MY first reaction on reading Andrew Tickell’s article was “oh really?” (Supreme Court route a dangerous one for May, April 20) In my opinion, this overly speculative article makes interesting reading, but careful observation of any of Westminster’s seemingly ill-considered actions demonstrates all too often that Westminster rarely picks a fight that it cannot win.
First off, “It isn’t about the Sewel convention...” On the contrary, I believe it is very much to do with it. Why so? The Sewel convention’s brief was the Tory Party’s plan and precursor to Brexit, the Future Governance of Scotland.
Credited to Ruth Davidson, this plan was written with the same unrestrained dubiety as in the Tory 2015 manifesto. Somewhat cunningly, Ruth Davidson was strangely silent about the plan’s intent during the 2014 referendum campaign. Moreover, it was published five months before Scotland went to the polls later that year, yet there was not the merest campaign squeak from the Tories about their final solution to the independence threat.
The plan emerged out of a bill presented by Lord Strathclyde to the House of Lords during the early stages of the Tory/LibDem coalition. The Tories empowered themselves not only to hold their own constitutional convention on the Scottish Parliament but also to legislate as they saw fit. Unsurprisingly, the ensuing deliberations were Tory-only. No invited coalition input from the LibDems, no cross-party scrutiny or independent constitutional conventions.
Brexit was unheard of yet Ruth Davidson’s Brexit precursor defied all odds and included every failed promise, the income-tax con and every devolved power now in dispute thanks to Brexit.
Secondly, Schedule 5 of the Scotland Act need not be of relevance. However, it is the post-Sewel butchery of a now almost unreadable Scotland Act where our concerns should lie, as the revised Act is now overflowing with interference with Holyrood’s powers.
Some 130 passages of text refer to exclusion of powers and/or empowerment of the appropriate minister. The obfuscated language used does not distinguish the extent to which the term “appropriate minister” might apply.
It does not rule out involvement of Westminster ministers in all Holyrood affairs, nor is this involvement constrained to those ministers already responsible for reserved matters.
This ambiguous redraft of the Scotland Act also includes some 50 or so passages of text that bestow unwanted powers to the needless position of Secretary of State for Scotland. When the changes were made, the lack of bestowing complimentary powers on UK ministers at Westminster seemed an irrelevance. That is to say not, as we now know, until Brexit law comes into force. The legislative stitch-up thus becomes self-fulfilling when the two pieces of this legislative jigsaw miraculously dove-tail together.
As for the actual power grab, well this has already happened right under our noses. Thus it is no surprise that May is taking her case to the Supreme Court, as this step is required to give legitimacy to the ambiguous Scotland Act and protect the power grab from future legal challenge. Everything Westminster does is about sovereignty.
Respectfully, we do not need speculative journalism. What we need is international Pulitzer Prize-winning standards of investigative journalism to tell the full story of Tory power abuse. Not speculate on the full range of unlikely outcomes.
Iain Jack
Blairgowrie
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