There will not be Scottish independence referendum next year, as the country’s prime minister, Nicola Sturgeon, wanted. The UK Supreme Court declared the request to hold a consultation unconstitutional, even if it was “merely advisory” without the permission of the Westminster Parliament, which represents “the whole country” and has powers over the unity of the state.

The judgment repeatedly invokes that of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1998 on Quebec. In it, the judges confirmed that the right to self-determination of peoples already applies to the Canadian province, which elects representatives and participates in the politics of the country at the same level and has the same legal rights and obligations as the rest of Canada. Therefore, you do not have the right to declare your independence outside of the laws established by the Parliament of Canada. This option, they explain, would apply only to colonies or territories clearly excluded from constitutional rights that exist in the rest of the country.

In this sense, the British judges endorse the Canadian arguments: Scotland already has the number of MPs proportional to its population in Westminster, and there have been two British Prime Ministers of Scottish origin (Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) during of this century, so the British cannot be said to be denied by law the right to participate in political life. Yes nor can it be said that there is no mechanism for Scotland to hold a legal and legitimate referendum: This already happened in 2014, when David Cameron’s government negotiated with Edinburgh to convene a binding consultation, which was approved by Westminster. Therefore, since there is already a valid and realistic mechanism for celebrating it – calling a vote in Parliament and winning it – which has already been used successfully for less than a decade, the judges conclude that the Scottish government has no special right to hold unilateral referenda.

The penalty, however, was not well received in Edinburgh. Sturgeon harshly rejected the sentence, denouncing that by leaving them at the mercy of striking agreements with the Unionist parties, whose deputies come mainly from England – which concentrates 83% of the country’s population and a similar percentage of parliamentarians – , shows that the UK is ‘not a voluntary union of equal nations’, a message repeated by the spokesman for his parliamentary group in Westminster, Ian Blackford. The Scottish Nationalist Party announced, will consider the next legislative elections as a “plebiscite”, although he did not specify whether they would be willing to make a unilateral declaration of independence and under what conditions. There is a precedent, if not a happy one: Sinn Féin declared independence from Ireland after sweeping the 1918 election, sparking a war with British forces that resulted in the partition of island and a civil war between pro-independence factions.

From London, the opinion of the government is that independence referendums should be extraordinary events, “once for every generation”, and that we would have to wait at least 20 years after the 2014 vote to start considering another one. The two main parties – Conservative and Labor – have made it clear that they have no intention of holding another consultation in the near future.