Pressure mounts on Theresa May to pass a Section 30 order after UK House of Commons UNANIMOUSLY votes to accept the sovereignty of the Scottish people

When it emerged last night that the SNP were about to hold an opposition day debate in the Commons on the Claim of Right, I speculated on the pickle the unionist parties might get into depending on how they decided to vote.  I expected the Tories to vote against the motion, in which case they would have to explain why they were opposed to the Scottish people's right to self-determination, and I thought Labour and the Liberal Democrats might abstain, in which case they would have to explain why they were refusing to support the founding principle of their own Scottish Constitutional Convention.  In the end, all three parties declined to walk into that trap.  They all backed the motion, which meant that it passed by acclamation - essentially a unanimous vote without a single MP registering an objection (not even the notorious 'Mr Upskirt').

But of course there are also consequences that flow from backing the Claim of Right.  If, when Nicola Sturgeon renews her request for a Section 30 order, the answer continues to be "no", it will be reasonable to ask what the Tories actually meant when they voted in favour of "the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs".  As a veteran of interminable back-and-forths about Devo Max with Tory supporters on Stormfront Lite, I'm well aware of the argument that the sovereignty of the Scottish people cannot be absolute when the objective is an enhanced form of self-government within the United Kingdom, because any change in the UK's internal constitutional arrangements affects the whole of the UK and can only be decided by mutual consent, not unilaterally.  But that excuse falls apart if you're still claiming that the sovereignty of the people is not absolute even when the decision is about whether to leave the UK altogether.  The choice on independence really is nobody's business but Scotland's, and the sovereignty of the Scottish people means nothing if it doesn't mean the right to say "Now Is Not The Time is an interesting opinion, but we disagree with it, and the decision is ours, not yours".  It means exactly the same right to decide whether to leave at a time and manner of our own choosing that the British people exercised in relation to the EU.

Tories: We accept that the Scottish people have the sovereign right to decide their own constitutional future.
Scottish people: We have decided that -
Tories: Not now.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) July 4, 2018

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Fundraiser: If you find Scot Goes Pop's polling coverage useful and would like to help it continue, donations can be made via the 2017 fundraiser page.  The initial £7000 target was reached last summer, but one year on that money has all been used up.  I know there are always lots of very worthy pro-independence causes looking for support, so I've held off for as long as I possibly could before actively seeking donations again.

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Border checks at Gretna Green? We're totally cool with that, say majority of Scots in new SHOCK poll

As you've probably already seen, the latest release from the new Panelbase/Wings poll asks how people in Scotland would feel about border checks if that were necessary for Scotland to enjoy the same special status in relation to the EU that has been mooted for Northern Ireland.

If Northern Ireland were to be granted special status which effectively meant it remained in the EU, but saw the imposition of customs and immigration checks between it and the rest of the UK, which of these is closest to your opinion?

The same status should be granted to Scotland: 53%
The same status should NOT be granted to Scotland: 26%

I think that's quite possibly the most remarkable finding in the poll so far, and it has all sorts of interesting implications.  The question is not sneakily worded in any way - it lays on the line that the border checks being talked about are the sort traditionally associated with a hard border between two sovereign states.  And yet, in spite of the fact that Better Together thought their fairy tales about barbed wire fences and Trump-style walls were a major Achilles heel for Yes back in 2014, an absolute majority of respondents - even when Don't Knows are taken into account - clearly do not believe that border checks are a dealbreaker.  And if they're not a dealbreaker for voters pondering an intra-UK border, it's hard to see why they would be a dealbreaker for voters thinking about a border between an independent Scotland and rUK.

In practice, of course, people are typically poor at answering hypothetical questions, and after being exposed to a second helping of Project Fear, they might well suddenly decide that border checks are quite scary after all.  In a way, the dream scenario would be if Scotland did actually gain the kind of special status referred to in this poll, because it would allow people to get used to a lot of the things associated with independence before making what would be a much smaller psychological jump.  That is one of the many reasons why the Tories will never allow it to happen.  But this poll leaves the Tory government with another problem: if the majority were not deterred by the mention of border checks, that means they must feel very, very strongly that it would be unacceptable for Scotland not to be given any special status awarded to Northern Ireland.  Can the government risk a massive public backlash in Scotland at a time like this?  If not, it significantly reduces their options in resolving the impasse over Brexit.

