The chief opponents of UK electoral reform are the Labour and Conservative parties, who by an astonishing coincidence are also the two parties who benefit by far the most from the undemocratic stitch-up that is First Past The Post, by which more than half of the votes cast in Britain result in no Parliamentary representation whatsoever.

The excuse they normally use to justify a system by which one of them will usually get a large absolute majority on barely over one-third of the votes cast is that FPTP produces “strong” governments, where “strong” is defined to mean “no possibility of the opposition, which speaks for two-thirds of the population, ever defeating the ruling party in a vote”.

The AV referendum was taken as a ringing endorsement of this principle, although in practice it offered just a bafflingly complicated and even less attractive version of the status quo. But a remarkable poll in Scotland this weekend (with detail published in today’s The National) shows that on one side of the border at least, FPTP has completely lost the support of the electorate.

The remarkable thing about the above findings isn’t that almost twice as many Scots (35% to 19%) want to see a Labour government at Westminster reliant on SNP votes as want Labour to have a majority, though that’s fairly astonishing in its own right in a country that until a few months ago had been solidly Labour for 60 years.

The real eye-opener is that 42% of respondents would prefer a coalition government at Westminster to EITHER of the two parties having unchallenged power, with just 32% wanting either Labour or the Tories to rule alone. (And almost as spectacularly, of those two options Labour only had 6% more backing than the Tories. Weirdly, a Tory minority at the mercy of the SNP seemingly wasn’t offered as an option.)

Having been relentlessly bombarded with the “strong governments” message for decades, and even despite the hideous experience of the current coalition, Scottish voters simply don’t trust either David Cameron or Ed Miliband with Scotland’s future. Having voted No to independence, they have no faith in the Unionist parties to deliver fairness and justice to Scotland. Which is kind of strange, if you think about it.

More and more, the result of the referendum looks like a temporary and conditional No at the most. In that context it’s perhaps not surprising that most Unionist politicians and commentators are so angrily and shoutily determined to assert that they won and that the matter is now settled forever.