Scotland and Complicity

The cursor hovered "Michael Moore launches defence of Zero Dark Thirty" for a second before I realised it was the other Michael Moore, not the mild mannered Scottish Secretary, the Guardian was quoting over the critically acclaimed Osama Bin Laden film.
It must happen from time to time though - mail for the guerrilla film maker arrives at Dover House and invites from the Scotch Whisky Association find their way to a film production office in the USA.

Moore, the film maker that is, was arguing that ZD30 must be a good movie because "it will make you hate torture". It certainly does, the whole first act of Kathyrn Bigelow's hunt for Bin Laden follows the CIA down the rendition route, and very discomfiting it is too.

The second  part shows how buying a Lamborghini in exchange for a telephone number can be more productive in gleaning intelligence,  and that sends you down the rappelling ropes with the US Navy Seals  to the Bin-Laden lair.

Nothing to do with the Scotland Office, then. Nonetheless there is, as there always is, a direct and an oblique Scottish connection to the whole issue of torture, or there is at the Scotland Office at least.

It is  little know but Alun Evans, the civil service head at Dover House, arrived there last year having served as Secretary of the Detainee Inquiry - the UK investigation into "whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees, held by other countries, that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11."

The inquiry was shut down prematurely last year and sent hasty conclusions to the government when the Met Police announced an investigation into the allegations the renditioning - the illegal transfer of prisoners of two individuals to Libya.

We still await to a full response to the unquiry but last month the UK government paid £2.2 million to settle a case brought by Libyan dissident, Sami al-Saadi, who alleged British involvement in the rendition and torture of him and his family, to the Gaddafi regime.

Kevin Toolis, the Scottish journalist and documentary film maker, is just back from Libya where he uncovered more evidence of British complicity in torture which might never make it into a report drafted by officials for the inquiry assisted by Mr Evans.

Toolis has a great journalistic track record and makes superb documentaries too. His first foray into drama, a very British take on state torture, is being aired on Channel 4 at 9pm tonight.

Complicit, deals with the very complicated issue of torture through a very layered and human story.  I've seen a preview, and it is a script and performances that make for very worthwhile viewing.

But back to the Scotland Office. Jim Wallace, the Advoate General in the government, the man who makes sure Westminster law and Scottish law knit together, tells a great yarn about Scotland and renditioning.

Wallace, a lawyer who studies historicial precedent, say that one of the first laws, if not the first law, the Westminster parliament passed in relation to Scotland after the Act of Union in 1707 was to ban torture.

Because torture was illegal in England its monarchs were apparently in the habit of sending their prisoners across the border to Scotland to have their conspiracies wrung out of them. The practice was abhorrent to the new state and so torture was outlawed across the kingdom. There is nothing new about renditioning, or Scotland's role in it.

When Wallace mentioned this, I flippantly asked if the English Crown might have used Prestwick airport for renditioning, as the CIA did for numerous flights taking prisoners from to black sites across Europe?

Quck as a flash, Wallace replied no, but they might have used Wick airport - indicating that we might all have been looking the wrong way when we focused on CIA flights in and out of Prestwick.

Sure enough Wick Airport, tucked away there in Caithness, features prominently in the Reprieve report on Scotland and extraordinary renditioning.

I think that's enough Scottish connections with torture for one afternoon, but congratulations to Kevin on getting his fim made. You can watch it on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm as you contemplate if anyone has clean hands when it comes to state torture.

As its Valentine's Day...let's have a song

Ladies and gentlemen, Swordale's finest Colin MacLeod, aka The Boy Who Trapped The Sun, with a new song - "Last call for the boat".

Colin is playing the Hebridean Celtic Festival this summer, so is Van Morrison incidentally.
He plays in Stornoway every week, Colin that is...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djTqIef3MGA&list=UUW_7H6sjHa839NAClfad7vA&index=1

Ed and the 10p tax cut

Ed Miliband never has great luck on his "big" speech days. If the Oscar Pistorius shooting story doesn't knock him off the news agenda then events in the Chris Huhne and Vicky Price trial later today could. 

