Derek Bateman: An Auld Sang Gang Wrang

An Auld Sang Gang Wrang

by Derek Bateman (26 March 2014)

Guess what I’ve been up to as the sun shines? Reading the British government’s legal advice on independence, of course. You know, one of those efforts we’re not allowed to know the cost of. Here are some headlines I’d forgotten since its publication last year:

The Treaty of Union is irrelevant

Scotland ceased to exist in law

It was merged into an enlarged England

It has no international personality in its own right

It cannot revert to pre-1707 independence

Read full article 

HERE

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See also:

Download pdf (45 pages) of above document 

HERE

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Quotes from Annex A document:

"36. We note that the incorporation of Wales under laws culminating in the Laws in Wales Act 1536 (England) and of Ireland, previously a colony, under the Union with Ireland Act 1801 (GB) and the Act of Union 1800 (Ireland) did not affect state continuity. Despite its similarity to the union of 1707, Scottish and English writers unite in seeing the incorporation of Ireland not as the creation of a new state but as an accretion without any consequences in international law."

"37. For the purpose of this advice, it is not necessary to decide between these two views of the union of 1707. Whether or not England was also extinguished by the union, Scotland certainly was extinguished as a matter of international law, by merger either into an enlarged and renamed England or into an entirely new state."

The clean slate

by Rev. Stuart Campbell (11 Feb 2011)

The devil, they say, is in the detail, and that certainly seems to apply to the UK Government’s first paper on the consequences of Scottish independence. With remarkably little fanfare, the coalition appears to have dropped an atomic bomb into the heart of the constitutional debate, and not even realised it.

Read full article 

HERE

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