Edinburgh Central is a plain, functional-sounding name for a rich, lively and psephologically baffling constituency where Scotland’s past and present weave around one another: desolate grave of a long-forgotten nobleman here, gaggle of selfie-snapping tourists there.

The constituency sweeps along the retail thoroughfare of Princes Street, round Castle Rock, with its stronghold jutting perilously from ancient dolerite, through the history-cobbled stretch of the Royal Mile, up past the regal sandstone of Holyrood and onto Calton Hill, a great verdant bump, home to a 19th-century folly, the still-unfinished National Monument of Scotland, and overlooking a more recent misadventure, the Scottish Parliament.

Taking in the Old Town (students and shops) to the south and the New Town (frappuccinos and farmers’ markets) to the north, Edinburgh Central is a prosperous, picture-perfect seat with deprived pockets kept on the fringes, so that its enlightened, professional residents can feel a great solidarity with the poor without having to go too near them.

Yet for all its quirks and charms, this seat is an ominous battleground, pitting the Scottish National Party (SNP) against the Greens, as Scotland’s two Left-wing, pro-independence parties try to outflank one another in their enmity for the Union.

The contest here is a symbol of how the Scottish Parliament, set up by Tony Blair to allow Scotland to choose its own approaches on health, education and other policy areas, has become captive to radical forces hellbent on dismantling the United Kingdom.

Next Thursday’s poll here is to elect members of the Scottish Parliament. Unlike the local council elections in England which take place on the same day, it will help shape the national government. And there is every indication it could unleash forces that dramatically alter the country we know and love.

W hen it sold devolution to the voters in 1997, Labour said: ‘The Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed.’ In fact, the Scottish Parliament has been a springboard for those who wish to tear Britain apart, devolution having inadvertently gifted them a proto-state apparatus with which they daily chip away at national unity and Westminster sovereignty.

The SNP has been in power for 19 years now and despite a dismal record in government (plummeting education standards, heaving waiting lists, the worst drugs deaths rate in Europe) it clings on thanks to the loyalty of a large minority convinced by its claims that it is the Scots who subsidise the English and that offloading them via independence would make Scotland one of the richest nations in the world.

It is an absurd fantasy, but enough people buy into it. Not enough for a majority in a referendum – 55 per cent of Scots voted to remain British in 2014 – but enough to romp home in multiparty elections against a divided and uninspiring opposition.

Hence why the headline acts in Edinburgh Central are the SNP and the Greens, two parties who agree on so much they were previously in coalition. The incumbent, Angus Robertson, is a senior minister in the SNP government. He wants to rip Scotland out of the UK – then take it straight into the European Union. He is for tax-and-spend, backs transgender ideology and once called on the UK to boycott the Eurovision Song Contest because Israel was participating.

His Green rival, Lorna Slater, is also an incumbent, albeit via the list system intended to make Holyrood elections more proportional. She, too, is a former minister, one who managed to botch a bottle recycling scheme so badly that Westminster was forced to step in. She believes in all the same things as Robertson, only she is more radical.

While Robertson entered the election the favourite, polls now suggest Slater has it by a nose. Pity the predicament of local Tory and Reform supporters, whose best chance of ousting Robertson, a dangerously capable independence ideologue, is by voting for someone markedly less capable but even more hardline.

Some voters prefer to stick to the devil they know. Jillian McDougall, 86, is a resident of the New Town and reckons she’ll ‘probably have to vote Conservative’, adding: ‘I don’t see Labour as terrible but I think Keir Starmer is a bit of a disappointment. He probably is a very nice person but perhaps they’re not the best at running countries.’

When last this constituency went to the polls, in a mid-Covid election in 2021, Nicola Sturgeon parlayed her dubious leadership during the pandemic into another ballot box triumph. Since then she has gone, as has her ill-fated replacement Humza Yousaf.

Current leader John Swinney has spent two years rebuilding his party after a nightmare general election, in which the SNP lost 39 seats and was reduced to a rump of just nine in the Commons.

Swinney is no rising star. He has led the party before – a brief and unhappy stint in the early 2000s – and he has been a top minister for most of the nationalists’ 19 years in devolved government. He has the look of a bank manager and personality of a funeral director but this belies the fanatical nationalism of a man who once pledged to ‘tell the Brits to get off’.

