Hadrian's Wallet: Scotland's independence referendum and oil

Depending on who’s talking, the prospect of an independent Scotland would see either the arrival of a new, modern and confident state or it will be fed into the Euro-blender to be destroyed forever. The idea of an independent Scotland is not new – it dates back to those unhappy with the original Act of Union in 1707. What is new is the proposed referendum in 2014 to give Scots a chance to vote on the matter.

The governing Scottish National Party put the cat among the constitutional pigeons with their announcement on 10 January they would hold a referendum in autumn 2014. The referendum will ask two questions. The first is whether there should be an extension of the powers and responsibilities of the Scottish Parliament, short of independence; while the second asks whether the Scottish Parliament should "also have its powers extended to enable independence to be achieved".

In many respects, the controversy over the referendum is a storm in a tea-cup. All the polls suggest that voters will turn down the proposal. YouGov’s polling from 1990 to 2009 show support for full independence hovering around the high 20s to low 30s percentiles. A clearer majority – though never more than 60 percent – are happier with more tax raising powers for the existing Scottish parliament created in 1999. The referendum that created that parliament two years earlier showed most Scots wanted power over their own taxes (currently they can vary the basic rate of personal income tax by a maximum of 3p in the pound). The issue with that was as First Minister Alex Salmond said in October 2010, “there is no point in being a pocket money parliamanet when the pocket money stops.”

The 2011 study of Scottish attitudes showed 70 percent of the population saw themselves as Scottish first compared to about 15 percent who thought they were British. The study also showed that support for increased devolution is also on the up but there was a lot of ambiguous findings on specifics that show there is much to play for. Specific questions on who should pay for what and by what amount narrowed opinion in a way that was rather different than the ungranulated question of whether you support nationalist or unionist.

Opinion is also divided as to whether Scotland would do better alone with its annual £6.5b North Sea oil wealth. According to Michael Moore, the secretary of state for Scotland, the year on year variations of oil prices in 2011 were better managed in a UK wide economy where Scotland could share in the risks as well as rewards. But Scottish finance secretary John Swinney disagreed saying Scotland contributed far more to the UK Exchequer than its share of population which underlined the strength of Scotland’s finances and the opportunities of independence. Scottish opinion polls consistently support the latter view with most Scots thinking those south of Hadrian’s Wall do better from the Union than they do.

Yet opinion polls are less clear on the economic benefits of independence. Most people think they would pay slightly more tax under an Edinburgh administration and there is no consensus on whether the nation would be better off financially. The debate reflects a strong and complex intertwining of English, Scottish and British traditions that make most Scots slightly ambivalent about their nationality.

Unlike the Irish Act of Union a century later, the English-Scottish Act of Union of 1702 was a genuine marriage of near-equals. Scottish kings had sat on the throne of England for over a hundred years (until ousted by the Glorious Revolution). Scotland was still the minor party in the marriage, and as in the case of Ireland, bribery was needed to get the Act passed in Edinburgh. Scotland was still reeling from the economic catastrophe of the Darien Scheme which hoped to set up a Scottish colony in Panama. But the Act of Union was good for Scotland; it gave its economy free trade with England and led directly to the Scottish Enlightenment of the mid 1700s. Thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith had an immense effect not only on Scotland but on the newly United Kingdom and beyond.

Scots became a driving force in the new British Empire, despite the continued rebellions of the highlanders. The lowlands were transformed by the Industrial Revolution with linen, coal and steel and a massive financial centre. Glasgow became a powerhouse city based on shipbuilding and railways. Scottish cities paid a terrible price for their industrialisation in World War II with extrensive bombing by the Luftwaffe. The deindustrialisation of the post-war years was balanced by the discovery of oil in the North Sea in 1970. Though production has fallen in recent years, a 2010 report said there was still 25 billion barrels of oil in Scottish waters, though they are in harder to reach areas near the Shetlands.

The importance of oil in any border negotiation between England and Scotland cannot be underestimated. 85% of British oil is in Scottish waters. The nationalist site Oil of Scotland claims Westminster moved Scotland's marine boundaries in 1999 from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Carnoustie “illegally making 6000 miles of Scotland's waters English.” The website called the Scottish Adjacent Waters Boundaries Order 1999 an “unjust act secretly passed, without the consent of the Scottish People” that took 15% of oil and gas revenues out of the Scottish sector of the North Sea and £2.2 Billion out of the Scottish economy. “This lost revenue is more than the proposed £35 Billion Scottish budget cuts for the next 15 years,” the group said.

