Being Supreme
I missed the whole SNP conference and the ‘I detest the Tories’ staged outrage, having a brief October break. So I am playing catch-up and observing instead the Supreme Court case play out.
Scotland’s chief law officer, the lord advocate, Dorothy Bain, has referred to the Supreme Court the question of whether the Scottish parliament requires Westminster’s consent to hold another referendum, at the request of the First Minister. Now, after only a couple of days of the case being heard the supreme court president, Lord Reed, noted that the hearing was just the “tip of the iceberg”, and that the five judges had 8,000 pages of written submissions to assess. He warned that it was “likely to be some months before we give our judgment”.
The whole thing has an odd, detached air about it. It’s a process in which we appear to have no agency.
But there are a few ‘certainties’ which people are repeating which seem far less certain on further examination. First, it’s assumed that it’s a slam-dunk that the court will rule against the Lord Advocate, and second that this will be a historic victory for the British state. The crowing and glee that surrounds this case from Unionist scribes and outriders is unedifying but instructive.
A Supreme Court decision against the Scottish Government effectively tells voters in the most explicit terms “there is no legal democratic route out of this Union”.
Telling people they are not in a voluntary Union is not the great political victory you think it is.
Second, is the legal situation actually as watertight as assumed?
Andy Wightman writes in response to a blog by David Allan Green (‘The Scottish independence referendum case before the Supreme Court‘):
“One fascinating aspect of this case is that there is no legal bar to Scottish Ministers introducing their Bill in the Scottish Parliament. The only reason the Lord Advocate is in court is because she does not have confidence as to the legislative competence of the draft Bill. The only reason she needs confidence is that she needs to sign it off before Ministers can introduce it. But the requirement to sign off Bills introduced by Scottish Ministers only exists because the Ministerial Code says it does in Section 3.4
“A Bill must also be accompanied by a statement, which will have been cleared with the Law Officers, that the Bill is within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament.
The Ministerial Code is a non-statutory document, the author of which is the First Minister. So Ministers cannot introduce this Bill because of a non-statutory rule created by the First Minister. Change the rule and Ministers can introduce the Bill.
Which begs the question as to whether the reference will be accepted given that following the Ministerial Code is arguably not a function of the LA or the Executive under the Scotland Act.”
This may be that the Scottish Government have a political opportunity they are ignoring because of the backlash it would provoke, but it may be an option they have not disclosed.
Third, even if the Scottish Government win this case, might the British government be so desperate that they issue a new law outlawing a referendum?
This might seem outrageous, but the current British government is both outrageous and desperate. Don’t rule it out.
Fourth, if the UK Govts actual position is to try and NOT come to a ruling this, again, may seem as a great victory, but actually isn’t. As Andrew Tickell has written (‘Why the UK Government wants the Supreme Court indy case thrown out’):
“If the Lord Advocate won’t sign off the bill as within Holyrood’s powers, and the Referendum Bill can’t be introduced unless she signs it off – the threat of a referendum will be once again deferred, until pro-independence politicians work out some way of bringing the proposal onto the floor of Parliament. There are obvious options, as far as it goes. They can either put the bill it into the hands of a backbencher who doesn’t benefit from the legal advice of law officers – or Nicola Sturgeon could amend the Ministerial Code to clarify the distinct roles of the Lord Advocate and the minister in charge of the bill. But things will get messy.”
Finally, opinions differ wildly on Dorothy Bain’s performance. According to David Allan Green: “My own personal view from having watched some of the hearing is that the Lord Advocate – on behalf of the Scottish government – put the case as well as it could be. In particular, she explained the legal route that the Supreme Court could take should it want to do so.”
Former Ambassador Craig Murray has a less, er, positive view: “My reading of today is that … Dorothy Bain has – not by accident, and in collusion with Sturgeon – presented so poor an argument as to make that decision virtually impossible for the court.”
What the purpose of this as a plan is not made clear by Murray.
We are supported only by our readers. We don't have corporate backers and we don't take advertising, so we rely entirely on your support.
Help to support independent Scottish journalism
It is reported that Eadie KC for the UK Gov did not respond in any way to the SNP submissiion.
the SNP argued the democratic case. I wonder why not challenged? Most of his effort was to get the case dismissed. This is same chap who appeared inthe parliamentary prorogation case for the Government.
