Acts of Union to be Disturbed

Ensuring a Protestant royal succession is provided for by the English Act of Settlement of 1701, but until the Union of Parliaments, the Scots could choose their monarch under the Scottish Act of Security of 1704, and have a Catholic monarch. The Act of Settlement runs in Scotland only because of the Acts of Union.

The provisions of the Act of Settlement are restated in, and integral to, the Acts of Union.

Brown and his 'Minister for Justice' Straw are not clever men - cunning, sly, certainly - but they are poorly equipped in understanding and education, as well as narrowly experienced in politics, with their strengths residing in crawling about in the bowels of the Labour Party.

Vision, on the scale required to understand what they are doing in yesterday's proposals to ram the provisions of European-style, post War settlements for defeated continental countries into our arrangements, is not theirs to claim.

Even more interesting is the understanding of state power and its control displayed by the Leader and his junta. Patently apparent is the assertion of the Leader not as an executive holding power devolved from the state that is expressed in the person of the monarch and in constitutional structures, and wielded through a democratically elected parliament, thus answerable to the people.

Rather, it seems the Leader believes that he, not the monarch, is the embodiment of state power, and that the monarchy, constitution and Parliament can be recast, or outcast as he chooses.

Foolishness and conceit are blind to the fact that behind power lies consent, and behind consent lies both long negotiation and settlement, and then force.