…that will satisfy the Unionist parties. Last night Ruth Davidson told STV viewers that even getting more than 50% of the vote in a general election wouldn’t give the SNP a mandate to pursue their manifesto policies.

She was echoing the words of Kezia Dugdale just over a year ago:

So that’s clear. Davidson has reversed her previous view. There is now no peaceful democratic avenue by which the people of Scotland could express the wish for a second referendum which the two main Unionist parties would accept. They have EXPLICITLY said, in full public view, that they would reject any democratic mandate.

And that’s frightening.

(50%, we ought to note in passing, is in itself a red herring. That’s not how democracy works. No UK government has achieved 50% of the vote in generations, and indeed it’s 16 years since one even scraped through 40%.)

In many other countries that sort of stance has led to armed insurrection and terrorist violence. In Northern Ireland – not some far-off banana republic but part of the UK – it led to decades of appalling murders and countless thousands of lost and ruined lives. It’s incredibly disturbing that the Tories and Labour appear to want Scotland to be driven down that path by closing down democracy as an option.

The Scottish independence movement has been the most peaceful campaign in the history of national self-determination anywhere on Earth. Not a drop of blood has been spilled in its name in almost 100 years. One guy got hit with an egg one time and that was it. (Though of course the Scottish media portrayed it as somewhere on a par with the Enniskillen bombing anyway.)

We fervently hope that the increasingly demented, belligerent, angry and provocative intransigence of the Unionist parties – along with their constant reckless inflaming of the known violent elements on their own side – does not succeed in what is an ever more apparent aim of changing that fact. There’s nothing they’d love more.