These setbacks have occurred after a decade of nearly uninterrupted progress for independence supporters. The SNP first took control of Holyrood, Scotland's devolved national parliament, in 2007. In 2011, it won an overall majority of the parliament's seats. In 2014, it staged (and narrowly failed to win) a landmark vote on the break-up of Britain. So the rapid loss of momentum that has taken place this year has been profoundly disconcerting for a movement that had come to view independence as a cast-iron certainty. [...]
The baseline numbers tell their own story. A poll from September put backing for independence at 46 percent - one point higher than it was at the same stage in 2014. Other surveys suggest it might be slightly lower than that, but few indicate that it has fallen far below the symbolic 40-percent mark. Similarly, the SNP - which is now in its 11th year of office - continues to register double-digit leads over Labour and the Conservatives at both the devolved Scottish and UK parliamentary levels.
Until quite recently, polling of this sort would have been unthinkable for nationalists. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, barely a quarter of the Scottish electorate wanted Scotland to leave the UK. Today, it's cited as evidence that the independence movement has stalled and that the SNP is spiralling into decline. [...]
Since the 2014 referendum, the case against independence has rested almost exclusively on the claim that Britain insulates Scotland from economic pain. In the absence of English public subsidies, unionists argue, Scotland would be a financial basket case, incapable of covering the basic costs of self-government. Even Jeremy Corbyn - who otherwise vigorously insists that spending cuts are an ideological choice rather than a fiscal necessity - has suggested that independence would mean "turbo-charged austerity" for the Scots. [...]
And the ongoing controversy in Catalonia is more likely to shrink the prospects of Scottish independence than it is to advance them. The constitutional standoff between Barcelona and Madrid may have animated the SNP grassroots, and even prompted the party's instinctively cautious leadership to launch a rare intervention into the affairs of a foreign state. But it also illustrates the pitfalls of declaring independence unilaterally (London will resist giving the green light to another Scottish vote for as long as it can), as well as the EU's intense institutional hostility towards regional and sub-state secessionist movements.
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