Corruption of governance in Scotland under bureaucratic-authrolitarian nationalists

Nicola  Sturgeon, accused of bureaucratic corruption in Scotland, will NOT resign as First Minister, even though what she did was undoubtedly a resigning matter, and would have been for almost anyone else (possibly even Salmond). She is a different proposition.

Sturgeon is like Nixon in that she genuinely does not see that what she did was wrong. She believes anything which will further her cause is legitimate, in the same way that Nixon put it long after Watergate to David Frost in their television interviews. If I may quote from my book which starts with this case, and ends with a prediction of the destruction of Scottish legalism by a hyper-nationalist government:

 

"Nixon’s view was that executive privilege covered anything the President might want to do. 'If the President does it, that means that it is not illegal,' he said later in a televised interview with David Frost. This essentially monarchical conception of power is precisely what the framers of the Constitution wanted to avoid when they introduced into practical government for the first time in history the concept of the separation of powers." (p. 29)

 

“If Sturgeon does it, that means that it is not illegal” - that seems to be her view. And it is only the institutions of Scotland, in particular the judiciary, which have the power to force her out of office. The civil service has already been corrupted by politicisation (analysed in my Part II), and the police are now a form of gendarmerie, controlled by the state. There is only the judiciary left.

The battle between the judiciary and the whole single-government (i.e. legislature and partisan civil service) apparatus in Edinburgh is the defining conflict in post-devolution Scottish politics. I have already written here about how Donald Dewar introduced into the first draft of the Scotland Act a provision which would have given the First Minister the power to hire and fire judges, which would have meant the end of the separation of powers due to abrogation of judicial independence, held since 1701 under the Act of Settlement. (see pp. 320-2) That would have opened the way to quasi-totalitarian government, restrained only by the Human Rights Act and the UK Supreme Court.

Here the issue is this: what will the still independent judiciary do and - more importantly - WHEN will they be given the opportunity to do it? (This is an issue similar to that in the second Trump impeachment as, if they cannot act until after the May elections, that will be pointless.) My book tells the story of the post-devolution judiciary in Scotland and might be consulted by those with an interest in this key constitutional question: is the Frist Minister any longer bound by the conventions of democratic politics or does she have the sort of "executive privilege" which Nixon claimed?

My arguments are supported by some important figures in law. The Foreword is written by Lord Hope of Craighead, ex-Deputy President of the UK Supreme Court and Alan Page, Professor of Public Law at Dundee, who is the author “Constitutional Law of Scotland”, the main reference work, has written an Introduction to Part II.

See "THE JUSTICE FACTORY: Can the Rule of Law Survive in 21st Century Scotland?" (Ian Mitchell, 2020)

Details here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1981993401?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860