politics as farce. I love Scotland, but to constantly give voice to this issue at every conceivable twist and turn risks turning its potency into a cliche. Soon we can expect crowds chanting "Arbroath!" every time the clock hits 13:20 during a football match, just as the Catalans chant for independence every time 17:14 rolls around at Barcelona's Camp Nou. And a woman as politically capable as Nicola Sturgeon, the head of the SNP, should know better.

Part of the problem is that the SNP isn't facing any particularly stiff countervailing winds just yet. Outside Scotland, they're called nationalists, but inside Scotland they're competing with the likes of the Labour-run Glasgow City Council, whose governance is perhaps best exemplified by its Guy Fawkes-esque proposal to blow up apartment buildingsas part of the opening ceremony for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, only to fail to blow them up properly when the time finally came. Even the tap water is colloquially known in Glasgow as "council juice."

For its part, the SNP is far from perfect. Maintaining an efficient police force in Scotland is a problem. One MP is being investigated for housing fraud. Another MP I spoke with in the run-up to the May elections spoke in needlessly acerbic terms about the man whose parliamentary seat he would soon be filling—the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the embodiment of Labour's former hold on Scotland—a bruising reminiscent of Tea Party rhetoric. Education funding could be better structured. And the biggest potential economic driver for an independent Scotland—North Sea oil—just brought