Scottish Election 2011: MacAskill adamant Megrahi release not an election issue

Published on Friday 29 April 2011 17:49

IN KENNY MacAskill's constituency office the front page of a newspaper hangs on the wall.

"Mandela supports MacAskill decision" proclaims a headline that must have offered a good deal of comfort to the justice secretary amidst the opprobrium heaped on him after he released the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

When Abdelbaset al Megrahi left Scotland around 18 months ago, never in his worst nightmares could Mr MacAskill have imagined that he would still be alive going into the 2011 election.

The survival of Megrahi so far beyond his three-month life expectancy has provided plenty of ammunition for those who opposed Mr MacAskill's decision to release the UK's worst mass murderer.

But, according to Mr MacAskill himself, Lockerbie is not proving to be a big issue on the doorsteps as he defends his Edinburgh East seat, a marginal constituency balanced on a knife-edge.

Out canvassing, Mr MacAskill has come across the "odd individual" who opposed his decision. "Equally," Mr MacAskill said, "there is a great deal of support for me as an individual and a recognition that I had to make the decision."

Mr MacAskill argues that he came out of the decision with his "hands clean", unlike "charlatan and shameful" Labour who criticised the decision at Holyrood while at Westminster, government ministers were plotting for Megrahi's release.

"Is it an election issue?" Mr MacAskill asks. "Not that we've picked up," he adds, answering his own question.

In any case, Mr MacAskill's only serious rival for the seat is reluctant to make Lockerbie a defining election issue. For the Labour candidate Ewan Aitken, his reasons for playing down the Lockerbie controversy probably has more to do with his own beliefs than any embarrassment over his party's behaviour on the issue.

As a Church of Scotland minister, the Labour councillor is a strong proponent of "compassionate release", although he does have some reservations about how the decision to release Megrahi was arrived at.

Mr Aitken said: "Compassion is an all or nothing thing. There are clearly questions to be asked about the process in this case, but the principle of releasing somebody - no matter how heinous the crime - on compassion is one that I support. But I do ask questions about what happened in this case." He added: "This election here isn't about the life and death of an individual in Libya, it is about jobs."

His mantra that this contest will be all about the economy was shared by Mr MacAskill, who suggested that the need for jobs was resonating more among the voters than the SNP's independence message.

"Folk are voting on the economy and the SNP's handling of it," Mr MacAskill said. "It is the economy… but tied into the conversation are powers (for the parliament]. But, at the end of the day, what concerns people are jobs, staying in them, getting their kids into them or the consequences of loss of jobs on services."

Pushing independence into the background is a tactic that appears to be working with sections of the electorate - those who remain Unionists, but think that the SNP has more to offer than Labour.

This apparent paradox was summed up by Margaret Paterson, retired clerkess, who happened to pass by Mr MacAskill's office opposite Jock's Lodge in Edinburgh.

"I think Alex Salmond does a good job, so I think I will vote SNP," she said.

But despite warming to Mr Salmond, she added that she "definitely does not" want independence.

"The world is in a bad enough state without us being separated from England," Ms Paterson remarked.

As far as Mr Aitken can make out, it is a race that is too close to call: "We are not behind, but we are not ahead. It is very tight."