No decision yet, almost six hours after Craig posted

28 May 2026
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2026/05/the-power-of-the-uk-state-over-scotland/

I went through yesterday's preliminary hearing in the Scottish judicial review
of the proscription of Palestine Action with a sense of mounting horror. We had
the same judge as at the permission hearing, Lord Young. We had exactly the same
arguments and the same case law being deployed again by the UK government as at
the permission hearing. But there the sense of déjà vu ended. The judge, Lord
Young, appeared to be rowing backwards from his decision to grant the judicial
review, as fast as he possibly could.

I may be wrong - we will have his decision in three hours' time. I hope I am
wrong. I quite often am wrong.

But every indication was that I am not wrong. English proceedings at an advanced
stage seemed in his mind to have shifted, from an irrelevance in a different
jurisdiction, to a fundamental reason not to proceed. The costs of holding a
physical review, in terms of the actual pounds and pennies of having courts, had
been dismissed contemptuously by Lord Young when advanced by the government as a
reason not to hold a judicial review at the permission hearing.

Lord Young now himself raised the cost of a Scottish judicial review as a
potential reason for not having one. Three times.

He also made plain from the outset that he was considering the Starmer regime
motion for sisting (postponing in effect forever) the Scottish judicial review
as a matter of case management, not as a matter of principle of whether the
court had jurisdiction. For that reason, if he decided to sist he would not be
contradicting his previous decision that the review could go ahead.

The solution was not openly to deny Scotland's rights, but administrative
delay. Forever.

The main obvious thing that had changed was not the government arguments, but
the person making them. This hearing had itself been postponed almost three
weeks to fit the diary of the Advocate General, Catherine Smith KC, who was
representing the Starmer regime in person because - as the Government submission
directly stated - of the great constitutional importance of the case.

Catherine Smith KC is political royalty. Daughter of former Labour leader the
late John Smith and of Baroness Smith, sister of the BBC's Washington
correspondent Sarah Smith, and sister-in-law of the son of former Secretary
General of NATO, Lord Robertson. I could go on.

She is also rubbish in court. She presented the government's arguments much
worse that they had originally been presented, with a really revolting mix of
personal arrogance and profound lack of articulacy. She sometimes appeared
unable to put a coherent sentence together, and on the rare occasions when she
did so, we were generally left wondering in what way it linked to the last
one. Lord Young frequently rescued her by expressing the idea she had been
groping her way towards with all the alacrity of a blindfolded person in
handcuffs.

At one point Lord Young actually said to the Advocate General: "You haven't
explained that very well".

Cont'd ...