As a lawyer, the First Minister knows she can’t legally railroad Brexit process so why is she misleading the Scottish public and putting the independence movement in jeopardy? BY JIM SILLARS
NICOLA Sturgeon has threatened to try to block the Prime Minister’s Brexit legislation if she doesn’t get her way on a second independence referendum.
She has also warned support for the Great Repeal Bill may be withheld if the Scottish Parliament is deprived of power over any devolved areas.
Ex-SNP deputy leader JIM SILLARS explains why he fears wrecking tactics could backfire DEAR me, here we go again – the Scottish Government are boasting about using powers they do not have to do something they cannot do.
This time, it’s torpedoing the Great Repeal Bill that will take us out of the EU in two years’ time.
Recent statements suggest the Scottish Government could use their cobbled-together majority with the Greens at Holyrood to refuse a Sewel Convention consent motion to the Repeal Bill and derail it are fantasy posturing.
That’s for two reasons – the decision in the recent Supreme Court Brexit case and the wording of the 1998 Act that set up the Scottish Parliament.
The Scottish Government continually ignore a stark fact about devolution – unfettered and sovereign law-making power remains at Westminster.
Although the UK’s constitution is unwritten – in the sense that it is not a codified document like the US Constitution – there are still written principles and parts that are legal and binding. Crucially, there are also conventions created for political purposes which are not binding.
The Sewel Convention is one of these. It states that Westminster will “not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters in Scotland without the consent of the Scottish Parliament”.
This, however, is not the veto power Nicola Sturgeon appears to think it is. The key words are “would not normally.” Brexit transcends normal business. It is of a magnitude that the Westminster Parliament rightly assumes gives it the sole right to decide on the great historic decision to leave the EU.
If the wording of the convention weren’t enough, the Supreme Court’s recent judgment on it is crystal clear: “Courts cannot enforce a political convention.”
The Westminster Act setting up the Scottish Parliament states in S28: “This section does not affect the power of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to make laws for Scotland.”
If that is not emphatic enough, the Supreme Court recorded that Scotland’s Lord Advocate, representing the Scottish Government, along with the Counsel for Wales, “were correct to acknowledge that the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly did not have a legal veto on the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union.”
Surely, our First Minister, a lawyer, has read and understood the Supreme Court’s judgments?
Surely she knows that talk of throwing a spanner in the Brexit works is misleading, meaningless waffle? The Scottish Government employ many people with a wide range of skills, including a substantial legal department. Yet, they are going to succeed, once again, in lunging head first into a political and legal cul-de-sac from which they can only emerge looking very foolish.
Since no rational Scottish Government can believe their own propaganda on stopping Brexit, what is really behind this exercise? I suspect it is to engender feelings of anger in Scotland that we’re being ignored and not treated as an equal in this United Kingdom, with a resultant surge in Scottish patriotism, a steep rise in support for independence, thus producing new compelling evidence of justification for a second referendum.
Make no mistake, I too want a second referendum, but I don’t think manufacturing grievance by issuing false and misleading claims is the way to achieve that goal.
The SNP Scottish Government now risk damaging the movement which they claim to lead, and that movement is compounding the damage by their docile, uncritical acceptance of whatever the First Minister says.
Intellectual rigour is missing, sloppy thinking has become the norm.
Does anyone in the SNP realise what is happening?
The obsession with Brexit and an early second referendum is playing right into the hands of the Tories.
There is no appetite among the people for another referendum at present. The people are sensible. They know the most important things that need attention right now are education, the NHS, low economic growth and tackling the curse of poverty that affects so many families and children.
An obsession with Brexit and a referendum is allowing the Tories to gather large numbers of 2014 No voters into their fold to reject a referendum they do not want. Ruth Davidson must purr with pleasure every time Sturgeon speaks or sends a letter to Theresa May.
Until the ink is dry on the final Brexit deal, and time is taken to consider what it means for our relationship with the rest of the UK, which takes 64 per cent of Scottish exports, there can be no deployment of the case for independence and a second referendum.
The voters grasp this basic truth. It’s time Sturgeon and her cabinet did too.
Former deputy leader of the SNP They are lunging head first into a political and legal cul-de-sac