Thursday 13 August 2009

Not Compassion, But Justice

Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi must not die a legally guilty man, since he is a morally innocent one.

Alliance with Syria is now so vital that, in addition to the simple question of justice, we cannot possibly allow this elephant in the room. As everyone who has ever really looked into the matter knows, that plane was bombed, not by Libya, but by Syria, whose support we needed (and received) in the Gulf War, without going into the question of sending our troops to die for the Al-Sabahs and the Al-Sauds when Saddam Hussein had been perfectly willing to sell us the oil anyway.

To those who say that the latest developments expose the madness of devolution, when a decision with such enormous foreign policy implications can be made by some Parish Councillor (and I write as a Parish Councillor) from a single-issue pressure group which has given up on its single issue, that would be perfectly true if the whole thing had not obviously been cleared with Downing Street and the Foreign Office. Without such clearance, Libya would not believe it (indeed, would have no way of knowing it), never mind be preparing to welcome him back. Did any separatist politician, never mind one from somewhere particularly dear to the hearts of the upper classes, obtain the necessary approval from MI6? Merely to ask that question answers it.

What’s that you say? “How come Labour MSPs are against, then?” Who asked them? Why would anyone ask Labour MSPs anything these days? And Scottish Labour MPs, one of whom is now the Prime Minister, never did ask Labour MSPs anything. Leaders of Councils, yes. Union godfathers, of course. But MSPs (like MEPs, in all parties and in all parts of the country)? Never. After all, why? In the privacy of the polling both, a good fifty per cent of Scottish Labour MPs voted No, No. Many of them toured the Lobby and the Tea Room to say so, secure in the knowledge that they would be unreported.

Labour MSPs who have not yet taken this hint need look no further than the manifest arrangement between the Labour Government and the SNP-run Scottish Executive in this case, with absolutely no reference to them. National Labour figures may emerge to cover their backs, but it is simply impossible that a deal with Libya has been done without central government. How, exactly? (If there really has been no such squaring, then the release will not happen. Watch that space. Ignore the rhetoric. If the release happens, then Brown has approved it. If he hasn’t, then it won’t. Simple as that.)

The Lib Dems are the same. Their supposed federalism is more to please the sort of people who vote for them in the South East of England and who like the idea of it, rather than the sort of people who vote for them in the North of Scotland and who have to live with it. This is very much like their stance on the EU, since they represent a slew of fishing constituencies from the whole of Cornwall (where UKIP recently topped the poll for the second European Election in succession), via North Norfolk, Berwick-upon-Tweed and North East Fife, to the Highlands and Islands, up to and including Orkney & Shetland.

On the special Ten Years On edition of Eorpa, it was in Gaelic that the view was expressed that devolution and the EU had given the speakers twice as many tiers of government as they had any need of. No wonder that Danny Alexander is rapidly turning into a latter-day Brian Wilson. At least one of his colleagues, meanwhile, will not suffer the words “West Lothian Question”, or anything else to do with devolution, to be uttered within his hearing.

But the Tories have had to be more grateful for small mercies, although they might not need to be for very much longer. And if (which I do not expect) there were to be twenty or thirty SNP MPs, then it would be laughable to suggest that they would pay anything more than the merest courtesies to anyone at Holyrood. In recent months and years, Angus MacNeil alone has got more done than the entire SNP “Government” (not its legal name) there.

Apart, I suppose, from making at least some sort of effort towards justice over Lockerbie. And even that can only really have been done by Gordon Brown. If he has not done it, then it will not happen. If it does, then he has.

11 comments:

  1. As I have said it is always reasonable to believe in ONE Conspiracy Theory.....and I tend to the view that this guy did NOT commit the crime of which he was found guilty.
    Believing in two conspiracy theories is more problematic. Three or more and we are in the LaLa Land.
    But an interesting side issue is that the majority of American family members (of victims) believe that he is Guilty but British victims' families tend to believe he is innocent.
    Not sure exactly what that says....a pre-disposition of Americans to believe in government or hostility to the Islamist" world in general.

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  2. Depends what you mean by a conspiracy theory. Anyone who belies that people were fed into paper shredders in Iraq, or that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or that there was an Axis of Evil, or that there was any link between Iraq and 9/11, or that there was any link between Afghanistan and 9/11, or any of a whole host of other things from the same sources, really is living in LaLa Land.

    We have to sympathetic under the circumstances, of course. But the Americans who believe in this poor man's guilt probably also believe that the NHS has death panels, that Ted Kennedy's brain tumour would not have been treated here because he is too old, and that "Stephen Hawking would be dead if he were British".

