Let there be no mistake about what just happened. Last night, Scottish devolution – an institution 111 years in the promising, just 19 years a reality – died. Iain Macwhirter summed it up concisely and accurately.

And it didn’t even go down fighting.

The UK government swept the Scottish Parliament aside contemptuously and casually. Not a single Scottish MP was allowed to speak during the 15 minutes which signed devolution’s death warrant, as Cabinet Office minister David Lidington, the member for Aylesbury, waffled away the entire alloted time for the “debate”.

And Scotland’s three Unionist parties lay down meekly and took it.

Labour abstained on the vote, which had no chance of defeating the government, but declined to even oppose it as a gesture, instead choosing to sulk because their own amendment had been declined. (The Speaker of the House pointed out that they could have amended the amendment which WAS voted on, but Labour preferred to pout.)

The Scottish Lib Dems, meanwhile, abstained in the name of, er, Wales.

And the man whose actual official literal job it is to defend the devolution settlement (and who had promised that he personally would amend the bill to stop this happening, then didn’t because he had better things to do like root around in his beard for snacks) said “Oh shut up Scotland, we were never going to listen anyway however much time we gave you”.

The Unionist parties, we must remember, weren’t opposing independence here. They were failing to defend the thing they’re supposed to be in favour of, the alternative to independence, the arrangement meant to show how much Scotland is cherished and valued by its partner in the UK.

But as Scotland’s politicians failed it, the media which holds them fearlessly to account rushed into the breach to speak up for their people.

The Daily Record, for example, felt that the most important things it needed to inform its readers about today were that a man who was paraplegic already might lose part of his (useless) leg after an accident, a woman’s breasts were too big and someone nobody had ever heard of had signed for “Rangers”.

The Scottish Daily Mail raged that some alleged “jihadis” were free to “roam” the UK – on the trifling grounds that none of them had been charged with any crime, let alone convicted – and that Prince Harry’s new bride had once given a magazine a glimpse of her underwear.

The Daily Telegraph’s only mention of Scotland was an attack on the SNP over drug deaths, but it did also pick up the Mail’s theme by reporting on an important “knicker rebellion” in Devon.

The “Scottish” Daily Express had nothing at all about Scotland on its front page, but found a corner for paparazzi shots of the estranged wife of Ant from Ant & Dec, for no particular reason that we’ve been able to ascertain.

Scotland’s biggest-selling paper did manage to cover the devolution story, though. We’ve highlighted its report here in case you didn’t manage to spot it at first.

The UK’s most august and serious paper of record, naturally, took the matter far more seriously, devoting more than twice the wordcount to the news. Again we’ve helpfully picked out the full 30 words for you.

The few small regional papers which made the power grab the main story all framed it in a UK context rather than a Scottish one, and as a partisan political matter of the SNP complaining, even though ALL the opposition parties in the Scottish Parliament except the Tories had voted to reject the bill by 93 votes to 30.

And BBC Radio Scotland’s flagship morning phone-in invited listeners to chat about – perhaps ironically – “the effects of bullying on your adult life”.

And that was that. When push came to shove, Scotland’s Unionist politicians and media crumpled like tissue paper and stood and watched the open destruction of the thing that every one of them has vowed endlessly to defend and strengthen.

Not a single, solitary one of them even voted against it symbolically, despite Labour and the Lib Dems’ own colleagues at Holyrood having opposed it just last month. Because at the end of the day, UK parties are UK parties and Scotland is at the very best an occasional sideshow to them, to be listened to only when it poses a threat.

Devolution has indisputably failed. At the end of the day – as we’ve always known but half the population has allowed themselves to be deceived about until now – power devolved has been proved to be power retained by London, to be wielded whenever it wants and regardless of what Scotland says, in the face of every “convention” and pledge to the contrary.

Scotland has only two options left now, and one of them is to die.