David Mundell is suffering from delusions of relevance. But he reveals just how desperate his political masters are to prevent the people of Scotland passing judgement on the union the way they have passed judgement on the British parties. What we see here is a decidedly clumsy attempt to get in early with an excuse for the UK Government to refuse to sanction another referendum. Mundell is asserting that any commitment to a new referendum in the SNP manifesto will not constitute a mandate unless it is worded in the way that he approves. Just contemplate, for a moment, the vaunting arrogance of a party with no mandate in Scotland presuming to dictate to a party with a clear and unambiguous mandate. Democracy is a process, not an event. That is a totally uncontroversial statement of the obvious. But try explaining it to those British nationalist fanatics who whine so pathetically about a "neverendum". They find the concept of popular democracy alien and frightening. The complaint from these tedious dullards is that the SNP wants to ask the question until they the answer they want. This is wrong on a number of levels. In the first place, it is not about the SNP. It is about the people of Scotland. There will only be a commitment to a second referendum in the SNP's 2016 manifesto if there is persuasive evidence of public demand for a fresh vote. The SNP are merely the democratic agents of the people of Scotland. Something the British most assuredly are not. The reality is that the SNP takes the wholly democratic position that, if the people demand a referendum, the question should be asked regardless of what the answer may be. The democratic process must be respected. Unionists, by contrast, insist that the democratic process be stopped once they have the answer they want. For them, the democratic process is only to be respected so long as it serves their purposes. Unionists are trying desperately to "bounce" Nicola Sturgeon into ruling out a manifesto commitment to another referendum early so that the British parties in Scotland don't have to face awkward questions in the Holyrood election campaign about their plans to deny the people of Scotland their democratic right of self-determination. I don't suppose even David Mundell is daft enough to suppose that Sturgeon might be so easily manipulated. The fact that he is trying anyway testifies to how worried the ruling elites of the British state are about this troublesome outbreak of popular democratic dissent in Scotland.