There is a word that has been in very heavy use since the debate about the independence referendum caught fire last month. That word is “mandate”. Both sides have sought to justify their stance on how the referendum should be conducted by arguing their particular perspective is the one that is consistent with the mandate the electorate supposedly gave the SNP last May.

Of course the idea that those who vote for a particular party endorse every one of the promises it has made during the election is little more than a convenient fiction.

Nevertheless, it is much easier for a party to lay claim to the legitimate right to take a proposed action if it can show it is fulfilling a campaign promise. Conversely, as the Liberal Democrats have learnt to their cost, a party that is thought to have broken a key campaign pledge is undoubtedly at risk of being punished severely by the electorate.

So we should not be surprised that in the debate about when the independence referendum should be held, the SNP points to Mr Salmond’s campaign statement that the vote would be held at some point between 2014 and 2016. Equally, there is every good reason why unionists should want to argue that the only vote for which the SNP has a mandate is one on independence – and not one on devo-max too.

However, one problem in a debate such as this is that parties are not always specific in the promises they make. Creating coalitions and retaining freedom of manoeuvre through the use of ambiguous statements into which people can read what they would like to hear is one of the arts of politics – and one that is particularly at a premium at election time. So we should not ne...

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The war of the consultations has now been set in train. Two weeks after Michael Moore invited us all to tell him how we think the independence referendum should be conducted, Alex Salmond has asked us to tell him too – or perhaps even instead. Doubtless we can expect whoever manages to secure the most replies to claim theirs was the bigger and better exercise. But in truth, the consultation competition creates a potentially awkward dilemma for the two governments. Both of them ask similar questions of much the same public. So how will they be able to justify coming up with different answers? After all, doubtless many of those who decide to express their views will respond to both consultations. They thus should elicit much the same set of [...]

Well, I guess we should not have been surprised that eventually the UK Government would seek to influence how the independence referendum is conducted. After all, the unionist chorus demanding a Yes-No referendum sooner rather than later had become little short of deafening. In November the Tory Chancellor, George Osborne, told the BBC: “The uncertainty about independence, the uncertainty about what sort of referendum Alex Salmond wants, the complexity of the question that he wants to pose to the Scottish people, all those things …are adding to the economic uncertainty in Scotland.” Subsequently in her victory speech on being elected Scottish Labour leader in December, Johann Lamont – to whom belated congratulations on her success – demanded the SNP “should get on with it”, and that the referendum should be [...]

It seems to have come as a shock to many a journalist that people’s willingness to back independence might turn on whether they reckoned it would leave them better off or not. Surely nobody would be willing to sell their right to be British for as little as £500 a year, as suggested by the latest figures from ScotCen’s Scottish Social Attitudes Survey released earlier this month? Well, of course, hypothetical survey questions are just that – hypothetical. We will never know whether 65 per cent would actually vote for independence if they thought everyone would on average be £500 a year better off as a result – not least because there will never be consensus amongst the Scottish public as to what the financial consequences of independence would be. [...]

There is not a great deal that Labour and the UK coalition parties agree on these days. But there is one subject on which they seem to be increasingly at one. They all want the forthcoming referendum on Scotland’s constitutional future to be about just one simple question – ‘Independence: Yes or No’. In espousing this view their overriding motivation seems to be to wish to deny the SNP any prospect of a consolation prize – in the form of a positive vote for whatever ‘devolution max’ turns out to be – should, as they fervently hope will happen, independence crashes to defeat. A referendum that unambiguously rejects independence has the apparent attraction that it would put the nationalist genie back in its bottle with the lid firmly shut tight. [...]