Then, in some ways the timing couldn't have been better. By the skin of his teeth the Labour leader has beaten the Tories to the draw on a 10p tax rate for low earners.

Cameron dropped an inadvertent hint yesterday at PMQs that Osborne was considering a 10p tax rate for next month's make or break budget.

Opportunistic, ruthless and playing fantasy economics -  all that will be thrown at Miliband today but the Osborne will be grinding his teeth while calculating a counter-attack.

The simplest one is  -do the numbers stack up?

According to Labour £2 billion could be raised from a mansion tax on properties worth more than £2 million.

That £2 billion pays for a 10p tax rate  that will leave 25 million  basic rate tax payers up to £100 a year better off.

A House of Commons Library assessment calculates that the 10p rate would cost £6 billion if came in between the tax free personal allowance (£9,440) and £12,000.

Ed Balls says all tax and spending commitments will have to wait for a 2105 manifesto and depend on the state of the economy and the public purse in two year's time.

Incidentally, reversing Gordon Brown's policy of "simplifying" the tax system by getting rid of the 10p rate also distances Miliband from the old regime, something that is necessary if the One Nation sensation is gong to happen.

But the main  message from Labour is clear - Ed is on the side of low paid workers, Dave is siding with the millionaires. Somewhere in there the Lib Dems will argue that raising the level at which people pay income tax was their idea all along. All this will be drowned out in what looks like a very busy news day.

Sweet boundary change blues

The vote on the constituency boundary changes last night produced some contorted political logic from the Commons.

It pitched the Tory Ministers, who backed the changes to even constituencies and reduce the number of MPs to 600, against Lib Dems who wanted revenge for their Lords reforms being trashed.

At one stage the government's front bench was completely empty of Ministers, as the Lib Dems spoke to wreck the bill. This is what a Coalition divorce looks like, but Coalition 2.0 can't be sustained with fall outs like this.

For some, life was sweet last night. Charles Kennedy finally got the Coalition he wanted and was delighted to tweet that he and his Lib Dem colleagues had just voted against the government. "After two years sense has prevailed".

Scotland Offfice Minister David Mundell, ever loyal, was in the position of having to support the changes which would have seen him lose a fair chunk of his Dumfrieshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale constituency. The changes would have seen him standing in Labour strongholds and that could have proved fatal in 2015

Not to worry though, the faithful Mundell trooped through the government lobby, safe in the knowledge that his constituents - Labour MPs Jimmy Hood and Russell Brown - would be voting the other way, to increase his chances of remaining as the only Tory MP in Scotland.

Question sorted, delighted I'm sure, date unknown

The SNP's Annabelle Ewing MSP is doing sterling work on the Politics Show just now, declaring her delight with the neutral wording of the Electoral Commission  referendum question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"

I notice Nicola Sturgeon has issued a statement from the same "delighted" script.

The Scottish government's pattern of bluster followed by a swift doublespeak about turn -  "we have always been at war with Eurasia" -  has been a  regular feature of the negotiations over the referendum.

Each time there is an about turn it is presented as some kind of tactical masterstroke that government wanted all along.

There was the smokescreen of two questions, there was the bluster in the talks between the two governments on the Section 30 agreement and then the barely veiled threat that the Scottish parliament, SNP majority, would be the final arbiter of the question. It still is, by the way, so hopefully the rest of the party are as "delighted" as Sturgeon and Ewing.
In truth the SNP had nowhere to go other than accept the neutral recommendations, otherwise the cumulative erosion of  public trust, which rests on all governments sooner or later, would have swung into the negative zone.

Salmond is always jinking and feinting to try and unbalance his opponents and keep the spotlight of uncertainty on himself. It used to look nimble in day to day politics, but when he playing with the entire future of the country I suspect people don't look on swerving and dummying so kindly.

Now the question is sorted, now the spending limits have been pencilled, and now the campaigns are underway, the First Minister should  stop fooling around and just name the day.

