NOW the dust has settled on the local government election results we are about to enter the phoney war of independence and indyref2. You may think we have been in that phoney war since the autumn of 2014 – I mean, the issue has hardly gone away at any point since then – but until now the Scottish Government have been only pretending. In the coming weeks, by contrast, Nicola Sturgeon’s ministers will at last do what they have long been threatening. They will bring a Bill to Holyrood to legislate for a second independence referendum.

That Bill will pass, but it will not become law. The Supreme Court will either strike it down or will so hollow it out that no meaningful referendum can be held. Future columns will go through the legal arguments, setting out how the British constitution will quietly deal with all the political noise to come. Before we get to that, though, some ground needs to be cleared out of the way.

For there are three unspeakable truths about independence and indyref2, and no honest account of what is to come can ignore them. The first of these is that there is going to be no repeat referendum on independence any time soon. The 2014 referendum relied on Westminster giving its consent. It was this consent which underpinned the legality of the 2014 referendum and, this time around, it is perfectly plain that such consent is going to be withheld.

Everybody knows this. The First Minister knows it. Her government know it. Holyrood knows it. You know it. And yet the pretence goes on that there is somehow, none the less, going to be a second independence referendum on the First Minister’s preferred timetable of a date to be confirmed in 2023. There is not. That is why the period we are about to enter is a phoney war and not one in which battle between the forces of Yes and the forces of No will actually be joined. That’s the first truth –unspeakable by the Nationalists but true nevertheless – indyref2 may be safely filed under Not Going to Happen.

Which is just as well because, if it did, Yes would win. That is the second unspeakable truth, except, this time, it is the Unionists who cannot utter it. Scotland would vote for independence this time around because a narrow majority of mainly younger voters would determine that it was a price worth paying to escape the United Kingdom. It would be close. It would be contested. It would be brutal and ugly and horrible. But Yes would win, in my view, by about the same sort of margin by which Leave prevailed over Remain in 2016.

Despite it being a so-called Yes vote, it would not be a vote cast mainly in optimism or glory about a new future for Scotland. The Nationalists have so obviously and so manifestly failed to make the positive case for independence that this has now become baked in to the political calculations. Rather, it would be a vote condemning the perceived failures of the United Kingdom. By a narrow majority, the voters of Scotland would be punishing Britain for Brexit, for Covid mismanagement, for failing to reform and adapt itself, for callous disregard and corruption in government, and for the man who (to them) embodies all of these failures – prime minister Boris Johnson.

The Unionist case against independence remains strong – indeed, compelling – but it would fall on deaf ears. There is no neat solution to the border. With an independent Scotland seeking membership of the European Union and the rest of the UK resolutely outside the European single market, our politics (like those of Northern Ireland) would become logjammed in protocols and backstops, and our cross-border trade would become snarled in bureaucracy and distrust. Likewise the currency. The Nationalists have made no headway whatever on the issue which, more than any other, cost them victory last time. That is because the solutions which make economic sense (joining the Euro) are political vote-losers, and the politically viable solutions collapse on their first encounter with the hard truths of economic reality.

But it would not matter. These are heavy prices to pay for national independence, but pay them young Scots would be prepared to do, if that is what it takes, to get us out of here. The forces of No have the arguments; but the forces of Yes have the votes.

The third and final unspeakable truth follows on directly. Were Yes to win it would be a disaster. I do not mean that it would be a disaster for the United Kingdom (of course it would – it would threaten Britain’s place in the world, destroy Britain’s sense of itself, put at risk the UK’s seat at the UN Security Council, and jeopardise the UK’s internal security).

I mean that independence any time soon would be a disaster for Scotland. The Scottish economy is so far from being ready for independence that it would crash and burn spectacularly. This, for me, is the greatest puzzle of the SNP. In their many years of government they have done nothing – nothing at all – to prepare the economy for independence. No building of the tax base. No steps taken to slim down the bloated public sector. No incitement to business to remain. No restructuring to drive the growth Scotland would need to prosper outside the United Kingdom.

It’s extraordinary. The SNP have their hands on all the levers of economic power they need to make a success of the only thing they truly believe in, and they haven’t done a thing about it. It’s almost as if they know the unspeakable truth. It’s not going to happen. There is going to be a lot of noise and sound and fury. But it’s not going to happen, and it’s just as well.

Adam Tomkins is the John Millar Professor of Public Law at the University of Glasgow School of Law. He was a Conservative MSP for the Glasgow region from 2016 to 2021.