VIDEO: Scot Goes Popcast interview with Alex Salmond

You've already heard it, and now you can watch it in glorious technicolor. Here is the video version of Episode 6 of the Scot Goes Popcast, in which I speak with Alex Salmond, leader of the Alba Party and former First Minister of Scotland. If you have any trouble with the embedded player below, the direct link is HERE.

I've written quite a few constituency profiles for The National since I last mentioned them: Clydesdale, Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse, Mid-Fife & Glenrothes, Kirkcaldy, Highlands & Islands (regional list), Falkirk West, Falkirk East, Glasgow Anniesland and Glasgow Provan.  

A couple of miscellaneous items...

First of all, here's the long-overdue confirmation of the result of the Olympic poll from a few days ago...

Will you be supporting Team GB this summer?

Yes 7%
No 53%
Only when there is Scottish involvement 39%

I must admit those figures surprised me slightly - I expected Option 3 to be the most popular. Not supporting Team GB under any circumstances creates a number of paradoxes - for instance, Scotland's campaign at the men's world curling championship has just got off to a winning start in Basel. I'm sure we all wish them well, but I'm afraid there's no getting away from the fact that a good result will automatically earn Olympic Qualifying Points for "Team GB"!

I think my own answer to the question would be either Option 1 or Option 3, depending on how irritating the London media are being on any given day.

Talking of polls, if you have ten seconds to spare, you might like to take this rare opportunity to vote for Alex Salmond as someone who deserves to be on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. I don't think the public vote has any official standing, but nevertheless it's being prominently publicised on the website. At time of writing, 3327 voters think Salmond should be on the list, and 1097 disagree.

Alex Salmond's most stunning personal endorsement yet?

I'm sure most readers of this blog will vividly recall AM2, the unrelenting one-man scourge of the SNP on the Scotsman and Herald comment boards, who later took up blogging as 'Scottish Unionist', before retiring from the scene altogether about eighteen months ago.  I had a series of skirmishes with him myself in 2007 and 2008, first at the Herald but more frequently at the Scotsman, when I was posting under a pseudonym.  Imagine my astonishment, then, to spot that he briefly came out of retirement six hours ago to write a one-off post entitled 'Alex Salmond for First Minister' (and, no, it's not an ironic title).

Given past history, I suppose we shouldn't completely exclude the possibility that his account has been hacked, but if this is what it appears...wow.

Too many eggs in one basket?

I didn't see tonight's edition of Newsnight Scotland, but if this article on the BBC website gives an accurate sense of what Alex Salmond said, I must say it strikes me as another troubling example of the SNP putting, if not all their eggs in one basket, then certainly a few too many of them. There's simply no need to act as if only the party that wins the most seats in May has the automatic right to rule. And contrary to the mythology that's grown up about the last election, the SNP didn't actually go down that road in 2007 - at least, not until it was clear that they had one more seat than Labour. Remember Salmond's speech at the Gordon declaration? Reading between the lines, he seemed at that point to be working on the assumption that not only would Labour emerge as the largest party in terms of seats, but would perhaps even sneak the popular vote on the constituency ballot as well. And yet he was still confidently pressing the case for an SNP-led progressive alliance. It was a PR election, after all.

Of course, the primary aim has to be a clear-cut win, but if the SNP were to fall, say, just one or two seats short of Labour's tally, wouldn't it be somewhat frustrating if they had tied themselves up in knots with too many pre-election pronouncements about what constitutes victory and defeat? It may seem improbable that "Two Hoots Tavish" would negotiate seriously with the SNP in that scenario, but as we learnt last May, all sorts of funny and unexpected things can happen in the aftermath of a tight election. Let's give them the maximum opportunity to happen in Scotland's best interests.

If the Telegraph had done their 'research' (ie. asked me) they'd have realised Alan Cochrane is a rubbish columnist

Well, it was always fairly predictable that Alan Cochrane wouldn't be able to resist marking Alex Salmond's impertinent dalliance with Respectable London Society (ie. going on Desert Island Discs) with yet another tedious Telegraph ramble featuring the word "Eck" rather a lot...

"But I'm afraid Miss Young's researches – or researchers – let her down badly in her estimation of Mr Salmond.