I’m confused..surely democracy in itself is the right to ask and receive an opinion..where does the law supercede this basic human right
I presume we still have a democracy
It’s a simplistic point of view but to my mind it’s common sense…
The point is, Meg, that democracy can only function within the rule of law, which defines and guarantees the fundamental fairness, justice, and liberty of its process. If we don’t have the rule of law, democracy decays.
The Lord Advocate has asked the UK Supreme Court for a ruling, under Scots Law, on whether or not the introduction of the government’s proposed bill to the Scottish parliament would breach the law that currently defines and guarantees the fundamental fairness, justice, and liberty of our democratic process; i.e. would the introduction of that bill be constitutional or not. It’s an important question for the functioning of our democracy.
“democracy can only function within the rule of law, which defines and guarantees the fundamental fairness, justice, and liberty of its process. If we don’t have the rule of law, democracy decays.”
This is just nonsense. The fall of the Weimar Republic into fascism was done with cover of law, Ideas about democracy were explored in ancient Greece and many indigenous communities who had no concept of what we call the rule of law, implementing varying degrees of democracy even the idea of federation comes cultures without the rule of law. I would suggest taking a look at the work of Graeber, there is also a great speech by William Kunstler from the ACLU.
What we consider to be the rule of law can never be allowed to preempt democratic processes, because our legal system is a fascistic endeavor, rooted in religious ecclesiastical law, along with the Justinian codecs which were attempting to justify Roman rule during it’s collapse.
What the SNP are doing is heading off a challenge. but in it they are justifying the structures which will ultimately frustrate the process. This is not surprising considering that Sturgeon trained as a lawyer. We can see the people who want to rule, as they give more weight to these institutions than they deserve, but if you don’t want to ruled, collectively we have to stop caring what they say.
I’m not saying that the rule of law is a sufficient condition of democracy, only that it’s a necessary condition. Unless we have laws that define and guarantee the democratic process by which we’d make our public decisions, then that process couldn’t operate.
But you’re right: the laws that enable our democratic processes shouldn’t be allowed to pre-empt the process itself, which can be one of the problems with codified or ‘written’ constitutions. The laws that enable our democratic processes should themselves remain susceptible to continual improvement by democratic means. The creation of the UK Supreme Court is itself an example of how the law can democratically be thus improved (if improve it it does).
My point was, it is not a necessary condition.
Are you saying that we can have democratic processes without rules that govern those processes? I don’t see how.
@Lord Parakeet the Cacophonist, of course we can have democratic processes without written or even fixed rules, that’s how a lot of decisions get made in anarchistic groups like friendship and peer groups. You seem to not understand what you have often claimed about social contracts, which are generally unwritten and stable-but-not-fixed rulesets. But you specifically said “democracy can only function within the rule of law”, which is wrong, both theoretically in political philosophy, and empirically in political science and social psychology.
I agree: the rules by which any process functions don’t need to be written and can be subject to change. Indeed, any process whose rules can’t change won’t be adaptable to adapt to changing circumstances, which will eventually lead to its functional decay.
That’s why I agreed with Kevin, when I said that ‘the laws that enable our democratic processes shouldn’t be allowed to preempt the process itself, which can be one of the problems with codified or ‘written’ constitutions. The laws that enable our democratic processes should themselves remain susceptible to continual improvement by democratic means.’
But that doesn’t change the fact that ‘democracy can only function within the rule of law’. Without such rules, unless all citizens and institutions within a community are accountable to the same laws (a.k.a. ‘the rule of law’), there can be no democratic processes.
Talking of David Graeber, I’ve just been reviewing the posthumous publication of his book, Pirate Enlightenment, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the January of next year. In it, David focuses on the political organisation of pirate communities and, in particular, of the zana-malata, a community that’s descended from the pirates who settled on Madagascar at the beginning of the eighteenth century and which Graeber encountered while conducting ethnographic research at the very start of his academic career.
As in his other writings, David talks in Pirate Enlightenment about the importance of dialogue (open and equal interaction) as an alternative to the coercive nature of our contemporary politics and about how knowledge and other cultural traditions are continually being subverted, remade, and edited in our dialogical storytelling.
