SINCE the Daily Mail published its Enemy of the People headline about the judges who did the right thing by the law and stopped Theresa May triggering Article 50 illegally, there has been much speculation about who the Remain side could tag as their pantomime villain in the Case of the Century.
The answer came yesterday when former Scottish Conservative Party chairman Richard Keen QC stepped up to the bar of the Supreme Court and within the space of an hour assumed the title of the Enemy of the Scots.
And the Welsh. And the Northern Irish. And indeed anybody who dares to oppose Theresa May and her Government from pushing ahead with Brexit exactly as she, and he, see fit.
The message may have been delivered in the bools-in-the-mooth accent of a public school product – King’s Rochester and Dollar Academy – but the import of what Keen said could well have been delivered in the flat broad whine of a disadvantaged North Country anti-immigration former-Labour-now-Ukip Brexiteer.
“Right you Scotch gits, get in line with Little England right now because we’re going to do Brexit any way we bloody well want.”
Make no mistake, the Advocate General is sneeringly good at his job of being legal lapdog to the Tory Government. The honeyed tones of Richard Sanderson Keen, the Baron Keen of Elie, once known as the rottweiler by some, dripped venom as he laid into those who dared to raise devolution issues against his paymasters.
Devolution legislation cannot be used to “qualify or abrogate” the UK Government exercising its foreign affairs and treaty prerogative, he said.
Sounding for all the world like Patrick McGoohan as Longshanks in Braveheart, Keen decried the Sewel Convention, which is now part of the law of the land and means Holyrood must consent to UK Parliament acts that affect Scotland, and added that devolved legislation “actually takes the court nowhere in the determination of the issue which it has to decide in the present case”.
In other words “back off Scotland, you shouldn’t even be here” and to emphasise it Keen said: “The Sewel Convention is wholly irrelevant to this appeal and indeed to the conduct of foreign affairs.”
It will be up to the judges to decide that, after they hear from the Lord Advocate today.
The events of yesterday and the statements made in court by Keen, Lord Pannick, James Eadie and the justices all show that the nub of the matter is simply this – do the prerogative powers of the UK Government extend to repealing laws and rights which the Westminster Parliament gave us all without the prior consent of that parliament and the other devolved legislatures in the UK?
The Government says yes, but the law, as stated by the three judges in the High Court, says no. And so far it looks as though the High Court judges and Gina Miller and her associates are winning the argument.
It is also worth noting that at no time did Richard Keen or his side ever refer to the fact that those contrary people north of the Border democratically voted overwhelmingly 62 per cent to 38 per cent to Remain in the EU. How dare they.
As Longshanks said in that movie: “The trouble with Scotland is that it’s full of Scots.” And Europeans.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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