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After Brexit many politicians in Scotland have started calling for a second referendum. While Brexit itself was a big uncertainty at the time when the Scottish referendum was negotiated, surely the Scottish reaction to it was possible to predict.
So why didn't the UK government include a clause in the original referendum saying that Scotland can only do one every X years? Was this ever discussed during the original negotiations?
The Westminster government's opinion is that the ability to organise an independence referendum is not one of the Scottish parliament's devolved powers, and thus far the SNP don't seem to be intending to test this. As such, it isn't a matter of binding Scotland from holding a referendum, but binding the Westminster parliament from calling one. But the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty says that one parliament can't bind the actions of later one, so the most that would be practicable would be to require no more than one referendum per parliamentary term, which isn't that different from the political reality anyway.