Although he shares responsibility for two decades of failure in education, health, drugs and transport, his reputation for dullness is such that he does not drive opposition voters to the polls the way Sturgeon did.

Yet his soporific demeanour should fool no one: he has made independence chapter one of his manifesto: ‘A vote for the SNP on May 7 is a vote to put Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands. And let Scotland decide.’

The Supreme Court has already ruled that the Union is a matter reserved to the national Parliament in Westminster, so what is Swinney up to? Some say he is cynically ginning up his core vote, well aware that the prospect of achieving independence is vanishingly small. He has in mind diehard nationalists like Jean Crawford, who lives in Bruntsfield in Edinburgh Central. She usually votes SNP but hasn’t fully made up her mind yet.

The 64-year-old told the Daily Mail that independence was her top priority, saying: ‘I’ve grown up in a family of Scottish independence supporters, even my grandparents supported Scottish independence. We were all Nats.’

It might seem cynical to toy with the hopes of such voters; however, others say the SNP’s strategy is more insidious. Nationalists see the weakness of Keir Starmer and the radicalism of those seeking to replace him, and wonder if they can either coerce or cajole Downing Street into granting another referendum. This would plunge Britain into constitutional chaos.

Not only would Scotland’s place in the Union be cast into doubt, the ascendant Plaid Cymru would demand equal treatment for Wales, with a referendum of their own. Across the Irish Sea, where Nationalist voters now outnumber Unionists, Sinn Fein would clamour for a border poll. Nation by nation, like a collapsing cascade of dominoes, the United Kingdom could fall apart before the world’s eyes.

A grim prospect in itself but one made all the more disturbing by the fact that Britain’s nuclear deterrent is housed at Faslane because no other naval base in the UK is equipped to accommodate both the submarines and the warheads. The SNP is stridently anti-Trident and would insist on their prompt removal from an independent Scotland. At a time of growing conflict and instability across the world, Britain could find itself disintegrating – distracted and defenceless.

Given the SNP’s dismal record in office, its ready supply of scandal and intrigue, and the natural shelf life of any government, the Nationalists ought to be packing up and ringing the removals men.

Alas, the mood north of the border is of the plague-on-all-your-houses variety. The SNP has broken promises left and right, but Labour struggles to make this point. Starmer’s attempt to snatch the winter fuel allowance has taken the party from landslide victory in 2024’s general election to polling hinting that it might finish behind Reform.

The PM is so unpopular north of the Tweed that his Scottish leader Anas Sarwar has repeatedly called on him to quit. Sarwar, however, has been damaged by claims he has been plotting to work with Reform, even as he accuses them of wanting to deport his children.

Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay is a campaigning anti-crime journalist who survived a gangland attempt on his life and entered politics to root out corruption. He is campaigning on a platform of tax cuts, longer prison sentences, getting gender ideology out of schools and a crackdown on benefits.

But his efforts have been hampered by the legacy of the UK Conservatives’ 14 years in government. Voters who might otherwise have been drawn to him stopped listening to the Tories a while ago and switched to Reform.

This election is a major test of Reform’s ability to win across the UK. Despite being leaderless since 2022, the party’s Scottish outfit began to climb in the polls as dissatisfaction grew with Labour and the Conservatives at Westminster. In January, Nigel Farage alighted upon Malcolm Offord as his preferred Scottish figurehead, despite the former Tory peer having defected just one month previously and having been a minister in the last government.

Offord’s leadership has been troubled from the get-go. A Reform staffer let slip just how troubled it was likely to get during the Press conference to unveil Offord, when she stepped in to stop questioning from ITV’s Peter Smith. Trying to put a leash on the media seldom suggests confidence but it soon became clear why Reform would want to limit journalists’ access to Offord.

Early in the campaign, he decided that a newspaper interview was a good time to reveal his opposition to Catholic schools, which he associated with ‘segregation’ and ‘sectarianism’.

Even those who have never set foot in Scotland are familiar with the fraught history between Catholics and Protestants in Glasgow and the west. Yet Offord, a son of Greenock, blundered into a toxic topic that had, until then, not been mentioned in the campaign. Such was the backlash among the very socially conservative voters Reform had hoped to attract, that the party issued a statement distancing itself from its own leader’s views.

To make matters worse, Offord has been hit by a flurry of candidate resignations over old social media posts, despite the party’s claims to have tightened its vetting processes.