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  3. The Lib Dems are strongest in areas that are always opposed to rule from the Central Belt and join in every rebellion against it.

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  4. Indeed so. Going back at least to the alliance of the Black Douglas in the Borders and the MacDonald of the Isles in the North, an allaince not only with each other but also the English; even then, they'd rather have been under ultimately English than ultimately Central Belt rule.

    Remnant Catholicism, Covenanting, recalcitrant Episcopalianism, Jacobitism, the Great Disruption: the coincidence is far from exact, but many areas certainly do crop up again, and again, and again. Areas where the Lib Dems do well now, in fact.

    No wonder, then, that those areas delivered relatively high No votes to devolution. In Wales, Lib Dem areas delivered such votes in absolute terms, as they did on the Assembly here in the North East, which was even more a shining example of just how hostile to these things traditional Labour voters are. Parliament and local government, not this sort of thing. And not the EU, either.

    At anything like the grass roots, the Lib Dems are not really federalists. They are the post-War Labour SDP (so devosceptical that George Cunningham was a founder-member), and they are the Liberal Party, a coalition of local communitarian populists and single-issue campaigners.

    If Westminster offered rural Scotland things (and there are plenty to choose from) that Holyrood had failed to deliver, then the Lib Dem MPs would go through the division lobbies for those things without a second thought, and to hell with devolution. If there is a hung Parliament next year, then watch out for that one.

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  5. You are absolutely right about this. The idea that Salmond or one of his underlings did this behind Brown's back is absurd. Does he have a hotline to Tripoli?

    Brown did it behind Iain Gray's back though. As you say, no change there.

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  6. The SNP is fairly posh and as you point out the aristocracy is fairly Scots, so I wouldn't be surprised if MI5 and/or MI6 had plenty of SNP connections. It would account for the complete neutralisation of independence.

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  7. But MI6 wouldn't do anything this public without Downing Street's approval. Nor would it publicly endorse a separatist party, especially one from the land of the beloved grouse moors, salmon rivers and single malt distilleries.

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  8. What are you on about? The Black Douglas was a rampant Scottish nationalist whose father died in an English prison. You really do not know your history.

    Er concerning the Lib Dems, tell me why the federalist leaders of the Scottish Liberal Democrats have always hailed from northern Scotland which so obviously hates home rule. Lets see, Jim Wallace of Orkney and Shetland (later just Orkney) - born and raised in the south - Annan to be exact.

    Nicol Stephen - born and raised and represents Aberdeen.

    Tavish Scott - born in Inverness and Shetlander in everything else.

    Why do you keep perpetuating these deluded prejudices? Yes, we know that you want to get rid of devolution and refound the British Empire, but buster it will not be long before we are working for the Indians and Britannia will down at the shore scrubbing Mother India's sari's in the filth of Ganges.

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  9. As you know, he ended up allied with all sorts against the Scottish monarchy.

    Although Wallace started out at Westminster, he ended up like the other figures you cite, at Holyrood. So who cares what he think? Scottish Lib Dem MPs at Westminster certainly don't.

    Scottish Labour MPs take the same view of their Holyrood contigent, as would any sizeable body of Scottish Tory MPs or of SNP MPs.

    Meanwhile, this country is an international laughing stock as some tin-pot nobody at least appears to make this diplomatically vital decision, rather than, after all, a PM who is himself a Scot sitting for a Scottish seat.

    Hillary Clinton having to phone this person? The Americans will not forget this indignity.

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  10. Er concerning the Black Douglas, that is junk.

    Concerning the Scottish Lib Dem MPs, I thought they would worry. The Scottish leader is their boss. That is not the same in Labour where the Scottish leader is only really the boss of Labour MSPs.

    Scotland a laughing stock? It is a hard decision to make. Better MacAskill to make the decision than mebbes Cathy "mince for ma man" Jamieson.

    By the way, before devolution such a decision would have lain with Scottish Secretary.

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  11. "Concerning the Scottish Lib Dem MPs, I thought they would worry. The Scottish leader is their boss."

    Good luck telling them that! Charles Kennedy or, even more so, Menzies Campbell regards Tavish Scott as his "boss"...?

    "Scotland a laughing stock?"

    No, Britain a laughing stock. Or at least an object of global bafflement.

    "Better MacAskill to make the decision than mebbes Cathy "mince for ma man" Jamieson."

    Again, who mentioned her? Or anyone at Holyrood?

    "By the way, before devolution such a decision would have lain with Scottish Secretary."

    In other words, with the Prime Minister, certainly on anything with international implications. But, as I said, that has either happened anyway, or else nothing will happen at all.

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