The tribunal had once again been called upon to rule on a dispute over Holyrood’s powers. According to the UK government, two bills it passed were outside these powers because they created legal obligations in the reserved areas.
Lord Reed told the QC representing the Scottish Government that it seemed to be “a matter of policy that … you draft the legislation as if the constraints of Scottish law do not exist, then leave it to the courts to sort out the issues. case by case. â€What a way to run a legislature.
For good measure, Lord Reed told hapless James Mure QC: “In most liberal democracies, the law of the land is expected to be publicly available and accessible – while this drafting technique ensures that the only thing you can be sure of is that the terms of the law do not represent the law.
Freely translated, this means that the Scottish Government’s priority is not to legislate for the social good within the vast powers it possesses, but to fight repeatedly on issues it knows perfectly well to be outside. of these powers.
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“We will fight the UK government in court over the children’s bill,” says John …
The strategy is then to make a furious noise about the wickedness of Whitehall by seeking to “seize” the powers that Holyrood never had, to waste the time of the courts up to the Supreme Court and to rely on loss of public memory at the time a decision is rendered. I repeat – what a way to run a legislature, and disregard for devolution.
These policies were well illustrated by Nicola Sturgeon’s rhetoric during the Holyrood election around one of the contested bills, which would incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Scottish law. The UK signed the convention over 20 years ago.
Ms Sturgeon, who has never been noticed for her understatement when there is a bogus grievance to promote, complained of a “politically catastrophic and morally repugnant” challenge. His sidekick, John Swinney, participated in “an orchestrated and sustained assault on the powers of Holyrood”.
It was hogwash. Rather, it was part of the “policy” of ignoring Scottish law in order to create a political dispute at whatever cost, either in financial terms – the Supreme Court is not cheap – or for the legal reputation of Scotland.
Meanwhile, so much remains to be done in the powers of Holyrood that would advance “the rights of the child,†rather than discussing total abstraction in the Supreme Court. Sturgeon and Swinney should be held responsible for every penny wasted on a political coup that could have been spent on tackling child poverty and educational disadvantage in Scotland.
They seem to have picked the wrong man in Lord Reed who comes with a hinterland not only when drafting the original Scotland Act, but also upholding Holyrood’s genuine rights within it.
In a 2019 conference, he cited a landmark judgment to which he was a party that upheld the Scottish Parliament, as well as the Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies, as democratically elected legislatures could only be challenged “for a violation of boundaries statutory powers “. . Thus spoke a true defender of the regulation of devolution.
The Supreme Court, he said, was “an arbiter when political solutions cannot be found. The success of the Court in exercising this role depends on the confidence of the public and politicians in the complete impartiality of the Court: something that the Court and the political institutions concerned have a responsibility to maintain and support â€.
Ms Sturgeon’s current struggle over powers is a dry race for the same performance, with even more belligerent rumors of political catastrophes and moral loathing, when a doomed referendum bill is presented to Holyrood for a green stamp.
Before that, the “policy” of ignoring Scottish law, creating false political fury and treating the Supreme Court as a useful cover deserves to be called the unnecessary masquerade that it really is – an abdication of the “Responsibility†specifically requested by Lord Reed.
