GEORGE Osborne was in Scotland this week, visiting a farm in the Borders with Ruth Davidson in the latest episode of the Remain campaign’s Project Fear. George and Ruth visited some sheep on the farm, carefully avoiding the pigs because Davie Cameron has got first dibs on them, but sheep are the Tories’ natural constituency anyway. They’re the ones who’re always saying SNPbaaaad.

George and Ruth were sheep whispering in an effort to tell people in Scotland that the SNP doesn’t have a mandate for another independence referendum while simultaneously telling people in the rest of the UK that they need to vote Remain in order to ensure that the SNP can’t have one under any circumstance. The SNP didn’t win the last election, oh no, said Ruthie, labouring under the delusion that she’d won it by dint of coming a very distant second. They didn’t get a mandate for having another independence referendum, so they’re just going to have to jolly well shut up, so there, or I’ll just have to get even more ranty than normal at Furst Meenister’s Questions.

Tories are forever making authoritative statements about things they know to be untrue, as Nicola Sturgeon pointed out to Boris Johnson during the EU debate on Thursday. This is because for Tories poshness is a substitute for accuracy and facts. Ruth isn’t very posh, just shouty, and despite her contrafactual assertions, the SNP may well have considerably more of a mandate for holding a second independence referendum in the event of a Brexit than the Tories do for holding the EU referendum in the first place. Allegations continue to pile up that the Conservatives only won the General Election by committing electoral expenses fraud. Over two dozen Tory MPs are now having their election victories investigated by the authorities, and if the allegations are held up the Conservatives will have no majority in the Commons at all, and plunging the country into this EU referendum will have been done illegitimately.

Ruth Davidson and George Osborne act as though denial is a tributary of declyde, but there is actually a majority of pro-independence MSPs in the current Scottish parliament. Ruth might affect to believe that the SNP lost its majority so can’t pass a referendum bill, but there are more SNP MSPs than MSPs from all three unionist parties combined, and when the Greens are taken into account there is an absolute majority for independence. There is not a shred of doubt that the pro-independence parties won their majority entirely honestly and fairly. That is something which cannot at this stage be said for the Conservatives in Westminster.

The people of Scotland voted for that pro-independence majority in the full knowledge that the Conservatives were going to hold their EU referendum, just like when we voted to remain a part of the UK back in September 2014 we did so on the basis that Westminster swore blind that doing so was the only way to ensure Scotland remained a part of the EU.

There’s a very real possibility that a majority of people in the UK will vote for a Brexit, and if that happens it will have come about because large numbers of people feel disenfranchised and alienated by our political establishment. One of the major causes of that disenchantment is that politicians like George Osborne and Ruth Davidson can make promises and commitments like promising that only with a No vote would Scotland be secure within the EU, and then renege on their promises a few months later. Their current panic over the possibility of a Brexit is a strategic error entirely of their own making, and they’re bent on repeating that error with the prospect of another Scottish referendum.

Anyone with a modicum of expertise in the finer points of contract law, which is anyone who has ever watched an episode of Judge Judy, knows that when a promise or commitment is made and a deal struck on that basis, one party to the deal can’t later change the terms of the deal and expect the other party to hold to their end of it. Judge Judy gets very stern about that sort of thing.

She makes a face and rips the guilty party apart like a ferocious wee dug disguised as an elderly American lady. Ruthie and George would get short shrift from Judy. They’d be the feckless boyfriend trying to explain that when Scotland loaned the UK its vote in September 2014 in return for EU membership that it was in fact a gift for the UK to squander on a new tank for Ruth and they didn’t have to bother their wee heids about the promise that in return for our votes we could stay in the EU.

The Westminster Parliament and the Better Together campaign of which the Conservatives were a part made a deal with the Scottish electorate when they inveigled us into a No vote in no small measure on the basis of Scotland’s status in the EU. They have no right to go back on that deal now, and if they do then there is a natural consequence. That consequence is that the gemme of the first independence referendum is a bogey. There will be a rematch. And there won’t be a thing that Ruth can do to stop it.