MAY I respond to Brian Boyce’s letter of November 9, as Brian has asked me to do? It is clear to me that Brian has given this issue a lot of consideration, and I appreciate that.
Brian correctly asks me the vital central question, when he asks who has the authority to declare independence, and where do they get that authority from? The answer to that question, Brian, is that the Scottish people hold sovereign power in their hands. Since this is so, then the supreme source of legal and political power in Scotland is the Scottish people.
Since that is undeniably the case then the authority to pronounce on Scotland’s legal and political future rest with the Scottish people, and with no other legal or political authority anywhere in the UK.
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This is of course to state the obvious, however the problem, which Brian recognises, is that the Scottish people have no voice, so who speaks for them? Who has the authority to do that? Brian is right to insist that we address this question.
This is exactly why Respect Scottish Sovereignty (RSS) have put forward the idea that we must insist that the present Scottish Parliament put the UN International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights into Scottish law, because if we do that it gives the Scottish people the means to express its voice. The UN ICCPR makes provision for Direct democracy, which would be available to the Scottish people in our domestic law, and which will be supported in international law. That is what we are pursuing.
Now, if we can get the means to give the Scottish people a voice in this way, then we will have won 75% of independence already, because the Scottish people can use this direct democracy to develop a proper Scottish written constitution like any normal country and to insist on it being put to the people in a referendum.
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The idea that such “people power” could only be used to tell the Scottish Government to hold another independence referendum like the last one is not why we want the people to have a voice. Frankly the idea that the people should have another vote on the abstract idea of “independence” is the last thing on my mind.
I can think of a thousand ways that the Scottish people could more usefully employ their voice to change our country and to make it better than the failing UK model.
However, our objective is not to tell the Scottish people what to do, it is to give them a voice so that they can tell us what they want done.
I must also express my thanks to Campbell Anderson for giving me a response to the RSS letter to the FM, on the question of the Scottish Government putting the UN ICCPR Covenant into Scottish law, in his letter to The National (Nov 8).
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This letter was signed by more than 300 people, and its content is supported by the Scottish Human Rights Commission, but the FM has not answered this letter yet. So if Campbell has had a response to our letter then I wonder where it came from. It would seem, however, that the response he had was inaccurate, and misleading, and does not address the questions we asked the FM.
As Campbell himself has pointed out, if the FM disagrees with what we have written, he should respond and tell us where we have got it wrong, and why the SHRC have also got it wrong.
We do not intend to be put off, we will continue to ask this important question and we will ask others to join us in asking this question. No answer from the FM is not an adequate response.
Andy Anderson
Ardrossan
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