I posted this comment on Twitter this morning:
How did we get to the point where there is no legal way for a refugee to apply to get into the UK and no legal way for a Scotland to leave it? The two are very clearly connected by the power structures that created both situations.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) November 25, 2022
I deliberately added the last sentence. Without it I suspect I would have been accused of being tasteless, but I am not.
My point is very simple. It is that the hierarchies of power in a country without a constitution are being used to deny what are legitimate rights. One is the legal right to apply for asylum in the UK. The other is the right of a country to leave a voluntary union of nations.
Suella Braverman came unstuck in the first issue when questioned by one of her own backbenchers in parliament this week. She could not explain how the legal right of a refugee seeking asylum could be exercised.
Tory and Labour politicians have collectively failed to explain how Scotland can exercise its legal right, which they claim exists, when they collectively wish to veto its exercise.
Ultimately neither position is sustainable. But, more tellingly, nor is the power structure that has let this position develop. Sometime the whole corrupt edifice of the two-party political hierarchy in Westminster is going to collapse.
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I agree with you that it’s going to collapse. My guess is that it will happen after a period of increasingly brutal authoritarianism and will be part of a process of rapid decline due to the ecosystem death spiral. Interesting times and all that.
The UK has a constitution. It is just not (or at least not all) written down. Personally I support a written constitution, but it is not a panacea. Particularly if we have a government with scant regard to the rule of law.
The honest answer that Braverman was reluctant to give is that for most refugees there is no legal route into the UK, but if they can get here (illegally) they will be entitled to claim asylum.
And for Scotland, the route to independence goes through Westminster. It always has. Supporters of independence need to create a political environment where it would be unconscionable not to put the question to the peoples of Scotland again.
How do you think Scotland can do that, peacefully?
“[U]nconscionable”, to whom? Westminster, presumably. What will count as “unconscionable”? Almost certainly nothing whatsoever, because the loss of Scotland represents an unconscionable existential threat to “Britain” and the final dashing against the wall of the gtand post-Brexit hopes (dreams ….. illusions) of England itself (and in addition, Scotland has almost all the future energy resources counted on, with any hope of avoiding dependence on ‘world markets’ for the long term foreseeable energy future).
Even Alister Jack, a doggedly obtuse Unionist, I think interprets that differently – the Supreme Court has finally cleaned out most of the Unionist hiding places used to date, to evade the ‘crunch’ question. Jack relies on the development of a “feeling”, in Scotland. He did not define what he meant (but in Conservative conceptual terms? How to put this – when the herd moves, it moves). In Scotland that means the little semi-autonomous oligarchies finally see a need to shift, and what starts at one end of the country as a ‘nod’, eventually feeds round to a ‘wink’ at the other end (Chatham House Rules). Actually quite a lot happened with the Court decision beyond the usual waffle, and all the little gemlins are already popping out the Unionist Pandora’s Box.
Unconscionable to the MPs who would have to pass the legislation in Westminster to authorise the referendum. And ultimately unconscionable to their electors in England.
For me, it would be a matter of regret – my father is Scottish, and both of his parents were Scottish, although he lived in England for most of his life, and I consider myself to be British and English and European in that order – but like I suspect a lot of English people I don’t want to hold Scotland in a union against the will of its peoples.
Not entirely off topic, but I was musing this morning why it may be that so many Conservative leaders today seem to be quite so flawed. Liars, or bullies, or just plain incompetent. Perhaps you get this in any group of people, but it is not clear to me that the cream rises to the top. If they are being selected for their abilities, something has gone seriously wrong with the selection criteria.
”I was musing this morning why it may be that so many Conservative leaders today seem to be quite so flawed. Liars, or bullies, or just plain incompetent.”
They are damaged by their upbringing and time at boarding school, magnifying sociopathic tendencies.
That might explain some of it, for some of them, but not for example Dominic Raab (Dr Challoner’s), or Liz Truss (Roundhay), or Prit Patel (Watford Grammar, for a time, probably), or Suella Braverman (Heathfield), or Grant Shapps (Watford Grammar and Cassio College), or Michael Gove (Robert Gordon’s College), or Nadhim Zahawi (King’s College School, for a time), or Matt Hancock (King’s, Chester), or Gavin Williamson (Raincliffe, and Scarborough Sixth Form). Some of their schools were selective and many are fee paying, but not boarding schools.
Andrew,
I lived in Surrey for ten years, but I don’t think such resonances or associations really fix the deeper problems. Allow me to touch on just one; from among a rich menu from which I could select. Scotland has a very serious, deep demographics problem (more serious and much more urgent than in England), that the EU had assisted very modestly to begin to alleviate; brought to a sharp end by Brexit. The longer term trend of population decline is already reasserting itself. At the same time Scotland’s universities have thrived in the environment of immigration. In Scotland immigration (not for any reason of virtue, but circumstance) is just not the vicious political issue it is in England. It is a solution to Scotland’s demographic time-bomb wrought by the appalling decision over Brexit. It is not mere sentiment that provides support in Scotland for the EU (Incidentally, for reasons already given, the whole history of our law is to work closely – closer than almost any other legal system – with other, even ‘foreign’ jurisdictions. If we can live with English law be assured, the EU Court of Justice gives us no issues then or now – that is our law’s history – a hybrid).