One of the stories David tells, and which he previously told in his essay on how ‘There Never Was a West’ and in his 2021 book, The Dawn of Everything, is the story of how Thomas Hobbes saw Charles Johnson’s play, The Successful Pyrate, on an English stage and how this experience influenced his political thinking by suggesting to him the idea that people could negotiate a ‘social contract’ with each other and that power could thus be organised not only vertically, from the top down, but also horizontally, between man and man. The story might well be apocryphal, but it is no less illuminating for that.
David often said that his task was to decolonise the Enlightenment and its naturalism; to subvert the idea that the way we currently live together is ‘natural’ and not merely ‘normal’ and to open our minds to the possibility of collectively choosing what kind of society we’d like to live in. Key to this task is showing how tradition (‘what’s ay been’) is nothing more than a construction of the past by elite thinkers who shape it into a particular narrative of necessity. Those elite thinkers (‘authorities’) ensure the hegemony of their constructions by eliminating alternative voices and narratives from our dialogues, thereby ‘colonising’ our collective discourse and its institutions with their particular ways of thinking.
The moral of this larger story is that periods in which state authority becomes inoperative for one reason or another, when it either ‘stops paying attention’ or is somehow weakened by internal or external crisis, become moments of liberation. It’s in such moments of crisis/liberation that voluntary interactions at ground level develop the basic meaningful contributions of democratic discourse, when truth and justice cease to be handed to us from the top down and are instead negotiated horizontally as a kind of ‘social contract’ between free and equal individuals. Building and enabling local resilience (the capacity for such voluntary interactions at grassroots level) is the work of community development, which capacity change is the real end of so-called ‘direct action’.
David also tells stories about the institutional structure of the media and how such structural factors lead to the shaping of the information systems through which our knowledge is mediated. Those stories contributed to the larger narrative of ‘manufacturing consent’.
The phrase, ‘manufacturing consent’, comes from Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, the first major state propaganda agency, which was designed to try to turn a largely pacifist population into raving Germanophobic fanatics as the Wilson administration took the US into the First World War. As in the case of Western propaganda in relation to China, Iran, and Russia today, the US government’s mission was to tell stories of atrocities and to demonise the leaders of the Imperial German regime to change public opinion and ‘manufacture consent’ for US military intervention. Such was its dramatic success, ‘manufacturing consent’ subsequently became a new dark art in the practice of Western democracy.
As David points out in his text, elite thinkers (‘authorities’) have has always been radically antidemocratic. They regard democracy as nothing more than ‘mob rule’. As Walter Lippmann, a chief architect of the Wilson administration’s anti-German propaganda campaign, put it: ‘the responsible men [of government] have to protect themselves from the roar and trampling of the bewildered herd’. Lippmann, who was considered and considered himself to be a left-wing liberal, reflected the view that democracy needs to put the public in its place as spectators, while the enlightened guys – guys like him – do the work of running society in the public’s interest.
According to David, democratic orthodoxy on both the left and the right in the 20th century was that the public is a bewildered herd, too stupid and/or too ignorant to know what’s good for it. The elite (‘The Men of the Best Quality’) had to control them in one way or another in order to keep a lid on the destructive democratic tendencies of the mob.
In Pirate Enlightenment, David tells how the democratic structures of pirate communities allowed each member of the community to shape the social environment around them. This is in contrast to our current ‘democracy’, which is built rather on institutions that prevent people from access to decisions about how they might live so that their lives can be managed instead by elite ‘authorities’. David’s opinion is that we can’t have democracy if our representation is of the ‘manufactured consent’ kind that theorists like Walter Lippmann advocated. In this kind of representation, the public’s role is just to show up periodically, cast their vote in favour of one or another member of the elite, and then go home and let them get on with running the world. The latter, according to David, is what passes for democracy in the West.
In David’s telling, democracy means the direct participation that the Madagascar pirates enjoyed in public decision-making at every level. In that decision-making, we can temporarily delegate responsibility to carry out or play some administrative role in the conduct of our public affairs, including war and domestic peacekeeping, as well as economic management and the adjudication of disputes. But if we don’t directly participate in our public decision-making, then it’s not democracy. And, of course, if we don’t have a decision-making structure like that, there’s nothing in the nature of things to stop us from developing it.
