Interesting Links for 08-06-2018

[andrewducker]

Belfast woman to challenge NI abortion law

(tags: NorthernIreland abortion )

Breakthrough pregnancy blood test can predict delivery date and help tackle risky premature births

(tags: babies pregnancy blood genetics )

Sucking carbon dioxide from air is cheaper than scientists thought

(tags: co2 Technology )

Edinburgh city-centre roads to close for Clean Air Day

(tags: edinburgh environment pollution scotland )

Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

That headline is REALLY misleading.

It's actually:

> TWO key roads in the centre of Edinburgh will shut to traffic for festivities to celebrate Clean Air Day.

Two. And two fairly short ones at that. They can come back when they close something substantial like Lothian Road.

[danieldwilliam]

I'm a bit ambivalent about the Supreme Court ruling.

Generally I'm in favour of the judiciary keeping out of the political realm as much as possible. I'm also concerned about the persistence of devolution settlements in the UK - the last two times these have been tested in the Supreme Court the result was not good for the devolution settlements.

That said the law on abortion in Northern Ireland is currently not optimal.

[andrewducker]

That's the whole point of signing up to things like the EU though - that you agree laws which override your local parliaments, making sure everyone has the same basic rights, even if the local government is rubbish.

[danieldwilliam]

Well yes, but 50% of the Supreme Court decisions that I can remember on devolution in the last 12 months have applied UK law to a devolved parliament in a way I strongly don't approve of. It's not a guarantee that a supra-national body or a multi-national state will produce better laws at the macro level. I quite liked the Scotland Act and I'm disappointed to discover that a key part of it is not, in fact, the law of the UK despite being passed by the UK Parliament and ratified by the Scottish Parliament.

[andrewducker]

And that's possibly a good reason to make it easier for groups to leave and enter agreements between nations. But while we're a member of the EU (or the UK), I can't see any choice but to have judges somewhere make rulings about which laws apply where.

[danieldwilliam]

I agree - there is always going to be a role for judicial interpretation. There is always going to be a role for judicial oversight of the proper functioning of the legislative process.

In the case of abortion in Northern Ireland there is some tension between the principle of devolution (that decisions should be taken by local parliaments) and Northern Ireland's membership of a signatory to the ECHR.

One of my concerns about Bills of Rights and such things is that they are often drafted in a Motherhood and Apple Pie way in order to get agreement and this gives the judiciary a degree of influence over the substantive law that I would (all other things being equal) see resting with more directly democratic decision making bodies. I would prefer to draft my Bill of Rights in a way that makes more of the detail explicit and leaves a smaller role for the judiciary.

I'm generally against things that I think are political decisions being made on the basis of expanding claim-rights through the judiciary. Not least because what the judiciary give, they can take away again.

[skington]

Is there any suggestion that the judiciary is biased, or is it just that the law governing devolution is badly-written? And/or that given that no parliament can bind a subsequent parliament, that e.g. Scottish devolution can always be reversed by Westminster?

[danieldwilliam]

Is the judiciary biased?

Depends what you mean by bias. Do I think that the judiciary in the UK is consciously biased against the devolved assemblies? Not particularly, we've come some way since Barton Hill Coal Company vs Reid. Do the judiciary of the UK have a series of unconscious biases, patterns of thought and implicit assumptions - certainly they do. No more, perhaps less in fact, that other people but the question of bias is one reason why I'm generally against the judiciary being involved in political decisions and decisions that have big implications for the UK's constitution. (I'd be less concerned about this if the UK's constitution was properly codified, had been instituted with more democratic legitimacy and was less slippery.

I don't think the law governing devolution was badly writen. No more or less so than the entire UK constitution. Large parts of that are writen on napkins from private dinners and inside the handshakes of dead men. I think the codification of the Sewell Convention in particular was pretty explicit and I think, in this case, the judiciary are wrong.

(Or at least as wrong as it possible for a surpreme court to be, given that they are the arbiters of right and wrong and the parable of the Three Baseball Umpires applies.)

I don't have a conceptual problem with the UK constitutional principle that no Parliament can bind its successor. It has a logical consistency. I would prefer that the UK constitution explicitely set out its ground norms and then gave them some limited protection and embedded status (and I spend quite a lot of my time leading an organisation that campaigns for that). I'm not sure that it is entirely currently the case that the judiciary think that all legislation is equally unprotected from change by successor Parliaments. Some part of it may have protection from implicit repeal by Parliament. But apparantly not by the judiciary.

I think in the case of the Sewell Convention, either the Supreme Court got it wrong or the Conservative Government lied.

[skington]

Is the Sewell Convention actually codified anywhere, or is it just a tacit understanding?

One that a great degree of people at Westminster haven't properly internalised, i.e. that it makes (or should make, anyway) the UK a de facto weakly-federal system?

[danieldwilliam]

It's codified in the Scotland Act 2016 which amended Section 28 of the Scotland Act 1998

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/46/section/28

Depends a bit on your defintion of "normal" I suppose but the rules on statutory interpretion which make ministerial statements admissible as evidence for interpretation support my view that the judiciary has erred.

[danieldwilliam]

I think you are right that many Westminister politicians haven't internalised the apparant change in status to a de facto weakly federal state. I think Ruth Davidson has, which is why she keeps going on about independence referendums - she knows that the main thing keeping something a weakly federal structure true s de facto but not strongly true de jure is the threat the the threat of Scottish independence, so she wants to reduce the threat that Scotland will keep chuntering on about independence as an alternative.

[danieldwilliam]

I think the project fall in costs for CO2 removal is a good thing but it's not an uncomplicated solution to global warming.

Firstly, it isn't necessarily the case that removing the excess CO2 returns the climate to its state prior to the addition of the CO2. Climate systems are non linear and the climate might move to a different state when the CO2 is removed.

Secondly, if we are going to remove all of the excess CO2 then we probabkly need to budget on using about twice as much energy as we extracted from burning the coal, oil and gas. That's a lot since 1750.

Thirdly, we need to find something to do with truly geological amounts of CO2.

We might be able to use CO2 extraction to slow down global warming and buy us some more time to change our energy systems whislt using it as a way to soak up short term energy imbalances caused by solar PV and wind intermittency. Either by using the excess electricity to extract and sequester CO2 or using it to round trip electricity in to methane and back to electricity.

[andrewducker]

Apparently, capturing it isn't that energy intensive. But turning it back into carbon really really would be.

So you have to store it as co2, which is tricky.

[danieldwilliam]

Tricky and energy intensive. If you are converting it to something else then you need to put energy in. If you are compressing it and / or moving it then you need to put energy in.

I for one favour turning it in to construction diamond and buckminsterfullerene and building houses and space elevators or turning it in to calcium carbonate and building islands.