Without wishing to stifle debate, all I can say is that Scottish politics is very hard to read from the outside, and that folks elsewhere in the U.K. almost invariably overestimate the general level of support for independence or for a second referendum (and believe it or not the issues are not identical). They also tend to regard Nicola Sturgeon more highly than the Scottish electorate. Here, she’s marmite, and it’s not a 50/50 split.
The SNP, and Sturgeon in particular, has been trying to use the EU referendum to stoke up support for a second Scottish referendum ever since 2016 but in Scotland nothing that has happened since then to make it more likely that a referendum will take place, let alone succeed. Sturgeon has been threatening to clarify her proposed timetable “soon” for almost a year now. In many ways she’s like Teresa May, continually kicking the can down the road and hoping something will turn up to get her out of the hole she’s talked herself into.
She’s not actually a complete imbecile, but she leads a party of imbeciles. She knows that a referendum called too soon will be lost and will ruin the cause for the long term. Many of her party, on the other hand, are riled up, woad-faced bravehearts who think, despite all the evidence, that free-dumb is there for the taking.