IT now seems that the official position of the British Government is that there is indeed a lawful democratic route to another independence referendum, but they don't want Scotland to know what it is.

The Conservatives at Westminster have now lodged papers with the UK Supreme Court urging it to throw out the case brought by the Scottish Government asking the court to rule on the lawfulness of a referendum brought about by Holyrood without a Section 30 order without giving any ruling on the substantive question.

Essentially, the position of the British Government is that Holyrood does not have the right to hold a consultative referendum without a Section 30 order and does not even have the right to ask the Supreme Court for a ruling on the matter.

Westminster is as desperate to avoid a ruling being made as it is to prevent another referendum from taking place. No matter which way a ruling goes, it would be bad news for opponents of independence. 

Should the court rule that the referendum can indeed go ahead, Westminster faces the nightmare of campaigning against independence in a referendum which it fought tooth and nail to block. However, if the court was to rule, as most observers think more likely, that Holyrood cannot hold a lawful referendum without Westminster's consent – effectively saying that a vote can only be held with the permission of a prime minister that Scotland didn't vote for - it would be a legal ruling that the United Kingdom is not after all a partnership of nations founded on consent. That would at a stroke destroy the cornerstone of traditional Scottish Unionism. Generations of Scottish political understanding about the nature of Scottish nationhood and the character of the Union would be swept away.

All that has the potential to be politically catastrophic for the Scottish Conservatives, and even more so for the Labour Party in Scotland. The parties who have always posed as anti-nationalist Unionists will be exposed as the Anglo-British nationalists that they really are – as parties that deny the right of the people of Scotland to choose the form of government best suited to their needs. This is a right that they have always insisted that the people of Scotland have. 

And as if that wasn't bad enough, the anti-independence British nationalists still would not be able to avoid Scotland voting on independence. Such a ruling would merely trigger the next UK General Election turning into a de facto referendum. That's an election that would be the British nationalists' worst nightmare.

They'd be standing as individual parties against a united Yes rainbow coalition, forced to defend a United Kingdom in which the Supreme Court has ruled that there is no such thing as the sovereignty of the people of Scotland, that Holyrood and the devolution settlement are entirely at the mercy of whichever party has a majority at Westminster, and that any vote on Scottish independence requires the approval of those who oppose it – approval which will never be forthcoming if they fear that there is even an outside chance of the vote going against them.

No wonder then that the anti-independence parties do not want a resolution of this question, a question which is central to modern Scottish politics and to the nature of this so-called Union. They are desperate to maintain the belief that the UK is a voluntary Union while continuing to sidestep questions about what the democratic route to another referendum actually is. Maintaining this destructive ambiguity is pretty much all that they have got.

However, this delaying tactic cannot go on forever. The anti-independence parties keep hoping that if they keep kicking the can down the road long enough, eventually some miraculous event will crop up which will destroy any desire in Scotland for independence. They are pinning their hopes on the chance that Scotland might change, because they themselves have no intentions of changing.

But even if they do succeed in preventing a Supreme Court ruling, the net effect is still the same. The next UK General Election in Scotland will centre on the twin questions of independence and the undemocratic nature of the Union.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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