The attempt to take Scotland out of the United Kingdom yesterday hit crisis point, as a new poll showed the nationalist campaign for the Scottish parliamentary elections has lost ground sharply with voters.
Mr Alex Salmond, the party leader, yesterday sought to claw back momentum, claiming the campaign for the ballot on May 6th had barely started, and that its final two weeks would see the message taken directly to the people, by-passing a hostile Scottish press.
Yesterday's Glasgow Herald front page carried the splash headline "SNP in freefall".
That paper commissioned a poll of 3,000 people - three times the normal sample - which showed a 20 per cent gap in voting intentions between Labour and the nationalists. For much of last year, the two were tied and the SNP seemed poised to control the first Scottish parliament for nearly 300 years.
But the new poll shows Labour instead on the verge of an overall majority, with 63 out of the 129 seats in the Edinburgh legislature. The SNP projection fell sharply over the past two months to only 34 seats, on 26 per cent of the vote share. In Scotland's four-party system, the centrist Liberal Democrats would have 18 seats and the Conservatives 13.