User:Sky4t0k/Date stamp2


 * timetable
 * fossil fuel levy
 * fuel price regulator
 * federalism
 * devolution of powers


 * Scottish Grand Committee
 * Scottish Affairs Select Committee
 * Scottish Questions

Scotland
Scots law, a hybrid system based on both common-law and civil-law principles, applies in Scotland. The chief courts are the Court of Session, for civil cases, and the High Court of Justiciary, for criminal cases. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom serves as the highest court of appeal for civil cases under Scots law, with leave to appeal from the Court of Session not required as a general rule.

Sheriff courts deal with most civil and criminal cases including conducting criminal trials with a jury, known as sheriff solemn court, or with a sheriff and no jury, known as (sheriff summary Court. The sheriff courts provide a local court service with 49 sheriff courts organised across six sheriffdoms. The Scots legal system is unique in having three possible verdicts for a criminal trial: "guilty", "not guilty" and "not proven". Both "not guilty" and "not proven" result in an acquittal with no possibility of retrial.

The Cabinet Secretary for Justice is the member of the Scottish Government responsible for the police, the courts and criminal justice, and the Scottish Prison Service, which manages the prisons in Scotland. Though the level of recorded crime in 2007/08 has fallen to the lowest for 25 years, the prison population, at over 8,000, is hitting record levels and is well above design capacity.



Calman Commission recommendations to increase tax-varying powers

Dungavel Scottish block grant Scottish Police

criminal justice scotland

Wheatley Report Police Forces in Scotland Scottish Police Service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Law_enforcement_in_Scotland

medicaid, medicare, agric, mil, social security, law enforcement,

is the leading party in Scotland that campaigns for the independence of Scotland from the United Kingdom

The Scottish National Party is a political party in Scotland which campaigns for an independent Scotland and has a number of seats in Parliament.

the party has had varied success in attracting local and national support for its programme of a separate, culturally distinctive and economically independent Scotland

May 2007 - The Scottish National Party becomes the largest parliamentary force, ending 50 years of political dominance in Scotland by Britain's ruling Labour Party.

August 2007 - The SNP sets out plans for a referendum on independence from England.

Nationalist party that supports the separation of Scotland from the UK as an independent state within the European Union. It was formed by the combining of several early nationalist parties in 1934 and at first advocated only autonomy (self-government) within the UK. It gained its first parliamentary victory in 1945 but did not make serious headway in Parliament until the 1970s when it became an influential bloc at Westminster, and its support was crucial to James Callaghan's Labour government. The SNP won 6 of Scotland's 72 seats and over one-fifth of the Scottish vote in the 1997 general election, and 35 of 129 seats in the 1999 election to the new Scottish Parliament, in which it forms the main opposition. It is now second only to the Labour Party in Scotland. Its share of the vote fell only slightly in the 2001 general election, when it won five seats.

The Independence of Scotland: Self-government and the Shifting Politics of Union After three hundred years, the Anglo-Scottish Union is in serious difficulty. This is not because of a profound cultural divide between England and Scotland but because recent decades have seen the rebuilding of Scotland as a political community while the ideology and practices of the old unionism have atrophied. Yet while Britishness is in decline, it has not been replaced by a dominant ideology of Scottish independence. Rather Scots are looking to renegotiate union to find a new place in the Isles, in Europe, and in the world. There are few legal, constitutional or political obstacles to Scottish independence, but an independent Scotland would need to forge a new social and economic project as a small nation in the global market-place, and there has been little serious thinking about the implications of this. Short of independence, there is a range of constitutional options for renegotiating the Union to allow more Scottish self-government on the lines that public opinion seems to favour. The limits are posed not by constitutional principles but by the unwillingness of English opinion to abandon their unitary conception of the state. The end of the United Kingdom may be provoked, not by Scottish nationalism, but by English unionism.