There’s been a lot of ill-informed nonsense on social media about the way the Liberal Democrats voted, or in fact didn’t vote, on devolution in the Commons the other night. I was going to write a post to explain it all but then found I didn’t have to, because Alistair Carmichael had done it for me, and better.

What I think was the problem is that we didn’t really get our story out in good enough time and allowed the SNP to put it about that we had somehow not stood up for Scotland. We need to learn from this and explain it all beforehand.

Actually, and unsurprisingly, the situation is very different. As Alistair explains here, if we’d voted the way the SNP wanted and had won that vote, we’d have gone back to the original clause of the Bill, which was awful because it would have repatriated all the EU powers to Westminster to be doled out from there. No thanks.

So, Alistair now takes us through what happened and comments on the extraordinary PMQs session yesterday.

There was a single motion voted on which was a government motion to agree with an amendment from the House of Lords (apologies some jargon is unavoidable here but I shall try to keep it to a minimum). This amendment related to the inclusion of a new clause in the bill dealing with the transfer of powers coming back from Brussels post-Brexit. I was not going to support that motion as there is not yet any agreement between the Scottish and UK Governments – the reason why Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Parliament quite rightly voted against granting the legislative consent motion for the Bill.

At the same time, however, the Welsh Government HAVE reached agreement with the UK Government and that is what is now contained in the bill. If it is wrong to vote against the Scottish Parliament’s view then surely it is wrong to vote against the view of the Welsh Assembly. There was an amendment to the government motion from the Labour Party on the order paper that reflected the true position and it was originally my wish to vote for that. Unfortunately, however, that amendment was not put to the vote so, in the circumstances described, an abstention seemed like the appropriate thing to do. In this view we were joined by the Labour Party.

One further consideration. It may not have been what they intended but the actual effect of the SNP vote (if successful) would have been to restore the Bill to the position that it was in when it left the Commons – a much weaker position for Scotland than the one that the Bill currently provides!

There are serious points at issue here :

• This set of circumstances is quite unnecessary. Time could and should have been made available to a proper debate and all necessary votes on this issue. The Conservatives used the Commons procedures to avoid debate rather than to engage in it;

• The SNP and the Conservatives should have tried harder to reach agreement on how this should be handled – the differences between them are not massive. It has, in fact, been widely reported that the SNP Minister Mike Russell was prepared to sign up to the same arrangements agreed by the Welsh but that he was over-ruled at the last minute by the First Minister.

The next day, Wednesday, the SNP Leader in the House of Commons, tried to pull a stunt in the chamber at Prime Minister’s Questions. When the Speaker called him to order he defied the chair and ended up being suspended for the rest of the day. As a consequence of his suspension an application that was due to be heard (and was almost certainly going to be granted) for an emergency debate on this whole subject fell and could not be made. Or, to put it another way – the SNP pulled a stunt to highlight inadequate time for debate and as a result managed to lose the chance of a three hour slot to debate the subject about which they were unhappy.