And a final thought: if people were not deterred by border checks, that must also mean they feel very, very strongly about the benefits of "effectively remaining in the EU".  That constitutes another timely warning that it could be a big strategic blunder for the SNP to water down its pro-Europeanism in pursuit of the minority of Yes voters from 2014 who want to leave the EU.

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Fundraiser: If you find Scot Goes Pop's polling coverage useful and would like to help it continue, donations can be made via the 2017 fundraiser page.  The initial £7000 target was reached last summer, but one year on that money has all been used up.  I know there are always lots of very worthy pro-independence causes looking for support, so I've held off for as long as I possibly could before actively seeking donations again.

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Bend It Like Blackford

The SNP's brilliant psychological tactic of forcing five lengthy parliamentary votes while England were playing a World Cup knockout match is surely destined to become the stuff of legend.  Labour abstained on the votes, as is the Labour Way, but nevertheless the Tories couldn't all go home or head off to the pubs because there needed to be enough of them around to outvote a few dozen SNP and Plaid Cymru MPs.  In the end, well over 100 of them saw it through, which probably means that a great many Tories who would very much like to have seen the England match missed a large part of it.

A lot of sanctimonious drivel has already been spoken and written about this episode, but what I found truly contemptible was the revelation that Tory minister Margot James had physically approached the SNP during the votes and demanded that they think of Westminster's staff.  It was as if she truly believed she was looking at a political party that had completely taken leave of its senses, and that needed to be snapped back into self-awareness about the consequences of its irresponsible actions.  Er, hello?  It's only a matter of weeks since Margot James' party destroyed Scotland's devolution settlement after just nineteen minutes of parliamentary 'debate', during which no Scottish MPs were permitted to speak.  The settled democratic will of the Scottish people, as overwhelmingly expressed in the 1997 devolution referendum, was casually overturned by the imperial authorities in the manner in which a fly might be swatted away and instantly forgotten about.  Until an independence referendum is called, the only way that Scotland's elected representatives can fight back against the squashing of our country's democracy is by clever use of the parliamentary rulebook to cause small amounts of disruption, thus making the London government realise that its actions do at least have some bothersome consequences - which in this case meant that a limited number of highly-paid staff missed part (and only part) of a game of football.  Oh how frightful.

Yes, Margot, there is one political party that has lost all sense of perspective about what is happening, and that needs to be forced to belatedly confront reality.  But that party is not the Scottish National Party.

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We're about to see a second day of clever parliamentary tactics from the SNP, because they've called an opposition day debate on the Claim of Right.  The motion that MPs will be asked to vote for or against notes straightforwardly that the Scottish people have the "sovereign right...to determine the form of government best suited to their needs".  The simplicity of the motion presents all other parties with a dilemma.  Can Labour and the Liberal Democrats really abstain on a Yes/No vote about the founding principle of their own Scottish Constitutional Convention?  Will the Tories be able to come up with an explanation for saying that the Scottish people do not have the right to determine the form of government best suited to their own needs?  The way each unionist party votes, and justifies how it votes, will be taken down and used in evidence against them - particularly in the next independence referendum.

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Purely by virtue of a freakishly favourable draw for England, we're now suddenly staring down the barrel of a 1966 scenario.  And the fact that an England victory from 52 years ago is still being insufferably rammed down our throats on a daily basis is a useful clue as to why we might, on the whole, be better off not having to deal with a much more recent repeat performance.  But we may have to face the fact that if The Catastrophe is yet to be averted, it's now most likely to happen in the final.  England probably have a slightly better than even chance of beating Croatia - their toughest potential semi-final opponents.

I've always thought the best way of countering the mythology of 1966 is to promote the truly concrete past achievements of the Scotland team - as opposed to clinging to relatively meaningless single game triumphs such as the 1967 win against England, or the 1978 win against the Netherlands.  By 'truly concrete' I mean the fact that any retrospective world rankings going back to the start of international football would put Scotland in the number one position for long spells, and also the fact that Scotland won the defunct British Home Championship - the oldest and for a long time the most prestigious international tournament - on a remarkable 41 separate occasions.