The idea that he is this Great Debater is, quite frankly, rubbish. I have seen every single formal debate – in parliament and elsewhere – in which Alex Salmond has taken part over the past 15 years or so and it is simply not his forte. Oh sure, he can do the smart one-liners, the often-personal put downs and he is a very good, sometimes brilliant, television performer and an often inspirational campaigner. However, there are too many holes in his basic argument for him to win many debates."

So the Cochrane logic seems to go something like this. I think Scottish independence is a bad idea. Alex Salmond argues for Scottish independence in debate. Ergo Alex Salmond is a poor debater. Oh, and Kirsty Young doesn't acknowledge that fact, ergo she and her team don't read my column (it goes without saying they couldn't have read it and - gasp - disagreed with it), ergo they haven't done their "research" properly.

Oh-kaaaaay....

On one small point we can probably all agree with Cochrane, though...

"...the London-based media is too lazy to find out what is really going on in Scotland."

Where we'd have to instantly part company with him again, though, is in his estimation that the only things of relevance "going on" in Scotland are his own thought-waves. And Jenny Hjul's, at a pinch. How else can we explain his bizarre insistence a couple of years ago that the SNP's planned local income tax was "universally known in Scotland as the Nat Tax", when to the best of my knowledge no-one other than him had ever actually used the term?

* * * * *

The substantial gap between Labour and the SNP in the latest TNS-BMRB poll clearly makes for sobering reading at this stage of the electoral cycle, but the raw percentage shares for the parties frankly have very little credibility. Does anyone seriously think Labour has the slightest chance of achieving 47% on the list vote, when even under Donald Dewar they only managed 35%? On past form, it may well be that both Labour and the SNP are being overestimated - the million dollar question is whether they're being overestimated by a similar amount.

Mixed news for SNP with Ipsos-Mori

The latest full-scale Scottish poll conducted by Ipsos-Mori contains sobering news for the SNP on the constituency vote, with Labour's lead increasing from three to ten points.  But that story is almost completely reversed on the list vote, with Labour's lead slipping from nine points to four.  Here are the full figures -

Constituency vote

Labour 41% (+4)
SNP 31% (-3)
Conservatives 13% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 11% (-2)
Others 5% (+1)

List vote

Labour 36% (-2)
SNP 32% (+3)
Conservatives 12% (-)
Liberal Democrats 9% (-3)
Others 10% (+1)

Despite the conflicting signals here, and in spite of the fact that the list vote is (in theory at least) the more important of the two, I'd have to say this looks more like bad news than good for the SNP.  The constituency vote is requested first and that will usually give the most accurate indication of the electorate's attitude towards the parties.  However, there's the customary better news on the leaders' ratings, with Alex Salmond comfortably outstripping Iain Gray in the popularity stakes, and with Tavish Scott very tellingly being the only one of the four leaders to suffer a negative rating.  That at least offers some grounds for optimism that the SNP's fortunes may improve once the campaign proper gets underway and the leaders are pushed to the forefront.

SoS opinion poll analysis : compare and contrast

According to Tom Peterkin in Scotland on Sunday, Labour's opinion poll leads of six and five points over the SNP are, in spite of having just been roughly halved, "solid".

But he also reassures us twice that Alex Salmond's seventeen-point lead over Iain Gray as the best First Minister is "not irretrievable" and "not insurmountable".

Answers on a postcard...

'Independence is not everything'

A sentiment which many of the fundamentalists within his own party have of course long suspected Alex Salmond of treacherously harbouring, so it's somewhat ironic that his uttering of those words at the SNP conference heralded a reorienting of the party's strategy towards making a full-blooded case for independence. It's a paradox that in order to do that you really have to start off by declaring that independence is not the be-all-and-end-all, but as the First Minister acknowledged in his speech, it's quite possible that many people are under the false impression that nationalists do merely hanker after the sterile trappings of statehood, such as flags and anthems. In fact, I'd go further - I'd suggest that impression is so deeply entrenched for some voters that they will be extremely resistant when they hear Salmond make a passionate case for independence in economic and social justice terms. They'll instinctively suspect that this is a phoney after-the-fact rationalisation for the nationalist impulse.

