IT’S been another eventful week in British politics.

Well I say eventful, what I really mean is we got to watch Michael Gove put a stick in the spokes of Boris Johnson’s bicycle wheel, causing a car crash that wrecked a train that smashed into an airport and burst Gove’s balloon.

We had Labour’s old hierarchy try and fail to mount a coup, then flounce off in disgust and fail to burst their way through a moist paper bag. And if that wasn’t enough we also had the spectacle of the Chilcot report, detailing the myriad ways in which Tony Blair is a self-serving, sanctimonious sleazebucket.

What we’ve learned in these past couple of weeks is that the only plan that members of the British political establishment possess is a plan to save their own skins. That’s all that they have any expertise in, and they’ve had lots of practice. Tony Blair may have spent Wednesday squirming and croaking in an attempt at self-justification, but that’s probably as far as his embarrassment will go. We live in a country where there are more severe consequences for missing a job centre appointment than there are for taking the country into an illegal war.

The UK is the laughing stock of the globe, a clownish incompetent that still thinks it’s a serious heavyweight contender, a country where shooting itself in the foot counts as punching above its weight. Even so, the political and media elite of the British state is still concerned to ensure that Scotland is told that we’re even less competent than they are. You’d be nothing without us, the British state says, although you have to set the bar pretty low to be less competent than the British establishment. Being lectured by that lot is like being taught social skills by a fluent Klingon speaker in his 50s who lives with his mum.

Although the starting pistol has yet to be fired on the second independence referendum, Project Fear Mk III is already well under way. It’s just as well then that we’ve had the experience of Project Fears Mks I and II, so we can get our rebuttals in early.

If, like the last time, the next independence referendum is organised and run under the authority of the Scottish Parliament, the chances are that only people who are resident in Scotland will be able to vote. Just like the last time, this will spark off a howl of protest orchestrated by the British media about how unfair it is that Scots outside of Scotland won’t be able to vote. This will be the same media that campaigned to restrict Scottish voting rights in the Commons, and wasn’t too upset that EU citizens resident in the UK were given no say over their futures, but still.

The fact is that the Scottish Parliament has no remit to solicit the votes of people who don’t live in Scotland, and no means of collating any lists of people who would be eligible to vote. Only the UK Government could do that. However, what this would mean, in effect, would be that the UK Government would be taking a unilateral decision about who was going to be a Scottish citizen before the fact of Scottish independence.

Doing so would mean that the UK Government was preparing for Scottish independence before the people of Scotland had had their say in a referendum, and last time Westminster was very definite that it wasn’t going to pre-negotiate independence.

However, if you are a Scot who lives outwith Scotland, and you are insistent that you should get to vote in a future independence referendum, you need to take it up with your Westminster MP. Holyrood is powerless to act to help you. The chances are that in the next independence referendum, the franchise will once again be restricted to residents of Scotland who are British or EU citizens.

But even if the UK Government was disposed to make a decision about who would be a citizen of a future independent Scotland, it has no right to do so, and the devolved Scottish parliament has no right to do so either. The decision about who is or is not a Scottish citizen can only be made by the parliament of an independent Scotland, after the fact of independence. There is no country on the face of this planet that allows its citizenship laws to be determined by its neighbour. An independent Scotland will decide its own citizenship qualifications, but only after independence is a fact.

It’s quite likely that an independent Scotland will extend citizenship to every British citizen resident in Scotland when independence is achieved, and to everyone born in Scotland or who has a Scottish parent. That is, more or less, how you qualify for citizenship of most European countries.

These rules would also mean that a certain Scottish-born former Prime Minister, one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, will become a citizen of a newly independent Scotland. That means that Scotland could apply to extradite him from whichever of his many homes he was residing in and put him on trial for war crimes, because even though the UK might allow him to get away with his misdeeds, Scotland doesn’t have to. Of course, it’s unlikely the rUK would agree to the extradition request, but it would certainly mean that Tony Blair would never darken our doorstep again and Scotland would have a future without Blair in it. That all by itself makes it worth voting for independence.