"This legal defence for the 3 Trident Ploughshares 2000 peace women ... " ALASTAIR MCINTOSH October 2001

This legal defence for the 3 Trident Ploughshares 2000 peace women argues that in British constitutional theory, military defence is the ultimate responsibility of a monarch who is both Commander in Chief of the armed forces and, by divine grace, “Defender of the [Christian] Faith.” Such implied theocracy sits in a framework of Scots constitutional law where, contrary to the English position, the Community of the Realm, and not Parliament, is Sovereign under God. God’s legal recognition is further emphasised by Scotland’s primary constitutional instrument within the United Kingdom, the Treaty of Union, 1707, and it is alluded to in the schedule to the Church of Scotland Act, 1921. 

Additionally, Lord Stair (like Blackstone in English law) affirms that divine law is the foundation and context within which Scots law develops. It follows from this that British military defence policy as it affects Scotland ought to be consistent with Christian principles. Such principles were taught by Christ as pacifism, but accommodated by most of the mainstream churches as “just war theory.” However, both stances - pacifism and “just war” - refute genocide as being ultra vires.

Nuclear weapons are, of course, potentially genocidal, which is why they are opposed by the mainstream Scottish churches which do not, otherwise, adopt a pacifist position. To destroy the infrastructure supporting nuclear weapons is therefore consistent with a citizen’s duty to prevent a greater crime from being perpetrated. Within Christian tradition, the precedent for such preventative destruction was established by Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers in the temple.

Set in such a context we can see that these three women are not criminals: they are stalwart upholders of law and order. Their work of witness calls us back to the constitutional nature of the British state that we are in. They remind us to raise ourselves up to our nation’s God-given higher vocation and to turn our backs on those “fallen” faces of nationhood that would traditionally have been called “sin,” such as possessing weapons of mass destruction.