It is over three hundred years since Royal Assent has been denied in the UK, and that as it happens was a Scottish issue. It has been denied since then, though not in the UK, the consequences of which these three nations and the rest of the world live to this day. This is the story of knowing when to pick a fight that you cannot lose in order to win a fight that you cannot win. It will not amuse everyone, and if you are offended, please accept my apologies. No offence is intended, but it can easily be taken, but you are free not to read on, so remember, if you have been offended it is merely because your own eyes have drawn you on in this most charming of encounters.
It happened in private of course but the conversation was along these lines, being translated for yours faithfully for the most part into English from the original Scots, except where English English simply fails to have any equivalent expression:
FM: We are all perfectly aware that England is going to object to our decolonisation proposals so we shall have to be bold. We have had one referendum, but as they have moved the goal posts against the wishes of the Scottish people we can and must propose to hold another.
MSP1: They won’t let us do that.
FM: We shall have one nevertheless.
MsP2: They shall send the matter to the courts which will not go well for us.
FM: Let them try.
Months later
MSP1: It is just as we warned FM. The Supreme Court has ruled that to legislate for a further referendum be outwith our powers; if only we still had the Lords. Now Lord Denning, he would have been cavalier enough to have supported us.
FM: We have other options. Our resources are not exhausted.
MSP2: Are you suggesting a general election? We’ll be out as quick as a dram in the bishop’s tulip.
MSP1: No, she means we’ll pick a fight with Westminster that we cannot lose.
MSP3: Precisely, the gender reform bill: just look at the opposition to it, but we know who wants it and what big mouths they have. Even though we all know that it goes too far, we can push it through here.
MSP2: Westminster won’t like that, it runs roughshod over too much of their equality legislation. It will not get Royal Assent. They’ll block it.
FM: Precisely! Then we can accuse them of using gender as a political weapon insinuating that this is the first of many ways in which they will emasculate the sovereignty of our Parliament.
MSP2: That way public opinion will be on our side. We won’t need to say much, the big mouths will not need our help to show that the English cannot overrule the Scots Parliament.
MSP1: So they will back down on gender reform?
MSP2: No, don’t you see? She’s a cannier lass than that.
FM: We compromise on equality and get a referendum.
MSP (from the backbench): but eerhm, gender, political weapons, if I may ask, isn’t that what you have just….[garbled noises emanating as from one recently subject to an uninvited attack on his person. ]
Ah, the perils of these so-called modern (post-modern) days. Do the right thing and you shall be pilloried. Do the wrong thing and what happens? You shall be pilloried. Well, if pilloried either way…
Finally, at last you say, I do wonder how we could ever be post-modern, for if modern is à la mode, today, the post-modern must be tomorrow, and we are never in tomorrow it is always just around the corner waiting for us, but I guess that in this modern post-modern world where words mean whatever Tweedeldee and Tweedeldum want them to mean we just have to accept it for what it is not. Which reminds me, a friend today remarked on an email into which I had copied him, to say that the recipient and the sender appeared to be one and the same. Oh no, I clarified for him, they were two entirely different legal persons, who simply happened to occupy the same body. The correct pronouns, articles etc are they and its derivatives. Forget ye not.