In Britain immigration has decanted the country’s sense of wise Governance. Whatever suits England, Scotland simply cannot afford Sunak’s proposals over foreign students to be sustained, for example (merely as an example of the consequences); it just isn’t sustainable if Scotland is to have any future of hope.
Thank you
Well put
“It always has.” When you get to my age, you realise that a little over 300 years is not, in fact, all that long a time in the wider scale of things and certainly does not merit the description of “always”.
“Tory and Labour politicians have collectively failed to explain how Scotland can exercise its legal right, which they claim exists, when they collectively wish to veto its exercise”
It is all positioning – neither wants to be in gov when Scotland leaves – which would then lead to finger pointing on the part of the party out of gov (you lost Scotland etc etc). Politics trumping ethics/morality/common sense/legality. It always has in the Uk and always will – for as long as there is a two-party state, Punch and Judy writ large & beyond pathetic. A bunch of bloody chimps could make a better fist of things.
As a Scot living in England I understand the concerns of family and friends have over independence and have great sympathy with them. I also have concerns about what I have read about the pragmatics of achieving it. My major concern, however, is with the Westminster attitude.
The 1707 Act of Union opens with the following statement; I. ‘That the two Kingdoms of (fn. 1) Scotland and England, shall, upon the first Day of May next ensuing the Date hereof, and for ever after, be united into one Kingdom by the Name of Great-Britain’. This is the basis of Westminster’s refusal to grant Scotland leave to hold an independence referendum. Four words are in dispute, ‘and for ever after’. As argued by Tom Paine in The Rights of Man the counter assertion is that no Government can ever hold authority to gift itself powers that they alone hold in perpetuity. The citizen of a future generation has an inalienable right to reaffirmation. The enthusiasm to deny that right to exercise fundamental democratic authority should be of concern to everyone be they English, Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish.
“The 1707 Act of Union opens with the following statement; I. ‘That the two Kingdoms of (fn. 1) Scotland and England, shall, upon the first Day of May next ensuing the Date hereof, and for ever after, be united into one Kingdom by the Name of Great-Britain’. This is the basis of Westminster’s refusal to grant Scotland leave to hold an independence referendum. Four words are in dispute, ‘and for ever after’.”
And that would be fine except for a number of things that must confound it;
1. The rest of the Treaty and associated Acts make provisions for certain obligations to be kept. If those obligations are not kept, the Treaty is breached and may be terminated if the breach is deemed serious enough by the party that suffered from that breach. Curiously enough, it is always the same party, Scotland, that suffers from the many breaches there have been to date, Brexit being the most egregious and recent one.
2. The Treaty did not grant ‘unlimited sovereignty’ to the new UK Parliament because one of the obligations was to uphold Scotland’s own constitution permanently. Scotland’s national sovereignty is embodied in its people, not in its monarch, nor its parliament, and both have been subject to judgement and punishment in the past for breaching the constitutional rights of the Scots. Scotland’s constitution derives its authority from its people’s sovereignty. Breaching Scotland’s constitution or the sovereignty of its people is itself a breach of the Treaty. Brexit certainly smashed that sovereignty by setting aside the overwhelming decision of the sovereign Scots to Remain in the EU.
3. The only sovereignty Westminster can wield over Scotland is Scotland’s own, delegated to Westminster by the inclusion in its parliament of the Scots MPs who alone wield Scotland’s sovereignty on behalf of the sovereign Scots. There is no legitimate basis for England’s MPs to be able to exercise that Scottish sovereignty by themselves, not only without Scots MPs approval, but even against the unanimous rejection by the Scots MPs. Where did the sovereignty to enable that come from? It cannot have come from England as English sovereignty stops at the border.
4. The UK Parliament does not own the Treaty, the Treaty owns it. It is not for Westminster to deprive the original owners of the Treaty their right to revoke the Treaty. Those owners were the signators to the Treaty, neither of which were the UK Parliament.
5. As Westminster has said on more than one occasion, ‘no parliament can bind the hands of a future parliament.’ The ‘for ever after’ is no more than a fervent hope.
6. By denying the people of Scotland the right to leave but not the means of exerting that right, Westminster is right in the middle of a moral hazard, because it is undoubtedly the subject of a conflict of interest. As the so-called joint parliament of two kingdoms, it is preserving the interests of one kindom over the interests of the other. And as ever, when push comes to shove it is Scotland’s interests that are set aside for the ‘benefit of the UK as a whole’. And that last phrase is worth unpacking in depth, all by itself.
Thanks
Nothing like proper detail to hit the nail squarely on the head.
“Brexit certainly smashed that sovereignty by setting aside the overwhelming decision of the sovereign Scots to Remain in the EU” – the killer fact. So, no more pretence Nicola Stugeon you have the right to assert independence now. This should be broadcast as widely as possible. Let’s hear Nicola explain away this and still go on about permission of the UK PM.
