Wee Ginger Dug: Despite Tory absurdity, indyref2 ball is in Scotland's court

The Conservatives are venal, duplicitous, and deceitful, but they’re not entirely stupid. Irrespective of the spin they put out for public consumption they know they fought this election campaign on the single basis of opposition to another independence referendum and lost.

There is now a substantial pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament – 72 seats in the 129-seat chamber are held by pro-independence parties. The anti-independence parties combined have only 57 seats among them. If the new Presiding Officer, who votes in Parliament only in order to break a tie, is chosen from one of the minority parties, the SNP will control 64 seats and votes in the Parliament, the same number as all the other parties combined.

That means that even in the unlikely event that all MSPs from all the other parties vote exactly the same way, they will still only have 64 votes the same as the SNP and won’t be able to outvote them. It’s clear that Scotland has unequivocally voted for parties promising another independence referendum within the term of this parliament, despite a highly organised and suspiciously well-funded campaign by pop-up “grassroots” Unionist organisations to encourage opponents of independence to vote tactically in the constituencies.

A majority of votes cast on the regional list vote went to pro-independence parties. Meanwhile, in the constituency first-past-the-post vote, the SNP took 62 of the 72 available seats, a crushing majority by any definition.

However, none of this was enough for the democracy-denying Michael Gove who oiled his way onto the BBC Scotland Politics Show on Sunday in order to deny there’s a mandate for another referendum because the SNP did not win an outright majority by themselves in a proportional electoral system designed to make majority governments next to impossible.

Gove (above) knows the difference first past the post and the additional member system used for Scottish parliamentary elections, he’s just hoping that enough members of the public don’t in order to allow him to deploy an excuse for traducing the democratic will of the people of Scotland while preserving a veneer of democratic legitimacy.

It’s an excuse that falls apart on even a cursory examination, but for the time being it will suffice for the zoomers of Scotland in Union and the right-wing press.

Still at least Gove should be thankful for the small mercy that he’s still able to ooze his way into the TV studios in order to slime his excuses. Others who boldly announced they were going to stop the SNP and save the Union were given very short shrift by the voters. George Galloway’s boastful claims came to naught. Instead the Scottish electorate voted to remove him from our TV screens and send him off to have his fedora surgically removed.

There are clear signs that the Conservatives are preparing to abandon any pretence that the Union between Scotland and England is founded on consent and are instead shifting to a union based on legal coercion, not democratic legitimacy.

On The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, the perma-sliming Michael Gove – who’s clearly on “oh God do something because you’ve got a Caledonianoid accent” duty for the British Government – was asked whether Scotland was allowed to leave the UK. “Of course,” he oozed.

When he was asked how the people of Scotland could do that he replied that they could hold a referendum. Then he was asked if the UK Government will allow them a referendum, and he said they won’t. For Scotland in the UK it’s like living in the pages of the novel Catch-22 but with added insufferably smug hypocrisy.

“There’s the door if you want to leave,” say the Tories, only they’ve locked it fast and have hidden the key. Gove is the Conservative go-to guy when they want to defend the patently absurd. He has no qualms at all about lying, deceitfulness or duplicity. He thinks that as long as he’s oleaginously polite while he’s defending the indefensible, it all becomes magically fine. Welcome to the Hotel Caledonia, you can check out but you can never leave.

However, he denied the British Government would take the Scottish Parliament to court if it legislates for another independence referendum. We’re not going near there, he replied. Naturally Scotland’s opinion was neither asked for nor wanted when it came to this fundamental re-writing of the foundations of the nature of the UK.

Meanwhile, Douglas Ross who, like his colleagues, is deep in Trumpian denial about who actually won the election, has at least come to recognise that the Scottish Conservatives cannot prevent the Scottish Parliament from voting for the second independence referendum that the voters have given it a mandate to deliver.

READ MORE: Michael Gove claims Scots congratulated him on the street after election

The Scottish Tory sulker-in-chief has said the Scottish Government’s own legal advisers would stop an authorised Referendum Bill ever getting to Holyrood as it would be beyond its powers. That is an assessment the Scottish Government is unlikely to agree with.

Nicola Sturgeon has said she would not rule out bringing an independence referendum forward to early 2022 if Covid is no longer circulating in the country due to a successful vaccination programme. If the Conservatives are so foolish as to try to use the law in order to effectively overturn the outcome of a Scottish election it will only prove that the Union is dead and over. All that will remain is to decide how to arrange its funeral.

Whatever the Conservatives say, the ball is now very firmly in the Scottish Parliament’s court. The coming weeks and months are going to be defined by the political and constitutional crisis which will inevitably arise from the clash between the determination of the Scottish Parliament to enact the mandate given to it by the people of Scotland and the attempts of an English nationalist Conservative government to thwart it.