Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Enough To Make One Swear
Would not Royal Assent to any legislation for Scottish indepedence be a breach of the Coronation Oath? I can't see how anything else might be the case. But my main point remains as ever: that the dissolution of the United Kingdom, if it is morally or constitutionally possible at all, is a matter for the whole United Kingdom, acting as such.
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Well they did not have much consultation when the Irish Free State was created. It was brought about by a Treaty negotiated by a represenatives of the British government and a delegation of Sinn Fein members representing the Dail government. The Treaty was then ratified by the British Parliament and the second Dail (the underground rebel legislature composed of members of Sinn Feinn - the first Dail was composed of Sinn Fein members who boycotted the Westminster Parliament - they won 73 out of 105 constituancies in the 1918 election and set up their own outfit).
ReplyDeleteThe 29th has just been dissolved for elections on the 24th of May. I am sure President Mary McAleese asked the Queen permission to do so.
I meant the 29th Dail.
ReplyDeleteForgot to ask, do you think that the 1707 Act of Union is more enforceable than the 1800 Act of Union?
ReplyDeleteRemember they had a referendum on the status of Northern Ireland in the 1970's.
"Well they did not have much consultation when the Irish Free State was created"
ReplyDeleteMore is the pity. Is that a happy precedent? I think not.
"they [Sinn Fein] won 73 out of 105 constituencies in the 1918 election and set up their own outfit"
Which they had absolutely no authority to do. One might add that Sinn Fein would have had no hope whatever of that number of seats if everyone at the Front had been home by then. The continuing existence of the Irish regiments of the British Army are among the many things that bear out this view.
"do you think that the 1707 Act of Union is more enforceable than the 1800 Act of Union?"
Yes. The 1800 Act was dissolved (in so far as it was) before the current democratic criteria became applicable in practice. See above.
The United Kingdom is my country, and no one has the right to take it away from me.
Yes, but precedent is precedent and Sinn Feinn won the local government elections in 1919 when the soldiers were back. They took I believe about 27 county authorities - on a reduced vote from the 1918 election.
ReplyDeleteServing in the British Army it should be noted did not automatic guarantee of loyalty to the British state. This was demonstrated by veterans Tom Barry (Mesopatania veteran later IRA commandant for South Cork), Emmet Dalton (Holder of the MC and later Michael Collin's aide de camp and general in the Irish Army)and of course Erskine Childers (former intelligence officer in both Boer and WWI and holder of the DSO for leading the first carrier born aircraft reconnisance mission in British Military history). Also Childers cousin Robert Barton, an Anglo-Irish landowner from Wicklow who helped put down the Easter Rising as an army major only to switch sides and later to become one of the Sinn Feinn delegates in the negotiation of the creation of the Free State.
Anyway, to return to Scotland.
The fact is that long ago it has been conceeded from Thatcher to Donald Dewar that Scotland has the right to self-determination if it so chose. At the moment there is only minority support for independence - about 25-33% on average which bobs up and down.
Sometimes support for independence outstrips support for the SNP. Sometimes support for the SNP outstrips independence (which seems to be the present situation).
I believe (despite the Scottish surname) that you are English and maybe not too aware of the constituational niceties over the Border. In Scotland soverignty lies with the people as ruled by Lord Cooper in McCormack v HM Advocate (1953). Cooper ruled 'Considering that the Union legislation extinguished the Parliaments of England and Scotland and replaced them by a new Parliament, I have difficulty in seeing why it should have been supposed that the new Parliament of Great Britain must inherit all the peculiar characteristics of the English Parliament but none of the Scottish Parliament, as if all that happened in 1707 was that the Scottish representatives were admitted to the Parliament of England. That is not what was done.
'The principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctly English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law.'
This was invoked often enough during the constitutional convention that met in the late eighties/early nineties to set up the framework for the Scottish Parliament. To the annoyance of the Tories and was boycotted by the SNP. However the thing they created a blueprint for is now alive.
