Wings Over Scotland

This makes it even more dispiriting that the SNP didn’t withdraw in 2015 in order to highlight this fact. Although the rump of 3 might have fulfilled the letter of the law it would have drawn attention to the inequity.

Alf’s comment arose from the details of a report of the Lords Privileges Committee, which had been asked to determine if an Act abolishing the right of hereditary lords to attend Parliament would breach the Treaty of Union.

The Committee argued that it wouldn’t, on the grounds that they only represent Scotland’s peers, and not Scotland the kingdom. It is only Scotland’s MPs who represent Scotland in the Union, and the lords referred several times to the need for Scotland to have adequate MP representation in the parliament if the Treaty was not to be breached and Parliament to be legally unable to function.

But at no time did they define what ‘adequate’ meant in the context of that representation.

Scotland’s representation is seriously inadequate because it is patently obvious that our MPs cannot effectively defend any of Scotland’s interests under the current voting system used in the Commons from predatory activity by England’s MPs, who can simply overrule the Scots MPs on any matter by nothing more meaningful than hugely asymmetric raw MP numbers.

Sovereignties, constitutions, Treaty obligations, reasoned arguments, even the simple fairness of a properly nuanced vote acknowledging the two sovereignties of the kingdoms that founded and empowered the Union and its parliament, as opposed to the 558 (now 650) non-sovereign constituencies that didn’t, all conveniently ignored and set aside as irrelevant by a hopelessly inappropriate flat vote in the Commons.

How many times does it have to be said?

Scotland agreed to joint governance WITH England, not unilateral governance BY England!

Aidan, your ‘near universal opinion’ is plain wrong, and based on deep ignorance of the true constitutional basis of the Union.

The Treaty’s alleged extinguishment was certainly NOT the reason the Lords Committee came to its conclusion. If it had been, A, it would have said so, and B, if the Treaty’s irrelevance was already well understood by the Parliament’s establishment as you suggest, the Committee wouldn’t even have been asked the question in the first place. That it was asked, and that the lords made the point several times that Scotland’s representation in the Union parliament needed to be adequate or the Treaty and Union would fall, makes it abundantly clear that the Treaty is still very much a live constitutional contract. Ignorance of constitutions and sovereignties and even what good democracy looks like is no excuse.

Westminster does NOT have full authority over the Treaty. Some of its terms or articles allow for some amendment, but others do not, and both the Union and its parliament are formal creations of the Treaty, and therefore subject to its authority, and not the other way around.

All you are doing here is falling for the English establishment’s oft repeated and unwarranted presumption of the Union Parliament’s ‘unlimited parliamentary sovereignty’, a sovereignty it acquired from England’s Bill of Rights pre Treaty. That sovereignty only has standing over the territories of the English Kingdom, and has none whatsoever over Scotland. The only authority the Union parliament does have over Scotland is that which was delegated to it from Scotland in the first place via the Treaty. Note! Delegated to the Union parliament, not to England’s MPs! And that delegation turned up as Scotland’s MPs on Westminster’s doorstep, carrying with them the right to exert Scottish authority on behalf of Scotland as part of Westminster’s suite of powers over the Union.

Scotland’s delegation did NOT include ‘unlimited parliamentary sovereignty’ over Scotland, because such parliamentary sovereignty never existed in Scotland to be delegated. And the authority that was delegated came with limits.

One of the limits is the obligation to maintain permanently the authority of Scotland’s constitution as cited in Scotland’s 1689 Claim of Right. That is therefore still on Scotland’s statute books, and is still in force today, and as Alex Salmond pointed out on King Charles III’s accession; “It can hardly be argued that the Claim of Right is merely a historical curiosity, when one of the first acts of the new King is to be required to swear an oath to uphold it!“

As for the UK’s Supreme Court, its position simply mirrors the English establishment’s bogus position. Did you seriously expect otherwise?

Your analysis of the matter is inept. The committee clearly took the view that the provisions of the Treaty’s Article XXII did not deny Parliament the right to amend the numbers contained in it with respect to Scotland’s representation in the two Houses, and anyway Article XXII of the Treaty had already been repealed in its entirety in the 19th century.

They agreed, quite rightly in my view, that the peers of both Scotland and England did not and do not formally represent either kingdom; they only represent their peerages. They agreed that it was the MPs in the Commons that formally represent their respective kingdoms, and that those representations must be adequate to their purpose, of “their rights, interests and aspirations”. But Scotland’s rights, interests and aspirations are fundamentally undefendable by Scotland’s MP representation because of England’s huge MP numbers deployed in the Commons flat vote system used for settling the outcomes of debates. Thus it is clear that Scotland’s representation is not remotely adequate in the context of that flat vote.

It also the case that your “application of the treaty is “not an issue that needs to be resolved here”, because it is a matter for the courts, and that the courts have consistently upheld the principal of unlimited parliamentary sovereignty” misrepresents the context it was made in. That context was that the Committee did not have to resolve matters of whether or not the Treaty’s provisions were justiciable, since “the court has always been able to find another route for the disposal of the argument, making it unnecessary to resolve the question whether there was a breach of the Union Agreement.” And the phrase “and that the courts have consistently upheld the principal of unlimited parliamentary sovereignty” appears to be your addition, not contained in the Committee’s considerations. At least I couldn’t find it, or anything similar. Not that that matters since I routinely deny any argument regarding Westminster’s so-called ‘unlimited parliamentary sovereignty’, UPS for short, as the fundamental basis for any denial of the rights of Scotland within the Union, since that UPS has never had any basis in Scotland, and there is no mention of it in the Treaty or Acts of Union, and Scotland’s own sovereignty isn’t subordinate to England’s anyway.

As for your “What they did consider was IF the ToU were to apply, would the proposed removal of certain members of the House of Lords be in breach of it.”  They said no such thing at all, there was no IF about it; there was a clear presumption that the Treaty’s provisions would apply, and thus the relevant provisions needed to be evaluated for the context of the question referred.

Bottom line, you are just bullshitting!

The “Supreme Court” was a creation of Teflon Tony and crew and obviously post dates the Act of Union so the one could not forestall specifically and by name the latter.
Indeed it’s been argued that the “Supreme Court” and Tony’s other git “The Scotland Act” both break or flout the provisions of the Act of Union.
Using these recent “manifestations” to justify themselves and their political motivated legal interpretations is legalese sophistry which if the tables were turned they would undoubtedly argue to the contrary.
The “Supreme Court” as an entity runs contrary to the terms of the act of Union, the passage of time in no way waters one down to suit a later artificial construct; otherwise what of Constitutionally devoid merry old Englands Magna Carta?
I suspect the “Supreme Court” would act differently there..