Sovereignty - Westminster or the Scottish people?

'Parliament is sovereign and can do what it wants.'
Lord Home, former Conservative Prime Minister.

Unlimited Parliamentary sovereignty is a distinctly English principle

The Union of Scotland and England in 1707 attempted, unsuccessfully, to fuse two separate constitutional traditions. In theory, both English and Scottish Parliaments were abolished and a new British Parliament was set up. But in fact, as the new British Parliament was in Westminster, the site of the English Parliament, it naturally appeared to the English that the English Parliament had incorporated the Scots one. This misconception is the basis of the current malaise in the United (sic) Kingdom. With hindsight, had a new British Parliament been set up at say, York, rather than Westminster, the present constitutional crisis might have been avoided.

The concept of unlimited Parliamentary sovereignty is a distinctly English one which is totally alien to Scotland. In Scotland, the people and not parliament are sovereign. The sovereignty of the Scottish people was first set out in the Declaration of Arbroath of 1328 and reiterated in the Covenant of 1950 and the Claim of Right of 1988.

The Labour leader, The Right Honourable Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a Scot yet he refuses to recognise the sovereignty of the Scottish people claiming:

'Sovereignty remains with me as an English MP and that is the way it will stay.'

Legal judgement by Lord Cooper, a senior Scottish judge, in 1953

The fact that Parliamentary supremacy is an English principle which does not apply to Scotland was confirmed in a famous legal judgement by Lord Cooper, of the First Division of the Court of Session:

'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.'

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