By Alex Thorburn
“The First Parliament of Great Britain”
Some people may wonder why I have used inverted commas to enclose the title. Well, that’s simply because what is often classified as the “First Parliament of Great Britain by a number of writers is incorrect and I will explain.
The 2nd Parliament of Queen Anne was summoned on 2nd May 1705 and Assembled on 14th June 1705 and then it was dissolved on 15 April 1708.
Therefore that parliament was called by Queen Anne as the Parliament of England, and it was not dissolved until 15 April 1708 and it had been continuous from the date that it was summoned. Almost 1 year prior to the dissolution of Queen Anne’s 2nd English Parliament, 45 Scottish Members of Parliament and 16 Scottish Peers were admitted and they changed the name to that of the “First Parliament of Great Britain”.
However, there had been no change whatsoever to the English Parliament and it continued to sit until dissolution in 1708.
Rather than dissolving the 2nd Parliament of Queen Anne and having new elections to take into account the Treaty of Union 1706 and to create a new Parliament of Great Britain, they “Co-opted the 45 Scottish MPs and 16 Peers into the English Parliament and changed the name.
The 2nd Parliament of Queen Anne carried on just as before but with a number of “co-opted” members.
The composition following co-option was as follows:
As you can see, the 45 Scottish MPs and 16 Peers were simply co-opted into the English Parliament because it made no difference at all to the function of that parliament. However, I cannot remember at any time being told that Scotland’s representatives were simply “co-opted” into an English Parliament.
So, I took a wee look at a number of English language dictionaries, and they all have very similar definitions of the word “co-opted”. For my purpose, I shall use the Cambridge Dictionary definition that states as follows:
1. to persuade someone who criticizes or disagrees with you to join your group so that the person can no longer oppose you:
2. To co-opt is also to claim something as your own when it was really created by others:
There you have it!
If we ever needed confirmation that the English Parliament carried on just as they always had following the so-called union, the co-option of our representatives clears up any misconceptions there may be on that matter.
As the English spy, Daniel Defoe stated on 20th November 1706;
“The Scots will be allowed to send to Westminster, a handful of men who will make no weight whatever. They will be allowed to sit there for form’s sake to be laughed at.”
Of course, Defoe was 100% correct and the massive Parliamentary Deficit at the time of the first parliament attended by Scotland’s representatives was in the favour of England & Wales by over 11 to 1.
Immediately following the Act of Union coming into effect, during a debate in the English House of Commons on 2nd May 1706 an MP shouted:
We have Scotland on the rack now!
This was immediately followed by John Smith, Speaker of the House of Commons, who joined in the jubilation by adding:
We have catch’d Scotland and will bind her fast.
Conclusion
This so-called union has been a sham from the beginning and, even from its’ conception, was always intended to be so.
I do wonder whether the Treaty of Union 1706 would have been signed had they known about Scotland’s co-option into England.
MY COMMENTS
My thanks to Alex Thorburn from the SNC Steering Committee for compiling this information. Alex is a top class researcher and does a power of work from which we all learn and benefit.
I am, as always
Yours for Scotland
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Just a detail, and probably just a typo, but that was 2nd May 1707.
Actually, there’s always been a bit of confusion regarding the dates around that period because calendars were in flux across Europe, because of discrepancies that had built up over the centuries, between dates and seasons. I’d been having some arguments about certain dates regarding the Treaty timelines with a BTL commenter over on Wings, so I’d decided to pin down the relevant dates a while ago. This is a copy of a brief summary I’d put together for myself;
In Scotland the year 1707 began on January 1st whereas in England the year 1707 didn’t start until 25th March. Scotland had been using Jan 1 as the start of the year since 1600, in line with most of Europe, but England didn’t fall in line until 1752.
The Scottish Parliament ratified the Treaty via its Act of Union on the 16th of January 1707. But in England that same day was 16th January 1706. Seven weeks later the English Parliament ratified the Treaty via its own Act of Union on the 6th March, which, in England, was still 1706.
On May the 1st, 1707 (in both kingdoms this time, England having caught up on the 25th March) the new Parliament of Great Britain officially came into being, and at that point both of the old parliaments of Scotland and England ceased to have any official relevance, as their powers converged on the new parliament, though the Treaty allowed Anne to delay the actual first session of the new joint Parliament of Great Britain as long as the formalities required by the Treaty had been concluded by the 1st of May 1707, which they were.
As to the article, I agree that the implementation of the Treaty was and still is a sham, and that the Treaty doesn’t provide any formal justification for England’s MP majority decisions to take precedence over Scotland’s MP majority decisions that Westminster claims it does.
