The SNP cannot win a mandate for indyref2

This week’s Holyrood election debate should not be allowed to pass without noting how it highlighted the dismal state of Unionism. Nicola Sturgeon revisited a point she has been underscoring heavily during this campaign: that a majority of nationalist MSPs returned after May 6 would represent a mandate for another referendum on Scotland seceding from the United Kingdom.

Scottish nationalists have a curious relationship with popular sovereignty, seeing no contradiction in espousing this doctrine while harking back to the Declaration of Arbroath, a pledge of aristocratic fealty and an apologia for the divine right of kings. Among Sturgeon’s statements during the STV debate was: ‘The future of the country should be for the people in Scotland to decide. That is democracy.’

It is certainly one model of democracy but one at odds with parliamentary sovereignty, which has been acknowledged as the Westminster model since the 19th century. Now, you might say the theorising of AV Dicey and Walter Bagehot is out of step with contemporary thinking about political legitimacy but, even if that was a dispositive argument, it does rather bring us back to the nationalists’ muddled thinking.