YET AGAIN, SNP SIMPLY REFUSED TO LISTEN TO CRITICISM

Yesterday’s supreme Court ruling on the Named Persons law makes grim reading for the sNP. It vindicates entirely the long campaign against this illiberal, dangerous and unnecessary law. tremendous credit is due to my colleague Liz smith MsP for leading that.

the supreme Court’s ruling is a wake-up call to the scottish Government, the scottish parliament and indeed to scotland’s Court of session that greater vigilance is needed to safeguard us from ill-considered laws.

that the Justices of the supreme Court were unanimous in their verdict only underscores the seriousness of the matter.

as ever, it is necessary to clear the fog that surrounds the Named Persons law before turning to the detail of what the supreme Court has said. scotland needs—and already has—robust and effective child protection laws.

Where the welfare of a child is at risk, social workers and others have all the powers they need to intervene.

this is just as it should be, and no criticism of the Named Persons law should be construed as undermining or trivialising the paramount importance of protecting vulnerable children from harm.

the Named Persons law extends our existing and necessary powers in two ways. First, it focuses not on child welfare (protecting the young from abuse or neglect) but on child wellbeing, which is defined much more broadly.

secondly, it empowers and in certain circumstances requires information about children and their families to be shared with a sweeping array of public bodies in scotland, including schools, local authorities and the scottish Ministers themselves. Often this will be confidential information.

It Is this overreach—the breathtaking scope of Named Persons law—on which our opposition to it has been focused. this is why we have described the law as a disproportionate interference with family life. sometimes it is necessary for the state to interand fere with family life. Where it is necessary to do so in order to protect a child from harm or abuse, it is obvious that the interests of child protection outweigh those of respect for family life. But the Named Persons law goes so much further than this.

as the supreme Court said yesterday, confidential information may be shared under the Named Persons scheme without any requirement to obtain the consent of children or their parents and, moreover, this may occur regardless of whether it is objectively relevant or necessary that the information be shared.

all that is required is that the holder of the information thinks that sharing the information might help a Named Person fulfil his or her statutory functions: ‘to monitor what children and young people need’ as the scottish Government have put it.

In the words of the supreme Court, the operation of this scheme ‘is likely often to be disproportionate’. In practice, it may result in a disproportionate interference with the human rights of ‘many children, young persons and their parents’.

On June 8 this year, the scottish Conservatives tried in the scottish parliament to have the implementation of the Named Persons law paused. as a party we are committed to the repeal of the legislation but June’s debate was not about scrapping the law: only that it should be halted so that concerns about its workability in the best interests of scottish children could be properly tested.

Our attempt failed. Labour abstained in confused chaos (Jenny Marra MsP having the courage of her convictions breaking her party’s whip to vote with us). Having formerly backed the named persons law with enthusiasm, Labour is now completely unsure where it stands.

the Liberal democrats and the Greens backed the sNP in support of the Named Persons law.

the debate was heated and ill-tempered, the sNP furious that one of its flagship policies was coming unravelled under sustained Conservative pressure. at one point John swinney screamed at me across the Chamber that an intervention I had made is one I should be ‘ashamed’ of.

so it was with a wry smile that I read in the supreme Court’s judgment yesterday precisely the same point I had been making in that June debate: that one of the key defects in the law is the lack of any ‘statutory requirement, qualified or otherwise, to inform parents of a child about the sharing of information’ about them.

Perhaps our supreme Court should be ‘ashamed’ of itself, too. after all, it has achieved what we could not: the implementation of the law has indeed now been paused.

It should not have taken a court decision to get to this point. the supreme Court identified no defect in the Named Persons law that had not already been pointed out in debates and committee hearings in the scottish Parliament.

BUt, whereas the sNP have the parliamentary numbers to ignore their political opposition, even a Nationalist government must obey the rule of law. and that is what lies at the heart of yesterday’s ruling—the rule of law.

Buried in the middle of the Court’s ruling is an extraordinary passage about dictatorship: ‘the first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influence of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world’, says the Court.

Now, there is no suggestion that this is the aim of the Named Persons law. Nonetheless, it is this passage that leads the Court to its conclusion, that ‘the obligation to give protection against arbitrary interference requires that there must be safeguards’. In the Named Persons law the safeguards are missing.

that is not merely bad politics. It is rotten law. and, contrary to Mr swinney’s view, it shames not those who have opposed this law, but those who have supported it.