As the UK exists by the Treaty of Union, would not Scotland, England and the rump of Ireland be the sucessor states? There is no treaty with Wales. All England did in 1536 and 1542 was incorporate a conquered territory into itself.
You mention in previous posts that Scotland would not get into the EU due to a veto by Spain, Belgium etc (who has actually asked these countries their opinion?). If the scenario was that Scotland was considered a secessionist state (which I don't, please see last paragraph) then obviously by principle other secessionist states should not have been let in the past - such as Slovenia and the Baltic States.
I know you will swat aside the Baltic States on the grounds they were invaded by the USSR (but of course the Baltic Republics had originally come into the Russian sphere by the way of the Great Northern War and the Partition of Poland) but Slovenia is different. On the 29th of October 1918 Slovenia along with Croatia and Bosnia seceeded from Austria-Hungary and set up the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.
However after being attacked by the Italians who were wanting to annex the state, the state negotiated union with Serbia. The union became effective on 1st of December 1918 with the new state becoming the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). The union developed into a unitary state and later became federal during the communist era. However the Serbs wanted to return back to the (Serb-dominated)unitary state and Slovenia seceeded well before the civil war started in earnest. Therefore it was a secessionist state was it not?
Talking about the Baltic States earlier and countries being taken away from people I have an interesting story. Nearly two years ago I went to Kiev and was picked up at the airport by transfer driver. He turned out to be a Latvian who had been a captain in the Red Army.
He was the son of a Latvian woman and a Russian soldier who was based in Riga and settled. My driver followed his father into the army and in his travels he married a Ukrainian and they had and raised their children in what is now Russia, Georgia, Belarus, Latvia and the Ukraine. He was also posted in Dresden for a while.
Anyway, he got his P45 in 1993 and he moved with his wife to the Ukraine. He wanted to go to Latvia but the Latvian government would not give citizenship to his wife as she was not descended from citizens of the interwar Latvian Republic. So it was easier for him to become a Ukrainian citizen (Latvia did/does not allow dual-nationality). So he needs a visa to visit his brothers in his homeland.
However I think you probably have no sympathy for him. For if the USSR had remained together in a reformed entity then possibly Mr Putin would be in charge and master of the Baltic and Black Seas and have control of all the that lovely oil and gas in the Caucases and the Central Asian Republics. And you think he can cause trouble just now!
Better for my driver to have his country (the USSR or Latvia)taken away from him. Last week we haled the life of one of the men who did take it away from him when he was buried in Moscow with full state honours of a President of Russia.
Anyway, the proposed referendum will be to give a mandate "to negotiate with the British government for independence" not on independence itself. It is generally conceeded by commentators here that no UK government could ignore such a referendum.
Well, what if it just did ignore it, on the grounds that the bidy which had held it had no competence to do so, and that the continued existence of the United Kingdom is a matter for the whole United Kingdom?
ReplyDeleteWho is going to have the vote in this referendum on the continued existence of my country? Everyone registered to vote in a Scottish constituency for elections to the House of Commons, including Irish Citizens? Or everyone registered to vote in elections to a Scottish local authority, including citizens of any country on earth? Yet most British Citizens will have no say whatever over the future of our country!
But again I say that even if a referendum were attempted, it would be ruled 'ultra vires' in the courts, if not at the behest of the Unionist parties, then at that of some Unionist millionaire or other. Counsel have probably already been retained.
No state has ever been admitted to the EU after seceeding from an existing EU mmember-state, and that is the point. Spain would just say no. Belgium would just say no. And, for that matter, the UK (a net contributor to the EU budget, lest we forget) would just say no. So no it would be, and that would be that.
Nor, one might add, would the EU ever give houseroom to the SNP's key policy of effectivley tearing up the Common Fisheries Policy, admirable though that policy is.
And the answer to Putin is very simple: nuclear power.