Thanks Michael for some very useful information. My gut feeling is we have to use Statute to undermine the UK Gov’s stance. They can’t be seen to ignore or pervert the rule of law and the whole question of their right to foist the UK Supreme Court as being a higher court than Scots Law gets us into territory that goes against the letter and spirit of the Treaty of Union 1707. My half-joking suggestion that Holyrood should resile from the Treaty of Union starts to take on more substance the more we examine Statute.
My usual proofreading failed in my comment above. The first part of item 6 should read; “By conceding the people of Scotland the right to leave but not the means of exerting that right, …”. The original was a mess, which must have been confusing.
My apologies.
The only way Scotland can get independence “legally” is if English political parties see their plight and vote for it in Parliament. At the moment only the Green party is sympathetic to the Scots’ dilemma and due to the growing climate and ecological crisis may increase their MPs but this will be a long process as Labour, Tory and Libs are too wedded to the present unequal power system.
I think that you’re correct: the two-party system will collapse and I can imagine sometime in the not too distant future. I can only hope that whatever progressive elements are present in Westminster at that time have the ability to respond. That much needed, new left-of-centre party would be very welcome right about now.
Yes, a new left of centre party would be very welcome, but I think we’re much more likely to see a new right of centre party. You certainly hear more about that in the media, with Farage staying relevant by popping up all the time to rant about us “not controlling our borders”. I saw something the other day about how 40% of those questioned would welcome a new party headed by him. Of course, they might have asked a quite specific group of people, but it’s not the sort of new party I’d like.
40% would give a new party a landslide, Tory got in with 23% of voting public.
I put this on https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2022/11/scotland-in-chains/comment-page-2/#comment-1030065
sustainabilty. 500, 000 net migrants this year. Usually, a million every three years net. How is Britain going to cope. We know there are millions of desperate people who want to move west but when it is the young , who are the only ones who can grow their country, this is unsustainable for them and us. With all our social services overwhelmed and trained top people from countries which have little in the form of social services quit and leave their homeland , those who remained are doomed to live on western charity. Watch Tv. britain is paved with gold for they who leave, We suck in all their professionals and they abandon their compatriots
The number is total nonsense and includes students
Stop hyper ventilating and ask instead how are we going to suruv7vevwithour migration
We never have
I come from a migrant finally, of course
There is a legal way for Scotland to leave the Union. Of course the government in Westminster is a barrier.
If the there was a substantial body of opinion in Scotland for independence then Westminster would be under considerable pressure to authorise another referendum.
The problem is there isn’t. On the 4th of November politics.co.uk reported the following from a poll, 5% didn’t know and 50.8% were for no and 49.2 for Yes.
There is a huge amount of wind being expended for independence. They don’t have it in the bag, far from it.
I’d go as far as saying that the Nats are in the same position as the Leavers were before 2016. Lots of emotion and making a huge amount of noise but there are no substantive policy options on issues like currency, central bank etc. etc. Sounds like the leavers and we know where that has ended.
Finally I think you are conflating two different issues. Government policy on Asylum and Immigration is driven by fear of the right wing of Tories and the likes of UKIP. Essentially an electoral calculation.
Scottish independence is a different issue and one far more complicated. Asylum is a humanitarian issue.
Scottish independence is about identity and belief.
I am posting this just to show the sort of nonsense some people have to offer and which I have to waste my time reading
You don’t have to read it Richard. Anyway.
We are able to disagree. You are at liberty to regard my response as nonsense.
I am at liberty to still regard you as conflating two different issues.
Best wishes etc.
K
Two points on Kane’s post
(1) Polls don’t decide election outcomes and the reliability of polls is dictated by the nature and precise wording of the question as well as by the composition of the sample (is it truly representative of public opinion)?
(2) “Scottish independence is about identity and belief”. Sorry but that’s naive – it’s about a whole lot more than that. For starters try democratic rights, a fairer society, a government that acts in the interests of, and is answerable to, the Scottish people, international trade and cultural exchange (scuppered by Brexit), a fairer tax system, the economic flexibility of having our own currency etc, etc. In short, it’s about being a grown-up nation that manages its own affairs.
Thanks
we read you comments and learn and contribute. You work too hard and risk burnout. slow down a bit
I have worked at this rate for 40 years
I have not burned out yet
But thanks for your concern
No legal way to come to the UK? Utter nonsense. There is a perfectly legal way for people to apply to come to the UK.
Details are here:
https://www.gov.uk/claim-asylum
Since the ONS estimate around 1.1m people came to the UK last year, it is obvious that this is a route known to many but not apparently by you.
Nor known to the Hime Secretary because to use this route you have to be here and there is no legal way to get here to app,y fir asylum
You are the one peddling untruths.
Kids born from the millennium onwards will drive the change.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s in a working class family and managed to get on the housing ‘ladder’ without parental support but I think kids from 00 onwards will struggle. They’ve grown up aware of climate change and seen their elders’ inaction.
They’ve seen student debt levels rise to ridiculous levels and their living standards slide.
They won’t have enough of a share in the economy to feel invested enough to defend it.
They will drive the change. the current generation are too embedded in legacy thinking.
At some point it will kick off.