As the Scottish National Party gathered in Aberdeen for the its annual conference, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham had also travelled north of the border. SNP conferences are of course a platform for the party to coalesce around its core aim of Scottish independence.

But at Labour’s conference in September, Burnham told colleagues the union is “worth saving” and “worth fighting for” and he was determined not to be “the last prime minister of the United Kingdom”. This was a riposte to SNP leader and Scottish First Minister John Swinney, who had predicted exactly that weeks earlier.

Also in September, Swinney and his fellow pro-independence leaders in Wales and Northern Ireland met for a summit where they asserted their right to decide their own futures. At the talks in Cardiff, the leaders signed two agreements – neither of which changes the law. What they do expose, however, is that the three nations stand in very different legal positions – and that two of them have no route forward at all.

The party leaders (Swinney of the SNP, Rhun ap Iorwerth of Plaid Cymru, and Sinn Féin’s vice president, Michelle O’Neill, and president, Mary Lou McDonald) signed what’s known as a memorandum of understanding.

Read more: Three of the UK’s four nations are led by parties advocating a split. Which is most likely to go?

Officially, the meeting was not a summit of first ministers, rather of party leaders. But this didn’t stop unionists in Northern Ireland criticising O'Neill for taking part while serving as first minister of an executive she leads jointly with deputy first minister Emma Little-Pengelly of the........

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