Eight years ago, before the SNP began telling its fellow citizens that they were transphobic bigots, it seemed that Scottish independence was just around the corner.

Barely a year after the referendum, the SNP achieved what had previously been considered impossible by annexing almost the entire country at the UK election. Scotland might not have been officially independent of the UK, but in the few years following 2014 it certainly felt like it. The SNP chalked up victory after victory in all four electoral jurisdictions and all by comfortable margins.

The result of the EU referendum in 2016 and the nature of the campaign across the UK reinforced the notion that, in everything but name, Scotland was already an independent country. And yet here we are seven years later at a point where many thousands of those who had voted Yes and campaigned for it in 2014 no longer believe that it will happen in their lifetimes.

Polling analysis just published in the Sunday Times seems to underpin this feeling that independence is withering on the vine. It found that support for the SNP among younger voters has fallen by 14 points since May and that independence was no longer deemed to be of paramount importance among independence supporters as the cost of living crisis proceeds undiminished across the UK.

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Immediately before and after the 2014 referendum I was one of several political commentators to advance the notion that, if the SNP didn’t move nimbly and adroitly to capitalise on the numbers and momentum, the independence window would slowly begin to shut.

In time, a Labour government would return to power, if for no other reason than that English voters would simply want to give the other guy a chance, providing he wasn’t too radically different from the current one. And that this would immediately deprive the SNP of one of its main line of attack: that everything was the fault of the Tories.

And, of course, there was the inevitable occurrence of events, dear boy, of which there has been an abundance in recent years. The Covid-19 pandemic was rapidly followed by a war in Ukraine and a cost of living crisis.

There is an ongoing police investigation into party finances that has already led to the arrest, questioning and subsequent release of the former First Minister, the party’s former chief executive and party treasurer. Thus, the seven years of abundance, so far as the SNP was concerned, is now being followed by years of famine. Wise people, guided by the reliable maxim that good times don’t last forever, will make provision for the lean years by putting something away in the years of plenty.

In the case of the SNP, many of us thought that the party would, at the very least, have commenced working on an economic prospectus for an independent Scotland that would have answered the questions posed during the first independence referendum.

We also thought that some creative thinking would be encouraged and deployed on how to out-manoeuvre the UK Tories’ implacable refusal even to consider a second referendum.

Yet, those who championed this idea, Chris McEleny and Angus MacNeil, have now been cast into the outer darkness. Joanna Cherry, who expertly plotted the takedown of Boris Johnson after he tried to subvert Parliament, found herself being targeted by the bullies and misogynists who then infested the SNP’s Westminster group.

During this time the only detailed work on how an independent Scotland might flourish was being done by the once-influential Common Weal think-tank. The SNP ignored this though and resorted to doing what it always does when it doesn’t like the look of those telling them the actual truth. It set its OnlyBams division of spivs, hustlers and chisellers on them as they’d done with MacNeil, Cherry and McEleny.

The party leadership contest provided a chance to conduct the necessary repairs. However, the SNP establishment, who had most to lose under a leader who wasn’t beholden to them, orchestrated the victory of a candidate the wider electorate deemed to be less able than the runner-up. He subsequently showed his gratitude by promoting some of them into a Cabinet that will soon need a small conference venue to accommodate them all. It means that critical decisions about the governance of Scotland have been left to some of the weakest and demonstrably incompetent politicians in Scotland. This is typified by the contrived inclusion of two Scottish Greens who’d struggle to run the affairs of a village bowling club.

In the late 1950s, the Conservatives enjoyed the support of a majority of Scottish voters. That will never happen again after it became clear throughout the Thatcher, Cameron and Johnson eras that this party was operating as a mafia whose primary concern was to protect and advance the interests and profits of Britain’s corporate giants and their most affluent stakeholders.

Yet, the Scottish Tories are presently being represented at the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election by a young, working-class man with lived experience of deprivation and social inequality in one of Europe’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

Read more: Independence can only be rescued by the SNP losing, and losing big

At Holyrood, the party is led by a man who attended a state secondary, unlike the leaders of Scotland’s other main parties. At the weekend, while the SNP was hoodwinking its own supporters with a march for independence in Europe (a palpable fantasy) the leader of the Scottish Tories was helping officiate at a football match in the SPL.

A slew of reports have revealed that while the SNP has been indulging its cynically-manufactured obsession with trans rights the life chances for Scotland’s most vulnerable citizens have been reduced.

Alcohol and drug addiction are disproportionately killing our poorest people; suicide rates are highest in our most deprived communities and there’s been an increase in the number of children being left homeless. And then, when they reach secondary school, the attainment gap between affluent and poor will reduce their chances even further. It’s shameful that, after 16 years of unbroken SNP government, the Scottish Tories on some of these issues look more progressive than a party which purports to be on the side of the poor, but has done nothing for them.

The little detachment of Tory volunteer canvassers I met in Hamilton last week were much more representative of west central Scotland than any of those self-serving careerists leading the independence march on Saturday.

The SNP has blown the chance for Scotland to be independent and betrayed the movement in doing so. Time now for it to drop the pretence and focus instead on repairing the damage it has done in our neediest neighbourhoods.