David’s storytelling is illuminating (‘enlightening’) in the sense that it undercuts a lot of our conventional thinking. Also just pointing out the many options that there are for developing more enlightened, more free societies, not just the ones encoded in our manufactured traditions, which excludes much possibility and reshapes the rest to fit the frames of our existing power systems.
I think Pirate Enlightenment is a tremendous contribution to the struggle for independence.
@Lord Parakeet the Cacophonist, or perhaps more briefly, democracy is an emergent property of groups with peer relations (which is why equality is such a big deal for democracy). Where nobody is “the boss of me”, innate conceptions of fairness lead ofttimes through socialisation to peers working out how to arrange to live in groups large enough to contain strangers.
I’m not sure that David would have owned your analogy between democracy and emergent properties (characteristics an entity gains when it becomes part of a bigger system), but he did advocate the idea of emergent democracy (the political structures and behaviours that emerge from the free actions of many individual participants in the absence of central planning). A more apt analogy would be with [Adam Smith’s conception of] free trade.
If you’re looking for an example of what emergent democracy, you could do worse than look at the crowdsourced encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. This is a global collaboration where consensus is in a state of perpetual emergence from a mass of divergent views and agendas with minimal central control.
We tend to associate democracy with nations and other state entities. But, dusting off my crystal ball, I think the state will probably be the very last locality in which democracy will emerge. Democracy is an experimental process, and, as with any experimental process, it requires the ability to fail over and over again. Far too many private party interests are at stake in national politics for failure to be acceptable to the powers that be.
We should look rather to civil society as the laboratory of emergent democracy. Already, democracy is emerging from nonprofits, activist groups, clubs, businesses, and other communities as they seek to govern themselves in a more participative manner. What used to be informal, unincorporated voluntary associations have, over the course of my career in community development, adopted legal structure and governance, assuming legal personality (the power to control assets and form contracts with others), and democratic systems of governance.
Emergent democracy has become fairly well established in our civil society; the task now is to spread its virus to the machinery of the state. There are already a few tentative experiments in community councils and other peripheral state structures. There’s still considerable resistance by private party interests, which would rather that we, the public, remained spectators rather than participants in our public decision-making, at local, national, and transnational government levels. It will be some time before we see democratic Scottish government, regardless of whether than government is ‘independent’ or not.
This connects with Joi Ito’s picture of a society where blogs and social networking platforms power planet-wide tides of opinion which coalesce around points of consensus (Emergent Democracy, Version 1.32). It also overlaps with Clay Shirky’s view of electronic systems as enablers of concerted action from disparate communities (Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators). A distinct feature of Emergent Democracy is its incorporation of formal decision-making machinery to give focus and voice to the concerns of thousands of citizens.
I can imagine a developing situation in which the virus of emergent democracy spreads from civil society to the state through conflict and negotiation between the two.
Meg, why would the Scottish F.M. ask the supreme court of ENGLAND for any opinion on anything to do with our SOVEREIGN country of SCOTLAND?
Why not ask these same courts of France, Spain or Germany etc?
There is NO confusion. F.M. Sturgeon and the executive of the NU-S.N.P. are UNIONISTS. That’s why I left and joined ALBA, which is the only TRUE independence party with the ISP and all Indy groups, which will deliver INDEPENDENCE.
The Supreme Court is the highest court of appeal for Scotland and for Northern Ireland as well as for England and Wales. As Scotland’s supreme court, it applies Scots law. It also rules on matters that pertain to the relationship between the three separate legal jurisdictions that together constitute the UK.
The Lord Advocate, the senior Scottish Law Officer, has appealed to the Supreme Court for a ruling on whether or not a bill that the Scottish government wants to introduce to the Scottish parliament would be constitutional. The Court is currently considering the legal question of whether or not the Court itself has the jurisdiction to determine the Lord Advocate’s reference and whether, if it does, should decline to determine the reference given that the bill hasn’t yet been introduced and the case remains only hypothetical?
