There is an April Fool story in this week's Sunday Herald but be assured it is not our cover story.

It may be difficult to believe, but the Westminster move to extend English legal injunctions to automatically cover Scotland is unfortunately all too true.

The MPs and peers on the privacy and injunctions committee believe it perfectly acceptable to overturn 300 years of separate legal systems to save rich celebrities such as Max Mosley a bob or two in the cost of taking out separate court orders north and south of the Border.

You might have expected the sole Scottish MP on the committee to point out the insanity at the root of the committee report – until you remember that MP was Eric Joyce, who was otherwise engaged headbutting political opponents in the House of Commons bar.

When the Sunday Herald named Ryan Giggs as one of the celebrities whose identities were protected by so-called superinjunctions, we argued that we were less interested in Giggs's alleged infidelities than in the principle of free speech. We tried also to draw attention to a legal system which prevented newspapers telling their readers facts which were widely available on the internet. We were supported in this by an unlikely combination of Prime Minister David Cameron and First Minister Alex Salmond.

Yet when the Westminster committee called this newspaper to attend one of their hearings they were not interested in discussing these issues, preferring to concentrate on the excesses of another newspaper being investigated by the Leveson committee and hogging the headlines at the time.

The committee report, issued last week, is a combination of naïvety and ignorance. It blithely states that sites such as Twitter be prosecuted for breaching injunctions without dealing with the legal problems which prevented that happening when thousands of Twitter posters named Giggs before the press could.

And they see an equally easy answer to their frustration that a Scottish newspaper was not bound by an English court's injunction: such injunctions should simply be enforceable outwith the boundaries of the court's jurisdiction.

The reason the Sunday Herald could name Giggs was because his lawyers had not sought a gagging order in a Scottish court. That course of action was open to them, but they chose not to take it.

Releasing celebrities' lawyers from that obligation might make it easier and cheaper for their clients but it tramples Scotland's legal independence underfoot and threatens yet further restrictions on the public's right to know.

It also speaks of an arrogance which is becoming more prevalent in Westminster's dealing with constitutional affairs – that same arrogance that deems it a good idea to run a "Save the Union" campaign fundraiser from a house in Sussex; the arrogance that led the Tory treasurer to suggest that their battle for the Union in motivated by politics rather than passion.

We have argued before that those who proclaim themselves driven by a burning desire to maintain the United Kingdom should articulate the positive case for doing so. Yet we continually hear little else but increasingly ridiculous scare stories and now these ill-thought out proposals which appear to be motivated by a desire to bring uppity Scots to heel.

As new Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson knows, modern politics makes it difficult to maintain a line in the sand, but if one has to be drawn the independence of Scotland's legal system seems as good a place as any to start.