strategy on independence for months, insisting that only an outright SNP majority will count as a mandate for another referendum, drawing on the precedent set by Alex Salmond in 2011.

At first, that seemed like a shrewd tactic. It would shore up the SNP’s vote in what looked like being their toughest election in years while muting criticism from SNP fundamentalists who doubt Mr Swinney’s passion for independence.

An SNP majority, if it ever materialised, would put the UK Government in check: how could it refuse a referendum when it had previously accepted the moral weight of that result and signed on the dotted line? But at the same time, an outright majority would be hard to achieve and therefore – helpfully – Mr Swinney would probably never have to make good on his strategy. Why would he want to? With support for independence bobbing up and down around 50 per cent, with the global security picture giving voters the heebee jeebies and with Labour running the UK instead of the Tories, the conditions are not there for a decisive Yes win. But Mr Swinney can still talk up a referendum, reaping the electoral rewards. Ingenious stuff.

Well, sometimes politicians are too clever by half. Mr Swinney’s manoeuvrings could be about to unleash Brexit-style misery on Scotland.

If – and it’s still a towering “if” – the SNP does scrape a majority of one or two on Thursday (different mega-polls have come to differing conclusions on this), he’ll find himself in the same position as David Cameron in 2015. Having used the promise of a referendum as a tactic to placate his internal critics and shore up the vote in a parliamentary election, he may believe he can control what follows.

That’s what David Cameron thought – but he lost the vote and lost his job.

Perhaps the worst part is this: whichever way any second referendum went, Yes or No, the result would certainly be close and therefore bitterly contested – just like Brexit. That was Mr Cameron’s great legacy – leaving the country painfully divided – and it would be Mr Swinney’s too. Because if one thing is clear it’s this: there is no settled will for independence and there is no sign of impatience among voters for another referendum. Pushing for that vote will just reveal how badly split we are.

Let’s say for a moment that Mr Swinney secured a referendum – that Keir Starmer, a man with a deep reverence for legal precedent, agreed to give Holyrood the right to hold one and a date was set. What would happen next?

We all know because we’ve been through referendums twice in the last 15 years. Enmity between the two sides. Complex questions reduced to a binary choice. Downsides dismissed, questionable potential benefits pumped up on steroids and paraded like prize-fighters before the crowds. The boundary between informed opinion and wishful thinking honoured at first but, as polling day approached, jostled aside and then trampled to nothing under a grotesque stampede for votes. People goaded to lend their support when rational argument failed.

For me, one of the most distasteful aspects of the independence referendum in 2014 was the way Yes tried to elide left-leaning communitarian politics and support for independence. It was not subtly done. A deliberate attempt was made to equate voting No with being a “Tory”. Our supposedly polite national conversation was reduced at the end to a slanging match.

John Swinney has insisted that only an outright SNP majority will count as a mandate for another independence referendum (Image: PA)

Yes, OK, but if the SNP get a majority, the UK Government isn’t going to agree to a referendum, you might respond. The SNP’s playing a longer game here. Starmer will resist it and then Swinney will be able to build support for Yes on grievance. By the time there is a referendum, Yes could win.

Perhaps, but if that’s the plan, then it’s a promise to spend the next five years stoking division and using constitutional wrangles to distract from those waiting lists and health inequalities and falling standards in maths and science. David Cameron has said he is “truly sorry” for the “uncertainty and division” that continued for years after the Brexit vote. He learned, too late, that there’s a right time for a referendum. In Scotland, this isn’t it.

Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on Bluesky at @becmcq.bsky.social and on X at @BecMcQ