Former MSP Christine Grahame’s presentation in the Scottish Parliament, 26 Jan 2012, Claim of Right - transcript at the following links (partly reproduced below): https://www.theyworkforyou.com/sp/?id=2012-01-26.38.43
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Christine Grahame’s (MSP), Scottish Parliament, 26 Jan 2012, Claim of Right

I have to agree with David McLetchie that power devolved is, indeed, power retained. We are talking about obtaining independence. As a divorce lawyer—as I was—he knows that when one party sees the end of the marriage, the marriage is at an end. The detail is then negotiated according to law and practice. The same would happen in the separation of two parts of the United Kingdom.

It is sometimes important to work back to why certain assertions are made—for example, in the claim of right, the assertion that the Scottish people are sovereign. Much slips into our everyday parlance that has a deep-rooted and substantive cultural constitutional genesis. For example, we hear Scots being reprimanded for saying “I seen it” or “I done it”. That is, in fact, grammatical language. Those phrases have survived through centuries of spoken Scots. They are not lazy or ignorant slang, but an echo from the past.

That takes me to the claim of right from 1989 and the words:

“We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention, do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs”.

That Constitutional Convention was proposed in a private members bill way back in 1980 by the SNP leader, Gordon Wilson. Where did that sovereign right come from? There is no written UK constitution, but there are fragments of an incomplete constitutional jigsaw, some of which predate the treaty of union. We have to go as far back as the declaration of Arbroath—a declaration of Scottish independence and of conditional monarchy. Talking of Robert the Bruce, it says:

“Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule.”

That shows that he was a king who was in office by leave of those who, at the time, represented the people. They were a narrow bunch—some 51 magnates and nobles—but, nevertheless, he was on parole.

The significance of those words, resonating through the centuries, is that the monarch’s power to rule was conditional on the will of the people of Scotland. That is reflected in the fact that Queen Elizabeth is Queen of Scots and not of Scotland. Therefore, sovereignty—now exercised in this democracy by various institutions—is exercised through the expressed will of the Scottish people.

That takes me to why Queen Elizabeth is designed Queen of England. If my recollection is accurate, Henry VIII of the Tudor dynasty, installing himself as the head of the church, embedded the divine right of kings to rule. Sovereignty—the embodiment of which was the monarch—was absolute. However, as power was removed from the Crown and transferred to the English Parliament through the centuries, so was sovereignty. Therefore, the English Parliament was, indeed, sovereign, but that does not overrule or supersede the conflicting principle of the sovereignty of the Scottish people.

Article III of the Union with Scotland Act 1706 says:

“That the United Kingdom … be represented by one and the same Parliament to be stiled The Parliament of Great Britain.”

The significance of that is that that Parliament was not a continuation of the English Parliament or of the Scottish Parliament. Therefore, for Scotland, sovereignty remains as it always was—with the people.

I pray in aid the case of MacCormick v the Lord Advocate, from the 1953 session cases. At that time, postboxes with “E II R” on them had been blown up, because Elizabeth was the first Elizabeth of Scotland. In that case, the following remarks were made obiter:

“Considering that the Union legislation extinguished the Parliaments of Scotland and England 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 … as if all that happened in 1707 was that Scottish representatives were admitted to the Parliament of England. That is not what was done … The principle of the unlimited sovereignty

See full transcript here: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/sp/?id=2012-01-26.38.43

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Iain Macwhirter, political commentator for the Herald and Sunday Herald, told IndependenceLive.net recently: "It is clear that the Brexit process hasn’t just meant that the U.K. is leaving the European Union. It means that there is going to be a new [U.K.] Union afterwards and it is going to be much more of an incorporating Union. A much tighter controlled Union and a much more centralised Union."

During the interview Macwhirter went on to say: "it looks like decision time, doesn’t it really!".

Turning to the impact on Scotland of recent events in the U.S., Macwhirter said: "what we’ve also seen, distressingly, with the kowtowing, the obsequies attitude towards the new president of the United States is that it won’t just be Brexit U.K. that we’ll be in. It will be Trump U.K. because we’re so desperate to strike some kind of trade deal, for whatever reason – it seems like a mystery why you would give up a perfectly good free trade deal with Europe, to go and try and have one with America, but that’s what they intend to do. The kind of concessions that are going to be made to Donald Trump in the process, I think, most people here will find profoundly distasteful and have al sorts of implications for the standards and integrity of the National Health Service, Health and Safety, agriculture, GM crops, fraking, you name it, it is all going to be down there, and I think that is going to make people think very carefully whether or not they want to continue down the road of a U.K. which is basically under the tutelage of Donald Trump.”

Transcript of video clip below

“It is clear that the Brexit process hasn’t just meant that the U.K. is leaving the European Union. It means that there is going to be a new [U.K.] Union afterwards and it is going to be much more of an incorporating Union. A much tighter controlled Union and a much more centralised Union.

“I think before the whole Brexit process began there was a sense, even among many in Westminster, that the U.K. was moving towards a kind of federal constitution, where there would be a division of powers. The Scottish Parliament, on domestic legislation at least, would be its own boss. It would decide what the laws were to be in Scotland about these areas, these domestic areas – you know, education, as I said, the law, criminal justice, the environment etc. And that the border issues, maybe like currency, defence and foreign affairs, would be managed on a U.K. bases. And there are plenty of models for that obviously. You have in America and Canada, states like Quebec which have extraordinary latitude. States in America like Oregon which legalised cannabis, which has the power to set its own statutory minimum wage. These are very significant powers.

“So there was a feeling that this was kind of where we were moving. That almost by default Briton was become a federal entity. And I think that really the Brexit process has exposed that, clearly that is not the case. And the test of this was really the Sewel Convention – whether or not the Scottish Parliament now had a right to exercise sovereignty in the areas of its own responsibility? Or did it now? You can’t have two ways about this. Clearly it does not. Now this doesn’t mean that Holyrood is useless. It can still pass lots of laws. But it will always under the understanding that theses [new laws] are explicitly endorsed by Westminster, and they can be taken away whenever necessary. And that will be important coming down the Brexit road when we get to the Great Repeal Act, Great Repeal Bill, which will supposedly repatriate all the laws that are currently exercised by Brussels – agriculture and fisheries and what have you. [Control over these laws] will go to Westminster initially. There is a suggestion that Scotland will get more powers as a result of this process, but, if it does – and I doubt it very much – they will on the bases of this provisional nature. That so long as they accord with Westminster’s view of things, then the Scottish Parliament will be allowed to exercise its power. As soon as there is a constitutional issues, a constitutional confrontation it will be asserted that the U.K. has the over ridding authority.”

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Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2017

For this you will need:
- 150g soft butter
- 150g caster sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1tsp baking powder
- 150g plain white flour*
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Oven at 190c for 15-20mins.

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Music:
- Beginner's Luck from Beginner's Luck by Lindalou and Michael Ryge: http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/162054/beginner-s-luck

Psycho Drummer from Dark Roads (drum and bass from Żywiec, Milówka, Laliki, Poland) by Simonus: http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/921259/simonus-psycho-drummer

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