While the numbers of MPs were specified, nothing was specified as to how they would be interpreted for decision-making purposes. It was just an unspoken assumption that Westminster’s existing simple flat majority voting system would continue to be used in the new parliament, despite it being a brand new parliament under new management and new constitutional and representational circumstances, especially as regards sovereignties, which changed from one to two. That last particular change was extremely significant, and yet Westminster completely ignored it.
My contention is that neither that assumption nor that voting system is valid as regards its use in the Union’s Parliament because, never having been stated in the Treaty nor in its two ratifying Acts, it was never formally approved by its negotiators, nor its signators, nor the ratifying parliaments and thus it cannot have any constitutional standing.
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Xaracen: you are quite correct in stating that the dates differed and that there had been no formal adoption of Westminster principles, simply an oral agreement or an understanding between the Commissioners when the Treaty was drawn up and, later, carried into the Acts. Almost everything – if not actually everything – attaching to the parliament from day one has been ultra vires because of the very nature of the Treaty itself.
The problem for us is that, in law, acquiescence can mean lawful acceptance. It can also be argued that sovereignty was not ceded in full because of the Articles of Union specifically retained all the arms of government bar the parliament – i.e. all the accoutrements of state, bar the parliament. It is only in reading closely the Articles of Union within the Treaty (an international agreement between two independent, sovereign states and, therefore subject to international law, not domestic law) that one realizes fully that it was not an incorporating Treaty as some historians claim except insofar as it incorporated both states, but actually a Treaty of equal partnership.
I think that the failure of the Scottish Commissioners to insist on new regulations for the new parliament was down to their fear that the Union would not go ahead, and also, that diplomacy called for an acceptance of the English parliamentary rules since the new parliament was to be situated within England’s parliamentary pale. It was a fateful omission that led to the English believing that they had subsumed Scotland when nothing could have been further from the truth (the Crawford & Doyle Report was fatally flawed, although never tested in law, because the premise was that Scotland had been subsumed, and, therefore the premise became the conclusion, also fatally flawed in law.
Treaties are primary legislation, international in nature, and domestic Acts (the Acts of Union) could do no more than translate the Treaty Articles into domestic law (secondary legislation, which cannot overturn primary legislation). In no way could the Acts have either abolished the Treaty or misinterpreted it, because the Treaty exists out-with domestic law. It is vitally crucial to understand that. Hansard must be a primary source of investigation here. I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the English MPs who, quite soon after 1707, declared that they had captured Scotland and would never let her go, were aware of the truth, as every Westminster ruling party has been since that time. When English people have been questioned about the Union, they almost always trot out the fallacy that Scotland was subsumed or defeated and brought under English rule. Utter, unadulterated nonsense.
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So really what was created was the ‘First Parliament of England as Great Britain’.
Incidentally it would appear that the technique of co-opting has been successfully adopted by those now in charge of the Scottish National Party.
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For sure, Duncanio, along with the inability to negotiate and stay fully awake.
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Great piece Alex. Something which should be taught in school!
MARJORIE ELLIS THOMPSON
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no surprise there. “ Unions” and other international agreements are rarely transparent especially in times past. Diplomacy is the art of the scoundrel.
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Great piece. The thing is, the dates of the Scots and the dates of the English were different in the 18th century until they converged later on and all followed the European/Continental example, which only Scotland had done hitherto. Xaracen spells it out admirably.
Having studied the speeches of Queen Anne, whom I rather admire – she was a far better and more politically astute monarch that she is given credit for – it seems to me that she was of the understanding that two sovereign nations had come together as partners. She stressed her TWO nations in one parliament she and stressed that she was monarch of each in her SEPARATE capacity as head of state of each, as remains the situation today, the ‘Union of the Crowns’ being no union at all, but a convergence of one person wearing two crowns, a very, very different proposition, and one that the royal family knows perfectly well is the case even today. Because of their intransigence on this issue, they will help to create a republic of an independent Scotland.
This is the meat and veg stuff that our people need to know because so many are ignorant of the reality – through no fault of their own, because this stuff has been hidden from them, as it has been hidden from the English populace through deliberate obfuscation, lies and propaganda. All of this is in Hansard and cannot be denied, and in the numerable Scottish constitutional and legal documents which SALVO/Liberation has unearthed from the Scottish archives – those not destroyed through English invasion. It was a case of the English MPs and elite wishing to control Scotland, especially against foreign invasion from Europe – shades of Faslane and Coulport, only a different enemy. Our geopolitical position has always been both our bane and our potential salvation.
