Gerald Warner: Time is running out for Kenny MacAskill's bleeding-heart liberalism

Published on Saturday 14 November 2009 19:08

THIS is becoming embarrassing – for Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill. His problem is that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, is, at time of writing, still defiantly alive in Libya, when he was supposed to be dead by now. When MacAskill released Megrahi in the teeth of world opinion, it was under the humanitarian convention whereby prisoners with less than three months to live may be set free.

The problem for our Kenny is that Megrahi has not done the decent thing. This Friday will see the expiry of his supposed three-month maximum lease of life, but it looks likely he will not have shuffled off this mortal coil, as MacAskill assured us he would. Coupled with the rejection by the Justice Committee at Holyrood last week of his plans to abolish prison sentences of less than six months, these are not good times for Mrs MacAskill's wee boy.

The Megrahi release first alerted the rest of the world to the calibre of governance we enjoy in Scotland under devolution. The destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 remains the worst terrorist atrocity committed on Scottish soil; even in the post-9/11 era it retains the power to shock. A total of 270 people lost their lives, 14 of them Scots. From the outset the whole affair was badly mishandled.

Allowing Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, sponsor of international terror, to call the tune on how the case would be prosecuted was the first huge mistake. The flummery of setting up a Scottish court on Dutch territory at Camp Zeist involved four judges and 230 witnesses, at a cost to the taxpayer of 60m. The subsequent appeal cost 75m. Megrahi was sentenced to a minimum of 27 years in prison: when MacAskill freed him on 20 August he had served just eight years.

To Kenny the Compassionate, however, that amounts to an Edmond Dants-style incarceration of intolerable length. If there is one sight our Justice Secretary cannot bear to see, it is an occupied prison cell. Hence his failed attempt to abolish short sentences. Hence, too, his decision to replace Greenock and Inverness prisons – a perfect opportunity to repair the shortage of prison accommodation – without building one extra cell, despite a 500m budget.

MacAskill is a bleeding-heart liberal utopian presiding over the justice system of the country identified by the United Nations as the most violent on earth. Under MacAskill's benevolent regime, more than two-thirds of perpetrators of knife crime in 2007-2008 escaped jail: only 29 per cent were imprisoned. This man makes the previous world record holder for "Soft on crime, soft on the causes of crime", Cathy Jamieson, look like Charles Bronson in Death Wish.

Lockerbie will haunt MacAskill for the remainder of his political career and beyond. Why did he compromise himself by visiting Megrahi in prison? Was pressure put on Megrahi to drop his second appeal? What assurances did MacAskill give American victims' families about compassionate release? Why did Megrahi start shipping his belongings home to Libya six weeks before his release was announced? Then there are the wider dimensions: Tony Blair's 2007 talks with Gaddafi, followed within hours by a massive oil deal for BP; Gordon Brown's discussions with Gaddafi at the G8 summit in Italy; Lord Mandelson's conversation with Gaddafi's son Saif at the Rothschild villa on Corfu. Did the big boys see MacAskill coming and recognise a convenient liberal patsy?

Despite MacAskill's invoking of here's-tae-us Scottish moral superiority, with humanity "a defining characteristic of Scotland and the Scottish people" (hence our UN rating as the most violent nation), the public verdict was hostile, with a majority condemning the release of Megrahi, 32 per cent calling for MacAskill's resignation and 69 per cent believing he had diminished Scotland's reputation in the eyes of the world. The Justice Secretary and his colleagues shrugged off those poll findings; they may have found it more difficult to treat the SNP's derisory vote in last week's Glasgow North East by-election – in an area where crime is regarded less indulgently – with equal insouciance.

Yet there is good news too for MacAskill. He has been shortlisted for the Scottish Politician of the Year awards to be held next Thursday, the day before Megrahi passes the three-month supposed limit on his mortality. Doing the reverse of what the public wants, not just at Holyrood but in the wider arc embracing Westminster and Brussels, has become the virility test of "democratic" politicians. Providing no wayward statesman sets fire to the hotel this year, MacAskill could be in with a shout.

It seems too much to hope he should win, since such an award would be the most eloquent testimony to the outside world of the pygmy inadequacy of the post-devolution phenomenon euphemistically known as "civic Scotland".