The Supreme Court isn’t all that Supreme
Roe V Wade was an important court case in the United States, the Supreme Court of the US ruled in 1973 that restrictive state regulation of abortion was illegal.
In 2022 another Supreme Court case rolled that back. What happened next was unprecedented.
Many individual states then went on to ban abortion, while others secured it as a fundamental right.
Do you know how many people in Scotland thought “oh I must now respect the decision of the US Supreme Court”?
Not many, they largely ignored it and went with their view on abortion, which is that it’s a woman’s right to choose.
It may interest you to know – the UK Supreme Court is not a separate entity from the UK Government, it’s a “non-ministerial government department”.
The Supreme Court isn’t the “Supreme” legal authority in the UK, that’s the UK Parliament.
That doesn’t mean you or I can ignore them, quite the opposite, we’re bound by their considered decisions. The UK Parliament can, and usefully, foreign entities can also ignore them.
Lord Reed essentially summarised that all was well and good with the bill, however Scotland cannot be asked that question, because even though legally it does nothing, the result could potentially be annoying enough that in effect it forced the UK Parliament to act in a certain way.
How terrible for our parliamentarians – being forced to enact the will of the people, it’ll never catch on.
Usefully they can be shamed into action by other entities – for example we witnessed this when the international community (including the US) decided to remind them of their commitments in the Good Friday Agreement.
You see, the people of foreign lands (and through them their governments), usually don’t care what UK Non-Ministerial Departments have to say, even when named the Supreme Court.
In the same way that a woman’s right to abortion didn’t change in Scotland following the US Supreme Court decision, neither do Americans think Scotlands right to independence is diminished by the UK Supreme Court. In fact – much like the public condemnation of the result by Scottish people to the US decision, it seems condemning of the UK decision will grow.
That’s our challenge now, grow our support, if we can chase down another 8% from our high of 52%, taking us to 60% – it won’t really matter what the Supreme Court says, because the whole gig of UK Parliamentary Sovereignty will be ignored by players far bigger than them.
65 countries already left the British Empire, and more recently the UK annoyed Europe with its style of Brexit, I can’t imagine there aren’t a few waiting to be rather difficult in return.
