Scottish Self-Determination

The Difference between the Scottish and English Crowns

Since the union began in 1707, England has used it as a cover for a massive fraud: falsely declaring Scotland to be part of the ‘crown’ to enable the blatant theft of Scotland’s natural resources.

It’s all done in the name of the ‘crown’. Declaring Scotland’s resources to be held by the ‘crown’ sounds good, right? After all, we’re in a union called the United Kingdom of Great Britain. One crown for England and Scotland. What’s to argue?

Well, everything, actually. There was never be one unified crown for the UK and never could be. It’s constitutionally impossible. Here’s why.

At the time of the union negotiations in the early 1700s, Queen Anne, Queen of England and Queen of Scots rather liked the idea of a “United Kingdom of Great Britain” and so, in the treaty, that’s how the unified state was styled. Anne may have liked the idea, but it could never be. And the clue lies in Anne’s titles. Did you spot it?

Anne, like all queens and kings of England was Queen of England, queen of the land of England. But in Scotland, like all our queens and kings, she was Queen of Scots, not queen of the land of Scotland. And that distinction is a fundamental big deal. It’s just the biggest of big deals. Anne, and all her successors by the way, including Charles, does not own the land of Scotland. We do. You and me, ie the people.

In England (and in other countries) it was accepted that a kingdom was first and foremost a feudal entity and was the property of its king or queen. But in Scotland, this situation was radically different. Here, the Crown’s status was as the representative of the Community of the Realm which vested that ‘ownership’ in the sovereignty of the people.

Let’s just emphasise that: In Scotland (then and still now), the institution of the crown represents the people of the nation rather than representing a monarch. It’s why Scotland had no king or queen of the ‘land’, only of Scots. 

This is why the territories of England and Scotland could not be merged into a single, territorial nation. Neither Queen Anne nor the Scottish parliament could transfer to the new united kingdom something that neither of them owned in the first place. Sovereignty was (and is) owned by the Scottish people alone and could not be transferred. 

Of course, all this made no difference to the new British state. It didn’t care. It had a country to take over and a little thing like the Scottish people’s sovereignty wasn’t going to stop it. And so continuously and assiduously has it done this over the past 300 years that it has created an almost universally accepted reality, unassailable by Scottish Courts, popular movements or political parties.

To create its giant fraud, it simply replaced the sovereignty of the Scottish people with the English doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty and ‘legitimised’ it by letting the English Act of Union (there were two Acts, one Scottish and one English) to replace the Treaty. Job done.

So the UK ‘supreme court’ upholds the English constitution in every respect, legitimising the overthrow of the Scottish constitution by that of England.

None of this is legal or lawful. It doesn’t legitimise the translation of a political and economic union into a single, territorial and constitutionally homogeneous ‘kingdom’. 

Despite the many assertions of the British establishment to the contrary; despite the imposition of English territorial and judicial sovereignty by fiat; and, above all, despite the co-opting and disposal of Scotland’s territorial assets as though these were the assets of a single, United Kingdom, Scotland as a nation was not absorbed into the larger kingdom which Great Britain aspired to become.

Scotland’s rights of sovereignty over its territory are vested in the people under Scots law and our rights were not affected by the Union of Crowns in 1603 (remember, when Jamie the VI hightailed it London to take the crown of the dead Elizabeth I?) and certainly not by the Treaty of Union in 1707. 

Scotland may have surrendered its independent statehood but it continues to be a sovereign nation. This means that the ultimate ownership of the territory of Scotland still belongs to the people of Scotland. 

This ultimate ownership encompasses the whole territory and all its natural assets, which, since 1707, the British state has stolen, plundered and ransacked, and continues to do so today.

The British State stole our money on a vast scale. I say that we should get it back.

The Darien Venture

Scotland’s attempt to form a colony in Panama could not be allowed to succeed. Whether they shared a king or not, Scotland would not be allowed to get in the way of England’s empire and Darien was deliberately sabotaged by the East India Company and the Royal Navy.