Entries for May 2014

What might happen to the Union in the event of a no vote in the referendum?  I was asked to address the legal process of constitutional change. Let me say straight away that from a legal or constitutional point of view there is nothing inherently difficult about changing the devolution settlement. It is simply a matter of amending the Scotland Act 1998, which defines the powers of the Scottish Parliament.

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There has been some talk of the need for ‘reconciliation’ in Scotland post referendum.  For those who view reconciliation as something we practice all the time, everywhere, this is not too disturbing.  But most people think of this call as something different  - a call for special that Scotland now needs that it did not before.

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In its weighty tome, Scotland’s Future, the Scottish Government promises that at its heart, an independent Scotland will have “the respect, protection and promotion of equality and human rights.” Furthermore, this will not be just an empty gesture but will be “enshrined in a written constitution to bind the institutions of the state and protect individuals and communities from abuses of power.”

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The Church of Scotland has this week extended an invitation to the leaders of the independence referendum debate to attend a service at St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, three days after the vote takes place. This service will look backwards into the future: focusing on ‘reconciliation’ and ‘healing [the] divisions’ caused by the campaign, in order to liberate the protagonists from their prior, seemingly entrenched, positions so that they might work together to construct or to renew Scotland’s constitutional settlement.

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Full disclosure:  I am an Irish citizen who has been (legally) living and working in Edinburgh for the past five years.   By dint of this, I am entitled to vote in the independence referendum on September 18^th.  Not because I am a British citizen (which I’m not), not because I can vote in Westminster elections (which I can), not because I can claim some sort of affinity to this particular part of the current UK (although family lore suggests that some of my forebears hail from the West coast generations back), but because I live and work in Scotland.  

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So much for the facts, but what of the moral and ethical nature of the present stage in Scottish constitutional (re-)specification? In this piece, I argue that the debates over an independent Scotland’s ability to be economically self-sufficient and prosperous are unduly concerned with the facticity of competing claims, which obscures important ethical concerns.

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