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I do not think that it is necessary.

If we were to move the question about an element of direct democracy element away from the issue of secession or independence, and towards how the people of Scotland assert their right to make a decision on a matter of importance, that is a question that the political process is failing to engage with. Is that not one way of putting a clear mechanism into the hands of the public, which allows them to force the political process to respond?

I appreciated Adam Tomkins’s frankness about “We will know it when we see it” being clearly inadequate but the best we can do. It might be that, in the interface between the legalities and the politics, it is not possible to have a position that is free of contradictions.

I want to pick up a couple of points in Adam Tomkins’s paper about the use of referendums more generally, and I am interested in everybody’s views on this. Several referendums that are not about secession are mentioned, and you make the case that we should use referendums not to determine or to find out people’s views on an issue but to establish what we think we already know. Among others, you gave the example of the alternative vote referendum as one that successfully settled the question. I would push back against that a bit, because it did not settle the question of whether electoral reform is necessary. The Lib Dems are not here, and they might push back against this, but they skilfully negotiated a coalition agreement that gave them a referendum on a voting system that nobody wanted. The AV system was not anybody’s choice, so it was almost designed as a scheme to put electoral reform on the back burner, but it did not settle the question of whether it was required, and, with the genuine prospect now of a far right Government in the UK, that should send chills down all our spines.

I would ask for your reflections on the experience of other countries that use referendums more frequently on non-secession issues. For example, Ireland has had a range of referendums on issues on which it was not really known how the public would vote. Common sense might have said that the public would have supported doing away with some of the misogynistic language in the constitution in the recent referendums on family and care, but those expectations were confounded, and the public voted quite comprehensively for what I would consider to be archaic language. Therefore, there is surely a case for using referendums to ask, genuinely, what the view is and to establish whether there is a 50 per cent plus one majority, rather than to confirm that there is an overwhelming settled majority that we already know about. Should we learn from Ireland’s experience of having a level of direct democracy as the trigger point for putting those questions to the public? Ireland used citizens assemblies in a number of instances to determine questions that the political process either could not resolve or was in deadlock over.

I see that others want to come in, but, first, one part of what was different between those referendums was that in 1997 there was a very clearly defined proposition being put rather than a general one, and I would suggest that one of the reasons why the EU referendum in 2016 resulted in such chaos was that every flavour of Brexit imaginable was on offer, not a clear, defined and solid proposition. However, had the result been no, I do not think for a moment that the Brexiteers would have gone away and spent the next decade saying, “Oh well, we lost that one. Let’s talk about something else instead.”

I do not think so.

There was one on Scotland’s future that was a bit vague and undefined. There was another on climate, which perhaps fell into the category that Stephen Tierney was talking about, in the solutions that it came up with.

I have taken quite a lot of time on this, convener, but I just want to acknowledge that, when I talked about having some element of direct democracy, I did not necessarily mean a citizens assembly as the format for that. However, it is something that I would like to explore further.

Yes. Aileen McHarg wants to come in, too, so I just want to remind everyone that I finished my first question by asking whether there should be discussion of the potential for a direct democracy element—some way in which the public themselves can assert that they, or a substantial body of people, are ready to have the question put, in order to do an end run around the political deadlock.

I will be brief, and I will not address everything, but I want to put something on the record about the question of an organisational opt-out. I looked at the various amendments on that as I was going through the amendments for the first time, and I was genuinely open to the argument. I would, however, like to raise one concern that was in my mind when I started reading the variations on the theme but which have not been touched on in the discussion. I would be concerned that, if we were to place a requirement on organisations to adopt a policy either in favour of or against participation in assisted dying, that could place organisations under inappropriate pressure. That happened to a certain extent in the early days of the similar policy coming into place in Australia. Campaigners for either view of the policy could place inappropriate pressure on organisations.

In particular, we have not talked about public sector organisations. In what way would an organisational policy, whether it is to participate or is framed as a conscientious objection, be determined for a publicly owned body? Would that ultimately risk becoming politicised, with a political decision having to be made by a local authority, for example? That would be inappropriate.

I was genuinely interested in hearing the argument to see whether a coherent case could be made for some kind of provision on an organisational policy. I have listened, and some of the arguments in favour of the amendments have been framed clearly in terms of protecting personal choice and the individual decisions that people have a right to make, as well as the desire to protect people from being in an environment that places one expectation or the other upon them about the way in which they might exercise their choices. That suggests that it might not be impossible, but nothing that is on the table at the moment suggests that we have a way of giving an organisational policy—

Yes—in just a moment.

I do not see anything on the table that would not lead to an organisational policy that does not, almost by definition, place everybody who is receiving services from that organisation under the expectation that they will make one choice rather than the other.