The SNP has no mandate for another independence referendum

Nicola Sturgeon should test her party’s claim that Scots back another poll by putting it to the people, says Brian Monteith

There has been a lot of assertive talk in the last week from SNP politicians stating, as if fact, that the Scottish Government has a mandate to call a second independence referendum. Figures such as MP Mhairi Black, George Kerevan, deputy leader Keith Brown and others were in the thick of making such claims, while the SNP’S Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, was challenged by Prime Minister Theresa May, who said there is no mandate.

This led the SNP to tweet on 6 March: “Theresa May tried to claim that Scotland has no mandate for a referendum on Scottish independence. FACT: Scotland has a mandate to pursue independence.”

Ignoring the obvious falsehood that the SNP is not Scotland and cannot speak for it, it is important to establish if the Scottish people – whom the SNP says are sovereign – have authorised a second referendum in pursuit of independence. It will, after all, be upon the back of any such mandate that denial of the legal process of a Section 30 order from Westminster will be turned into the mother of all grievances.

The chronology for the SNP claim starts six years ago when, in January 2013, David Cameron promised a referendum on EU membership if he were to command a majority following the 2015 general election. As the Conservatives were in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the party published in June 2013 a private member’s Bill to emphasise its intentions. It passed its first and second readings in the Commons but was stopped in the House of Lords.

When the 2014 Scottish independence referendum came along the following year, there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that a referendum to leave the EU could take place and that it would be possible for the UK to vote to leave. Nor could there be any doubt that it would be an issue for the UK to decide as the member state – and so Scottish voters might take a different view from the rest of the UK electorate.

Indeed, so likely was this scenario to become reality that during the independence referendum the Scottish Government warned Scottish voters that remaining in the UK could mean Scotland would leave the EU against their will. It was also clear during that referendum that, were Scots to choose independence, Scotland would leave the EU the same day that it left the UK – which was being suggested by the SNP would take place before the next general election.

By the SNP’S own words, it is beyond challenge that the “circumstances” of the 2014 referendum were that the SNP was willing to take Scotland out of the EU as a price for achieving independence, and that, were Scotland to remain in the UK, it might still leave the EU later, irrespective of how Scots voted. Scots voted to stay with the UK.

Once the Conservatives’ 2015 general election victory arrived, it was announced that the promised referendum would take place in June 2016 and would be a Uk-wide decision.

Nicola Sturgeon, by then First Minister, had the opportunity to put at the centre of her May 2016 Holyrood election campaign a promise to hold a second independence referendum. Instead she relegated the idea as a priority, burying it on page 24 with the caveat there would need to be “a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will”.

The Scottish public was by then getting fed-up with Sturgeon’s fixation with holding a second referendum and in May 2016 she lost the SNP’S overall majority. The unionist parties won 52.4 per cent of the con-