Our political editor considers the challenges ahead for the Scottish National Party after its conference.
So said the SNP leader and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon as she closed her party's conference in Aberdeen.Like all of these political gatherings at this time of year, they are an assembly of the convinced who have to persuade those who are not.The first is to make the case, via whatever means, for another independence referendum.Clearly the second isn't possible without the first, and securing the first is proving very difficult.
But the power to grant a referendum is, to use the jargon, reserved, which means it lies with Parliament in Westminster, not the one in Holyrood. The weight of legal opinion suggests the Scottish government will lose that case, and so Nicola Sturgeon will be left with her Plan C.Plan B is the court saying yes. It probably won't.The SNP argue that if they won more than half the votes in Scotland in a general election that would do the same job as a referendum and count as a mandate to leave the UK.
To give you a sense of just how high a bar it is, they could win every seat in Scotland and still fall short.And if they lost, that would probably spell the end of Nicola Sturgeon's leadership of her party and of Scotland.Perhaps the biggest cheer of her entire speech came when she said she intends to remain Scotland's First Minister for "quite some time yet."
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