A government or a colonial administration?

The latter if there's no mandatory referendum on the "juryless trial" bill

I just sent this to the three unionist Scottish papers, The Scotsman, The Herald, and the Edinburgh Evening News. It’s a condensed version of Henry Ferguson’s earlier post on the ‘juryless trial’ bill now before Holyrood. I wonder if it will be printed….

So, I’ve just seen that it was published in the April 5th edition of the Edinburgh Evening News, without the last 3 sentences, but published in full in the April 7th edition of The National.

The Scottish People have been missing from the debate over the Scottish Government’s controversial Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform bill that's wending its way through Parliament. Proposed changes to the Scottish constitution should trigger a mandatory referendum where the People, not parliament, decide. This bill proposes two constitutional changes - ditching both the ‘not proven’ verdict and juries for rape cases. 

It’s international practice that constitutional change be approved by the People in a referendum. The Scottish Government recently endorsed this principle when it stated, “A constitution….should not be vulnerable to change at the whim of the government of the day or of a simple majority in parliament.”  

Mandatory referendums are one component - others are Optional Referendums and Popular Initiatives - of direct political rights under a system of Direct Democracy, which give the People the final say on proposed constitutional changes.

And because Scotland’s constitutional basis is popular sovereignty, where the People are sovereign over parliament as opposed to England’s parliamentary sovereignty, political rights such as Mandatory Referendums should exist.

Furthermore, Article 25 of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which the UK ratified in 1976 states that Direct Political Rights are a fundamental human right of all citizens. And yet the Scottish Government has failed to incorporate direct political rights into legislation. 

This bill is a direct attack on Scotland’s constitutional principle of Popular Sovereignty and contravenes Article 25 of the UN Covenant in which all citizens have an inalienable right to directly participate in the running of the country.

If it’s rammed through parliament without a referendum, then we’ll know once and for all that the Scottish “Government” is no more than a colonial administration, operating on the basis of English Parliamentary Sovereignty.