Former independence supporter Stuart Campbell effectively admits trying to "kill" indy at the general election - and he wrongly thinks he's succeeded

I just want to make one simple point.  Although it's an important point, there's nothing complicated about it and it can be explained very briefly.  On polling day, Stuart Campbell broke his word to his readers.  He had previously assured them he would never tell them how to vote, but instead he ended up instructing them to vote Labour: "there’s a job that needs doing...grit your teeth and gird your loins and get it done".  Although this would mean they'd be voting for an avowedly anti-independence party, Campbell tried to make out that they'd somehow be playing a game of five-dimensional chess and bringing independence closer.

So having got the election outcome he wanted (I doubt if many people were stupid enough to follow his advice, but he got the outcome anyway), you might have been forgiven for expecting some kind of guidance from him about where the cunning masterplan goes from here and how precisely independence has been brought closer.  But nope.  Instead, he brazenly asked his readers for suggestions about how he should spend the next two years, because he couldn't see any way forward.  And then on Thursday, he announced that: "Independence is dead as a political issue in Scotland for the next few years. This much should not be in any dispute."

And why is independence dead in his view?  Oh, he is in no doubt whatever about the reason: "A Labour government with a crushing majority sits firmly in Westminster with absolutely no intentions of granting a second referendum". That'll be the Labour government he instructed his readers to elect with as crushing a majority as possible.  In other words, he knowingly gave his readers advice intended to "kill" independence - exactly as I and others pointed out he was doing at the time.  Those who said we were wrong owe us an apology.

Independence is of course not dead, whatever the fantasies of the Brit Nat commetariat and Stuart Campbell (essentially one and the same thing).  The era of "muscular unionism" and "now is not the time" under Theresa May started, seemingly, at a moment of maximum weakness for the Brit Nat side - the SNP had 54 of the 59 Scottish seats at Westminster, and were dominant at Holyrood.  It's therefore not at all hard to imagine the pro-indy movement starting a fightback in the current circumstances which are far less unfavourable than anything the Scottish Tories faced in 2016-17.  But it does actually require someone to go out there and make the political weather, rather than just passively accepting the fatalistic nonsense being put about by the likes of Campbell.

I won't give Campbell any advice about how he should spend the next two years, but I'll make a prediction about how he will spend them - he'll campaign for a Labour-led Scottish government under Anas Sarwar, because he thinks independence hasn't been killed quite enough yet.  It would be grand if we could stop pretending this guy is anything other than an anti-independence campaigner at this stage.  If that's what his dwindling band of die-hard fans actually believe in, fine, but if not, they've been brainwashed by a bog-standard cult leader.