He said: “The main difficulty for the Scottish Government is that Scotland ‘s constitutional relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom is a matter of caution, which means that the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to legislate.” He predicted that Ms Sturgeon would argue that it was only an “advisory” referendum that alone would not change the relationship between Scotland and the United Kingdom. However, he cited a recent Supreme Court ruling that the SNP had overstepped its bounds in trying to incorporate child rights and local government into Scottish law. He said: “The difficulty is that the Supreme Court ruled last October that if an issue was reserved, it meant not only that the Scottish Parliament could not legislate directly on it, it also meant that they could not legislate in a way that to put pressure on the UK authorities on a cautious issue. “I suspect this will probably be the main difficulty in the way Mrs Sturgeon applied.”
