How does an SNP member end up writing an Act of Union - and other comedies

Political rule of thumb: always punch the bruise is the UK a voluntary union?

The SNP is a constitutional party in an aconstitutional state. Constitutions are normally a contract between people and state. In the UK it belongs to anyone who can seize the crown-in-parliament abetted by FPTP’s crazy winner’s bonus.

Our politics is trapped in this aconstitutionality. There is no electoral route to an agreed referendum - some mandates are more equal than others. The Supreme Court has ruled. We have run out of road.

But the whole UK is in a constitutional crisis.

To win we need to hold the strong ground force our opponents into a position where they don’t want to be and to shape the crisis.

The mathematics of victory are simple:

We need to build a majority from 2 of those 3 camps. It starts with the national interest of Scotland.

Nobody believes in parliamentary sovereignty in a serious sense, and the political class has been captured by entitled actors who use the power it grants them arbitrarily.

The hook on which the post-Brexit Westminster parties are trapped is that the people voted for it, the implicitly sovereign people voted for it.

But the UK is only partially aconstitutional: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have mostly-written constitutions based on popular sovereignty.

We stand four-square for popular sovereignty, for the peoples of Scotland to determine their own fate. Our institutions are strong and respected, far more so than Westminster. All Scotland’s politicians are held in higher regard than their Westminster equivalents. Our country and society works.

But an election-as-referendum is winnable only if it a last resort.

I propose that we do what our opponents don’t expect - reach out and make a grand offering with an open hand. An involuntary union is intolerable, a voluntary union is what we have asked for twice already.

To that end I have drafted a Westminster Act of Voluntary Union - based on British constitutional precedents.

The Brexit crisis is all consuming, its flames lick up the side of the rock of Gibraltar. We want a clean end, not a chaotic one that slows us returning to Europe. We should shift the debate from party to government, to speak to Wales, and Gibraltar, to bring in the Commonwealth succession and the Irish, to internationalise and widen. There will still be an England after Britain.

We in the SNP do not want Scotland to be independent, we want the people of Scotland to want to be independent and have the means and mechanisms to make that so. Belief in the sovereignty of the Scottish people is what unites us, what makes this an issue of country not party.

And if, after all, there are to be tanks on lawns, better our tanks, their lawns.