You clearly believe (with the UK government, albeit for different reasons) that the Supreme Court doesn’t have that jurisdiction and should decline the Lord Advocate’s reference.
my feeling is that we dont need to ask anyone for permission to ask the population of scotland what they think..we dont need to call it a referendum thereby laying it open to someone elses rules of law…..just ask the question ..and then see what the result is..simple
its a corrupt convoluted system that requires permision to ask a simple question of the population living and working and dying ….they have a undeniable right to be asked and to answer
We’re not asking anyone’s permission to do anything. The Lord Advocate is referring a legal question to the Supreme Court for a ruling, the question being whether or not the Scottish government would be be acting within its constitutional rights by calling a referendum on its proposed independence without the UK government’s agreement. The legality of any such referendum is important for the credibility of its outcome. That’s because the international community would be loath to recognise the outcome of an illegal referendum because to do so would be to undermine the rule of law, on which democracy as a legal (rules-based) process depends.
The last thing an independent Scottish government would want is for the legitimacy of its independence to be disputed, which is why the Lord Advocate is going to all the trouble of referring the question of legitimacy to the Supreme Court.
Your final sentence gave me a chuckle.
Surely there is no case to answer. This matter comes under Scots Law, and both Westminster and the new ‘king’ have upheld the Claim of Right.
The Scottish people are sovereign and our Parliament represents the will of those who elected it.
So whatever the ‘Supreme Court’ decides, the Scottish people can actually reject their decision and carry on regardless. Perhaps the idea is to demonstrate that?
There is no case to answer. No case is being tried. What the Lord Advocate is asking the Supreme Court for is an opinion on a point of law in advance of the Scottish government bringing a bill before the Scottish parliament.
It’s absurd that the lord advocate is a member of the Scottish government. We are so democratic we have a member of the government who wasn’t elected never mind the scary government/legal system entanglement.
I read Craig Murray’s take on the hearings and he wants the lord advocate to be a much more political appointment, and that would involve the lord advocate being a member of the SNP.
CONGRATULATIONS to the BRITISH con artist F.M. STURGEON who has successfully KICKED THE CAN once again. All ALBA members and supporters caught on RIGHT AWAY while the NU-S.N.Ps’ laughed at Ian Blackford’s imitation of P.M. Truss. at their so-called conference.
Can any NU-S.N.P. member or supporter explain how that helped our independence cause? JUST ONE ?
Dave, do yourself a favour and bin the capitals. For me, any post with capitals is a ding-a-ling alert and just gets ignored without being read.
Hullo Wul. Point taken. Sometimes that’s the only way to get the message out.
A pity for you that precious few are listening.
Alec Lomax. It’s a pity for all Scots, not just me. I realize that as you are not Scottish or living here that your point of view is different.
I’m Scottish, dave, and my point of view is different from yours.
(And how can one be ‘Scottish’ – a participant in the civic life of the imagined community of ‘Scotland’ – without living here, within that community’s political jurisdiction. Everyone who lives here is ‘Scottish’, whatever their point of view.)
221016 alias Alec Lomax. So, what is your point of view? Please reply in as much of our Scots tongue as you can. That way all readers will understand what you are saying.
Thanks in advance. Lang mae yer lum reek.
Ach, Dauvit, man; ye’ll fuin my airtin gin ye juist onraivel the threids o thir scrievins, that I lig oot afore ye. (Ye can rade, can ye no?)
An my flytin an scatrie sall be
Wi yer fantice an mocage entwined
As the bauch Yirth is wi the lift
Or fate wi mankind!
Tho I’m no juist as bauld as aince I wis…
The elbuck fankles i the coorse o time,
The shekel’s no sae souple, an the thraipple
Grows deef an dour: nae langer up an doun
Gleg as a squirrel speils the Aidam’s aipple.
Here’s a point of view for you, in plain English. It’s based on the principles and assumptions enshrined in the United Nations’ Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.
1. All communities should, without any conditions or reservations, transfer all powers of governance to dependent communities in accordance with the freely expressed will and desire of the latter and without any distinction as to race, creed, or colour in order to enable them to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
2. Inadequacy of political, economic, social, or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence.
3. The right of a community (as asserted by the UNs’ Charter, its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and its Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples)to peacefully and freely exercise its right to complete independence should not be denied by armed action or repressive measures of any kind.
Democracy is a foundational principle to this point of view. The right to complete independence and the right to peacefully and freely exercise that independence is conditional on its being the freely expressed will and desire of the dependent community. Not just the majority will, but the general will of that community, the consensus or ‘social contract’ that emerges from a discourse that takes place under the conditions of an ‘ideal speech situation’.
