We’re not a Catalonian-politics website and we don’t even have an opinion on whether Catalonia should be independent, but sometimes it’s easier to understand the workings and failings of the media if you watch how it behaves on a subject you’re not directly and closely involved with. Last week was one of those weeks.

Below is a clip from yesterday’s edition of Sunday Politics Scotland. It features a man called José Rodriguez Mora, who was introduced to SPS viewers neutrally as simply an academic from Edinburgh University but was in fact instrumental in the creation of a stridently anti-independence Catalonian political party.

He was brought on to give voice to what has become the universal UK-media spin on events in Catalonia – that both sides are to blame, that the Catalan government was provocative and irresponsible to call an “illegal” referendum, and that the only way for the area to achieve independence is through the 1978 Spanish constitution, despite it expressly forbidding any such action and its cornerstone of existence (also known as the “Preliminary Title”) being “based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation”.

So in the striking absence of any useful information in the press, we thought we’d do a little digging and see how that might work.

The first point to note is that the Spanish constitution is – by design – very difficult to amend, placing a series of onerous obstacles in the way of any proposed change.

The largest is the requirement for a succession of supermajorities – variously 60% or 67% – in Spain’s two houses of Parliament. Catalan representatives alone have no chance of achieving such a vote, numbering just 47 of the 350 seats in the Congress of Deputies, very VERY broadly the Spanish equivalent of the House Of Commons.

The ruling party of Mariano Rajoy, the Partido Popular (PP) – implacably opposed to independence or any sort of referendum in Catalonia – currently runs a minority administration in the DoC, with just 38% of the seats. So in theory the Catalans, if they could get the support of every opposition party (some of whom also have ambitions of independence), could get fairly close-ish to a supermajority in the Congress.

However, they would then have to do the same in the upper house, the Senate, where the PP holds 56% of the seats and the combined opposition just 44%. That’s plainly impossible in any practical sense, and even if by some implausible miracle they were able to succeed then any amendment would still be subject to a general election, new 67% supermajorities in each of the two parliamentary houses following that election, and finally approval in a Spain-wide referendum, which it would undoubtedly lose.

So in effect, saying the Catalans could achieve independence through the constitution is like saying the SNP could win the same thing for Scotland by persuading the rest of the UK parliament to vote for it – it’s “perfectly possible” in a purely abstract theoretical sense, but could never happen in reality. The arithmetic will always prevent it.

The British and Scottish media, however, has made no attempt to explain any of this, and has colluded with the official Spanish government line at every turn. The most startling example is the way every UK news outlet has casually and repeatedly asserted as fact that the turnout for the October 1 referendum was 43%.

The intention of that, of course, is to suggest apathy and an inconclusive result, but it’s a remarkable empirical distortion of both the truth and the most basic principles of language. Hundreds of thousands of votes were seized by the Spanish police on the day, and the best guesses at the percentage of eligible voters who actually succeeded in casting their votes into a ballot box are around 57%.

Additionally, large numbers of people turned out to vote but were prevented from doing so by police closing polling stations and removing ballot papers and boxes before they could be used, both on the day and preceding days. It therefore seems an extremely conservative estimate to suggest that the REAL percentage turnout – that is, people who went out intending to vote – was at least in the 60s.

(We must presume that other would-be voters were deterred from even trying, purely out of entirely justified fear for their safety, but there’s no means of counting those.)

Of the votes which were able to be counted, over 92% were cast for independence. Statistically the percentage in the seized boxes would be the same, which would mean that even counting every single non-voter as a No, at least 51% of the entire eligible electorate voted for independence – a clear and unarguable mandate.

(Realistically, of course, turnout is never anything like 100% and the actual proportion of the votes cast that were for independence – which is how referendums are counted – would therefore have been significantly higher, and certainly beyond the “decisive” 55% achieved by the No campaign in Scotland’s indyref.)

For comparison, just 37% of the eligible UK electorate voted for Brexit, and 47% of the eligible Scottish electorate voted to remain in the UK. Among the Catalan ballots that weren’t seized and were properly counted, more than 38% of the electorate voted for independence, so even despite the Spanish government’s best attempts at stealing the votes and violently suppressing turnout, Catalan independence still has more of a mandate than the UK is leaving the EU on.

To witness even the best and most diligent of UK journalists not only rejecting these unarguable facts but openly mocking them has been a dismaying and alarming sight.

What is happening in Catalonia in 2017 is indisputably an affront to democracy. The result of a referendum which was conducted with impeccable dignity and propriety under incredible intimidation is discounted, but the people of Catalonia are permitted no legal recourse to achieve their aim.

Their democratically-elected government has been dissolved for no other crime than trying to discover the will of its people. Their media is being taken over by the state. Their politicians are being imprisoned under medieval treason laws. The chief of police has been fired. If these things happened in a Third World country it would rightly be regarded as a coup and the UK press would be baying for military intervention.

(Readers are, most obviously, invited to consider the UK’s reaction if Spain had sent in riot police to violently disrupt a referendum in Gibraltar, then declared the government “dissolved” and invaded despite the residents voting to stay in the UK.)

The core principles of the UN Charter on self-determination are being ignored by the international community. Countries whose own independence was achieved “illegally” and often with much bloodshed turn their backs on the heroically peaceful Catalans, while the international media parrots laughable and transparently false propaganda on behalf of the Spanish government.

(Ireland recognised Kosovo’s 2008 unilateral declaration of independence, which was proclaimed by its parliament without any referendum at all, in just 12 days.)

You cannot say that people who cast their votes but then had them stolen by riot police “didn’t turn out”. You can’t say that those who went to a polling station to vote only to find it smashed up and/or closed by the same riot police “boycotted” the referendum. You can’t say that a government given no lawful options for “properly finding out” what its citizens want is behaving irresponsibly by seeking the best, most peaceful and most democratic solution open to it.

At least, not unless you’re playing by Madrid Rules.