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Scottish sovereignty

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Scottish sovereignty was not subsumed by English sovereignty in 1707. In the case of MacCormick v Lord Advocate 1954 (1953 SC 396), Lord Cooper stated that "The principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law. ... I have difficulty in seeing why it should have been supposed that the new Parliament of Great Britain must inherit all the peculiar characteristics of the English Parliament but none of the Scottish Parliament...." This case dealt with the styling of the current monarch as the "second" of the United Kingdom (there never having been a previous Queen Elizabeth of the UK). There is a section on the nature of Scottish constitutional law within the UK in G Mitchell's 'Constitutional Law' (2nd Ed. Wm Green and Son, Edinburgh 1968(ish))

"we are sovereign within the Union and we can walk out any time we want". Those are the exact words once uttered by Michael Forsyth, an arch-unionist and Secretary of State for Scotland under the last Conservative government, uttered January 1997


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