Harold Wilson’s only ever Secretary of State for Scotland was Willie Ross. A staunch opponent both of devolution and of EEC membership, Ross was no liberal. He tried to ban ITV from carrying advertisements on Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Friday. And in 1969, he suggested that if the death penalty were to be retained, then executions ought to be carried out on television. That unanswerable line shocked a number of waverers into the Aye Lobby to make permanent the 1965 suspension of capital punishment, a measure that there has never been any serious attempt to reverse, nor any at all since 1994.
By the starkest contrast, Pete Hegseth, he of the Jerusalem Cross tattoo and of the Office of Religious Affairs, has decreed that the execution by firing squad of Dr Nidal Hasan is to be livestreamed from Fort Hood. Thank goodness that the seventh arrestee in the case of the now abandoned USAF Fairford has been bailed like the first six and therefore cannot be a suspected terrorist. And as for the two “Latvians” at USAF Molesworth, trespass is a civil matter. You can be arrested only for aggravated trespass, and for that you need to be obstructing or deterring a lawful activity, or intimidating people so as to deter them from engaging in it. Coming into force in 1994 as part of the Act that the last of the hangers and floggers had failed to amend, the whole thing was devised to hit hunt saboteurs. It is heard in the Magistrates’ Court, and it carries a sentence of up to three months in prison (so out in six weeks), or of a fine up to Level 4 on the standard scale (so a maximum of £2500), or of both. That would hardly impress Donald Trump, so another outpost of the Occupation may be about to be evacuated in the dead of night, back to the land of livestreamed executions. The very, very, very best of riddance.
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