WHERE were you when saw the final – fatal – crack form in the United Kingdom?
It was another night where everything changed but, for the moment at least, little will happen.
England, as you will have gathered by now, voted for the party led by a serial liar to govern over it for the next five years.
Scotland, again, took a different path. The night saw the SNP win convincingly with a manifesto that put indyref2 front and centre.
They asked voters in Scotland to endorse the right of Scotland to choose its own path and by returning 48 MPs to Westminster, they got that endorsement.
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon to publish new legal case for indyref2 next week
Much analysis of these results will be done over the next few days. Alongside that will inevitably come the spin. If you hadn’t realised by now, election victories don’t count for much up here.
We’re told that this SNP landslide is categorically not a mandate for indyref2. Many spurious reasons are given for this claim. Chief among them is that the General Election was a UK-wide vote. Sound familiar?
Look out for the deliberate conflation between Scotland being independent and holding a vote on independence – because it matters. Unionist parties, faced with a SNP victory of a scale that even the party weren’t expecting, will try to muddy the waters.
Ask them about the mandate for a second independence referendum and they will list the reasons they personally don’t believe that independence is the best route for Scotland. Remind them that the SNP has won every election since 2014 and they will cover their ears and scream that voters in Scotland don’t want another divisive independence referendum.
WATCH: Bernard Ponsonby destroys Scottish Tory's argument against indyref2
I spent election night at BBC Scotland. That defiance and wilful ignorance you see from Unionist politicians is only on display for as long as the cameras are rolling. In private, they acknowledge their failure to convince the electorate of their proposition. On air, they are bullish – delusional – about what yet another SNP victory says about the desire of Scotland to decide its own future. Off air, there is a quiet defeatism that befits the woeful state of their respective parties.
As I headed out of the of the building to go home, one prominent Scottish Conservative was going in. Flanked by his aide, he practiced his line. "It was a UK-wide vote". While I didn’t feel sorry for the weight of expectation to spin that lay on his shoulders, I did understand the cognitive dissonance that underpinned it.
We have just endured a post-truth election campaign. Boris Johnson’s resounding victory south of the border is proof that we have an entered an era where a sizeable portion of the electorate are willing to not only tolerate – but endorse – being lied to. We shouldn’t be surprised that Scottish Tories look to their leader, then at their own electoral defeat, and prefer to spin rather than be honest with themselves, and us.
READ MORE: Jackson Carlaw backtracks on Tories' indyref2 campaign message
So what next?
Nicola Sturgeon has said she will be publishing the "detailed democratic case" to request the transfer of power from Westminster to hold a second independence referendum. There has been no indication that Boris Johnson has any intention of giving the slightest consideration to that request.
Why would he? The General Election campaign showed – not for the first time – that in this disunited kingdom Scotland is not an equal partner. Boris Johnson didn’t win Scotland, and nor did he need to.
While the size of the Conservative majority may have come as a surprise, the polls have been showing for weeks that Boris Johnson was in with a good chance of winning a working majority.
Nicola Sturgeon will have given thought to this outcome and all eyes will be upon her in the coming weeks and months to see how she decides to approach Johnson’s refusal of a Section 30 order.
It’s lucky that Yes supporters have learned a great deal of patience over the last five years because you get the sense we’re going to need some more. The disparity between the nations of the UK has never been clearer. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Voters in Scotland have a clear choice to make – when they are given the chance. How many more general elections are we willing to endure under this broken system? How long are we willing to tolerate waking up, blinking, to a new dawn and a new Conservative prime minister that we didn’t vote for?
As the argument for independence becomes easier to make, indyref2 feels further away than ever. While the power to consult the people on that choice remains in Boris Johnson’s clammy fist, we are forced again to watch and wait.
Make no mistake – indyerf2 will be the Yes campaign’s to lose. Boris Johnson knows this and – emboldened by his success in England – he will do all he can to make sure the will of Scotland isn’t tested. The question is: what are we going to do about it?
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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