So what can the party do in the face of such scepticism? The successful 2007 strategy was to essentially opt-out of the problem - using the prospect of the referendum to 'quarantine' the issue of independence, and instead making the election about what could be achieved within the devolved powers of the parliament as they stood, or possibly as they would be under 'devo plus'. Make no mistake, if today's speech was a declaration of intent, that strategy is now defunct, and the SNP's mission will in future be to tackle head-on the cynicism and apathy encountered in various segments of the electorate about the cause of independence. It's a mammoth task, and perhaps even one that is not wholly achievable in the space between now and the election - but making a start now could pay long-term dividends, regardless of who wins power in May. I'm sure the SNP leadership have been acutely aware for some time that a strategy designed to secure a referendum on independence could be spectacularly counter-productive if the groundwork to win that referendum has not been done in time.

With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps one thing we can be grateful to Labour for is that in their foolishness of replacing Wendy Alexander's (admittedly chaotic) imagination on the subject of a referendum with Iain "the Snarl" Gray's knee-jerk rejectionism, they may well have bought the SNP more time to make their case. Due to the economic climate, winning a referendum on the planned date this year would have been a long-shot - it looks like Salmond, shrewd gambler that he is, is resolved to ensure that the odds are firmly in the SNP's favour whenever the referendum does finally come.

Nelson's column

As ever, I'm grateful to Ezio for pointing me in the direction of a Nat-bashing article I might otherwise have overlooked, this time by Fraser Nelson in the Spectator Coffee House. I must say I'm not so much angered by the piece as...well, bemused. The general thrust of it seems to be that unionists should be dismayed to note that, a decade into devolution, no-one is now surprised by the fact that the Scottish government routinely speak out on issues of concern to Scotland, such as the tragic death of aid worker Linda Norgrove - as if Alex Salmond was "the spokesman of the nation", Nelson adds with evident distaste. But, quite honestly, if anyone had been surprised by such a thing even ten days into devolution, they would have been missing much of the whole point of the exercise. The Scottish Parliament, for example, was always intended (even by its unionist 'founding fathers') to be a comprehensive national forum - the standing orders allow for debate on subjects well beyond the institution's defined powers. By extension therefore it would be utterly extraordinary if, at this moment of tragedy, the First Minister did what Nelson presumably feels would be more seemly, and responded to media questions by saying - "It is not appropriate for me to comment on this matter, or to extend any sympathy to Ms Norgrove's family. Please understand that I am charged merely with certain limited aspects of the administration of this country, I do not in any way speak for it. Perhaps David Cameron will have a view."

Would it have occurred to Nelson to tell the humble MP for Cleethorpes that it isn't his place to comment on the death of one of his constituents in a foreign land, simply because he isn't Foreign Secretary? Somehow I think not. We hear a great deal about 'narrow nationalism', but the fact that Nelson could even begin to imagine that 'First Minister of Scotland sends condolences over Scot's tragic death' is, should be, or ever could have been a story of note, let alone a matter of controversy, is extraordinarily revealing of the narrow-mindedness of his own British nationalist zealotry.

To deal with some of his other specific points :

"He didn’t say that, when a Libyan murderer wants to be released, the SNP can use this to thumb their nose at Wicked America and posture on the world stage. Any excuse to make Scotland seem distinct from England, and themselves as spokesmen for a country."

I'd be quite interested to see some hard examples of the SNP (by which I mean the party leadership, not the likes of Christine Grahame) being in any way critical of the United States at the time of Megrahi's release, let alone "thumbing their nose". Indeed, Alex Salmond went on to show the patience of a saint with Senator Menendez and co, and their clownish attempts to set up a McCarthyite show-trial over the affair.

As for any suggestion that the decision over Megrahi was being used to differentiate Scotland from England, the way to do that would have been to treat Megrahi differently from Ronnie Biggs, not to release him on an absolutely identical basis.

"But I cannot see why Salmond needs to release a statement about a woman who has not really lived in Scotland since she left Aberdeen University."

This is really quite telling - Nelson evidently regards Scottish identity as such a weak thing that it is totally negated by time spent outside the country. To him, Scotland is simply a place where people live, not somewhere to which it's possible to have a broader sense of belonging. But does he similarly regard Ms Norton as no longer in any meaningful sense British because of her time spent abroad? Of course he doesn't. Little more needs to be said.

"As First Minister, Salmond is in charge of about half of government spending in Scotland - and as a unionist, I'd like him to confine his comments to the provision of public services."

And how precisely does Nelson propose to enforce this principle? It's perfectly legitimate to restrict a minister to commenting on his own responsibilities inside parliament, but if you try to enforce the same rule outside parliament it becomes censorship, plain and simple. Now, if Scotland had actually shared Nelson's preference for a shrinking violet First Minister who left the grown-up stuff to his betters in London, we could of course have elected one. (In fact we might be about to, so Nelson shouldn't despair just yet.)

