 | 'In pretending that Scotland ceded its sovereignty in 1707, Tony Blair is not merely making a gross historical error. He is making a political error of cosmic proportions..' Earl Russell, Liberal Democrat Peer, in the Scotsman. |  |
| 'In pretending that Scotland ceded its sovereignty in 1707, Tony Blair is not merely making a gross historical error. He is making a political error of cosmic proportions..' Earl Russell, Liberal Democrat Peer, in the Scotsman. | |
Tony Blair's commitment to a referendum on devolution is an irritation. It seems unnecessary, yet it will cause nothing worse than a little delay. His readiness to contemplate a parliament with no tax-raising powers, on the other hand, is a contradiction in terms. The Independentis surely right that it means 'he comes not to praise home rule for Scotland, but to bury it'. We know what followed when faint-hearted members of the Liberal Party did the same for home rule in Ireland.
Yet this pales into insignificance beside his failure to recognise Scottish sovereignty. The Scottish Constitutional Convention asserted 'the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of government best suited to their needs'.
As a point of historical fact, the Convention was quite right. Scotland is a nation and it is a nation which retains sovereignty. Tony Blair's assertion that his devolution bill will include 'a clear statement ... of the sovereignty of Parliament' (by which he means the Westminster Parliament) is a claim to annexation.
In saying a Scottish parliament would be a 'subsidiary assembly or parliament', he is trying to turn it into a dependency of England instead of an equal and consenting partner. He has no authority to do this.
When England and Scotland were united in March 1603, they were united because the Kings of Scots inherited the throne of England, not vice-versa. James VI and I had the sense not to present this as a Scottish annexation, but it would have made more sense that way round than the other. For 104 years, England and Scotland were united in the same way as the states of the European Union, as sovereign powers under a common authority, each with their own parliament and laws.
This arrangement repeatedly came under strain because of the inability of the English to understand the ideas of sharing sovereignty. An arrangement which would have been normal anywhere else in Europe came under strain because England continued to do things, such as declaring war or executing the king, without even telling Scotland it had done it.
It is behaviour Mr Santer would have found easy to recognise. England before 1603 had been a sovereign nation state. Britain since 1603 has never been any such thing. It is a multinational state of many parts.
It was in part because the Scots got fed up with this limitation of English imagination that they entered into the Act of Union in 1707, which gave the two countries a single parliament, though not a single law.
The Act of Union was not a cession of Scottish sovereignty. It was an international treaty between two equal sovereign states. Like other treaties, it can be renegotiated if it ceases to enjoy the consent of both parties. It is that renegotiation that the Constitutional Convention was attempting.
In pretending that Scotland ceded its sovereignty in 1707, Tony Blair is not merely making a gross historical error. He is making a political error of cosmic proportions. He is telling Scotland it cannot renegotiate the terms of the treaty of 1707.
Those terms have ceased to enjoy consent north of the Border. In every test of Scottish opinion, the status quo comes a poor third after devolution and separation. In insisting that the Scots are stuck with it, Tony Blair is coming to sound like Edward Leigh on the Family Law Bill - he is tying Scotland to a relationship to which it no longer consents.
This attempt must turn Scotland from a nation trying to renegotiate a partnership into a nation rightly struggling to be free. Tony Blair has put the Union in more danger than it has been since 1649, when the English absent-mindedly dissolved it by cutting off the head of the King of Scots with his crown upon it.
If the Union is destroyed, the loss to England will be immense. It will leave us more tied than before to a cult of the sovereign nation state which makes us unable to function in the modern world, and which is very nearly four centuries out of date.
It may interest Tony Blair more, that there will never be another Labour government. Seldom has cowardice been more justly rewarded.
Return to home page