Wee Ginger Dug: Unionist excuses pile up over mandate for indyref2

That is exactly how they have responded. The excuses are varied, but that is what they are, excuses. So we are told that there is no mandate because the SNP did not win an outright majority in its own right in an electoral system designed to make outright majorities for any single party fiendishly difficult to achieve.

There is of course a large pro-independence majority in Holyrood composed of SNP and Green MSPs. The opponents of independence think that it constitutes an acceptable argument to aggregate all the support for anti-independence parties but to deny the validity of pro-independence or pro-referendum support given by the electorate to the smaller of the two pro-independence parties represented at Holyrood. Even if the Alba party had succeeded in winning any seats, the parties of British nationalism would have turned their selective blind eye to those MSPs too.

Of course it is not an acceptable argument as Ruth Davidson (below) admitted in 2007. Speaking to the BBC the former Scottish Conservative leader said: “If the Greens and the SNP and the SSP, or any of the other parties who have declared an interest in independence, get it over the line and can make a coalition, make a majority, get the votes in the Parliament, then they’ll vote through a referendum,” she adds. “That’s what democracy is all about.”

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The SNP and the Greens have that majority. Seventy-two members of the current Parliament out of 129 were elected to represent parties which explicitly asked voters for a mandate for another independence referendum within the term of this parliament. Only 57 MSPs were elected for parties which oppose another referendum. That’s democracy.

However Ruth and her colleagues now appear to have changed their minds about what democracy is all about. Naturally they haven’t sought the approval of the people of Scotland for their revised definition of what constitutes democracy. But then since that revised definition appears to be “We’ll decide what counts as a mandate, not the electorate,” that’s scarcely surprising.

The other argument being deployed is that a majority did not vote for pro-independence parties and therefore there is no mandate. A narrow majority in the constituency vote voted for anti-independence parties, but a narrow majority in the regional list vote voted for pro-independence parties.

In any event it’s irrelevant, this was a parliamentary election not a referendum. In the 2015 UK General Election those same Conservatives who currently seek to deny there is a mandate for another referendum won 36.9% of votes cast and a majority of 12 seats in the Commons which they claimed as a mandate for the EU referendum held in 2016. If the Conservatives and the other anti-independence parties want to apply the standards of a referendum to a popular vote in Scotland then let’s have a referendum. They don’t get to retrospectively change the rules defining victory in a Scottish Parliament election just because they failed to win a majority of the seats being contested.

IT is perfectly acceptable for the Labour party, the Conservatives and the LibDems to continue to argue against independence. Likewise it is perfectly acceptable for them to continue to argue about the most suitable timing for another referendum. As we face the growing and alarming possibility that we are in for a third wave of coronavirus infections and the risk of a surge in hospitalisations due to a novel variant of the virus which is feared to be more transmissible, even many independence supporters are sympathetic to the idea that another independence referendum should wait until we are out of the immediate crisis of the pandemic.

However what is not acceptable, and indeed profoundly anti-democratic, is for the anti-independence parties to continue to deny the existence of the mandate to bring about another independence referendum during this parliamentary term.

We expect the Conservatives to run roughshod over Scottish public opinion. However for the Labour Party in Scotland and the LibDems this is a moment when they face an existential choice. If they refuse to accept the democratic verdict of the electorate of Scotland then what is the point of their existence? You cannot plausibly claim to be the party of devolution when you only accept the outcomes of elections to the devolved parliament whose results you happen to agree with.

Few expect a party led by the determinedly Unionist Anas Sarwar to heed the advice of the journalist and Labour Party member Paul Mason who last week on BBC Question Time called on the party to embrace the “exciting prospect” of Scottish independence.

Mason pointed out that the demographics of independence mean that support for independence will only tend to grow over time. By the time that the 16-year-old kids who voted for the first time in the referendum of 2014 are old enough to have 16-year-old kids of their own, support for is likely to be overwhelming.

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It’s legitimate for the Labour Party in Scotland to continue to argue against independence, it is not legitimate for them to argue that the Scottish Parliament has not been charged by the electorate to bring about a second independence referendum within the next five years.

The Conservatives appear to have learned nothing, they will continue to stall and prevaricate and will fiercely resist the verdict of the Scottish electorate. They will refuse to acknowledge that if the Union is to survive it must fundamentally change. They have hoovered up the diehard Unionist vote in Scotland.

If Labour and the LibDems do not change tack and accept that the Scottish Parliament has a mandate for another referendum they will risk being squeezed out of the Scottish political landscape entirely and are facing oblivion in the longer term.