Negotiating the winding slopes of Dundee Law with the SNP’s 50-foot-long battle bus last Saturday will prove a breeze compared to their promise to deliver another independence referendum.

There’s more chance of the bus winning the Le Mans 24-hour race than them fulfilling their pledge.

John Swinney’s promise of another referendum journey is aimed solely at those folk whose only destination in life is an independent Scotland but that battle is lost before a wheel turns.

Like his proposal to cap bus fares, the road to another referendum has little mileage with most voters, who face much more pressing issues.

The SNP may have driven the bus out of the garage but the campaign it’s helping to launch isn’t roadworthy for the mythical journey ahead, in which they claim independence is close.

‘Myriad of SNP failures’

Urging voters not yet registered to vote to do so, Mr Swinney claimed on X: “We are within touching distance of an SNP majority and securing a referendum on independence, and the power is in your hands.”

But I don’t believe the campaign is about independence.

I think it’s about ensuring the continuation of the very comfortable lifestyles of SNP MSPs and assorted hangers-on who are on board – and determined not to get off – what one aspiring politician once called the Gravy Bus.

There is no new route to independence through a referendum because there is no way to secure one since constitutional matters are reserved and outwith the powers of Holyrood.

Swinney’s promise is aimed at the terminally gullible and those who’ve closed their eyes and ears to the myriad failures of the SNP in power under his leadership and that of Humza Yousaf and Nicola Sturgeon before him.

The Edinburgh parliament has provided an out-of-touch SNP and their apparatchiks with extremely comfortable lifestyles which they couldn’t hope to emulate in the real world.

Those lavish lifestyles would be upended if they ever actually had to run Scotland as an independent country, instead of having their continued incompetence underwritten by Westminster.

Holyrood has provided them with the consequence-free ability to virtue signal on their pet subjects without cost.

‘Opposition parties are equally unattractive’

There are too many free loaders interested in securing only their personal ambitions at the expense of their supposed aim of real self-government.

This cabal of chancers have no intention, never mind the means, of delivering independence.

A phalanx of feeble-minded fantasists has turned our devolved parliament into an embarrassment, pursuing personal peccadilloes and pet priorities instead of governing for all the people.

Now they may suffer the kickback as voters look desperately for a change to the years of incompetence, indolence and ineffectiveness.

What might just save them is that the opposition looks every bit as feeble and unattractive as they do.

Labour were as guilty as the SNP in indulging in the self-identity gender foolishness which though now in full-blown retreat saw their views move like shifting sands.

The Lib Dem leader squirmed and refused to say whether he thought that a male double rapist Isla Bryson was a man or a woman when I put the question to him on a BBC Scotland TV debate.

The Greens are net zero zealots who would rather we froze in winter than burned wood or coal on our fires or extracted oil from the North Sea.

The Tories have been an endangered species in Scotland since Margaret Thatcher’s days and their years in charge of the UK proved them to be every bit as incompetent as the SNP in Edinburgh.

And Reform UK north of the border are proving gaffe-prone and riven with infighting, the closer the election looms.

With such shambolic opposition, the SNP may yet hold the reins of power after May, but there’s not a cat in hell’s chance of them securing another referendum.

© The Courier