On that theme, I was browsing through some of Wikipedia's articles about the British Home Championship a few hours ago, and just by chance I landed on the article about the 1979/80 edition of the tournament.  Now I've seen some brazen Anglocentric wording in my time, but just take a look at this effort...

"The tournament also finally marked the end of a decade of extremely poor international football results for all the Home Nations. Apart from disappointing Scottish performances in the 1974 and 1978 FIFA World Cups, no British side had been represented at a major football tournament since England were knocked out by Germany at the 1970 FIFA World Cup. In 1980, England finally qualified for the 1980 UEFA European Championship and although their performance was unspectacular it did lay the groundwork for the appearance of three of the Home Nations at the 1982 FIFA World Cup in Spain. The Home Championships thus allowed spectators and coaches an impression of the reorganised British sides and their capabilities in competitive football."

It's almost exquisite, isn't it?  England's qualification for the 1980 Euros was the first time a British team had qualified for a major tournament since England in 1970, unless you count Scotland qualifying in both 1974 and 1978 but obviously you won't count 1974 and 1978 because Scotland are not England.  That complete gibberish actually made sense in someone's head.

I was initially a bit daunted by the major surgery that would be required to make the article less risible, but after a bit of thought I edited it to read as follows...

"The tournament also marked the end of a decade-long era in which Scotland had been the only British side that managed to qualify for major international football tournaments, in the 1974 and 1978 FIFA World Cups. In 1980, England finally ended that Scottish dominance by qualifying for the 1980 UEFA European Championship and although their performance was unspectacular it did lay the groundwork for them to join both Scotland and the revitalised Northern Ireland at the 1982 FIFA World Cup in Spain. The Home Championships thus allowed spectators and coaches an impression of the reorganised British sides and their capabilities in competitive football."

I may have gone a bit to the other extreme by talking about a "decade-long era" of "Scottish dominance", but sometimes you need to go to the other extreme just to balance out the nonsense.

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Panelbase poll suggests the prize of staying within the EU will boost Yes support

The new full-scale Scottish poll from Panelbase, which is being released bit by bit over on Wings Over Scotland, has failed to provide any comfort for the small minority of SNP parliamentarians who take the view that the party needs to water down or reverse its pro-Europeanism to win back Yes voters from 2014 who want to leave the EU.  The poll shows that, when the independence question is asked on the assumption that an indy Scotland would definitely stay in the EU, Yes support is in fact several points higher than in recent Panelbase polls that asked the standard independence question.

The UK is currently scheduled to leave the EU in March 2019.  If a referendum on Scottish independence was held around this time, and if a Yes vote meant that Scotland would stay in the EU, which way do you think you would vote?

I would vote for an independent Scotland in the EU: 49.4%
I would vote for Scotland to stay in the UK and leave the EU: 50.6%

That's about as close to a 50/50 split as you can get, and compares to figures of Yes 44%, No 56% in the last Panelbase poll that asked the standard independence question.  (I gather from my informant that Stuart Campbell didn't get Panelbase to ask the standard question, so there's no direct comparison available within this poll itself.)  So it looks as if simply convincing people that independence more or less guarantees EU membership would be enough to add around 5 or 6 points to Yes support at a stroke.

Of course, this doesn't prove that Yes haven't lost a minority of supporters because of Brexit (in fact they almost certainly have), but what matters going forward is whether a particular pitch would increase or decrease support from where it currently stands.  It looks from this poll as if putting a doubt in people's minds as to whether the SNP want Scotland to remain a full part of the EU could potentially be a major strategic blunder.

As you probably saw a couple of days ago, the poll also found that a slim majority (50.6%) want a second independence referendum to take place within the next eight years, and a much more comfortable majority of 66.5% want it to take place at some point in the future.  Of course these results are always very susceptible to the way the question and possible answers are framed by the polling company, but nevertheless there is no real doubt that when the Tories say "the people of Scotland don't want another independence referendum", they are quite simply not telling the truth.

