FRIDAY’S article by the National Fact Check Service looks at my claim that the Scottish Government is ultimately responsible to the Scottish electorate rather than the UK Supreme Court. The findings are interesting. They present no constitutional grounds for the Westminster claim that they have legal sovereignty over the Scottish people.

However, they leave out completely what is probably the most important aspect of jurisprudence. Law – any law – is only of value if it is accepted or at least tolerated by a clear majority of the community in which it is intended to function. If a law, however well created by the appropriate authority, is rejected by a substantial minority of the community it is intended to apply within, then it can’t function and becomes useless.

In October 1995 a small group of us in Skye decided to challenge the legislation dealing with the private tolls put on the Skye Bridge.

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There was no doubt in some of our minds that the legislation was valid and had gone through the proper channels, but we were determined to stop it from being applied. It took us a long time and cost us dearly and I had to go to prison for a while, but we won. All the lawyers we talked to told us we could not win, but we won. The legislation which made it a criminal offence is still on the statute book, so technically it is still a criminal offence to cross the Skye Bridge and not pay a toll, but many people have done it today and no-one is there to ask for the toll or to charge them for not paying.

There probably was a maximum of 500 people who actively challenged the law over the Skye Bridge issue, but that was enough to stop it working and make it useless.

Now if you want to challenge the claim that Westminster has the sovereign power to stop the Scottish Government and Parliament from holding a referendum, the Scottish Government should simply hold a referendum and ask the Scottish people who controls the Scottish Government: is it the Scottish people, or the Westminster Parliament? Nothing else is required.

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I think the Scottish Government would win that referendum quite comfortably and this would put an end to the sovereignty question for good. Of course, Westminster and the English courts would not like it, but there would be nothing they could do about it.

There is little point in SNP and Yes campaign leaders pronouncing that the Scottish people are sovereign unless they act to defend and support this.

So let us act in accordance with that, and challenge this arrogant assertion by the UK establishment.

Andy Anderson
Ardrossan

THE struggle for workers’ rights in British history has been an arduous and ponderous one. The Chartist movement, the general strike of 1926 and the existential battles of the Thatcherite years all witnessed a common theme: the unwillingness of the forces of capitalism to yield in the face of workers’ demands for decent pay and conditions.

Brexit has freed the present Conservative government from the necessity to adhere to the protection of workers’ rights that is inherent in EU law and the dilution of trade union legal entitlements will be, predictably, one of the consequences.

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Sunak’s administration has reacted to the raft of recent ongoing strikes by progressing the restrictions on trade union activity we have already witnessed in the Trade Union Act of 2016. By chipping away at workers’ rights and portraying the trade unions as irresponsible at a time of falling standards of living and transparent inequality, the Tory government, supported by their stooges in the right-wing media, aim ultimately to deny a worker’s fundamental right to withdraw their labour. In short, trade unions will become toothless pressure groups in thrall to employers regardless of pay or conditions and as emasculated as their Dickensian ancestors.

Under new Tory proposals employers may be entitled to sue individual workers or their representatives in the event of financial loss through strikes. Employers will be able to name individual workers that they deem necessary to their place of work as essential and thereby deprive them of their human right to withdraw their labour, regardless of their working terms and conditions.

Britain has more billionaires currently than before the pandemic. The super-rich have literally never had it so good. The disparity in wealth is the greatest it has been for a century yet the Conservative government’s response is exactly the same as it always has been historically: protect the affluent, the powerful and all those with a vested interest in the status quo. Punish and stereotype those leaders and groups who speak truth to power and challenge the cancerous views and ethics of those who control the narrative in the increasingly undemocratic British state.

Britain is a moribund entity. Its time is truly at an end.

Owen Kelly
Stirling

I NOTE that Alister Jack’s Scotland Office has spent more than £1.5 million in less than two years on a team of spin doctors designed to do nothing more than promote the Westminster government in Scotland.

After almost 13 years of Tory government austerity we now have the lowest economic growth in Europe, a proliferation of food banks, a health system under almost impossible pressure, dedicated public servants striking because they are being offered below-inflation pay increases whilst MPs award themselves huge salaries – and so on.

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Whilst £1.5m spent on spin doctors is, of course, a relatively small sum in absolute economic terms, your readers may wonder whether it could have been better spent. Perhaps Mr Jack might care to share with his constituents how the money his department has spent on spin doctors has benefited them?

David Howdle
Dumfries