Can AI help Scottish independence? What it said about the Act of Union

I regret to say I have found very little hope of ending the Union in a legal and constitutional way, due to the doctrine of the UK parliament being sovereign which the courts, especially the UK Supreme Court, accept as fact.

I long ago concluded that the only way for Scotland to regain its independence is a political solution – by Scottish democracy asserting itself – which singularly failed to happen in September 2014.

Last week I wrote: “The Union was brought about on May 1, 1707, by deceit, dishonesty, and bribery. Perhaps this week someone somewhere can find out how we end it, because I can’t see it.”

READ MORE: What happened the day that the Scottish Parliament was adjourned?

I am glad to say that Andrew M Fraser of Inverness took up my challenge with his excellent long letter in Friday’s edition of The National. I will refer to Andrew’s letter later in this column.

First of all, however, I bring you results of a small experiment that proceeds from my constant concern, which I have often expressed, that Scottish people have been kept in ignorance of their country’s history by the domination of our culture and education system by British, i.e. English, overseers.

Thanks to my friend and colleague Nan Spowart’s reporting in the Sunday National, I became aware of artificial intelligence (AI) and the effects it is having on communications, one of which is the fact that AI apps now exist which promise to help you write, draw and learn, and which will answer questions for you on just about any subject under the sun.

One such app – ChatAI: Write This – promised to help me brush up my knowledge by offering five key points on any topic.

So for the benefit of our readers, here is what the app told me about the Union of 1707:

“1. The Act of Union 1707 was a political agreement that united England and Scotland into a single sovereign state called Great Britain.

“2. Prior to the Union, there had been decades of political and economic turmoil between the two nations, including attempts at armed conflict.

“3. The Union was made possible through a series of negotiations between the Scottish and English parliaments, resulting in the drafting of the Articles of Union.

“4. The Union had significant implications for Scotland, including the abolition of the Scottish parliament and the loss of some autonomy in areas such as trade, taxation, and the legal system.

“5. Despite initial opposition from some quarters, the Act of Union has been seen by many historians as a crucial moment in British and Scottish history, paving the way for the creation of the United Kingdom and its rise as a global power.”

Bearing in mind this is a global app that anyone can subscribe to and read, you can see why I am slightly worried that the app gives a less than comprehensive account of the Union.

In point 2, for example, the “attempts at armed conflict” were actual battles and wars fought between Scotland and England right up until the 1690s.

Nowhere in the five points does it mention that the Union was opposed by the majority of people in Scotland and was imposed on both countries by men intent on lining their own pockets. Nor is there any mention of the part played by Queen Anne who wanted the Union above all to preserve the Protestant succession in the monarchy.

I would also liked to have seen some reference to the Jacobite Risings which were very much against the Union. Apart from those four points the app has it mainly right and hopefully it might inspire its users to make their own study of the 1707 Union. What no app can do, however, is help find a way for Scotland to exit the Union.

In his letter, Andrew Fraser took me to task for capitulating “far too readily to the idea that we are unable to end the Union as far as he can see”. I am sorry, Andrew, but as long as independence supporters are wedded to the idea that we regain our independence via a lawful democratic referendum then we won’t win our freedom from the Union any time soon.

READ MORE: Let's imagine a Scotland where the Act of Union had not passed

I do agree, however, with Andrew’s conclusion that “at some point the Scottish Government has to say enough is enough, defy Westminster’s diktats and appeal to the international community. Our independence will only happen when it is accepted under international law, not domestic law.”

That should have happened the day after the Brexit referendum, and I can only conclude that Nicola Sturgeon and her government were too scared to do so.

I disagree with Andrew on this point he made: “Hamish gives precedence to the acts instead of to the Treaty of Union without which there could have been no acts.

“It was of course an international treaty and therefore subject to international law. When I studied constitutional history our (English) professor taught us that if one party to an international treaty breaks it the other party is no longer bound by it. We all know that the treaty was broken almost immediately after the Union took effect, plus many times since, so why do we feel we must still stick to it?”

I looked at that issue years ago and had to conclude that the identical Acts of Union passed by the English and Scottish Parliaments in 1707 had superseded the Treaty of Union agreed by commissioners for the two kingdoms in July, 1706.

The principle involved is recognised in international law.

