Last weekend, my tweets were grabbed and made into an article for the Daily Express – not with my consent. I was quite pleased, however, at being lent this platform to explain my calculation that Scotland has roughly 3 per cent of the seats that make up Westminster.
The Express wrote: The Cybernats are currently raging about the Lords after Tory peer Malcolm Offord told a podcast that a second independence referendum had to be “earned” at the ballot box rather than simply granted because a sizeable minority of Scots want one.
Again showing off her suspect maths, Ms Kemp tweeted: “It’s hilarious. This guy was rejected by voters in a democratic election but now has the power to rule over us for why? Because he was made a Lord! Scotland has 3% of seats in Westminster – where most seats are appointed in a murky money-driven process.”
I still say my sums add up.
I took Scotland’s elected MPs as a proportion of the total number of Westminster legislators in both Houses of Parliament.
Why include the House of Lords?
Because they legislate. They amend, delay and shape the law that governs Scotland. If you want to talk about power in the UK state, you can’t air-brush out the unelected majority of the legislature.
Why does Malcolm Offord have a lifelong seat in Westminster?
Offord is a Unionist propagandist who stood for election in Scotland and was rejected. Not long after donating significant sums to the Conservative Party, he was appointed to the Lords.
One wag replied to my tweet – “Maybe we should buy what we want – just like Offord did.”
A few replies said, “But there are Scots in the Lords.” Indeed.
Most countries use their second chambers to provide territorial representation to nations and regions, to balance a lower chamber which is tilted towards where most people live. Not the UK.
Lords are appointed for life because of secret favours they have done for powerful folk – we don’t have the right to know why anyone got made a peer.
Some of them were born north of the border for sure. Underwear tycoon “Lady” Michelle Mone made a lot of money out of using the VIP lane to supply dodgy protective equipment in Covid,
Born in Glasgow, she has lived in Mayfair for many years. How can she possibly claim to represent anyone except herself? (She is still a peer though her entry says she is on leave of absence from the House)
Yet these people have the power to determine the future of Scotland – a power that Scotland’s elected representatives don’t have.
Just yesterday, Keir Starmer said that however Scots vote, even if every last one of our MPs and MSPs supports independence, he will never grant a second referendum.
That power is in his gift as UK leader backed by a majority in both Houses – however undemocratic that seems from a Scottish point of view.
Two years ago, the UK Supreme Court ruled that Holyrood can’t lawfully call a referendum on independence. The argument they gave is that sovereignty rests with Westminster (1), not with the people.
If the people of Scotland were sovereign, they could authorise a vote. If Westminster is sovereign, then it, not the Scottish people, gets to decide Scotland’s future – and remember, Scotland holds around three per cent of the seats across that sovereign legislature and zero guaranteed representation as a nation.
Scotland is an ancient nation – one of the most ancient in Europe – and it joined the UK as a member by the Treaty of Union in 1707. But Scotland as a country has no formal representation in the UK Parliament. Gordon Brown recommended replacing the Lords with a Senate of the Nations and Regions – first to dismiss the idea? Lord Peter Mandelson, now disgraced, but still a lifelong member of Parliament.
Is that sustainable? At a meeting at the UM headquarters last week, some passionate Scottish independence supporters sought to argue that Scotland is being treated like a colony by Westminster. You may agree or disagree with their wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory arguments, not all of which chime with the modern, civic Scottish independence movement.
But summing up, George Katrougalos, a UN expert on equitable international order did not comment directly on the question of whether Scotland is a colony but said it has an undeniable right to self-determination.
He said: “The people of Scotland have in my opinion a constitutional right to determine their political future.”
Even some Unionists are uncomfortable with the indefinite blocking of a referendum by Westminster. Times columnist and award-winning Substacker Kenny Farquharson tweeted about it here:
Footnote
(1)The Supreme Court judgment jars with Scotland’s own constitutional tradition that the people are sovereign, not Parliament. As Lord President Cooper famously said in MacCormick v Lord Advocate (1953), the English doctrine of absolute parliamentary sovereignty has no exact counterpart in Scottish constitutional law.
Cooper questioned why the post-Union Parliament should inherit all the English Parliament’s peculiarities and none of Scotland’s. Lord Cooper wrote:
‘The principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law…. 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 but none of the Scottish 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.’