He has proved to be a liability on this front, too. Opponents and the Press seized upon an obscene after-dinner joke he told about George Michael’s partner in the wake of the singer’s death. Reform supporters are no fans of cancel culture but making fun at the expense of a grieving man struck some as another example of Offord’s poor judgment.

Rounding out the cavalcade of calamity are the Scottish Greens, a comically Left-wing party which is standing on a manifesto pledge to ban homework, while one of its candidates wants to abolish all prisons. Despite their largely pro-crime stance, there is one offence the Greens want to crack down on: they have pledged to prosecute any Scot accused of being ‘complicit’ in Israeli ‘war crimes’. Scottish firms deemed similarly complicit will face tax hikes.

Then there’s the Greens’ chief priority: gender ideology. They were key drivers behind legislation to allow men to self-identify as women and MSP Maggie Chapman says Holyrood ‘should be exploring’ whether to permit eight-year-olds to change their sex. (The Greens also talk about the environment occasionally.)

They might sound merely eccentric but the Scottish Greens are anything but fringe figures. They have already been in power with the SNP between 2021 and 2024, and used their clout to push gender self-identification, agitate for a shutdown of the oil and gas industry, and even oppose safety upgrades to an accident blackspot motorway.

And they’re itching to get their hands on power again. The Holyrood electoral system makes single-party majorities difficult to achieve; coalitions are the norm. Should the SNP fall short on May 7, another alliance with the Greens might be their only means of setting up a stable government.

Scotland would face the worst of all worlds. Another five years under the SNP, trying to spend its way out of a £5billion fiscal black hole with the higher public spending Scotland enjoys courtesy of English taxpayers. And by their side would be the Greens, pushing ever more dangerous gender practices, spoiling for a fight with the Trump administration and frothing at the mouth about Zionism.

Untethered from notions of compromise or sensible decision-making, the Greens would prod the Nationalists to become even more confrontational with Westminster over independence. As leader of the SNP, John Swinney could hardly allow himself to be outflanked on national liberation.

The Scottish devolution experiment is off the tracks and heading right for the heart of the Union. There is a real risk that, at the very moment Labour is locked in a turbulent leadership battle to replace Keir Starmer, the SNP will cause maximum constitutional and political mayhem until the Government bends the knee and gives them another referendum.

Understandably, some voters in England will think, ‘let them go, if that’s what they want’, but the unintended consequences for Britain’s constitutional future, economic stability and national security would be immense. Not least among these, the prospect of sharing a vast land border with an independent Scotland whose government is ideologically committed to mass immigration and determined to unleash EU-wide free movement once again.

All this is far from the everyday concerns of the ordinary voter. They want more jobs, better schools, more doctors and safer streets. But the fragmented nature of Scottish politics and the Holyrood voting system makes it difficult to elect a government that will pursue these priorities.

This is bad news for Edinburgh Central but farther west in Glasgow Baillieston and Shettleston it will be devastating. These communities, located in the city’s poverty-blighted East End, desperately need a break from the constitutional sideshow of independence and trendy elite concerns like pronouns and Palestine. They need a government that will help them lift their neighbourhoods out of deprivation, create jobs to drive down unemployment and tackle health inequalities in places where, at just 74 years, the male life expectancy is three years less than the Scottish average and five years less than its English equivalent.

Baillieston and Shettleston have none of Edinburgh’s natural grandeur or storied history. No castles and no parliaments, no tourists and no royals. But they brim with decent folk playing difficult hands, ambitious for their families against all the odds and proud of their wee bit of Scotland however many noses might turn up at it.

Reform’s Thomas Kerr, a local lad, is standing to challenge the establishment parties and while he will have a hard time beating the SNP, his brand of plainspoken, working-class populism could find an audience.

From Edinburgh’s New Town to Glasgow’s Baillieston, the Holyrood elections are regarded by many voters as an endurance test rather than an opportunity.

Precious little has got better in Scotland in 19 years of SNP government and while that has put some off voting for the Nationalists again, in many others it has kindled a deep and pervasive fatalism – a sense that nothing will ever get better, that no party can be trusted, and that this is just the way things will always be.

For the rest of Britain, the stakes are higher than many realise. One week from now, the results of an election in which they have no vote could throw their country, its security and its standing in the world into years, if not decades, of disarray. The SNP menace has risen again and with it the threat of Britain’s demise.

Additional reporting: Dan Barker & Paul Drury