It basically states that “the later law supersedes the earlier law”, rendered in Latin as “lex posterior derogat priori”. No one doubts that the treaty and acts of Union have been traduced many times by the Westminster Parliament and numerous governments since 1707, but here again we find that old conundrum – how do you challenge such breaches when there is no mechanism for doing so within the acts of Union? The point is that only the UK Parliament can authorise the ending of the Union, and unless the people of Scotland are going to rise up in, say, mass civil disobedience, then we must continue down the political route until the case for independence is unanswerable.

What history can teach us that even before the Union, there were plenty of people who predicted that it would not bode well for Scotland, and I have also chosen some juicy quotes about the Union down the ages.

Speaking in the Scottish Parliament in October 1706, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun said: “The Scots deserve no pity, if they voluntarily surrender their united and separate interests to the mercy of a united parliament, where the English shall have so vast a majority.”

Before his last-minute change of heart, James Douglas Hamilton, 4th Duke of Hamilton spoke against the Union. He told the Scottish Parliament: “What shall we, in half an hour, yield what our forebears maintained with their lives and fortunes for many ages. Are none of the descendants here of those worthy patriots who defended the liberty of their country against all invaders – who assisted the great King Robert Bruce to restore the constitution, and avenge the falsehood of England and usurpation of Balliol? Where are the Douglases and the Campbells? Where are the peers? Where are the barons, once the bulwarks of the nation? Shall we yield up the sovereignty and independency of Scotland, when we are commanded by those we represent to preserve the same, and assured of their assistance to support us?”

Another opponent was John Hamilton, 2nd Lord Belhaven who also opposed the Union and told Parliament: “I think I see a free and independent kingdom delivering up that which all the world hath been fighting for, since the days of Nimrod; yea, that for which most of all the empires, kingdoms, states and principalities and dukedoms of Europe, are at this time engaged in the most bloody and cruel wars that ever were, to wit a power to manage their own affairs by themselves without the assistance and counsel of any other.”

An anonymous poet of the time got it right about the Parcel of Rogues:

Our Duiks were deills, our Marquesses were mad,

Our Earls were evil, our Viscounts yet more bad,

Our Lords were villains, and our Barons knaves

Who wish our burrows (burghs) did sell us for slaves.

They sold the church, they sold the State and Nation,

They sold their honour, name and reputation,

They sold their birthright, peerages and places

And now they leave the House with angrie faces.

Much later, Robert Bontine Cunningham Graham spoke at a rally at Bannockburn in 1927, saying: “I regret, as a Scotsman, because we have always had a good name for business, that those Judases who sold our country in 1707, got so little for themselves. £26,000? Why, their patron saint, Judas, got almost as much, taking into consideration the greater purchasing power of money when he did his deal.”

Robert Burns is sometimes cast as a Unionist, but this is what had to say in letter of 1790: “Alas, have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the Union that can counter-balance the annihilation of her independence, and even her very name.”

In the 20th century, plenty people learned to dislike the Union as then constituted.

See if you can guess who gave this speech on devolving power to Scotland in 1911: “We have to secure for Scotland a much more direct and convenient method of bringing her influence to bear upon her own purely domestic affairs. There is nothing which conflicts with the integrity of the United Kingdom in the setting up of a Scottish parliament for the discharge of Scottish business. There is nothing which conflicts with the integrity of the United Kingdom in securing to Scotsmen in that or in some other way an effective means of shaping the special legislation which affects them and only them.”

That was Winston Churchill, speaking in Dundee.

Just 13 years later, William Adamson, Secretary of State for Scotland, said of his own Labour government: “We believe that government policy is to subordinate Scottish administration to Whitehall to a far greater extent than has ever been the case and to remove from Scotland practically the last vestige of independent government and nationhood and to have its centre in London.”

It wasn’t just Labour men who were worried that Home Rule wasn’t going to happen. In 1932, the novelist and politician John Buchan, told MPs: “I believe that every Scotsman should be a Scottish nationalist. If it could be proved that a separate Scottish parliament were desirable, that is to say that the merits were greater than the disadvantages, Scotsmen should support it. I would go further. Even if it were not proved desirable, if it could be proved desirable by any substantial majority of the Scottish people, then Scotland should be allowed to make the decision.”

The writer and activist James Halliday wrote in Scotland the Separate in 1982: “We have a miraculously surviving national consciousness, which makes feasible the preservation of our aspirations; and we have the capacity, proven in many generations, to create a leadership from within the community of Scotland.

“It is these qualities which entitle us to cling to the hope that we in our generation will yet succeed in handing on to the Scotland of our sons the unique inheritance which was the Scotland of our fathers.”

There are so many other voices that have been raised against the Union since 1707. Next week I will look at some of the best of them.