DESPITE the spin you’ll hear in the media from anti-independence parties and their supporters about how the SNP won this election, be assured they won decisively and handsomely.

Scotland has chosen a majority pro-independence parliament, elected with an unambiguous mandate to deliver another independence referendum within the first term. By any normal standard that ought to provide sufficient democratic legitimacy for the SNP and the Greens to press ahead and work to give us the independence referendum which they have been elected to deliver.

However, this is Scotland, where we don’t have normal standards of democracy, we have British nationalist double standards. Those double standards are now being deployed in order to gaslight Scotland into believing that the people of this country have not really voted for what they have actually voted for.

The parties that got hammered in the Scottish elections are claiming that the SNP, a party which beat each of them by 20% or more in the popular vote, hasn’t got a mandate to implement its manifesto. Irrespective of what you think about independence, this is an extremely dangerous precedent for our democracy.

The Tories have not won the popular vote in Scotland since 1959. They don’t now get to complain about another party’s vote share. It’s deeply misleading to present the possibility of an astonishingly rare outright majority within a proportional system, deliberately designed to produce minority or coalition governments, by deploying the language and expectations of first past the post. But aided and abetted by the overwhelmingly anti-independence Scottish media, and especially the BBC, that’s exactly what the parties opposed to Scottish idependence are doing.

The fact that the SNP did not achieve an outright majority in its own right is not a failure in a proportional electoral system. That is how the BBC and others in the media, who really ought to know better, are trying to spin it.

The media has banged on relentlessly about an SNP majority, with the strapline on the BBC news telling us that the party has won so many seats, bringing it closer to victory, and that 65 seats are required for a majority.

The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg told us several times that the election was on a “knife-edge”. But winning an absolute majority is not how victory is defined in a Holyrood election. Labour was regarded as the winner of the first Holyrood election in 1999, even though it only won a total of 56 seats. It was likewise the winner of the second Scottish Parliament elections in 2003 when it won a total of just 50 seats.

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On both occasions Scotland went on to have Labour-LibDem coalition governments with a Labour first minister. By mid-afternoon yesterday, the SNP had already achieved more than 50 seats. By that time the SNP had already convincingly won the election, even though the results in the regional list and many constituencies had yet to be called. Some knife-edge.

Yet again Scotland is being badly let down by a London-based media which insists on viewing Scotland through a Westminster-centric lens. It’s either ignorance or it’s a deliberate attempt to intervene in Scottish politics and to help to create a narrative that is helpful to one set of parties, instead of educating and informing the people of Scotland as an unbiased observer. In either case it’s inexcusable.

The duty of the media in a democracy, especially a publicly funded broadcaster, is to reflect the views of the public, not to attempt to shift them in a direction favourable to one side in a constitutional debate on which public opinion is divided.

To put this election into context, if this was a first-past-the-post election, then the SNP have achieved a crushing and overwhelming victory – far greater than the landslide won by Tony Blair in 1997; far greater than anything ever achieved by the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher.

Winning 80% of constituencies declared by yesterday afternoon is the equivalent, for argument’s sake, of taking 520 out of 650 seats at Westminster – a majority of more than 400. This is the London media’s knife-edge Scottish election.

However, Holyrood’s electoral system is designed to make outright majorities for an individual party next to impossible. Legitimacy in Holyrood comes from multiple parties coming together to form a majority. That’s how our electoral system is supposed to work, and between them the pro-independence SNP and Greens have achieved that majority.

The SNP and Greens stood on a platform of holding a referendum. They won. Labour, the LibDems and Conservatives stood on a platform of blocking one. They lost.

To deny the legitimacy of the SNP and the Greens to implement the mandate on which they were elected is to deny democracy itself. In 2015 David Cameron’s Conservatives won the UK election with a manifesto commitment to hold a Brexit referendum. They went on to deliver on that pledge. They did so having won 36.9% of the vote.

It’s not an SNP majority which is crucial. It’s not the percentage of the electorate which voted for avowedly pro-independence parties which is crucial. What is crucial is that a majority of seats in Holyrood are held by pro-independence parties.

With a majority of Green and SNP MSPs in the Scottish Parliament, elected having made explicit and unequivocal manifesto commitments to another independence referendum within the term of this parliament, Scotland has voted for another referendum.

That’s the rule, that’s the standard. Boris Johnson and the Conservatives, aided and abetted by other democracy-denying anti-independence parties, do not get to shift the goalposts after the event.

There’s no moral justification for Johnson to block another independence referendum. If he does he assaults democracy itself and proves that Scotland cannot function as a democratic nation as long as it remains a part of the UK. He changes the framing of the independence debate and shifts it from being a debate about the best form of government for Scotland to being a debate about the very survival of democracy in Scotland.

Denying the existence of Holyrood’s mandate for another referendum is a tacit admission by the Conservatives that the traditional understanding of the union between Scotland and the rest of the UK is dead. It’s an admission that we do not live in a consensual union as we have always been told, but one based on coercion and control.

All by itself that creates a moral and political justification for holding another independence referendum.