Wednesday’s chaotic procedures in the House of Commons have handed an enormous soapbox to the SNP’s Stephen Flynn. The MP for Aberdeen South, who has led the Scottish National Party’s Westminster group since December 2022, has been intoning gravely that the debate ‘descended into farce’ and, with suppressed fury, told the speaker that he no longer trusted him to preside impartially over the House. Flynn has tabled an early-day motion which, at time of writing, had 66 signatories, and expresses ‘no confidence in Mr Speaker’.

Flynn has cause to be upset. His is the third-largest party in the House, with 43 MPs. Moreover, the debate on Gaza was a day on which, rarely, the SNP had chosen the subject under discussion. Yet, for a time, it seemed as if there might not be an opportunity for him and his colleagues to vote on their motion after only a government and possibly a Labour amendment to the wording were selected by the Speaker. That would have been a matter of discourtesy and a diminution of the SNP’s right to be heard on its own terms.

SNP supporters talk with straight faces about Scotland being a colony

What we have to remember, however, is that Stephen Flynn is a separatist. He wants Scotland to remove itself from the United Kingdom and become an independent country. Given that ambition, he and his party have absolutely no stake in the existing institutions of the UK operating smoothly and effectively. The debate had barely got underway yesterday before Scottish Nationalists were deploying the phrase ‘Britannia waives the rules’ to describe the speaker’s decision not to follow the advice of the clerk of the House.

This was barely about the interpretation of the standing order which governs the order in which questions should be put. It was a fragment in a wider, half-assembled mosaic of Scotland getting a rough deal as part of the United Kingdom, of being ignored and subjugated by an imperialist Westminster system.

SNP supporters talk with straight faces about Scotland being a colony. The same month as Flynn was elected Westminster leader, Mike Russell, then the party’s president, told BBC Radio Scotland’s The Sunday Show that ‘the way the Westminster government and parliament behaves towards Scotland now has strong parallels with the approach taken during the last years of the colonial era’.

The same narrative has been promoted when the Scottish government and parliament have exceeded the powers they have under statute, whether it be in seeking a referendum on independence, passing legislation on gender self-identification or engaging in diplomacy with foreign leaders. The SNP identifies something it wishes to do or see happen, which it knows or suspects cannot or will not happen, and presses on in full cry, ready to accuse the Westminster establishment of overriding the wishes of the Scottish people (which are, of course, represented wholly and only by the Scottish National Party).

Under these circumstances, Flynn and his colleagues will be rubbing their hands with glee at the latest turn of events. They had hoped to embarrass the Labour party over its hesitant policy on a ceasefire in Gaza, especially in light of Scottish Labour passing a motion at their conference which went further than Sir Keir Starmer had at that point done. There is underlying annoyance that such embarrassment was salved by the decision of the speaker to select the amendments he did. But this wider stooshie, as Flynn would no doubt call it, is just as good for stoking grievance and dissent.

The desire of the SNP for a separate Scotland is not a secret. They do not hide their long-term political aims and they are not engaged in some weird kind of sleight of hand. But when they wade into a constitutional argument, one which is used to talk about the rights of Scotland within the Union, they must be seen for what they are and their interests recognised. Flynn can only gain from parliament seeming dysfunctional and neglecting the SNP’s particular interests.

When F.E. Smith, the outrageously gifted but unpredictable Conservative lawyer who would be lord chancellor at 47 and dead at 58, made his maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1906, he savaged the sanctimony of his opponents:

I do not, more than another man, mind being cheated at cards; but I find it a little nauseating if my opponent then publicly ascribes his success to the partnership of the Most High.

Stephen Flynn should be viewed in the same way. He is making pro-independence hay while the sun is shining, but let us not suppose he is some dispassionate constitutional scholar. He is in the mire where all politicians must spend their time, and we shouldn’t presume that his hands are cleaner than anyone else’s.