Category: Devolution
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Anurag Deb: Direct Rule in Northern Ireland and the Power to Make Irrational Laws
The townland of Carrickmore in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland is the ancestral home of legendary Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. It is also near an ancient and beautifully preserved Neolithic court tomb, excavated between 1979 and 1982. Carrickmore was at the heart of a different funerary matter when, on 3 February 2023, the Northern Ireland…
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Iain Halliday: Political and Legal Constitutionalism in the Age of Supreme Court Referrals
Back in early 2013 I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the role of law and politics in the independence debate. I concluded that: “Throughout the independence debate, the law, in the form of judicial intervention, had no role to play. This can be seen as a victory for the political constitution. In the context of…
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Gordon Guthrie: Brown vs Dewar – The Labour Commission on the UK’s Future
With the publication of Labour’s Commission on the UK’s Future it is worth contrasting the approach that Gordon Brown and his colleagues have taken with the very successful devolutionary legacy of Donald Dewar. The Scottish Parliament is one of the most powerful subnational parliaments in the world. But the Scottish state hardly changed in 1999…
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Michael Foran: Sex, Gender, and the Scotland Act
Yesterday, the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill was heard at Stage 3. If it receives royal assent, it will amend the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to make it easier for people in Scotland to change their legal sex. This has proven to be extremely controversial, prompting calls from some feminist groups that the introduction of…
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Mohamed Moussa: The ‘Absent Word’ Canon and Asymmetrical Sovereignty
Introduction: The Supreme Court’s Textual Fidelity The UK Supreme Court (UKSC) recently issued its unanimous judgment which found the draft Scottish Independence Referendum Bill to be outside the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament. While the facts of this case are distinctively different from previous Scottish cases, a common theme remains in the Court’s insistence on ‘ordinary meaning of words’ as…
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Aileen McHarg: The Future of the Territorial Constitution under Labour? The Report of the Commission on the UK’s Future
On Monday, the Labour Party published the report of the Commission on the UK’s Future, chaired by Gordon Brown: A New Britain: Renewing Our Democracy and Rebuilding Our Economy. The report focuses on changes that can be delivered within a single parliamentary term, and therefore discusses only those issues which the Commission regards as most…
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Ronan Cormacain: The rise and rise of the super-enabling clause
It has become increasingly popular to include what I term a ‘super-enabling clause’ in primary legislation. It is my contention these clauses are bad for democracy and the rule of law. A regular enabling clause grants a minister the power to make secondary legislation on a specific point. A super-enabling clause is broader and less…
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Chris Himsworth: Referendum Bill Consequentials
At paras 56-57 of their judgment, the court in Reference by the Lord Advocate of devolution issues ([2022] UKSC 31) declared: “The central issue is whether legislation for a referendum on Scottish independence would relate to a reserved matter…. The critical question is accordingly whether the proposed Bill would relate to the Union of the Kingdoms of…
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Kenneth A. Armstrong: Will the Supreme Court Clear the Way to a Scottish Independence Referendum?
At the end of June, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon set out the Scottish Government’s roadmap for a referendum on Scottish independence. The centrepiece would be a Bill to be introduced into the Scottish Parliament to legislate for a referendum in like terms to the 2014 independence referendum, but absent an accompanying section 30 order…
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Stephen Tierney: The Lord Advocate’s Reference: The Constitutional Significance of Referendums and Electoral Processes
The Lord Advocate’s Reference to the Supreme Court asks if the proposed Scottish Independence Referendum Bill relates to reserved matters under the Scotland Act 1998. Core to the Lord Advocate’s case is the claim that the referendum proposed by the draft bill would be ‘advisory’, ‘consultative’ or ‘non-binding’. If this is the case then it can be argued that the…