Fact-checking would aid debate
IT was, I suppose, inevitable that the Supreme Court would come under attack from nationalists aggrieved at its recent decision.
Your correspondent Peter Dryburgh (letters, November 25) expresses surprise and disappointment that Lord Reed “resorted to comparing Quebec with Scotland”. This comparison, he says, “is regularly invoked by opponents of Scottish independence but is utterly spurious”.
What Mr Dryburgh fails to mention, however is that it was those notorious “opponents of Scottish independence”, the SNP, which itself introduced reference to Quebec in its submission to the Supreme Court.
So it is perhaps not altogether surprising that Lord Reed felt compelled to deal with this issue in his judgment.
And then Frances Mckie (letters, November 28) refers to the Scotland Act 1998, and the establishment of the Supreme Court as evidence of Westminster politicians feeling “free to meddle with the unwritten British constitution whenever they feel like it”.
Since the 1998 Act established the Holyrood Parliament, does this mean that Mrs Mckie thinks that devolution should never have been allowed to take place?
She goes on to state that this meddling “included endowing that same Supreme Court with final jurisdiction over our separate Scottish legal system, including the Court of Session itself”.
This is completely misleading – the Supreme Court is essentially a rebranding of the old Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, which has long been the court of final appeal for Scottish civil cases.
He refers to Boris Johnson’s illegal prorogation of Parliament, but ironically for Mrs Mckie, it was that same Supreme Court which safeguarded the constitution by ruling that it was unlawful.
Mrs Mckie then makes the inaccurate statement that the British Empire (in which enterprise, Scots have probably been disproportionately the most active) has never peacefully surrendered any colony, finally reaching the absurd conclusion that Scotland is a colony of the country of which it is an integral part.
If those of a nationalist persuasion who regularly write to these pages were occasionally to check their facts, perhaps the continuing debate over Scotland’s future would be more constructive.
Robert Murray,
Glasgow.