Landscape and memory - for Donald Murdo MacDonald

There is something in the unnerving tingle of a phonecall from home at an unexpected hour. You know when the ringing stops bad tidings will begin

There could not have been a darker news at the start of last week than my brother’s call to say that Donald Murdo MacDonald, Mac Mhagan from Knock, had fallen to his death from the Swordale cliffs.

The bare facts of Monday 15th January were too shocking to absorb in just one phone call. Donald Murdo and his older brother had been on the Druim Mhor, the steep rising cliffs that you can see from the Braighe, looking for sheep on a wet afternoon when he slipped on the cliffside.

John Murdo, the elder brother on the cliff top, raised the alarm and in fading light the Coastguard helicopter and lifeboat crew lifted Donald Murdo to hospital. He lost the fight later that evening.

Donald Murdo was only 48, the first of my Knock School year to go before his natural span, death’s first breach into our classroom.

Undoubtedly it is our own mortality that confronts us on days like these, but the stab of anguish was all the stronger because of the messenger. My brother, Domhnall, was the last person these cliffs tried to claim. Monday night's call had a chilling resonance for us.

But the brother left grasping the shattered bond last week was John Murdo. From the loneliness of that barren clifftop a numb grief spread through the surrounding villages.

News of the catastrophe was foreshadowed by a tragedy that had long before touched the MacDonald family. Small communities bestow on us such an intimate history, even if there is little day-to-day connection.

Donald Murdo’s own father fell to his death, from the roof of their old home in Knock. I remember the house, it was a felt-roofed white cottage, now demolished, on the road in to the Post Office, but was too young to actually remember the event.

I do recall it happened on a Stornoway Carnival Saturday and that the three boys were due to go up town to the festival with their father. On carnival days we were sometimes reminded of their forever cancelled happiness.

For John Murdo and Malcolm Donald, the elder brothers, and their widowed mother Jessie Ann, these events will echo from either span of the bridge. Death must have etched the boys’ schooldays too but as children, if these things were ever noticed, they were never spoken.

At school Donald Murdo was quiet, industrious, and clever. He knew the rules of chess before they were patiently explained to the rest of us.

He had wild, straw-blond hair that would put a young Boris Johnson to shame, just as badly styled too, and he was pioneer of spectacles that would now be considered trendy. To adult eyes he would have been cute, to us he was simply Donald Murdo, the boy who somehow managed not to lose or break all the plastic geometry accessories in his neat pencilcase.

He worked for many years with Voluntary Action Lewis, an organisation representing community groups on the island. There he was a mainstay in the organisation and made a valuable contribution to the voluntary sector. Moving to Dundee, he worked in Community Education and came home barely two years ago to care for his mother.

Maybe, as returning exiles do, he went out that Monday with a child’s fearless memory of the cliffs, because they are a place adults rarely venture.

Regardless of their fearsome appearance we never, as youngsters, held these guardians of the Point coastline to be a danger.

Only half-named now, their Gaelic names are slipping from our tongues, the cliffs don’t actually have a great record for claiming lives considering the gauntlet we ran, literally ran, as we scrambled their flanks every summer.

In our own generation my brother - who quite spectacularly, and accidentally, rode his bike over the edge in 1983 - and Fiona MacAulay, Lightcliffe, who fractured her hip in a bad fall as a teenager in 1978, were the only victims.

Alasdair Finlayson, a regular summer visitor, was once trapped halfway up but my uncle, Domhnall a Bhuidsear, and Am Bice came to the rescue. We boys watched incredulously as the two men hauled him up on a looped rope, hand over hand, gripping the rocky knife edge of the promontory with their bare feet.

In their own pre-War generation Alasdair Sheumais, No 12 Swordale, fell out in Ard Chirc and was brought home on a wooden door, torn from its hinges to make a hasty stretcher. He survived and lived to an old age.

