Quiet, isn’t it? Three months on from yet another election that was falsely billed as the most important in our lifetimes, politics has gone into a deep sleep and the issue which dominated that election campaign - indyref2 - is more or less comatose.

This is not the calm before the storm. If, indeed, there ever is another indyref gale due to blast our shores, it is a long way off. Even the long phoney war that will precede any actual campaign is, as yet, but a distant prospect.

How can one tell? For the simple reason that neither side is remotely ready to campaign and, moreover, neither side has spent the long summer recess doing any of the prep they would need to undertake if they truly thought battle would be joined any time soon.

Even if a few indyref noises echo in the early autumn, they will not amount to much. A rallying cry here. A recruiting drum beaten over there. A sabre rattled, perhaps, but it will just be for show (sabres usually are).

So quiet is it that last week the only indyref news of note was made by Maureen Watt, now retired, once one of Holyrood’s more ineffectual MSPs and a minister so anonymous that no governmental achievement could be found to attribute to her name.

Still, in retirement perhaps she will attain more notoriety than she managed in office, for last week it was disclosed that, when a minister, she had conceded that Scotland is “too small” to establish its own version of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), whose expertise has played such a looming role in our public life these past 18 months. We simply do not have the expertise here, Ms Watt told Holyrood in 2016: “simply by nature of its size, Scotland has a much smaller pool of expert clinicians”.

“Too wee, too poor, too stupid” is a claim against Scottish independence voiced by no unionist. The phrase was coined either by an SNP spin doctor or (I’ve heard it suggested) by John Swinney - and of late it has been more used by Michael Russell than by anyone else – but it is precisely the point the hapless Maureen Watt was making.

As was The National, in its eye-catching story over the weekend that, were Scotland to become independent of the United Kingdom, we would need an additional 35,000 civil servants to add to our already bloated public sector. This, dear reader, is a deeply conservative estimate, from a paper not widely regarded for its conservatism.

An independent Scottish state would need not only an entirely new foreign service and diplomatic corps, it would need officials at home to undertake all the work currently performed by UK public servants on behalf of all of us. Scotland would need a central bank. It would need a competition and markets authority. It would need trade commissioners. It would need pensions experts. It would need a legion of negotiators to manage the transition to independence after more than three centuries of union. And, of course, it would need panel after panel of professionals and experts to advise ministers on all manner of matters, including vaccination and immunisation.

Scotland’s newly required officials would have to be found (from where?), recruited (by whom?), trained (how?), given offices and support staff and, of course, they would have to be paid. Ask yourself: if indyref2 is just around the corner, where is the advance planning for any of this? The reality is that the successful delivery of a project on this scale of ambition requires years of careful and detailed preparation. Of course it could be done: Scotland is more than large enough, wealthy enough and smart enough to make it work – in time.

But that is the key point. It will take a great deal of time and energy and resource and, right now, no time at all is being taken to invest that energy and resource in anything like this direction. Why? Because those whose mission it is to prosecute the case for independence know that it is not going to happen any time soon.

Which, from a unionist perspective, is just as well, really. Seven years on from the referendum campaign of 2014 unionists know what the argument against independence is. It is the same now as it was then – for the nationalists have manifestly failed to answer in the meantime the questions they flunked in 2014. On currency, on the border, on defence and on pensions, no work has been done to plug the gaps in the nationalist case.

But most unionists recognise that just asking awkward questions is unlikely to be enough. A positive case for the union will also have to be made and, on this front, unionists are as guilty of squandering the last seven years as nationalists are. A handful of building blocks have been laid but, even if the foundations are there, they have not been developed in any meaningful way. Take the power to spend money – the legislation is in force (in the form of the UK Internal Market Act) but it has yet to be used.

Unionists know that Scots will have to be shown and shown again the added value of union (and not merely told about it in theory). Spending public money is one way of doing this, but the wait drags on. Fewer speeches about levelling up and more direct interventions in the economy would be a good start. That it has not happened yet is a sign that the unionist camp is in no rush.

Just as it suited both sides to pretend in this year’s election campaign that indyref2 was imminent – the tactic does tend to get the vote out – so it suits both sides now to put the foot firmly on the brake.

As such, the sultry mood of summer may yet linger awhile, even after the weather cools and the rains return. Those darker evenings we have to look forward to will not be filled tramping the streets in search of referendum votes. Not this year – and not next year either.

Quiet is good. Long may the slumber continue.

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