We must go back to the early 20th century to observe the last period when a once powerful UK political party suddenly became irrelevant. This was when the emerging Labour Party, reinforced by the trade unions and universal suffrage, was beginning to replace the Liberals as the main vehicle for social progress.

Since then the Liberals – now the Liberal Democrats – have become a twilight party. Their role has been to hold the jackets when Labour and The Conservatives face off against each other.

The SNP is approaching this moment of truth now. Their relevance as an electoral force exists purely on a perceived commitment to deliver independence for Scotland. Yet, as this UK election campaign has progressed its most prominent champions have begun quietly to walk away from the notion of independence in the manner of Gerald Ratner shareholders.

After 17 years in government its main proponents, the SNP has lately become associated with failure across every sector in which it wields devolved power. Nevertheless, while the Conservatives were in government at Westminster and under the jurisdiction of pantomime villains such as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, independence could easily be marketed.

When it becomes clear, though, that your own party has become a bigger clown-show than the UK Tories and that, in any case, Labour will form the next Westminster Government (and probably the two after that) the appeal of independence begins to lose what lustre it ever possessed. Shorn of a desire to fight for independence the SNP’s offering is merely a device that roughly tracks Sir Keir Starmer’s manifesto in the same way that mortgage brokers will always track Bank of England interest rates.

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The SNP leadership has thus been kicking the notion of independence further down the road. It’ll be five years, according to its Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn. “This election is about much more than independence,” he said last week, acknowledging perhaps that there is no strategy for achieving it.

The actor, Brian Cox – a committed advocate of Scottish self-determination – expressed his suspicion on Sunday’s Laura Kuenssberg show that the SNP was moving away from independence. The word ‘independence’ rarely features on its election materials. What then is the point of voting for the SNP? It’s not as though they’ve proven to have been competent stewards of Scotland’s business.

On Sunday, John Swinney insisted that the SNP was the only party in this election seeking to deliver a left-of-centre agenda. The only arena though, in which the SNP could ever be considered left-wing is the state legislature of Texas.

Ask the 500 workers at the Ineos oil refinery plant at Grangemouth if they think the SNP is a left-of-centre party. Last week Unite the union condemned the Scottish Government for its failure even to pretend it was trying to mitigate next year’s planned closure of the facility.

The election was called just weeks after the SNP announced a 26% cut to its affordable homes budget. According to the government’s own figures, the number of homeless households stands at more than 32,000, an increase of 10% in a year.

Child poverty remains stubbornly high at around 250,000, despite almost two decades of the SNP in government. Under Nicola Sturgeon we were asked to judge her and her party on their efforts to reduce the academic attainment gap. Verdict: D-minus.

John SwinneyJohn Swinney (Image: free)

This target was further shown to have been little more than a chimera when the mask slipped during the Coronavirus contagion. That was when John Swinney, as Education Secretary, opted to downgrade the expected marks of working-class school pupils.

At the start of the Covid crisis it became clear, moreover, that the Scottish Government was responsible for throwing infected elderly and infirm citizens into care homes which overnight became state mortuaries.

The SNP revulsion of the working class is evident in its absurd Hate Crime Bill, a chaotic and reactionary piece of legislation fuelled by the lie that the Scottish people are backward and hate-filled. The SNP don’t think working-class people can be trusted to drink responsibly or bring up their children properly.

They tried and failed to impose its sinister Named Persons legislation, a boutique, middle-class fantasy that assumed working-class parents were knuckle-draggers. Undeterred, the SNP has replaced it with their proposed ban on conversion therapy which will criminalise parents seeking to protect their children from the behaviours highlighted in the Cass Review.

The SNP loathe ordinary, working-class Scots and no late attempts by the current First Minister to position the party as ‘left-of-centre’ can change that.

Ah yes, but all the recent polls show that support for independence remains at around 50%, claim the party desperadoes. This will diminish significantly though, if another campaign is run any time soon. The decade that's elapsed since the first referendum has been characterised by an extraordinary degree of hostility towards a large number of SNP politicians from many of their own activists.

These politicians stand accused of betraying the movement by allowing it to be hollowed out, intent on creating a hostile environment for women who wish to protect their sex based rights. There’s a perception among many former SNP supporters that this misogynistic and homophobic cohort has exploited the wider independence movement as a means of securing votes and keeping the gravy train running.

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If these characters - and there are around 40 of them at Westminster and Holyrood - were front and centre of any future independence campaign it would fail before it had properly started. And that’s before you factor in an expected sharp increase in support for Scottish Labour at the 2026 Scottish election. This of itself would finish the prospect of independence.

Ironically, it would be sunk not by another Better Together coalition but by many of the activists who were prominent in 2014. I’ve never previously witnessed so much resentment being directed by so many lifelong independence supporters at such a large number of those for whom they once worked.

There was a time – not long after the triumph of the extreme Brexiteers – when the SNP might have had a chance of securing a second referendum. By then though, they’d begun the process of marginalising those few individuals within the party with the intellect to treat with the UK Government and to devise a strategy. They were replaced by a collection of mediocre, unquestioning acolytes incapable of delivering public policy let alone devising it.

Until every last one of them has been chased from this party, independence will be nothing more than a hustle.