THERE’S a video clip doing the rounds which involves Angus Robertson MSP and Cabinet Secretary for lots of things being interviewed for Channel 4 News. Asked if the focus on referendums is to divert attention from the SNP’s record on the NHS, education and so on, Mr Robertson gives an impatient reply.

“If people were so unhappy with how Scotland is governed”, he says, “we would not have won eight elections in a row”. And there, in a nutshell, is why so much about Scotland is in stagnation without our devolved political leaders feeling the slightest need to improve or even address serious questions.

Not since Mrs Thatcher, have I heard such a crude enunciation of the 40 per cent principle. Like Mr Robertson, she made no bones about it. So long as 40 per cent of voters were on-side, it did not matter what the other 60 per cent thought. She would win elections and carry on as before, a formula that kept her in power for 13 years.

For most of the bedrock support Mr Robertson’s security relies on, there is only one issue that matters and it certainly isn’t the NHS or education far less gender recognition or the currency we might be using. It’s the constitution. While that base remains firm, the arrogance of his response is fully merited. They get elected so what’s the problem?

The crucial challenge for opponents is to separate the minority within the 40 per cent who do care more about the NHS and education than the constitution to re-arrange their priorities, at least temporarily. At that point, the face of Scottish politics can change rapidly and it might just be starting to happen.

The Supreme Court ruling brought forth voices within the independence movement to wonder whether this dead-end focus on a second referendum is really what they should be prioritising. Would evidence of a caring, competent government not have been a better long-term strategy? That is the question Mr Robertson feels no need to address as long as the 40 per cent bedrock sustains them.

Yet his own situation in his Edinburgh Central constituency neatly illustrates both the dividends from that approach to politics and also its democratic ambiguity. With 39 per cent of votes cast, he has a comfortable majority. More than three-fifths of votes were opposed to him while over a third did not vote at all.

There is nothing abnormal about this and Mr Robertson’s mandate is not in dispute. Does it, however, equate to a licence to dismiss major policy concerns with the mantra that if “people” didn’t like it, they wouldn’t vote for it? That conceit can only exist as long as the base is guaranteed and, as even Mrs Thatcher discovered, that does not last forever.

But maybe the doctrine that “only the 40 per cent matter” is now enshrined in the new definition of Scottish democracy? According to Ms Sturgeon, she and Mr Robertson are standard-bearers for the “Scottish democracy movement” and no mere political party. We are colonised prisoners in our own land! It is dangerous, patronising nonsense best left to the dafter fringes.

There was an interesting letter in yesterday’s Herald from Isobel Lindsay which recalled the Claim of Right document in 1989 which I, along with other Labour and LibDem MPs as well as assorted worthies she referenced, signed up to with open eyes. It stated: “We hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs."

“Have they decided their principles were wrong?”, she wondered. I can only offer reassurance on my own behalf that I would sign up to the same principle today. However, it is interesting that Isobel Lindsay only remembers those who signed the document and not those who failed to do so.

No SNP MP signed it. Indeed, the only SNP activist who did so was Isobel Lindsay, which was to her credit. The reason for the nationalist abstention, which evolved into a boycott of the Constitutional Convention, was that they perceived a trap for their cause. What if the Scottish people’s view of “the form of government best suited to their needs” did not coincide with the word ‘independence’?

There is a crucial distinction within that piece of history, of continuing relevance today. It is that both Isobel Lindsay and I, from different perspectives, were prepared to uphold the Scottish people’s views about “the form of government best suited to their needs” even if it led to outcomes we did not like. The SNP walked away because they could never accept that the people’s view might not coincide with their own. Anyone who thinks Ms Sturgeon is motivated by the optimum form of government for Scotland needs to remember that lesson. That is not what nationalism is about.

And so it goes on. The problem for the SNP and Ms Sturgeon’s silly rhetoric is that Scotland is not being imprisoned within a union against our will. As well as the 2014 referendum result, all polling evidence that digs deeper than the polarising yes-no question suggests that an accommodation within the UK that respects Scottish identity and interests is by some distance the preferred option.

What the SNP will never be capable of acknowledging is that the Scottish people’s view of “the form of government best suited to their needs” may not be synonymous with their own. To assume the contrary as a belief on which “democracy” depends is the antithesis of democracy.

If at some point the public mood demands another referendum, then we are unlikely to miss it. Those who believe in the words of the 1989 Claim of Right will not stand in its way, any more than we did in 2014. Meanwhile, we do not need lessons in democracy from Ms Sturgeon or Mr Robertson, based on the cynical certainty of their 40 per cent power base.

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