Of course he did not do it, at least not on his
own. But that was beside the point. The point was that these matters were for a
court, perhaps including the High Court of Parliament under certain
circumstances. Not for Executive fiat. Where would that end? 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 Because he should never have withdrawn his appeal.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
has died 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 they could.
But later, it turned out that they had done no such thing; that it had all been Gordon Brown all along, and that they had really only been doing as they had been 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 of 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 their role to play the fall guy. The only person to come out of this at all well is David Cameron.
No serious person, by definition, thinks that Libya had anything to do with Lockerbie. But it is nevertheless worth repeating that the Americans were arming the IRA at exactly the same time as Gaddafi was, and, moreover, they were throwing almost incomparably more political weight behind that organisation, to incomparably more eventual effect. The present Coalition was as bad as Blair for sucking up to Gadaffi.
And the synthesis of Islamism and what passes for Socialism in lands unblessed by the synthesis of Radical Liberalism, Tory populism, Christian Socialism, Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism, and other such entirely non-Marxist influences, is in fact the position of numerous individual and collective seceders to David Cameron’s Conservative Party, one of whom is now a rising star of the 2010 intake to the House of Commons.
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 they could.
But later, it turned out that they had done no such thing; that it had all been Gordon Brown all along, and that they had really only been doing as they had been 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 of 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 their role to play the fall guy. The only person to come out of this at all well is David Cameron.
No serious person, by definition, thinks that Libya had anything to do with Lockerbie. But it is nevertheless worth repeating that the Americans were arming the IRA at exactly the same time as Gaddafi was, and, moreover, they were throwing almost incomparably more political weight behind that organisation, to incomparably more eventual effect. The present Coalition was as bad as Blair for sucking up to Gadaffi.
And the synthesis of Islamism and what passes for Socialism in lands unblessed by the synthesis of Radical Liberalism, Tory populism, Christian Socialism, Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism, and other such entirely non-Marxist influences, is in fact the position of numerous individual and collective seceders to David Cameron’s Conservative Party, one of whom is now a rising star of the 2010 intake to the House of Commons.
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