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Anguish for mystery man Leonard as Scottish Labour slump to THIRD in new Panelbase poll

Tonight has seen the publication of a new full-scale Scottish poll, conducted by Panelbase and commissioned by Wings Over Scotland.  Funnily enough, I had advance warning this was coming, because one of the poll's respondents sent me some of the questions the other day, and I couldn't think of anyone else but Wings who would commission a political poll that included supplementary questions about the Old Firm and Wee Ginger Dug!

So far we only have the headline voting intention numbers for Westminster and the Holyrood constituency ballot...

Scottish voting intentions for the next Westminster general election:

SNP 38% (n/c)
Conservatives 27% (n/c)
Labour 25% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+1)
Greens 2% (n/c)

Scottish Parliament voting intentions (constituency ballot):

SNP 41% (+1)
Conservatives 27% (-1)
Labour 22% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 6% (n/c)
Greens 2% (n/c)

The eagle-eyed among you will already have spotted that the percentage changes listed above are different from the ones listed in the Wings article.  That's because I'm using the standard approach of comparing with the last poll conducted by the same firm, whereas Wings states that he's comparing the Holyrood numbers to a much earlier poll from last December, and comparing the Westminster numbers to the result of the general election a year ago.

When the last Panelbase poll came out a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was a little startled that it showed Labour's Westminster vote holding up, and indeed that it showed Labour moving from third into joint second - which flatly contradicted what looked like a highly significant Labour slump in the most recent YouGov poll.  The YouGov direction of travel seemed intuitively much more plausible, because it was in line with the Labour-to-Tory swing witnessed in Britain-wide polls in recent months.  Tonight's poll may go some way towards solving the mystery, because it shows Labour slipping back in both Westminster and Holyrood ballots.  It could be that the last Panelbase poll overstated Labour a tad due to normal sampling variation, and that what we're seeing tonight is closer to the true picture.  That said, Labour are only just behind the Tories in Westminster voting intentions, whereas YouGov suggested a slightly bigger gap of four points.

Although tonight's poll and the previous one from Panelbase were only conducted two weeks apart, something very significant happened in the intervening period - ie. the SNP walkout in response to the power-grab.  Superficially, then, it looks like that eye-catching moment was not an immediate game-changer, although I would argue that the real value of it was in hardening and motivating the SNP's core vote.  That's something that doesn't necessarily show up in headline poll numbers, but could make a huge difference in any snap general election.  The SNP's biggest problem last year was not so much voters drifting off to Labour or the Tories, but rather SNP voters just not turning out at all.

Having said that, the SNP's Holyrood vote has crept up by one point, which although not statistically significant leaves open the possibility that the power-grab issue has caused some small movement in the SNP's favour.

Rather than fretting about the lack of any major SNP bounce over the course of June, I think we'd be better off reflecting on just how admirably the SNP's vote has held up over the year - and, incredibly, it is now a whole year - since the general election.  Given the hysterical post-election narrative in the media, you might well have expected some kind of anti-Nat bandwagon effect that could have led to Labour quickly reclaiming their traditional place as the dominant party of Scottish politics, at least as far as Westminster voting intentions are concerned.  But they haven't even come close to doing that.  There have now been twelve full-scale Scottish polls since last June, and nine of them have given the SNP a higher vote than the 37% achieved at the general election.  (No poll has put the SNP lower than 36%.)  If tonight's numbers are to be believed, the SNP's lead over the Tories has increased from 8 points to 11 since the election, and their lead over Labour has increased from 10 points to 13.  Given the large number of ultra-marginal constituencies in Scotland, that would be more than enough to produce a significant number of SNP seat gains from the two main unionist parties.

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The momentum is now unstoppable as the previously unionist Mail on Sunday demands...THE BREAK-UP OF THE UNITED KINGDOM

You've probably already seen this, but it has to be one of the all-time classic newspaper front pages.  Today's Scottish edition of the Mail on Sunday declares that Scotland is an "OPEN DOOR FOR TERROR" on the grounds that the paper's "investigators" (I rarely say LOL, but LOL) were able to take a ferry trip from Belfast to Cairnryan without encountering any "border controls" or having to show their passports.

