A terrible article in today’s Observer nevertheless helpfully provides the most utterly categorical refutation yet of the endlessly-repeated Unionist lie that Spain would veto an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU.

The piece ran under the blatantly untrue headline “Spain drops plan to impose veto if Scotland tries to join EU” – it has NEVER had such a plan – and went on to propagate a whole series of further falsehoods asserted without any basis by reporter Jennifer Rankin, but such a spectaculary direct and unambiguous quote bangs yet another nail into a coffin that only the very stupidest of the nation’s pundits are still trying to insist contains a living occupant.

So let’s collect everything in one handy place.

Spanish government ministers have in fact been explicitly stating for more than HALF A DECADE that they definitely WOULDN’T veto Scottish EU membership provided that Scotland achieved independence by legal means:

The country’s then-Foreign Minister, Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, was quoted giving a quite stupendously unequivocal statement to that effect:

(In case anyone hadn’t been listening, he said it again in December 2013.)

In any sane world, with a remotely competent and/or honest media, that would have been the end of the matter. Yet bizarrely, as recently as two days ago the Deputy Political Editor of The Sun (English edition) was still blithely honking this:

That’s despite it being only three weeks since Esteban Pons, an MEP from Spain’s governing party, said this to the BBC:

INTERVIEWER: [So] there’s no sense that Spain would want to veto Scotland joining the EU or anything like that? PONS: No, because if you are thinking about Catalonia, the Catalonian situation is very very very different to the Scottish situation.

That interview took place just another three weeks after two MEPs from the Spanish government’s EU committee had reiterated the position yet again to Buzzfeed News, repeating the comments made by Garcia-Magallo five years earlier:

“I have never read such comments from any Spanish political leader. If Scotland gets its independence, in a legal referendum in the United Kingdom, if that is legitimate then Scotland will claim independence and be accepted by the international community. If that happens, then the discussion will be whether Scotland should or shouldn’t join the EU. In that case, Spain would have nothing to complain about at all.”

Despite the Guardian’s headline, Spain’s position demonstrably hasn’t changed since 2012: namely, it’ll treat Scotland exactly the same as all the other newly-independent countries whose EU accession Spain has approved in recent years, including Latvia, Croatia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Estonia, and Slovenia. That’s not just an assertion, but what the Spanish government has consistently and explicitly said in public.

So you’d have to be some sort of absolutely epic, throbbing tinywit to still –

Sigh.