You lost! UK’s top judge slaps down SNP on state snoopers
THE top judge at the UK’s highest court has embarrassed the SNP by insisting it lost its legal bid to salvage its state snooper scheme.
Supreme Court president Lady Hale said the Named Person challenge was one of the ‘most important’ recent cases.
The court ruled in 2016 that information-sharing proposals in legislation for the scheme – which aimed to monitor the well-being of children – flouted European human rights law.
A judgment warned that the ‘first thing a totalitarian regime tries to do is get at the children’ and ‘within limits, families must be left to bring up their children in their own way’.
But minutes after the publication of the judgment, Deputy First Minister John Swinney published a press release, ‘Swinney commits to roll out service as legal bid to scrap NP [Named Person] scheme fails’, and the SNP vowed to plough on with the scheme.
Now, in a speech in Edinburgh, Lady Hale has said: ‘The two most important cases recently were the Scotch Whisky Association case, where legislation for minimum unit pricing of offsales of alcohol was said to be inconsistent with EU law, and the Christian Institute case, where legislation setting up the Named Person scheme was said not only to relate to a reserved matter, but to be incompatible with the right to respect for private and family life.
‘The challenge succeeded in the Christian Institute case.’
It was the first time the court had blocked a substantive government policy.
At the time, Miss Sturgeon quoted the Supreme Court judgment and insisted the aims of the scheme were ‘legitimate and benign’ – as critics accused her of overlooking the reference to ‘totalitarian’ regimes. The Nationalists were forced to overhaul the Child and Young People (Information Sharing) (Scotland) Bill but campaigners say Mr Swinney’s changes, made in a bid to save the legislation, do not go far enough.
Yesterday, a spokesman for the No to Named Persons group said: ‘The only person who thought the case against this terrible scheme had failed was John Swinney.
‘He should be in no doubt that the Scottish Government has failed in its attempt to trample over the rights of parents and children.’