There is of course a remarkably simple explanation for this shocking lack of border security.  The "investigators" didn't actually cross over an international border.  As most people have discovered by the time they leave primary school (let alone by the time they have editorial control over a national newspaper), Northern Ireland and Scotland are both part of the United Kingdom.  A ferry crossing from Belfast to Cairnryan is therefore a routine domestic voyage.  Having to show your passport on such a trip would be quite literally as daft as having to show your passport on a ferry between Mull and Oban, or between the Isle of Wight and Southampton.

I'm just about old enough to have done that trip (or rather the very similar Larne to Stranraer crossing) on three separate occasions during the Northern Ireland Troubles - in 1990, 1992 and 1994.  Even back then, there were no passport checks, and in fact there wasn't much in the way of ordinary security - a far cry from the heavily militarised international border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

The amusing part of all this is that there is only really one way to introduce the kind of hard border between Scotland and Northern Ireland that the Mail on Sunday are demanding.  And that is for Scotland and Northern Ireland to cease to be part of the same state.  Scotland will have to become independent, or Northern Ireland will have to leave the UK.  Either way this is a long distance from the Mail on Sunday's previously rock solid British nationalism, and is a development to be greatly welcomed.

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Is there a strategic advantage to what happened yesterday?

Obviously we all wanted the government to lose in the Commons yesterday, but now that they haven't, I'm trying to work out whether in the long run that will prove to be good or bad news for the SNP and the wider cause of independence.  As they say about the French Revolution, it's probably too early to tell.  The case for arguing that it might be good news is that it makes Theresa May's survival as PM more likely (I know, I know, but bear with me), which in turn makes a general election late this year or early next year less likely, thus making any decision to press ahead with an independence referendum next year much less complicated.  But the counter-argument is that now the power-grab story has finally broken through into the public consciousness, the SNP would have had a fearsome weapon with which to fight an early general election - one that simply wasn't available to them last time around.  If they had made gains rather than losses in an election, that would have set them up perfectly for the calling of a referendum shortly thereafter.

So you pays your money and you takes your choice.  I note, incidentally, that there is a great deal of smugness and complacency in many part of the London media about how the Tory government will sail through the vote on Heathrow expansion next week due to the support of the SNP.  My own view, for what it's worth, is that whatever the merits or demerits of a third runway, the SNP should be pursuing a policy of total non-cooperation with the government until and unless the power-grab is reversed.

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Sturgeon marches on: new Panelbase poll confirms SNP are on course for gains in any early general election

Today brings word of a new full-scale Scottish poll from Panelbase.  In one sense it repeats the recent findings of YouGov (albeit in less dramatic fashion) because it shows the SNP on the up, and on course for gains from both the Conservatives and Labour in any early general election.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election (Panelbase, 8th-13th June 2018):

SNP 38% (+2)  
Conservatives 27% (-1)
Labour 27% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 6% (n/c)

The SNP's lead over the Tories has increased from 8 points to 11 since last year's general election, and their lead over Labour has increased from 10 to 11.  This is obviously a relatively modest change (and less than suggested by YouGov), but given the number of ultra-marginal seats out there, it's enough to potentially make a very significant difference.

The meaningful dissimilarity with the YouGov poll (and this can't easily be explained by margin of error) is that Labour's share of the vote has not dropped back at all, and the Tories haven't made any advance.  Quite the reverse, in fact.  YouGov had Labour slumping from second to third, but Panelbase have Labour moving from third into joint second, courtesy of a slight fall in Tory support.  We'll just have to wait for more information to see which firm is closer to being right - although admittedly that moment may never arrive, because both the Panelbase and YouGov polls were (more or less) conducted prior to the SNP walkout from the House of Commons on Wednesday.  Assuming that was the watershed moment in Scottish politics a lot of people think it might have been, future polls may pick up more recent changes in public opinion that will disguise anything that might have been going on prior to the last few days.

