The finest QCs in all of Twitterdom have made much out of the Johnson government, firing off law suits at the drop of the hat. But while token victories at London’s High Court are trumpeted as earth-shattering defeats for the wicked Tories, the shenanigans of Nicola Sturgeon’s government in Scotland get far less publicity in the Fleet Street press. For this week the SNP regime was (again) found guilty of breaching laws regarding freedom of information.
For the Scotsman newspaper has won a decisive victory this week, forcing ministers to publish legal advice they received about a second independence referendum after a thirteen-month battle between the paper and the Scottish Government. It will be the first time any aspect of Holyrood’s official position on the legality of indyref2 will be made public, with lawyers in both Edinburgh and London split on whether the Scottish Parliament has the power to pass a law mandating such a plebiscite.
It is merely the latest setback for Sturgeon’s administration after a series of defeats which forced ministers to reveal the scale of care home and hospital deaths to Covid-19 in individual institutions, as well as publish secret modelling of a then potential second wave of the virus. The Government was also found to have unlawfully claimed its own report into harassment complaints against Salmond did not exist. Whoops!
Scottish Information Commissioner Daren Fitzhenry said the Sturgeon government’s decisions during the Alex Salmond inquiry and the ‘obvious’ and ‘significant’ public interest around a second independence referendum meant parts of the legal advice should be released. Fitzhenry said in his ruling that:
The Commissioner investigated and found that the ministers had partially complied with FOISA in responding to the request. He found that the ministers had only been entitled to withhold some of the information falling within scope of the applicant’s request under the relevant exemption.
Interestingly, Fitzhenry’s intervention again highlights the impotence of the Scottish Parliament, which twice voted for ministers to publish advice they were given after Alex Salmond took the government to court. Sturgeon’s administration only caved and published it for political reasons, rather than legal ones. However in the case of Fitzhenry, his statutory basis means if the SNP government ignore his rulings, they are actually breaking the law – suggesting he has more power than the elected chamber of the peoples of Scotland.
Perhaps if Jolyon Maugham and Co aren’t having much success in London, they might want to train their guns on mis-happenings at Holyrood instead.
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