DAVID Mundell hadn’t got the foggiest. Pressed on whether the abolition of the Human Rights Act would extend to Scotland, the new Secretary of State and Scotland’s solitary Conservative MP struck out on an assertive note: the Human Rights Act is dead, long live the British Bill of Rights. Like it or dislike it: we’d have to lump it.

Missing from Mundell’s analysis was any sensitivity to the devolution of power to Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. It clearly hadn’t even crossed his mind. The Cabinet’s man in Scotland may come to regret not doing his homework. Abolition of “Labour’s hated Human Rights Act” was meant to be a triumphant, populist gesture. A crowning gesture in Cameron’s radical 100 days. The smack of firm government. No nonsense. No pinkos. No left-wing lawyers. No compromises and no soft touches. Time to put a bit of stick about and make the gurning lefties jump. So much, so predictable.

But even this now looks like a serious miscalculation. Instead of an early triumph for the new Government, human rights repeal looks doomed to be a divisive constitutional stramash of the first order. Only days into his second term, the “one nation” PM’s slapdash administration is already on course for a divisive row with not only Holyrood, but Stormont and Cardiff’s Senedd. And worse, all of this was eminently foreseeable. In 2012, the Coalition’s UK Bill of Rights Commission told the Government that devolution was an unexploded powderkeg. But Mundell, and the new Lord Chancellor Michael Gove, are carefree, striking matches regardless.

The Human Rights Act does more than you might think. It means that the courts can review Westminster legislation for its compatibility with the European Convention. But is also requires every public authority in the land – every court, every council, every school and hospital and police officer – to respect your basic rights. To think about your privacy, your family life and your right to free expression. To give you a fair trial and to uphold your right to life, ensuring that people are always treated with dignity and humanity.

The Scotland Act goes even further. Under the devolution legislation, Nicola Sturgeon’s Government and the Scottish Parliament must respect your ECHR rights in word and deed. The courts stand ready to strike down any infractions.

It was the Convention which forced Britain to take LGBT rights seriously, and to roll back the discriminatory laws which saw Jeff Dudgeon lifted by the police and interrogated, his diaries and love letters read for the crime of living and loving another man. It was the Convention which put an end to the arbitrary power of police officers to tap phones and read your correspondence. And it was the Convention which formed a core plank of the Good Friday Agreement.

But power devolved is power retained. In law, sovereign Westminster under a Tory majority can do what it likes, scratching the Human Rights Act from off the statute book, and even amending the Scotland Act to delete your Convention rights from Scots law. Make no mistake: our Convention rights are not safe and protected. They must be fought for.

But alongside the strict law – we have constitutional principles, one of which is that Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast parliaments must give London the nod if it wants to trespass into their devolved competencies. It is, in David Cameron’s phrase, only “respectful” for their democratic mandates. In 2011, MSPs knocked back the Welfare Reform Bill.

Even the Smith Commission recognised the central importance of this principle, recommending that it should be enshrined in law to ensure that no Westminster Government could ever run roughshod over the devolved parliaments. The Smith compromise hasn’t even made it onto the statute book, and yet our new Scottish Secretary already cuts a picture of ignorance and confusion when discussing these basic principles.

The overwhelming majority of Scotland’s parliamentarians in Holyrood and in the House of Commons have no truck with the Tories’ plans. That overwhelming, cross-party majority must now unite to demand that no British Bill of Rights may pass, and no clause of the Human Rights Act be eliminated, without the democratic sanction of the Scottish Parliament. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Our civil liberties depend on it.