"The misleading phrase 'Scottish government' is routinely used to describe Salmond's administration."

What exactly is misleading about calling a body that governs a "government"? Wouldn't it be considerably more misleading to call it anything else - specifically an "executive", the use of which for eight years left most people utterly baffled? All right, so Nelson is getting at the fact that the Scottish government doesn't control all of the administration of Scotland - but let's turn that on its head. The fact that it does control some of the administration (and the same applies to its counterparts in Wales and Northern Ireland) means that, by definition, David Cameron and his ministers do not control all of the administration of Britain. Does that mean it's also misleading to describe them as "the British government"? Presumably it must be.

But, alas, democracy still has its critics...

The other day, I suggested that Ian Hamilton was wrong to talk as if Scotland was an occupied country, with the need for some kind of 'revolutionary' activity to secure independence. I was of course basing my comment on the fact that every British Prime Minister since Harold Wilson has acknowledged that Scotland has a right to self-determination. In the case of Mrs Thatcher and John Major, that didn't extend to a right to choose devolution, but nevertheless those leaders did accept that the country could, if it wished, opt for full independence. So that democratic bottom line is a very long-established principle - but, depressingly, it seems there are some out there who still hanker after the antiquated notion that the sovereignty of the state trumps the sovereignty of the people.

Early this morning, in response to a trademark wind-up from my old Political Betting sparring-partner ChristinaD on the subject of David Cameron's criticism of the Megrahi release, I left a brief comment linking to my previous post. It provoked an extraordinary (and largely tangential) response from another PB poster, "HD2" - it's now on a very old thread, so I might as well respond to it here instead...

"Scotland used the Lockerbie release to snub Gordon, Westminster and the USA as the Soviet-style mindset up there meant ‘wee ek’ (sic) wanted to posture on a wider stage (poor little man).

It’s all gone horribly wrong for him, as it’s disgraced Scotland throughout the world and won no friends, anywhere."

Now, that would be leaving aside the utterly trifling figure of Nelson Mandela, who praised the decision to the skies, would it? Well, of course it would, we all know that the "International Community" (aka "Everywhere" or "The Whole Wide World") consists solely of the US and that highly select band of Britons who Mrs Thatcher used to call "sound".

"It also means England and the English have even less sympathy and tolerance for Holyrood."

Ah, yes, I think I'm starting to see where HD2 is going astray here. It's the familiar Anglocentric assumption that every decision Alex Salmond and his government make must by definition be calibrated to impact upon the English psyche in some way. So, depending on what day of the week it is, Salmond is either a malevolent genius intentionally driving hard-pressed English tax-payers to distraction in order to force them to demand an end to the Union, or alternatively he is a pitiful, cack-handed buffoon who yearns for the respect of polite London society, but fails lamentably with his every effort to win it.

The truth, of course, is rather more prosaic. Alex Salmond is primarily interested in what the Scottish electorate think of his actions, because it is the Scottish electorate alone to which he is accountable. But, oh, how HD2 longs for it to be otherwise...

"The assumption, for far too long, is that the Scots, and the Scots alone, have the right to determine their own future within the UK. That was always wrong, as it ignores the fact that, at the start of 1997 each and every person living in the UK was electorally equal, having a single MP in Westminster.

So...any putative ‘independence referendum’ for Scotland has to be carried out throughout the whole UK and not just in Scotland - which should have been the position in all devolution referenda to date."

Hmmm. A sentiment of which Abraham Lincoln would heartily approve, no doubt, but this is 2010. It wasn't that long ago that a woman needed her husband's permission to obtain a divorce - perhaps HD2 would like to turn the clock back on the right of individuals to control their own destiny, as well as the right of nations to do so? In fact, I'm starting to wonder if he thinks it would also be appropriate for residents of England (on the grounds of being "equal citizens of the UK") to be allowed to vote in elections to the devolved parliaments and assemblies - that was, after all, the de facto position prior to 1999, with the Westminster parliament (consisting of 90% non-Scottish MPs) voting regularly on Scotland-only laws.

"The logical extension to the ‘Scots only get to vote’ position is to ask where the international border should be and should every single person be able to declare themselves independent and their home a separate State?"

