Mr. Angus Robertson:

Shorter answers from the committee's guest would probably help.

The good news, from our point of view, is that we have already had a referendum about Scotland's constitutional future and that has established a number of precedents. It has provided a precedent of a United Kingdom Government that respects democratic election results in Scotland and works with the Government of Scotland to hold a recognised constitutionally-approved process and that is exactly what we intend to do this time around. We have been elected as a government, we have a mandate to hold a referendum and we intend to hold a referendum as we did previously. If there are to be any changes, that would be from the UK Government that would disrespect a democratic election result and that would recast the United Kingdom as the kind of state that it would then be - one that would deny democratic election results and overturn a precedent that was set by a previous and incidentally Conservative Government. We are proceeding on the basis that we have a precedent and a mandate. On the basis of those two facts, it should not be an insurmountable problem to recognise and operate as a democracy.

It is not my area of expertise to understand the various mechanisms of these islands and there is not a direct read-across. There are very different provisions that have been agreed in relation to the Good Friday Agreement, etc. Our position is different in that we have had a vote. Subsequently, we have had Brexit. We did not vote for that. There is public demand now, given that context, that we should be able to revisit the issue because there has been a profound change of circumstances for us relative to 2014.