Lockerbie anguish continues as Al-Megrahi protests innocence

While many in Britain and America have condemned the celebratory nature of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi’s Libyan return, they conveniently overlook the fact he was unlikely to be the Lockerbie bomber. The Scottish government released the 57 year old cancer suffering al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds last week after serving eight years of his life sentence. But dying or not, al-Megrahi says he is still intent on proving his innocence. “If there is justice in the UK I would be acquitted or the verdict would be quashed because it was unsafe,” he said this weekend. “There was a miscarriage of justice.”

Al-Megrahi has a good point; justice has always taken a back seat to politics in the Lockerbie bombing. Pan Am flight 103 blew up over the small Scottish town a few nights before Christmas 1988 en route from London to New York. 270 people died - 243 passengers, 16 crew and 11 residents on the ground. Scotland claimed jurisdiction for the crime as the plane was destroyed in Scottish airspace.

The initial suspect was a Syrian group with the unwieldy title of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command (PFLP-GC). The PFLP-GC had a motive by acting for Iran in revenge for the American attack on an Iranian Airlines passenger plane a few months earlier. Two years before Lockerbie, the group’s Syrian leader Ahmed Jibril had publicly warned there would be "no safety for any traveller on an Israeli or US airliner". Although PFLP-GC subsequently denied responsibility for Lockerbie, the early years of piecing together evidence focussed firmly on the Syria-Iran link.

But by 1990 Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Neighbouring Iran and Syria were now suddenly proxy-allies whom the west could not afford to alienate. The Lockerbie case refocussed on the “Malta connection” and later that year the US and British governments issued indictments of murder against two Libyan men Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah. In 1991 the pair were back in Libya and the US and the UK requested their extradition. Libya refused as it had no extradition treaty with either country. Libya arrested the pair but a local prosecution went nowhere as US/UK refused to hand over their evidence. The UN then made an unprecedented move to impose sanctions for not complying with the extradition request. The sanctions lasted six years.

After years of negotiation the UK agreed to Libyan demands for it to take place in a neutral country due to concerns of safety and a fair trial. The juryless trial began in May 2000 in the Netherlands under Scottish law and three Scottish judges. The key evidence was the brown Samsonsite suitcase which contained the bomb hidden in a radio/cassette player. The clothing in the suitcase was purchased at a shop in Malta and the store owner swore that a Libyan he could not identify bought them. Al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, was in Malta on the day of the purchase and stayed near the shop. He was unable to offer the court a reason for his stay on the island. This evidence plus his connections to airport security and the Swiss company that built the timer in the explosive device was enough to convict him. Al-Megrahi was given a life sentence.

The second defendant Fhimah was an acquaintance of al-Megrahi and an Air Malta employee. They both arrived in Malta on the same flight from Libya two days before the bombing. The prosecution argued Fhimah knew how to get unaccompanied baggage onto a plane but the court found no evidence to show he had assisted al-Megrahi and acquitted him. But with Fhimah’s acquittal part of the case against al-Megrahi collapsed too. How did he get the bomb out of Malta?

Also, as part of their defence under Scottish law, the pair accused the Syrian-backed PFLP-GC of carrying out the attack. A German police officer testified that PFLP-GC had the means and intention of attacking an airline but the timers and cassette player used were not consistent with other PFLP-GC attacks. A Jordanian agent Marwan Khreesat who had infiltrated the group said he had never seen radio cassette players with twin speakers converted into explosive devices. On the basis of the German and Jordanian evidence the court concluded the PFLP-GC did not make the bomb.

The UN appointed five observers to watch the trial. Of these only one, Professor Köchler from Innsbruck University, published his findings. Köchler concluded the trial was unfair based on two points of objection. He noted the extraordinary length of detention (though this had been requested by the defence to prepare its case) and said the “presence of foreigners” at the prosecution and defence tables hampered the judges’ ability to find the truth and introduced a political element to the case (though there was no evidence that the judges were swayed by the “foreigners”).

Al-Megrahi appealed against the sentence based on the strength of the evidence linking him to the fatal suitcase. There was also the startling evidence that emerged in September 2001. A former security guard at Heathrow named Ray Manley made a sworn affidavit he had told anti-terror police one of Pan Am's luggage rooms had been broken into on the night of the bombing. This evidence cast complete doubt on the whole Malta connection. But for many years Scotland fought the appeal process.

