What Unionists insisted was the biggest and most important parliamentary transfer of powers to a devolved government anywhere in the world was squeezed into five and a half hours of debate time in the House Of Commons tonight, approximately two hours of which were taken up by Westminster’s farcical voting system.

Of the remaining three and a bit hours, a third of the time was taken up by the three MPs you can see video of at the bottom of this post. We know it’s a lot to ask to watch an hour of politicians deliberately trolling Scotland, but if you didn’t see the debate live it’s about the minimum you need to get an accurate sense of the tone.

At the end of it all, a small number of things had been decided.

– Holyrood will NOT have the power to call another referendum

Labour and the Tories voted against.

– Holyrood will NOT have power over equal opportunities

Labour abstained, the Tories voted against.

– Holyrood WILL have power over abortion

Tories and SNP voted for, Labour voted against.

– Holyrood will NOT have power over tax credits

The Tories voted against. So, in a staggering display of inexplicably brainless hypocrisy, did Labour. Yes, you read that right – after spending the last 10 days raging that the Scottish Government must expensively and by unknown means mitigate Tory tax-credit cuts, Labour turned round and denied the Scottish Parliament the power to stop them happening at all.

– The Tories refused to say they wouldn’t claw back benefit top-ups

And here’s the killer. When asked directly by SNP MP Mhairi Black if he would pledge that the Tories wouldn’t treat any compensatory payments to victims of the cuts as income and claw it back to Westminster – leaving Holyrood hundreds of millions out of pocket but the victims no better off – Mundell refused to do so, as Iain Duncan Smith had also done previously.

The Scotland Bill, if enacted, will now bring about a scenario by which the Scottish Government could have to cut services or increase taxes to fund top-up payments, implement the incredibly costly and complicated bureaucracy needed to carry it out, and then see all the money vanish NOT into people’s pockets, but into the coffers of the Treasury in London.

Labour didn’t even abstain on tax credits, their natural reaction to anything. They could have done so in total safety, knowing that Tory opposition would have blocked the devolution of them anyway.

But in one of the crassest, crudest two-fingered salutes to an entire nation ever recorded in the Palace Of Westminster, Labour voted to make doubly sure that the Scottish Parliament could do nothing about the cuts. Because no responsible government could ever now spend the sums of money necessary to mitigate the cuts, knowing that it could all be for nothing.

There’s not even a cynical political defence. Labour, screaming constantly that they’re against the tax-credit cuts, could have kept its hands clean knowing it was still dropping the SNP in the swamp.

But in opposing devolution they threw their own Scottish colleagues under the bus. The next time Kezia Dugdale or Jackie Baillie stands up, whether in the Holyrood chamber or a public debate, and makes hollow, vague, uncosted demands that the SNP clear up the Tories’ mess with Scottish people’s money, they’ll be drowned in jeers and catcalls by an audience that knows full well Labour voted AGAINST giving Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney the power to stop the cuts at the source.

The debate’s last act was the Speaker cutting the SNP’s Angus Robertson off in the middle of a sentence, just in case Scotland still wasn’t sure how much contempt it was held in. But nobody who’d been watching what had happened for the previous few hours would have been in any doubt about that.