I do not have time to take any more interventions.
I ask the Scottish Conservative MPs—I may give way to one or two of them later—whether they are helping to strengthen or to weaken the Union in this Parliament. They came down here with 29% of the vote—the “Ruth Davidson opposes a second referendum” party did relatively well in Scotland—but they have lost five percentage points in the past year. Their constituents are watching them whine on about a Parliament and a Government 400 miles away, and they are sick and tired of being represented by people who could not care less about their duties and functions in the House, but everything about a Parliament that they can no longer question, and that is having an impact on what they are doing.
We could get on to English votes for English laws. Does that strengthen or weaken the Union? Well, there is a hard one. We could also get on to the £1 billion that Democratic Unionist party Members were able to secure, of which Scottish Conservatives have not been able to get a single penny. However, let us just sum up where we are in the wider debate. If we look across the range of defining constitutional issues, we find, when the people of Scotland are tested in opinion polls, that independence now stands at 47%, or two percentage points up from our very impressive gains in 2014. We are very much on
a journey with all this. Independence remains more or less at the level we had in 2014, and we are not even campaigning for independence at the moment.
The defining feature in all this will be the Conservatives’ Brexit—their hard Brexit—and how the Scottish people start to assess the situation. Scotland is currently tethered to HMS Brexitannia, which is heading full speed for the biggest iceberg ever encountered in political history. Unlike the real Titanic, this HMS Brexitannia is hurtling towards an iceberg at full speed in the full knowledge that that will sink the ship and all the souls on board.
For Scotland, however, there are lifeboats attached to this doomed and stricken liner, and they are marked “Independence”. All we in Scotland need to do is clamber aboard, get them off the vessel as quickly as possible and row towards the shores of independence, security and sanity.