Corks are popping in the legal chambers of London and Edinburgh over English votes

A quasi-English parliament within a parliament will now awkwardly co-exist alongside the all-welcome business of the Commons

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An open invitation for lawyers to become a part of any process means that you risk screwing up everything by turning the straightforward into an expensive minefield. M’learned friends, as Alfred Nobel once noted, make their living by defending – if they are asked – the very idea that a straight line is crooked if you look at it long enough.

Since William and Mary were first asked to sit quietly while a convention of Whigs and Tories read aloud the terms of their conditional promotion to king and queen of England, Parliament may have been full of legal eagles, but the debates and proceedings inside the institution have been kept beyond the reach of any court. That was one of the key statutory provisions of the 1689 Bill of Rights.

Last Thursday at 5pm in the House of Commons, that long-protected right was ditched overboard like unwanted constitutional cargo. Despite fuzzy assurances by the Commons leader, Chris Grayling, that he was finally supplying a working solution to the long-unanswered West Lothian Question by excluding Scotland’s MPs from the full democracy of the Commons through the creation of an English-MPs-only grand committee, the Tory benches seemed to not appreciate (or much care) that the hidden cost of this plan involved unlocking Westminster’s doors and leaving the Speaker seriously exposed to legal challenges.

Any claim that this exercise was about saving the Union is dodgy. It all looked like little more than an arithmetic-led wheeze to weatherproof David Cameron’s slim majority.

This week there will be more than one delegation at the door of John Bercow’s lavish apartments inside Westminster. All of them will have the same question to ask: how the hell is this going to work?

Well, it probably won’t. The usual law-making procedures in the Commons will now have a new stage to pass through. A quasi-English parliament within a parliament will now awkwardly co-exist alongside the all-welcome business of the Commons. This English-only grand committee will have the power to veto legislation before it reaches the final stage where all MPs can vote.

One English MP, during the heated debate on the so-called “Evel proposals” (English votes for English laws), said that Scottish members would still be welcome and he hoped they would “continue to contribute”. How kind, and damn condescending, of him. The words in this article, and others like it elsewhere, might conceivably be regarded as a contribution to a debate. The key difference is that I don’t have any right to vote – that’s why we elect MPs. But from this week, “contribution” has sadly become the devalued privilege of the new second-class regiment of Scottish MPs. And that is supposed to keep the Union intact and pristine?

It will fall to Mr Bercow to decide whether a parliamentary Bill affects just England, and therefore merits the exclusion of Scottish MPs from equal involvement. It’s at this point that you can hear the champagne corks pop in the legal chambers of London and Edinburgh. Before the debate, which Gerald Kaufman branded “a day of shame for the House of Commons”, the former Supreme Court justice Lord Hope warned that he did not see how the Government could safely rely on a procedure that risked legal challenge and delay by the courts.

Given the choice of putting my faith in Mr Grayling, who knows little about the law despite holding the office of Lord Chancellor, or Baron Hope of Craighead, who has been Lord President of Scotland’s Court of Session and one of the first justices of the Supreme Court, I’ll go with the learned lord to forecast what happens next.

Mr Bercow is unlikely to be able to legally fireproof any constitutional call which says only England will be affected by this or that. Having spent much of the past few years arguing that the United Kingdom is a group of highly interlinked economic and cultural entities, why is it now believable that England can be conveniently ring-fenced whenever it suits Parliament? If that sounds like the opening lines of a barrister about to challenge the Speaker, I wouldn’t at all be surprised to hear it sometime soon.

What happens to parliamentary law-making while the speaker‘s wisdom is being ripped apart and dissected in a courtroom? Are we looking at Westminster shutdowns or long judicial impasses while the courts – rather than Parliament – decides?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous American jurist and associate justice of the US Supreme Court, once said that lawyers can spend a great deal of their time shovelling smoke. That might be a brilliant prophecy for the consequences of fast-tracking a flimsy change in the political relationship between England and the constituent countries of the UK.

Parliament lost something last week. Even if legal challenges generate more smoke than heat there’s every possibility that, in all the haze and confusion, the UK will have broken apart without anyone really noticing.