Politicised civil service
The rule of law cannot survive if you have a
politicised civil service (never mind the other significant problems raised).
Few people realise just how far that degenerative process has gone in Scotland
since the SNP assumed the reins of government.
If I may quote briefly from my book on the subject:
"Immediately after the SNP got into power in 2007, it announced that it
was going to change the name of the Scottish Executive so that both it and what
was previously referred to as the Scottish Ministers became one entity called
the “Scottish government”.
Announced initially as “re-branding”, it was made official when the Scotland
Act was amended in 2012. The country is now run by a body officially known as
the “Scottish Government/Riaghaltas na h-Alba”. This obscures the distinction
between politically responsible ministers (responsible to parliament and the
electorate) and politically neutral administrators (responsible to law for
ethics and to minsters for policy). If they are still separate organisations,
why do they have the same name? Who, outside the Edinburgh elite, understands
the distinction between the Scottish Government/Riaghaltas na h-Alba and the
Scottish Government/Riaghaltas na h-Alba?"
For further details, and much information on how the civil service was used to
promote the SNP view of the 2014 referendum, and is still doing much they same
thing, see "The Justice Factory: Can the Rule of Law Survive in 21st
Century Scotland?" (Ian Mitchell, 2020)
It is not a party-political screed. 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 on the subject, has written an Introduction to Part II.
This is an as yet untold story, but a very, very important one if the British
state is to survive with the ideals it has embraced about civic government roughly
since the Act of Union, of which the main one is the rule of law, at the centre
of which is the principle of the separation of powers. The Scottish
nationalists want to undermine that in order to establish a form of populist
absolutism in Edinburgh. Now is the time for all good folk to come to the aid
of the country and of course democracy. Without the rule of law, that is a dead
letter.
Details of the book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1981993401?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
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