The TNT Show with Stephen Flynn
The TNT Show on Independence Live interviews Stephen Flynn MP and later myself on where we are …
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Why is he even in London? The SNP are a waste of time and I hope they are destroyed in the GE. He should look at how Sinn Féin did it in 1920.
@Alan C, the Houses of Parliament have an apparently excellent library resource with competent and diligent staff, so if a constituent asks their MP a difficult question, they can often pass it on and receive an informed answer. This is especially good for information not available on public-access websites, including information that any current government may not be keen on the public knowing.
Flynn is going nowhere, if he accepts his own idea that the Westminster cess pit is sovereign over Scotland.
He cannot come to admit it.
His deference stands out.
He’s no idea how to get self-determination.
He sounds like a lackey.
Disgracefull
A wee clarification:
The Westminster system of government (of which Holyrood in a fine example) locates sovereignty in parliament, which is nowdays a popular assembly of the proxies we elect to represent us in that assembly. In electing those representatives, we alienate our sovereignty as autonomous individuals (collectively ‘the people’) to parliament. This sovereignty is returned to the people whenever and for so long as the parliament is dissolved and a general election is held.
Stephen is thus right insofar as the UK parliament, which sits in Westminster, is the assembly to which the UK electorate, acting as that electorate, alienates its sovereignty to that assembly, in exactly the same way that the Scottish parliament, which sits at Holyrood, is the assembly to which the Scottish electorate, acting as that electorate, alienates its sovereignty to that assembly. That’s just the way the Westminster system of representative democracy works (at least, in principle; in practice, the system is vitiated by several mediating factors that distort its functioning).
That said, sovereignty isn’t centralised in the British Isles; it’s alienation is diffused throughout the various representative assemblies through which we manage our public affairs at local, national, and supranational levels. Some of that sovereignty is invested in out local councils, some in the Scottish parliament, and some in the UK parliament. When we were members of the EU, a modicum was invested also in the EU parliament; but we (the UK electorate) decided we wanted to take back even that small modicum.
The point is that, while we might wish to take back the sovereignty we’re invested in the UK parliament and alienate it to the Scottish parliament instead, Stephen is right inasmuch as we at present alienate some of our sovereignty to our representatives who sit in the Palace of Westminster.
It’s all nicely laid out , well done , unfortunately the truth is stranger than fiction.
To actually believe , we have democracy, is just another fallacy, a veneer, unionist councils, and parliamentarians.
Settler colonialist , lackeys and grifters.
Even the medias are biased towards their
English system of control, under the facade of ” The UK ”
If we had any ounce of democracy we would have at best a constitution where all citizens
Know the lines and boundaries are to protect them from the corrupt fraudulent shyster systems we are being subjected to.
Yes the façade is there , and you put it so succinctly its the propagandist historical accountable way isn’t it.
The English citizenry are led to believe they took back control, by Brexit, yet the evidence
When you look around right now globally is to the contrary.
And it’s worrying. Heartbreaking watching the slaughter and a feeling of helplessness and anger all at once.
I agree that our system of representative democracy is flawed, insofar as it admits the distortion of the general will of society rather than allows the emergence of such a will through the processes of our public decision-making, but I suspect you’d be hard put to provide evidence that would support your claim that our system of representative democracy is a ‘veneer’ that hides a conspiracy of ‘[s]ettler colonialists, lackeys and grifters’. That’s what the right-wing populists would have us believe.
The Flynn couldn’t get away fast enough.
Is that the flying Flynn, then.
Jeez, help ma boab.
It’s a simple question where are we with your constitutional convention.
We don’t have competent politicians .
Ones that stand for the cause.
Even the insult that Westminster is sovereign.
Tell that to all those countries who are now independent.
They’re so so mercurial, like grabbing a feral cat.
AI surely. The sentence structure gives it away I think.
AI is better than that.
I dispute the early characterisation of sovereignty. The official Royal UK website is clear on who the sovereign is:
https://www.royal.uk/role-monarchy
and this is tied into the discussion later on why Sinn Fein doesn’t take its seats in Westminster: to become a Member of Parliament you have to swear loyalty to the sovereign. Not that Sinn Fein was always republican.
Rather than sovereignty being a representation of divine or popular will, I suggest those concepts are linked to the maldevelopment of politics, and would rather have a biospheric sovereignty whose essence was health, and whose authority was distributed, which would form an alternative approach to a new Scottish constitution, one which would indeed be the kind of rupture, ecological and social, that Mike Small talks about.
Well there’s sovereignty and sovereignty… The sovereignty of a state is certainly embodied in the person of the titular head of state (i.e. the monarch or the president; a.k.a. ‘the Sovereign’), but (in the Westminster system of government at least) that sovereignty itself derives from the constituent subjects of that state, who alienate it to their proxies in parliament, who legislate on their behalf.
Rather than appoint biologists to run our public affairs of behalf of life in general, we could arrange our public decision-making to ensure that as much of it as possible is carried out directly, by ourselves, in our real communities, rather than indirectly, through proxies, in a hierarchy of ever more abstract, ‘imagined’ communities, and to ensure that the public decision-making that affects more than one community is carried out inter-communally, under strict conditions of subsidiarity. In other words, we could arrange our public decision-making to ensure that it’s carried out in much the same way it’s already conducted in civil society (more or less) rather than it’s currently conducted in the state. Less centralisation, more diffusion of decision-making power or ‘sovereignty’.
Not that that’s ever going to happen.
If, as there seems to be, a division over sovereignty why has there been no challenge in the CHR to the Supreme court ruling? Surely the peoples of every nation have a right to self determination.
@Gerry Robertson, not in a (quasi-)constitutional monarchy. The Crown and the constitution:
“The royal prerogative is one of the most significant elements of the UK’s constitution.”
yet
“The precise scope of prerogative powers is difficult to determine.”
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8885/
This brings the British Empire/UK into conflict within international organisations like the United Nations and historically the European Union, which have more codified norms, although NATO is fine with thermonuclear monarchy.
And yet a comprehensive survey of those prerogative powers was published by the Ministry of Justice in 2009 (The Governance of Britain: Review of the Executive Royal Prerogative Powers: Final Report). You can download it from the Commons Library.
Also:
The existence and extent of prerogative powers is a matter of common law, making the courts the final arbiter of whether a particular type of prerogative power exists. Parliament may legislate to modify, abolish, or simply put on a statutory footing any particular prerogative power.
Prerogative powers are abolished by clear words in statute or where the abolition is necessarily implied. The prerogative powers of government are, under the Westminster system, thus severely limited.
Those powers are further limited by three fundamental principles, which are:
1. The supremacy of statute law (Where there’s a conflict between the prerogative and statute, statute prevails).
2. Use of the prerogative remains subject to the common law duties of fairness and reason and is therefore subject to judicial review.
3. While the prerogative can be abolished or abrogated by statute, it can never be broadened.