I NOTE Campbell Anderson’s thoughtful letter in The National on Wednesday and will do my best to address his questions.
He asks why the Scottish Government has not engaged lawyers to examine the issue of Scottish sovereignty and its full implications. Well, Nicola was a lawyer and she led us down the wrong track. The expertise of lawyers is to examine the text of statute law and consider how it can be interpreted, or to look at the common law and how it has been interpreted in the past.
What they seldom do is consider the sovereign authority behind any law, or indeed if a particular law is acceptable to the community and is viable in that sense.
Every legal system needs to be supported by a sovereign authority of some kind. Laws passed in the Westminster Parliament which get royal assent are valid laws in England, but they do not apply in France. However good these laws might be, they can’t be considered legally valid in France.
So sovereign authority is vital for the validity of any law.
If sovereignty in Scotland rests with the people, which can be demonstrated in our constitutional history, and if there can only be one source of sovereignty in any state, then it follows that the UK Government, or King Charles, or the UK Supreme Court can’t be sovereign in Scotland. Indeed sovereignty in Scotland can only be exercised by a Convention of Estates, which can be called by the Scottish Government or the Scottish people.
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My second point, that any law must be acceptable to the community it applies to, is a wider question than any lawyer can address, but it is entirely valid in any modern democratic state in particular.
One example I can give of that in Scotland in recent times is the Westminster legislation for tolls on the Skye Bridge, The New Roads and Street Works Act. This was legislation passed by the Westminster Parliament which received royal assent and is still on the statute book in Westminster.
This act makes it a criminal offence to cross the Skye Bridge without paying a toll. The act is still there, the law is still there but the toll booths are gone. So people cross every day and ignore this law because the UK state found it could not apply it because the community would not comply with it.
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Campbell is not alone in looking for a way forward towards independence. Many, many thousands in Scotland are like him in this regard. The answer is to respect Scottish sovereignty, because this provides us with a legal way forward, which must be supported by every Scottish court which gets
its authority from Scottish sovereignty, and which can’t be challenged by any court outwith Scotland. The answer, Campbell, lies in our own hands.
Andy Anderson
Ardrossan
THE state of the union is in a log jam. Not the European Union. Nor the Union of the nations within the United Kingdom, although it is also in some state.
The union to which I refer is the good ol’ US of A.
The current 50/50 split between Republicans and Democrats has several policies blocked.
The major blockage of the $60 billion aid package for munitions to Ukraine and Israel has been caused by the Republicans inserting a requirement to pass the HR2 bill that “shuts down the border”, according to Senator Chris Murphy for Connecticut.
Why should I care? I wish that neither country needed this help, but I can’t change that. Ukraine should benefit from support due to the invasion by its bigger neighbour Russia. Israel on the other hand is another quite separate matter, and not one I personally would support. It appears they have grossly misused material received from the US.
The other issue this exposes is that the UK far-right Conservative government’s “blanket” policy of Hotel Rwanda for legal and illegal immigrants is driving the wrong immigration policies in the UK, apeing the US Republican Party.
Let’s be clear, Scotland needs people, good people that want to contribute to and share in the benefits of our fair land with the rest of us, from whatever country they previously hail.
Alistair Ballantyne
Angus
WHAT a stirring call to action that was by Richie Venton (Defy, Don’t Comply, Dec 5), at a time when bankers are misusing millions in ordinary people’s money as outrageous and unnecessary bonuses.
Congratulations to him and his fellow activists on their victory in Liverpool back in 1986. The trouble with transferring this to an entire country, even one as small as ours, is that it would need vastly more in terms of organisation, time, and resources than a single city can deploy.
It’s premature to say the Scottish Government have “chosen” “compliance over defiance”, no matter how clever the Anglo-Saxon alliteration used to get the notion into our heads that they have. They are NOT “wringing their hands in grovelling surrender”.
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How often has Richie’s strategy been successful England-wide? Do his “working-class communities” include Lancashire, just north of Liverpool, which Michael Howard, then Tory leader, visited in 1994 because it was a place of, as the Channel 4 reporter who covered his visit put it (make sure this sinks in), “solid, traditional, working-class Conservatism”?
Even the “Red Wall” proved to have a lot of white and blue behind it. The leader of the striking miners at Orgreave became a Tory small businessman. People in working-class English towns went for Thatcher’s “share shops” in droves.
Do we need a lecture from Richie Venton? Scotland is not Tory to anything near the extent England, even working-class England, is. And yes, there is an alternative. It’s called breaking free from Tory-electing England and avoiding what Richie is talking about in the first place.
Ian McQueen
Dumfries
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