Despite the ministrations of helicopters and hospitals, it was not so for Donald Murdo. Gentle, kind Donald Murdo, who came home to care for his mother and lost his life on a winter's day, in a landscape with a memory that none of us can escape.

The funeral was on Friday. The weather could have been much worse they said, which is another way we have of saying we feel a deep pain of bereavement.

Another classmate of Donald Murdo’s, Rev Hugh Stewart from Seaview, led one of the prayers, which couldn't have been easy. 

The next day it was Hughie - the boy with the bow tie and the gap toothed smile in the Knock School class photo that was dusted down after the funeral - who gave the lesson of the week, that love will ultimately triumph over death.

Hughie, a year short of his 50th birthday, announced he is engaged to be married, and a little flame rekindled bruised hearts with a flicker of the continuing thread of life. Beanneachd leat, Donald Murdo.

Cameron throws for a double six on Britain's future

You wait years for a referendum on the constitution, and then two come along at once.

He's already be forced into a position where one dice is being rolled on Scotland's future, and now the right of the Tory party has pushed David Cameron into blowing on a clenched fist and throwing for a second time on the EU.

We have been waiting for what seems like decades for this speech from a Conservative Prime Minister and Eurosceptics like Liam Fox, on the tv just now, can barely conceal their delight with EU referendum pledge.
The right wing of the Tory party has Cameron by the goolies, and they’ll raise the rafters at Prime Minister’s Questions in half an hour.

Finally the Tories have an answer on the doorstep to the threat of UKIP, but will they heed the advice of Lord Ashcroft, who spends a fortune on crunching the numbers in marginal superpolls, and now get on to talking about things that matter to voters?

Ashcroft has the best comment, so far, on what has to be considered an important speech, that for the first time in a generation put the possibility of the UK leaving the European Union onto the mainstream political agenda.

Ashcroft is worth quoting: “The new policy will be in the manifesto. The only question is whether we will get a chance to implement it – and that depends on whether we get a majority at the next election. And that depends on how voters think we are doing on the economy, jobs, public services, welfare, crime, immigration: whether we are on their side and understand their priorities.

He concludes: “It is time for Tory Eurosceptics to declare victory and talk about something else.” Fat chance of that.

This is a big moment in British politics but Cameron himself has a lot of talking to do if he is to convince voters this throw of the dice is in the national interest and not to party advantage.

That’s the snapshot Westminster picture - and we’re waiting to see if Ed Miliband has counter-punch or whether he’s willing to be pummelled by that rare thing, a untied Tory party, albeit one out of step with the public.

From the other end of the East Coast line the Prime Minister looks guilty of a constitutional double cross.

After pushing for an early Scottish referendum, and arguing that economic uncertainty would be caused by a long delay, how can he kick his own referendum into the long grass, beyond the next election and halfway into a parliament he might not command?

If he claimed that a referendum on Scotland’s independence causes uncertainty for business, what does this do to an economy ten times the size of Scotland’s?

(Midway into the negotiations on 2014 Cameron did declare that he was “not fussy” about the date of the Scottish referendum, but would rather it sooner than later)

First Minister Alex Salmond was out of the blocks briskly this morning, describing Cameron’s long crafted speech as “fundamentally confused” and “painfully short on detail”.

Salmond said: “On the one hand he is trying to appease the Eurosceptics on his own backbenches and on the other he is trying to appear as a European reformer. He is trying to ride two horses at the same time and it is inevitable he will fall off before long.”

Salmond restated his claim that the biggest threat to Scotland’s membership of the EU comes not from a referendum on independence but from “the persistent undercurrent of Tory Euroscepticism”.

We could see parallel negotiations in the middle of this decade - a breakaway Scotland talking its way into the EU (the SNP now accept there would be no automatic entry) and a rump UK looking for a new deal or threatening to leave.

Both scenarios depend on a lot of ifs and the polls don’t look particularly good for an independence vote or a Tory majority in 2015. But there a hard political furlongs to go before either vote.

Only one certainty, the one thing Cameron and Salmond have in common, deep down neither leader really wants their referendum.