The Scottish law professor who negotiated the Netherlands trial says many people believe there was overt political pressure placed upon the judges. Robert Black says it was probably necessary to reach a conclusion that was satisfactory to the British and American governments. “I think that consciously or subconsciously, these judges appreciated that if neither of the two Libyan accused were convicted in this trial, this would be an enormous embarrassment to the prosecution system in Scotland,” he said.

But by 2003, Libya was no longer a public enemy. Gaddafy told the Americans about his weapons capability. The west lifted international sanctions against Libya after it admitted responsibility for Lockerbie in 2005 and paid about $2.7bn in compensation to the victims’ families. Libya has since got that money back and much more in oil revenues. As The Times points out, al-Megrahi’s freedom is a further product of the effort to bring Libya out of dangerous isolation. “This is as much to America’s advantage as Britain’s, but Washington has too much baggage to be openly involved,” said The Times. And 20 years on, everyone is happy except the families of the Lockerbie victims who are still no closer to knowing who killed their loved ones.

Scotland the Brave

Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond has begun discussions with the other two Celtic nations with a view towards joint UK governance in his visit to Belfast. The newly elected SNP leader will suggest to Northern Irish leaders that relations could be put on a “proper business-like basis” by resurrecting joint ministerial committees that will also including Wales. “It is not a question of ganging up, it is a question of formulating ideas in a constructive way,” he said. “And on many of these issues it will also be, in my opinion, in the interests of the Westminster Government.”

Salmond is travelling today to address the Northern Ireland Assembly and meet his Stormont government counterparts on his first official engagement outside of Scotland as First Minister. Salmond is attempting to improve the channels of communication between the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and want to re-establish the Joint Ministerial Committees to discuss matters of common interests with colleagues in the devolved administrations which have been in abeyance since 2002.

Salmond flew to Belfast from Dundee in order to discuss with Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist First Minister Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness the possibility of their forming a united Celtic front with Rhodri Morgan's administration in Wales. He will also discuss the economic and fishery links between the countries. Salmond will suggest to the joint heads of the Northern Irish Executive that relations could be put on a "proper business-like basis" by resurrecting joint ministerial committees.

Salmond is coming from a position of strength after the nationalist SNP won the election in May 2007 winning the largest number of seats without winning an outright majority. The nationalist SNP beat Labour by 47 votes to 46 on the election held on 3 May. Salmond was forced to form a minority government on a "policy by policy" basis. He was elected as the Scottish Parliament's nominee for First Minister on 16 May 2007, and was sworn in a day later. He is the first nationalist to hold the role following three Labour first Ministers Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell.

Salmond has the reputation of a Nationalist hard man. He is a former civil servant and banker who was expelled from the party in 1982 for being “too socialist” but re-admitted a year later. In 1987 he was elected for the Westminster seat of Banff and Buchan and more than doubled his majority in 1992.

He was elected leader of the SNP in 1990. He served as Leader of the Opposition and Shadow First Minister in the Scots Parliament before suddenly standing down as Party Leader in September 2000. In 2004 he was returned as SNP leader with 75% of the vote. He won the May 1997 election taking an additional 20 seats from the 2003 election. With the Tories winning 17 seats and the Lib Dems winning 16 and the Greens winning 2, the SNP surprisingly entered into an agreement with the Greens (pdf) on “how a new Government in Scotland will be established that pursues a progressive programme and which places addressing climate change at the heart of its agenda”. Nonetheless an alliance of the SNP and the Greens alone are not enough to form government. This is where the neglected Tories come in.

The unspoken agenda in Scotland is full independence. A Scottish Conservative spokesman has publicly backed a referendum on independence yesterday, sparking a major debate within his party which he hopes will lead to a change in Tory policy. Richard Cook, the vice-chairman of the Scottish Conservatives, said he wanted the referendum as soon as possible to "clear the air" over Scotland's constitutional future. Though Cook himself is against full independence, his parties 16 votes plus the SNP and the Greens would be enough to push the policy through parliament.

Though the Ulster Unionists are suspicious of Salmond’s nationalist agenda, the two administrations have much in common including the fact they both want money from the exchequer and increased flexibility to respond to local needs, including regional cuts in Corporation Tax. But some Unionists see Salmond as the enemy. Assembly member David Burnside said "I personally like Alex Salmond but I believe Ian Paisley is falling into a dangerous trap for unionism. He [Salmond] is a nationalist who wants to end the Union between England and Scotland.” He said “that has implications for Wales and Northern Ireland”.