CAN you smell the fear?

The will of the people is paramount, unless, that is, it’s the Scottish people. Tory Defence Minister Michael Fallon had a bit of a strop earlier this week when he claimed that his Government would block any attempts by Holyrood to hold a second independence referendum.

Forget it, he said, we don’t need to listen to the SNP. There are other voices from Scotland, like that nice Ruth Davidson with her tank and her penchant for amusing press opportunities with dumb bovine creatures, most of whom are Tory list MSPs who are great at milking the system. That would be the very same Ruth Davidson who has said on more than one occasion that it would be counterproductive for the UK Government to block a second independence referendum. So that’s awkward. And as a bonus prize it proves to Scotland that not even a Scottish Tory gets a hearing in Westminster.

You’d almost think that Fallon was afraid that if the vote was held he would lose it, and he certainly lost the plot in his comments the other day. The SNP don’t have a mandate for a referendum, he cried, like a toddler refusing to accept it was bedtime even though the conditions for bedtime had been spelled out in words a toddler could understand in the SNP manifesto for the Holyrood elections. The very cheek of that SNP, having the nerve to be electorally successful on a prospectus of a second indyref if Scotland is to be taken out of the EU against its will. However, Fallon did manage to prove he had not even a tenuous grasp on what the word mandate means. Which explains a great deal about Brexit.

It’s not just that Mikey struggles with the concept of mandate – possibly he believes it’s something that happens on a gay dating app – he’s obviously unclear on the whole concept of democracy. He actually said the SNP don’t have a mandate because they won fewer seats in Holyrood in 2016 than the previous time. Following the same logic, Tony Blair didn’t win the elections of 2001 and 2005, John Major didn’t win the 1992 election for the Tories, and Fallon’s blessed Maggie didn’t win in 1987.

Either Fallon is a political illiterate, or he’s desperately grasping at straws because he’s terrified that if there is a second independence referendum his sorry excuse for an authoritarian regime won’t win it. Admittedly, those two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Keep clutching that straw Michael, it’s the only thing that keeps you breathing in the ocean of Scottish contempt that’s pouring down on your arrogant head.

The SNP are the largest party by far in Holyrood. They form the Government. They were elected on a very clear mandate which stated that, if there was a material change in circumstance, there would be a second independence referendum. Scotland being taken out of the EU against its will was explicitly spelled out as just an example of the material change necessary. Mandates don’t come much clearer, and it’s a mandate the Scottish Greens have said they will support, meaning that it’s backed by a majority of MSPs.

It’s straightforward and it’s plainly worded, and is a far clearer mandate than Theresa May’s mandate to take the UK out of the EU and into a hard Brexit tax haven governed in the interests of oligarchs and where sooking up to Donald Trump in the hope that he finds someone else to bully is what passes for a foreign policy. She didn’t have a mandate for any of that, she only had a mandate to take the UK out of the EU, not a mandate for the sort of Brexit that entailed.

We have a Westminster Government with just one solitary MP in Scotland, which has refused point blank to take the views of Scotland into account in its Brexit plans, and which is imposing the hardest Brexit imaginable on a Scotland which voted to remain a part of the EU. This comes just a few short years after that same Westminster insisted that the only way Scotland could ensure its continuing membership of the EU was by voting to stay part of the UK.

This is the same Westminster Government that secured a Supreme Court ruling that writing the Sewel Convention into law was nothing more than a cheap trick to fool Scotland into the belief that our Parliament is not subject to the whims of Westminster Governments that Scotland doesn’t vote for.

And now, if we are to believe Mikey, Westminster is going to prevent the people of Scotland from having any opportunity at all to decide the path that they want this country to take. Scotland doesn’t get to choose a path, Scotland just gets trodden on.

This Tory Government is a champion of Scottish democracy in the same sense that Iain Duncan Smith is a champion of the poor and disabled. Mikey has since backtracked on his words. He wants us to forget that he told us to forget it, and now wants us to believe that he really meant that the SNP should forget about having a referendum and not that he’d just said that his Government would block a referendum.

Still, you can appreciate his confusion. At Prime Minister’s Questions earlier in the week his boss had insisted to the SNP’s Angus Robertson that Scottish independence meant Scotland would be leaving the EU.

You’d think she’d get her scare stories updated. But the truth is that they’re running out of scare stories, since the scariest thing of all is to remain in a Brexit Britain that’s headed off an economic cliff into a deeply uncertain future. That just leaves Mikey with his threat to block another independence referendum and undermine Scottish democracy because he knows Westminster has run out of ammunition.

The great mistake of the Conservatives is that Scotland changed during the referendum of 2014, but they didn’t. They underestimate our resolve and our determination. As they say in Glasgow: come ahead Mikey.