The same problem makes it hard to draw many conclusions from Panelbase's finding on support for independence.  It shows no change at all - but of course any surge in Yes support would have been much more likely to occur after fieldwork concluded in the middle of the week, not before.  (Remember that most respondents to online polls tend to give their answers early in the fieldwork period, so for the most part this poll was probably conducted several days before the SNP walkout.)  The jury is still out, then - we'll have to wait for more up-to-date polls to find out just how big an impact the events of Wednesday had.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 44% (n/c)
No 56% (n/c)

Incidentally, don't be too alarmed to see Yes on a smidgeon below 45%.  Panelbase have of late slotted in at the No-friendly end of the polling spectrum - somewhat ironic, given that for such a long period prior to the first indyref, it was only Panelbase that gave Yes any reason for optimism.

Ever eager to find the most negative possible spin for the SNP, the Sunday Times have placed most emphasis on the Holyrood findings, which are bound to look less encouraging than the Westminster numbers because the SNP are starting from the much higher baseline of 2016.  Curiously, the headline reads "SNP set to miss 2021 seats target for new independence referendum", which ignores the rather obvious point that the SNP have not set any seats target for an independence referendum in 2021, because they've already successfully won a mandate at the election in 2016 for a pre-2021 independence referendum.  Indeed, any suggestion that the pro-independence majority may be lost in 2021 will simply strengthen the already overwhelming argument that the existing mandate for a referendum must be used.

As it happens, though, the poll actually suggests that the pro-independence parties would only very narrowly fall short of the 65 seats required for an absolute majority.  The Sunday Times' projection has the SNP on 56 and the Greens on 7.  So only a couple more seats would be needed, and a small increase in SNP or Green support would do the trick - with the election still three long years away in any case.

Voting intentions for Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 40% (n/c)
Conservatives 28% (n/c)
Labour 24% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 6% (n/c)

Voting intentions for Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 36% 
Conservatives 26% 
Labour 23%
Greens 7%
Liberal Democrats 6%

Strangely, this is the first time since the 2016 election that Panelbase have asked for regional list voting intentions, so it's not possible to give percentage changes on the list ballot.  However, the list results are fairly encouraging for the SNP - other polling firms have suggested their list vote has slipped rather lower than 36%.

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This may seem impossible, but the UK government is even less committed to the Sewel Convention today than it was yesterday

David Mundell's statement to the House of Commons today was extraordinary.  It wasn't simply that he failed to strike a conciliatory tone or offer any path towards compromise.  It wasn't simply that he repeated his unconvincing justifications for the UK government's unprecedented breach of the Sewel Convention.  He actually went a step further than any UK minister had ever gone before by unilaterally changing the terms of the Sewel Convention, thus leaving the Scottish Parliament utterly defenceless against any future attempt by the UK government to further reduce its powers or abolish it altogether.

As I understand it, until today the UK government at least accepted that the Sewel Convention precluded it, in "normal" circumstances, from legislating on devolved matters without consent.  Its excuse for breaching the convention on this occasion was that this is a one-off exception in circumstances that are not "normal".  But today Mundell insisted that the convention allows (indeed "requires"!) the UK government to legislate without consent whenever the Scottish Parliament has been asked to consent but no agreement is reached.  Essentially Sewel Mark II as set out today is a rapist's charter: consent need not be obtained but merely sought.  "My client took every reasonable step to obtain the woman's consent, your honour, but regrettably she was being stubborn."  There is no longer any requirement for circumstances to be "abnormal" for a refusal of consent to be ignored - future breaches could in fact become fairly routine.  (The way Mundell would frame it is that circumstances are automatically deemed to be "abnormal" whenever the Scottish Parliament withholds consent, thus setting up an almost comical circular argument that deprives the words "normal" and "consent" of any meaning.)

I would suggest this has enormous implications for the next independence referendum.  Personally, I've never believed it's likely that any UK government in anything like the foreseeable future would seek to abolish the Scottish Parliament outright.  But it doesn't matter what I think is likely, it only matters what the public think is plausible, and after the events of the last 72 hours, a lot of soft No voters will now have entirely rational doubts about just how secure Holyrood's foundations really are.  If the next Yes campaign presents the choice as being between independence and no Scottish Parliament at all, that may resonate in a way that would have been unthinkable in 2014.

With almost every move they make, the Tories are idiotically weakening their own hand in any referendum campaign.  They're putting all their eggs in the basket of preventing that referendum taking place before the current mandate expires in 2021.  That's one game we mustn't help them with.

