I voted for sovereignty to be returned to us the people not corrupt MPs

I watched the QT special last night. For once the audience was proper balanced with proportions of leave/remain 52/48. The panel was 50/500 with Clegg pedalling the usual Lib Dem mixture of mixture  of inaccuracies and half truths. He boasts of his Spanish wife who seems to prefer her maiden name to being Mrs Clegg.  Starmer, for a QC and former DPP was long on rhetoric and short on fact, worrying for the bar from which our judges are drawn. The US seems to get on very well with elected judges not the selected ones we have.

I was disappointed in Alex Salmond. The English are rightly proud of Magna Carta, 1215, but it was a toff's charter set up to protect the rights of the nobility and eel traps not the ordinary people. For a Scot, the Declaration of Arbroath, 1320, still available in the Vatican library, was much more important. Its central tenet was that government, kings in those days, could only govern with the consent of the people, no mention of MPs or Lords. It was drafted by the Scottish bishops and was so far seeing many of its principles and ideas were incorporated into the US declaration of independence of 1776. Largely drafted by Jefferson how did the Arbroath ideas creep in. Obviously by the printed word but also one of the New Jersey delegates to the 1176 Continental Congress was a Scottish cleric, John Knox Witherspoon recently appointed Provost of Princeton and previously minister at Paisley kirk.

There he is, no 37, in the great painting of the Congress that now hangs in the Capitol building, I think.

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