This last risible rejoinder is rather akin to insisting that, because newborn babies are unable to hold a pencil, we might as well forget about our commitment to the 'unattainable ideal' of universal suffrage. Of course, there's a (miniscule) grain of a serious point there - the criteria for determining which groups have a right to self-determination are rather fuzzy and subjective. But if only we could finally move on from this Victorian notion of the absolute sovereignty of existing nation states, it ought to be possible to easily remedy that problem by allowing an international body to adjudicate - and it could also be charged with ensuring that the rights of minority groups in any aspiring new nation are fully protected. But we're fortunate in Scotland that there's quite simply no credible dispute to our status - by any criteria that could conceivably be set down (long history as a distinct jurisdiction, clearly-defined boundaries) we undoubtedly qualify for self-determination if anyone does.

And to anticipate one of the predictable retorts at this point - "ah, but you don't believe in self-determination for Shetland, do you?" - well, actually, I do. I don't see the slightest grounds for believing that Shetland would want to secede from Scotland if independence occurred, but they would have every right to make that choice without hindrance.

Labour are the party in greatest need of allies, whether they realise it or not

Via Joan McAlpine's blog, I've just caught up with the story about a "senior SNP figure" supposedly sounding out Labour about a post-election deal. Of course, in the terms in which it was reported by the Scotsman, the story is a pure slab of Labour delusion. It presupposes that the SNP are resigned to defeat (in spite of two opinion polls putting them just fractionally behind Labour), and are so desperate for a deal that Labour can essentially dictate its own terms - ie. the dropping of the policy of independence, only dealing with the bits of the SNP they find less objectionable, and naturally Salmond would have to go. The complacency that is seeping out from Labour's every pore at the moment makes me wonder how on earth they would cope with the psychological trauma of a second defeat next May that could still very easily happen.

But let's just assume for the sake of argument that Labour do emerge as the largest single party, and then find themselves entertaining the idea of a deal with the SNP. Obvious question - if they're doing that in the first place, doesn't it indicate that they have no real choice? And if that's the case, who exactly is going to be dictating terms to whom? The lesson of the Westminster coalition negotiations this spring is that it's the smaller party that holds the whip-hand - after all, it was Nick Clegg demanding Gordon Brown's departure, not the other way round. So if Labour-SNP talks take place after the Holyrood election, it's safe to infer that Labour are the party with the most to lose. Indeed, from where I sit, the SNP already look like the party with the greater range of options for post-election cooperation - Labour can't credibly do even an informal deal with the Tories, and while it would be premature to completely write off the chances of a renewed understanding with the Lib Dems, it's hard to imagine such a relationship being anything other than deeply uncomfortable and unstable for as long as the Westminster coalition is in being. So how are Labour going to function, even as a minority government? A deal with the SNP may be 'unthinkable' at present, but as the UK Tories discovered in May, when something is the lesser of several unthinkable options, it can often be the one you end up pursuing.

It's clear from the original Scotsman article that this penny hasn't quite dropped yet, but in such a scenario Iain 'the Snarl' Gray and co are going to need the SNP far more than the SNP will need them. So at some point they'll have to forget the hubris about remaking the SNP in their own image under a more pliant leader, and start thinking instead about what carrots they can offer - which probably means either the prospect of an independence referendum, or the beefing up of Labour's own policy on further devolution. The Scotsman cites the example of the Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition in Wales, suggesting that Plaid 'reduced its constitutional aspirations' in order to secure the deal. In truth, of course, it was entirely the other way round. Labour knew that without Plaid they might very well not have a role in government at all, and consequently simply swallowed hard and conceded what the nationalists had been seeking all along - an early referendum on Scottish-style powers for the Welsh Assembly. Something similar in scope will be required from Gray if he shortly finds himself in need of nationalist friends.

Murder on someone's mind

A few years back I was somewhat mortified to read a post listing some of the more unusual Google searches that had taken people to the blog in question - mainly because one of the searches was my own. Thankfully, my anonymity was preserved! It's occurred to me a few times to do a similar post myself, but sadly most of the searches for this blog have tended to be fairly routine. But a handful of recent ones did catch my eye...

bethan jenkins breasts

The blog list on the right can probably explain the first two words, but the third is a bit of a mystery. And on a vaguely similar theme...

her bosom as weapon

Ljubica, Ljubica...

will someone please kill alex salmond

Perhaps Senator Menendez is stepping up his "inquiries" once again?

