THERE have been a number of developments in 2022 which have had a significant impact on the campaign for Scottish independence, but in terms of how they shape the campaign all are dwarfed by the UK Supreme Court ruling in November that Westminster has ensured that the Scottish Parliament does not have the legal right to fulfil the democratic mandate for a second independence referendum which was given to it by the people of Scotland in the Scottish elections of 2021.

It is not a court sitting in London which has created this sorry state of affairs, the judges merely interpret the laws made by the Westminster Parliament.

This travesty of democracy has been created by those British political parties which dominate Westminster, firstly by creating a law which fails to respect that right to self-determination that Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems continue to insist that the people of Scotland possess, and secondly by failing to respect the result of the 2021 Scottish elections.

It is abundantly apparent now that the only democratic verdicts of the people of Scotland which those parties are prepared to accept are those which happen to coincide with what the parties of the British state agree with.

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The Supreme Court had been asked to rule on a narrow point of law, whether the Scotland Act gave Holyrood the right to hold a consultative referendum on Scottish independence, however the ramifications of the ruling are immense, going to the very heart of the nature of this so-called union that Scotland has always been assured is voluntary, assurances made by those very same British politicians who are now denying the people of Scotland the ability to put the constitutional dogma of a voluntary union to the test.

A Union in which the smaller member nations can only ask themselves about their place in that Union after they have obtained the permission of a Prime Minister who owes his or her power to the electoral choices of voters in the largest member nation, is not a voluntary union in any meaningful sense of the term.

Indeed it is neither voluntary nor a union. This is apparent from a political reality in which permission for a referendum is highly unlikely to be forthcoming if the Prime Minister fears that there is a plausible chance of the smaller nation voting for independence.

The National: The Supreme Court verdict proved Scotland does not exist within a voluntary union The Supreme Court verdict proved Scotland does not exist within a voluntary union

The freedom of choice implicit in the phrase voluntary union is as meaningful as being told that you have the freedom to purchase anything you want in a shop whose shelves have been stripped bare, and after your wallet has been stolen.

The court ruling definitively proved that for decades the people of Scotland have been lied to by successive generations of Westminster politicians. The United Kingdom does not allow the people of Scotland the agency that Westminster politicians have always claimed that they have. This is not a voluntary union. It is a prison where democracy goes to die.

Yet naturally this epic betrayal of the people of Scotland by British politicians was presented by the British media as a “blow for Nicola Sturgeon” and not for what it really is, a fundamental shift in understanding of the very nature of the British state as a polity.

This so-called voluntary union is as we have learned, not voluntary, and neither is it a union, the British state is nothing more and nothing less than the political expression of English nationalism.

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There has been little interest or appreciation of this amongst commentators in England, a lack of interest which reveals that the dominant perception in England has always been that the British state and England are essentially the same thing. But no longer can British politicians pretend to the people of Scotland that things are otherwise.

No more can the opponents of independence plausibly claim that they want Scotland to remain a part of the UK because they are opposed to nationalism, not when they themselves seek to maintain the subordination of Scotland's interests and concerns to the dictates of English nationalism in a British state which is functionally indistinguishable from Greater England.

The Scottish independence debate is now a campaign to ensure that democracy in Scotland is respected, but it is also a debate between two competing nationalisms, Scottish nationalism and Anglo-British nationalism.

2022 will be remembered as the year when traditional Scottish Unionism died.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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