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

[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.