An ideal speech situation is one in which the members of a community are able to evaluate each other’s assertions solely on the basis of reason and evidence in an atmosphere that’s completely free of any non-rational (‘coercive’) influences, both physical and psychological, and motivated solely by the desire to obtain a rational consensus. More specifically, it’s a situation in which: every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse; everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever; everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse; everyone is allowed to express their attitudes, desires and needs without any hesitation or reservation; .and no speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his free speech.
The practical problem in our contemporary politics, then, is how (by what practical mechanisms) do we ascertain the general will of a community, how do we enact (or near enough enact) the requirements of an ideal speech situation that will determine as its outcome whether or not, and under what conditions, Scotland (say) should be an independent community.
What we need is not a referendum, in which the winner takes all and imposes its will on the loser, but a proper national conversation in an atmosphere that’s completely free of any non-rational (‘coercive’) influences, both physical and psychological, and motivated solely by the desire to obtain a rational consensus of the community as a whole.
No wonder bojo worked to reinvent this charter……to fit his narrative…..
I wonder why are our Scottish govt still stalling…
221016 / Alec Lomax / 2210 etc etc. etc. Thank you for the poem. However, I asked you for your point of view in the Scots language. Anyone can get your deflected answer from the net. Scottish, no you are not. A resident of Scotland, you are not.
The poem wasn’t mine; it was part of the dedication and opening stanzas from Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Chris Grieve (who created and performed the character, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’) was my mentor when I was at the school, who nourished my fledgling interest in philosophy and encouraged me to serve an apprenticeship in the craft. ‘MacDiarmid’ was and remains the point of departure from which my point of view continues to evolve dialectically. You asked for that point of view (my ‘look at the thistle’) in Scots, and ‘MacDiarmid’ expresses the trajectory of that outlook most admirably.
But tell me… why do you think I’m not ‘Scottish’? And why does it matter to you?
221017. alias Alec Lomax. You are the one who posted that you have a different point of view than me. Yet you don’t know what your p.o.v. is. You said you are Scottish but can’t answer in Scots. Copying a poem? Come on. I don’t have time to waste posting to someone who uses umpteen
nom de plumes. You don’t even seem to know that Scotland is a sovereign country.
Every success to you in whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. It certainly isn’t our independence.
And yet here you are, wasting your time, posting to a protean pseudonym. Go figure!
Regarding what I’m trying to accomplish: a long time ago, one of the points of view I posted on another blog self-identified as ‘Clegg’. You know what a ‘cleg’ is in the Scots language, don’t you?
Regarding sovereignty: I know that the more fascistic elements amongst the independentistas want to make Scotland a sovereign nation. Sovereignty is the defining authority within individual consciousness, social construct, or territory. The trouble I have with sovereignty is that, as well as external autonomy for states, it thus entails hierarchy within the state. I’m not keen on defining authorities and their hierarchies; they’re hegemonies that need to be resisted.
Presumably the possibility that introducing such a Bill would count as felony treason might have exercised the legal minds on this case?
“If any person whatsoever shall, within the United Kingdom or without, compass, imagine, invent, devise, or intend to deprive or depose our Most Gracious Lady the Queen [sic], from the style, honour, or royal name of the imperial crown of the United Kingdom, or of any other of her Majesty’s dominions and countries, … and such compassings, imaginations, inventions, devices, or intentions, or any of them, shall express, utter, or declare, by publishing any printing or writing … or by any overt act or deed, every person so offending shall be guilty of felony, and being convicted thereof shall be liable … to be transported beyond the seas for the term of his or her natural life.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason_Felony_Act_1848#Text
since such a Bill is surely a device to deprive the Queen’s successor of the country of Scotland?
Will the Treason Felony Act finally be repealed by the time this judgement is due?
Will we know what use the King makes of Crown Consent (we have not in Scotland reached Ruritanian escape velocity yet) on the royal pre-vetting of this (potential) Bill? Was that not a special cause of Andy Wightman recently?
“…or of any other of her Majesty’s dominions and countries,…”
Hopefully the 65 countries which have gained independence from the UK in recent times have set a precedent?
Given that our current Govt. are in receipt of dark money requiring that they trash our economy to please their paymasters, they may not be too keen to bandy the “treason” word about.