The Darien failure – later, the Panama Canal’s construction at the Isthmus of Panama proved how smart the Scots had been – can be laid at the door of the odious William of Orange, he who sleekitly ordered the Glencoe Massacre – as much to malarial conditions, as he ordered the English colonies in the Americas to refuse any help or assistance to the Scots, aided and abetted Spain (which had interests in the region) and encouraged the Dutch to offer no help or assistance either. It was all done to bring Scotland to its knees and force it into union with England. It was never considered to be a Union by the English MPs and elite, and they fed the English population the idea that Scotland was absorbed into a Greater England, a wholly false notion based upon a wholly false narrative that persists to this day.
Long experience of the English elite’s duplicity and mendacity meant that many of the representatives in the Scottish parliament knew that it would herald “the end o ane auld sang”, and they were not wrong in that assessment. However, Scotland’s jurists (lawyers) tasked with drawing up the Articles for the Commissioners tried their level best to save her institutions and nationhood as far as they could, and I think they succeeded, if we would only but open our eyes, as a nation, to see it.
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Terrific further information and assessment from Xaracen and Lorncal which was the intention. Why would anyone believe that the sovereign nation of Scotland would willingly enter an international treaty with a nation that had ravaged Scotland for centuries. The riots throughout Scotland would have been much greater had the ordinary Scot known they were being subsumed into a greater England with a Parliamentary Deficit of 11 to 1 that would last for centuries and the impact of which Daniel Defoe pointed out even before the Treaty was signed. I have a hard time believing that those in favour of the union, on both sides, did not know or understand that Scotland’s representatives would “be allowed to sit there for form’s sake to be laughed at”.
Just as you have stated, “Scotland was absorbed into a Greater England, a wholly false notion based upon a wholly false narrative that persists to this day”. This was portrayed to the English as a victory and when you take into account England’s position at the time of the Treaty where they were continually at war and short of both money and manpower, what’s not to like about a new source of taxation and what would later be termed “canon-fodder”?
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You are right, Spear. What I really hope for is that those English Scots who do support independence will read this and pass on the information to their compatriots. We are all kept in the dark by the elites. All of this information should form part of our Scottish history and wider British history curriculuae at both primary/secondary school, and at university/college levels. As Alf Baird says, keeping a people from their own history is a colonialist tactic, and, even in England, the truth about the Union is not broadcast to the wider population. A country is mature when it can face its own history and its own shortcoming with understanding and equanimity, safe in the knowledge that, although we all make mistakes, being human, we can decide to learn the lessons of those mistakes.
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Postcolonial theorists readily apply the term ‘co-opted’ to describe the behaviour of a compromised national party elite who, instead of delivering independence, has ‘opted’ to protect the colonizer’s interest.
The colonial administration we know as Holyrood and ‘Scottish Government’ well fits what Alex suggests, that: “To co-opt is also to claim something as your own when it was really created by others”.
Holyrood/SG, which is not the creation of us Scots, is clearly working against the independence movement despite the repeated election of pro-independence majorities. This is the real deceit and denial of our democracy – an elected national party that is neutral on independence.
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Seems like a last ditch plea today by Doug Chapman MP for SNP MPs to withdraw from Westminster, which the SNP leadership will NOT even discuss at its conference. And now with SNP MP’s jumping ship even to England’s Tories; what next, Sheppard et al returning to their ideological roots, British Labour? A party eaten up by its own deceit now in its final throes, indeed:
https://www.thenational.scot/politics/23849937.stephen-flynn-consider-withdrawing-snp-mps-westminster/
The SNP MPs should have withdrawn from Westminster long ago, as many of us ‘radicals’ advised. They could do it now, today, it would for sure be their last chance “to become Scotland’s heroes”, Iain – but they don’t have the courage, far less the inclination:
After the next election these SNP MPs will be gone and forgotten, juist anither auld sang; though the people will remember them as another ‘parcel o rogues’ who enslaved us for English gold, much like Holyrood’s payroll an aw.
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In only my estimation, we are about to witness how many SNP MPs and MSPs are going to “jump ship” to colonialist parties other than the SNP. However, although the MSPs have a few more years left on the colonialist’s gravy train creation at Holyrood, their “colleagues” at Westminster don’t have quite so much time left to them before the axe wielded by the People of Scotland gets rid of them for good at next year’s general election.
I take no pleasure whatsoever from this taking place but the SNP conference brought me to mind of Burns and his Address tae the Deil:
An’ now, Auld Cloots, I ken ye’re thinkin,
A certain Bardie’s rantin, drinkin,
Some luckless hour will send him linkin,
Tae your black pit;
But faith! he’ll turn a corner jinkin,
An’ cheat ye yet.
Burns at least had hope on his side but I don’t now believe that the People of Scotland will provide the SNP that opportunity, or be quite as forgiving as the Dei’l hissel’!
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