Intolerable intrusion

6 Pillars of Digital Sovereignty

In a recent article I commented on the dearth of news relating to the constitutional issue and the fact that this reflected the lack of any action on the part of the Scottish Government to progress Scotland’s cause. I might well have commented in a similar vein today. On the whole front page of The National’s website, there is not a single mention of independence or anything directly pertaining thereto.

There is, of course, lots of stuff about the World Cup and Scotland’s victory against the mighty Haiti. While I am delighted by the result and especially pleased for the fans who always do Scotland proud when they travel as the Tartan Army, I am otherwise taking very little interest in the tournament. I’ve seen the day I’d have stayed up to watch every one of Scotland’s matches. These days, however, I can’t see a mention of the subject without recalling Jim Sillars’s understandable bitter remark:

Scotland has too many ninety-minute patriots whose nationalist outpourings are expressed only at major sporting events.

Other than the football, the Sunday National takes an interest in the UK’s defence budget, the racism of the far right, and climate change, among other things. As I write, the top story is a rather strange ‘Westminster bad’ piece about MPs spending taxpayers’ money with firms which have direct experience that is relevant to the work that MPs do. Needless to say, the below-the-line comments are a festival of knee-jerk outrage out of all proportion to a practice which we are assured involved a relatively trifling sum of money and no wrongdoing or breach of regulations. As scandals go, this doesn’t.

I used the qualified phrase “directly pertaining” to the constitutional issue advisedly. Because everything comes back to the constitution ultimately. A point I feel obliged to make far more often than should be necessary. The constitutionally anomalous and grotesquely asymmetric Union necessarily impacts every aspect of life in Scotland—invariably, to Scotland’s detriment. The Union cannot do other than adversely affect everything in Scotland because the constitution regulates the capacity to effect change, and the Union removes and withholds from Scotland’s people the full and free capacity to effect change that is rightfully vested in the people of Scotland and our democratic institutions.

Some will respond to the above by referring to devolution and the Scottish Parliament. Surely, they will argue, this represents the capacity to effect change being in the hands of the people who elect the Scottish Parliament. But this capacity is neither full nor free. The purpose of devolution is to delineate and curtail the capacity to effect change. The capacity is in no case full. Exercise of the capacity to effect change is ultimately subject to the approval of the British state. This is true even where there is a very convincing appearance of the capacity being exercised freely.

Here’s an illuminating exercise anybody can undertake any day of the week. The National website’s front page features twenty items in three tiers. Go through those articles and count how many are at base about something that would all but certainly be changed if the people of Scotland possessed the unfettered capacity to effect change.

Take, as an example, The Ferret piece about land ownership in Scotland and Andy Wightman’s noble efforts in this fundamental aspect of life in Scotland. Who can doubt that given the full and free capacity to effect change, foreign ownership of land in Scotland would be stringently restricted? This is a clear instance of the deleterious impact of the Union on every single person who calls Scotland home.

It may be that not all of us would want the kind of land reform Andy Wightman advocates. It may be that there are many who simply don’t care. That’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want reform or don’t consider it important. The point is that you are deprived of the capacity to effect change regardless of whether or not you feel motivated to exercise that capacity. It is something which you own, in every sense of that term, but which has been taken from you and continues to be withheld from you because that is what the Union does. That is what it is for.

The ultimate and most fundamental purpose of the Union is to afford England-as-Britain an overwhelming advantage over Scotland in perpetuity. A purpose which cannot be pursued without affecting every single person who calls themselves Scottish. It cannot do other than make every one of us less than we should be. Less than we would be but for the Union.

When I sat down to write this article, my intention was to focus on another item from the Sunday National’s website—US campaigner warns Scotland to ‘run like the plague’ amid AI data centre boom. This is yet another example of a situation that almost certainly would not be as it is but for the Union withholding from us the capacity to effect change that is rightfully ours. Again, it doesn’t matter what your take on the “AI data centre boom“ happens to be. You have no capacity to effect change. The Union took that from you and won’t give it back. It may give something that superficially looks like the capacity to effect change through the democratic process. But at some point every attempt to exercise your capacity to effect change comes up against the constitutional device which renders your will subordinate to the will of a foreign parliament and government.

Preparing to write something inspired by the Sunday National article, I decided to do some research on the subject of digital sovereignty. I was already aware of this topic. It is very much a live issue in Europe, and at a personal level I have lately been attempting to de-Americanise my digital life. This has involved a time-consuming search for suitable European alternatives. I am far from alone. There is a huge shift underway.

Somewhat ironically, we have to thank Donald Trump for the rapid increase in awareness of the disconcerting extent to which American power intrudes on the sovereignty of other nations. This awareness has prompted a wave of action across Europe and elsewhere to secure their digital domain against intrusion by American (and Chinese) big tech. I quickly realised that researching the subject of digital sovereignty was not going to be the work of one Sunday morning. Not even if the research was limited to Europe.

Each nation and a host of organisations define digital sovereignty differently, and there is no general agreement on how the issue of securing digital sovereignty is to be approached. This, I hasten to add, is my impression from the various articles I ploughed through this morning. More promisingly, there is some suggestion that thinking on the matter may be coalescing around some basic principles. What also struck me was how much the issue of digital sovereignty parallels the constitutional issue in Scotland.

Just as technologically and economically (and militarily?) superior corporate and state powers intrude on the digital sovereignty of other nations, so the parliamentary sovereignty of England-as-Britain intrudes on Scotland’s popular sovereignty. This intrusion is forceful even when it is subtle. And it gets less and less subtle by the day.

Scotland has a particular problem in that our indigenous political elite doesn’t think in terms of securing our popular sovereignty. I find it increasingly difficult to pin down just what John Swinney and the rest have in mind when they talk of independence. It seems they are content to tolerate a level of intrusion which other nations consider intolerable.

As a Scottish nationalist, I regard all forms and levels of intrusion unendurable. The principle of the sovereignty of Scotland’s people and England-as-Britain’s doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty are entirely incompatible and irreconcilable. They cannot co-exist within one national entity. But I find it hard to believe Mr Swinney would agree. I’m fairly sure he would offer a markedly different take on the nature of sovereignty and the conflict of constitutional traditions. I’m pretty sure that he would explain his take on the matter, and that having heard his explanation, we would be no wiser about that than we are about exactly what his conception of independence is.