Fateful fantasy

The delusion of a beneficent British state

I surely can't be the only one who sees the glaring contradiction in Tommy Sheppard's latest batch of platitudinous piffle. On the one hand he says,

Let us not pretend that the agencies of the British state will acquiesce in our enthusiasm. They will not.
And they will use the full might of that state to block, and criminalise, our attempts to change it, including the suspension of Holyrood and the imposition of direct rule.

Then, in the next but one paragraph he anticipates that the same British state will agree to "remove the reservation of the constitution to the UK Parliament".

Dream on, Tommy! The British government not only won't ever remove that reservation, it can't! To do so would fatally compromise the sovereignty of the Westminster parliament. That cannot happen. That is precisely why they will "use the full might of that state to block, and criminalise, our attempts to change it". If Westminster ceases to be sovereign, the British state as it is conceived by the British ruling elites ceases to exist.

Then there's the following bit of self-serving illogic.

Some argue that if we do not reject the authority of the UK in these matters that we are accepting it. That is just not true. It is possible to acknowledge a reality and still wish to change it.

Not if the reality you acknowledge is the authority to prevent you changing it! Which is exactly what Tommy and others do when they put Westminster at the centre of their thinking on the constitutional issue. He talks about the Claim of Right which formalises the sovereignty of Scotland's people at the same time as he "acknowledges the reality" that the British state has lawful authority to overrule the will of Scotland's people.

This is the kind of utterly muddled thinking that has left Scotland's cause becalmed for a decade and brough the SNP to its present parlous condition. Like so many others in the upper echelons of the SNP and the 'old guard' of the independence movement, Tommy Sheppard persists in the delusion that the British state can be as opposed to the people of Scotland exercising our right of self-determination as he himself describes, and yet still be expected to consent to and cooperate with the very thing they're so adamantly opposed to.

You'd think that having been a professional politician for some years, Tommy Sheppard would have learned that power is never given. Power is only taken. That which is given is never real power because the act of giving necessarily implies the option of not giving. Whatever the nature of the power that is given, it is always inferior to the power of the giver.

That the "reservation of the constitution to the UK Parliament" must be removed is an inescapable fact. That the British state will consent to and cooperate with its removal is an unmistakable fantasy. The entire constitutional issue turns on the matter of legislative competence. All 'routes' that might be taken on the journey to restored independence converge at the point where the Scottish Parliament must legislate in a way the British state will insist it has no competence to legislate because that competence has been withheld by the British state.

The British state is not going to stop withholding the legislative competence in matters relating to the constitution which rightfully belongs with the Scottish Parliament for the reason given and because having legislative competence in all constitutional matters is effectively independence. They are not going to give us independence. And even if they did, the fact of it being given means it is not independence but devolution.

This is why the idea of 'permanently transferred' legislative competence is so absurd. Firstly, there is no such thing as 'permanently devolved'. Power devolved is power retained. If it is given, it can also be taken away. Secondly, the only constitutional power the British state could possibly devolve is the wholly inadequate power to hold a Section 30-type referendum. A referendum that could not possibly lead to independence being restored no matter what the result.

There is only one way that the Scottish Parliament can acquire the legislative competence to authorise a proper constitutional referendum, and that is to take it. Just take it. In the same way as England-as-Britain took that power from us by simply asserting its ownership of the power and defying us to challenge them on it, so Scotland must take back its power over the constitution by asserting it and defying the British state to mount a challenge.

This is what Tommy Sheppard and his ilk refuse to admit. They pretend to the electorate that there is a 'legal and constitutional' route to independence in which England-as-Britain plays nice in a way that it never has in the entire history of its dealings with Scotland. For all I know, they've convinced themselves of this delusional nonsense. Regardless, there can be no progress for Scotland's cause until our own political elite rids itself of that fateful fantasy.