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12.06.18: The day the calling of a pre-2021 independence referendum became inevitable

Huge respect to Ian Blackford for taking a stand at Prime Minister's Questions and sending the message that the unprecedented breach of the Sewel Convention that occurred yesterday, with the mass-scale stripping of existing powers from the Scottish Parliament, was a sufficiently serious matter to warrant the disruption of the flagship occasion in the House of Commons.  It was blindingly obvious that John Bercow was advised by his clerks that Mr Blackford had the right to immediately move a technical vote on the House sitting privately, which would have interrupted PMQs by around fifteen minutes.  Indeed, Bercow initially seemed to concede that point by appealing to Mr Blackford to wait until PMQs were over, but then, as he so often does, he made the rules up as he went on to save face and decreed that the vote would have to wait even if Mr Blackford didn't back down.  He then ended up expelling Mr Blackford from the chamber, prompting the entire SNP parliamentary party to walk out in solidarity - leaving a huge gap in the benches that would have brought home to viewers just how many seats the SNP actually won last year.  Shamefully, Bercow then let his anger (and his true colours) show by making a number of fatuous British nationalist propaganda points, such as that it was a great shame that SNP MPs who had questions down on the order paper would not now be able to ask them - as if a couple of twenty-second questions followed by the usual sneering replies from Theresa May would have somehow made up for the shameful scenes of yesterday, when powers were removed from the Scottish Parliament without a single Scottish MP being allowed to speak.  (No bending of the rules from Bercow to stop the disgraceful fillibustering yesterday, you might note.)

The reason why it was necessary for Mr Blackford and the SNP parliamentary party to send this symbolic message is that the London establishment and media just don't seem to have received the memo yet.  We hear a lot about the get-out clause in the Sewel Convention that the consent of the Scottish Parliament will only "normally" be required.  That implies, of course, that to act without consent is an extraordinary constitutional exception on a par with the impeachment of an American President or something of that sort.  Do you get any sense at all that the London establishment and media have acknowledged the gravity of what is happening?  Has Huw Edwards been presenting the Ten O'Clock News from Edinburgh for the last week as the crisis deepens?  Has the sainted Sarah Smith been fronting Panorama specials?  Was it a figment of our imagination that only a token 15 minutes was devoted to the power grab in the House of Commons yesterday, rather than ten hours?  It has become abundantly clear that the Sewel Convention - supposedly put on a statutory basis after 2014 in line with The Vow - is a presentational con-trick.  The pretence of treating it with reverence was only going to be maintained for as long as there was no cost to Westminster - but as soon as that was no longer the case, it was always going to be contemptuously ignored as if everyone knew it was a bit of a joke.  Not one person in the London media seems to think this turn of events is remotely strange or surprising.  Indeed, they seem more surprised today that Ian Blackford was actually taking the Sewel Convention and The Vow seriously.

There is, of course, no going back from the walk-out today.  The SNP membership would not accept that a matter that was serious enough to prompt a walk-out from the Commons is not serious enough to also necessitate a pre-2021 referendum on independence, in line with the mandate secured two years ago by the Scottish Government.  What's more, I simply don't believe - regardless of Sarah Smith's relentless propagandising to the contrary - that the SNP leadership will ask the membership to accept that.  It is inevitable that a pre-2021 referendum will now be called.

Events since the first indyref - betrayal of The Vow, followed by the Brexit vote, followed by Brexit mutating into a Hard Brexit, followed by the destruction of the devolution settlement - have occurred at a gradual enough pace that it's sometimes possible not to see the wood for the trees.  Let's take a step back.  The people of Scotland narrowly voted against independence in September 2014 on the basis of specific promises that Scotland would remain in the EU, and that the Scottish Parliament would become more powerful.  Instead, Scotland is being dragged out of the EU against its will, and powers that the Scottish Parliament has held since its inauguration in 1999 are being taken away.  Either one of those two material changes in circumstances would make the case for a second referendum unanswerable.  The two in combination make it a slam-dunk. 

This isn't a strategic calculation about whether we dare risk asking the question again in case the answer is No.  It's about giving a betrayed public the right that they deserve to revisit a decision they took on the basis of a false prospectus.

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