Lockerbie

He should have been released. Because he should never have withdrawn his appeal. But he did. (For that matter, he should have been tried by a jury. But he wasn’t.) So he is legally guilty of 270 murders. People have died in prison, including of horrible conditions, while legally guilty of an awful lot less than that.

I wrote at the time of his release that the Scottish Justice Secretary had now called significantly into question the integrity and reliability of the Scottish justice system. That hardly seems like anything that a Scottish Nationalist should wish to do. It is certainly not anything that a citizen of the United Kingdom, within the fundamental documents of which Scots Law is specifically protected, should wish to do. Kenny McAskill, and with him necessarily Alex Salmond, seemed to have gone feral, doing something like this merely because he could.

But now, it turns out that they had done no such thing; that it was all Gordon Brown all along, and that they were really only doing as they were told by Westminster and Whitehall. So much for this spirited assertion of Scottish autonomy, loudly applauded as such by what is frankly the rather credulous core vote for the SNP, although it is not as if such voters have anywhere else to go. Nationalistic sound and fury for strictly domestic consumption, but signifying nothing in practical terms, has characterised many of the most loyal and useful clients of Westminster and Whitehall for a very long time indeed, and it is habitually been the role to play the fall guy. The only person to come out of this at all well is David Cameron.

Of course he did not do it, at least not on his own. But that is beside the point. The point is that these matters are for a court, perhaps including the High Court of Parliament under certain circumstances. Not for Executive fiat. Where would that end?