21-05-2025
Tory MSP fumes as expert says Scotland 'not a partner in a union'
Professor Robert Black, emeritus professor in Scots law at Edinburgh University, argued that Unionist assumptions about the creation of Great Britain under the Acts of Union were wrong in a speech over the weekend.
But his comments were met with fury from Scottish Tory MSP Stephen Kerr, who blasted the fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh's comments as 'irrelevant'.
Kerr shared a screenshot of The National's story on Twitter/X with the caption: 'This is what the nationalists are now resorting to. Trying to rewrite ... the Act of Union 1707.
READ MORE: Scotland 'absorbed into England' by Acts of Union, says top legal expert
'An out of date ideology which is irrelevant – yet still the SNP cling to it and any success for them promotes this sort of thinking.'
Prof Black told the Scottish Sovereignty Research Group's conference on Saturday that Scotland had been 'absorbed' into England by the Acts of Union, contrary to the prevailing political view that 1707 marked the creation of a new state called Great Britain.
(Image: David Cheskin)
He said: 'No honest and conscientious lawyer can look at what happened in the first decade of the 18th century to the institutions of government north and south of the Tweed and reach the conclusion that the pre-existing states of Scotland and England both ceased to exist and that a new state emerged, phoenix-like out of the ashes.
'The evidence, the facts on the ground support no judgment other than that Scotland ceased to exist as a state in international law and was absorbed into a still-extant England, cosmetically renamed 'Great Britain'.
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"Scotland's legal status today, more than three centuries later, is therefore not that of a partner in a union – unequal, perhaps, but a union nevertheless – but is that of territory absorbed into a larger country.'
Prof Black, a distinguished legal expert who laid the groundwork for the Lockerbie bombing trial in 2001, did not delve into the political consequences of his comments but they were perceived as a landmark moment by his hosts.
The Scottish Sovereignty Research Group is allied with Liberation Scotland, which is attempting to have Scotland 'decolonised' by the United Nations.