Selective standards of proof

Brian Flynn is the brother of one of the American victims of the Lockerbie bombing, and was also one of those consulted by Kenny MacAskill in a video conference before the decision to release Megrahi was taken. He has had a high profile in recent days, castigating the Scottish government, alleging nefarious motivations for the decision on the basis of "evidence" that frankly isn't there, and last but not least demanding the resignation of both Alex Salmond and Kenny MacAskill.

It's difficult to know how best to respond to someone who has suffered so much, has a huge amount at stake in all this, and clearly has no agenda other than the truth as he sees it. But it seems to me that when the integrity of others is being wrongfully impugned, it's still important that those points are rebutted. In particular, it strikes me that Mr Flynn is guilty of a clear double-standard - he is very quick to label anyone who questions Megrahi's guilt as the peddler of wild conspiracy theories, and yet the evidential basis for those "theories" are demonstrably about a thousand times stronger than the "proof" he cites for his own apparently unshakeable belief that the SNP were nobbled by businessmen in the Libyan corner.

Here is the comment I left at Mr Flynn's latest article in the Guardian -

As I've said to him on another website, I have every sympathy for what Mr Flynn and his family have gone through since 1988. But the fact remains that his logic is self-contradictory, evades certain inconvenient facts, and thus leads him to direct his anger towards the wrong place.

The point about the dictatorship in Libya having been strengthened by Scotland's actions is first of all a totally unproven assertion, and frankly highly implausible. The idea that a devolved government could ever have anything like as much impact on international affairs as Mr Flynn is suggesting stretches credibility to the limit. But the much more important issue is this - does Mr Flynn want the rule of law to prevail, or doesn't he? If he does, then he can't seriously argue that Kenny MacAskill should have been taking account of any theoretical side-effects of his decision. He was acting in a quasi-judicial capacity, and thus had to focus on the narrow matter of whether Mr Megrahi satisfied the conditions for compassionate release, and whether it was appropriate to release him. If he'd done anything else, he would be guilty of Mr Flynn's charge of treating Megrahi differently from others for political reasons. But he didn't.

"two months before the release, the Scottish National party received a visit from the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), a Middle East-based sovereign wealth fund critical to SNP's plans for capital investment and greater economic independence from the UK"

A fairy story. The only thing that can give Scotland "greater economic independence from the UK" is legislation at Westminster, not shady deals with mysterious Qataris.

"Clearly, the vaunted Scottish justice system had been corrupted by the political needs of the SNP."

This really is an extraordinarily silly charge, and it resembles the one made by Menendez and co over Lord Trefgarne's (utterly unimportant) letter. Mr Flynn's logic seems to be that because it can be shown that someone said something to the SNP, the SNP are somehow automatically "implicated" in it. It apparently doesn't even change anything if it can be clearly shown that the SNP gave a firm response that political and economic considerations would under no circumstances be taken into account.

"And dozens of prisoners die of natural causes every year in Scottish prisons. Why was al-Megrahi considered a special case?"

The whole point is that he wasn't. Many terminally ill prisoners have been recommended for compassionate release before, and it has always been granted by Scottish ministers. If they had rejected this particular recommendation on political grounds, they would indeed have been treating Megrahi as a special case. They didn't.

"How is it right that al-Megrahi served only 11 days for murdering a little child four days before Christmas in Lockerbie?"

And if he hadn't been granted compassionate release, how many days more would Megrahi have served for that murder? One or two, at the very most. I can understand the emotive power of those kind of statistics, but they aren't terribly meaningful in these particular circumstances. It simply wasn't in Kenny MacAskill's power to give Megrahi the kind of punishment Mr Flynn feels he deserves.

American views on compassion are based on "emerging evidence"

USA Today has published an opinion piece on the Megrahi case, which (as you can probably guess without even reading it) is full of the now-familiar ignorance and innuendo. They do, to be fair, reprint Alex Salmond's first letter to John Kerry as an 'opposing view' - although, mysteriously, it's very heavily edited. Anyway, I decided to leave my own comment...

"Perhaps Libya has a better hospice system than anyone realized, or perhaps Megrahi's failing body was revitalized by the hero's welcome he received when he returned home."

Or perhaps USA Today should have read the statement Kenny MacAskill made when he released Megrahi, making abundantly clear that it was possible he might live longer than three months. That was merely a reasonable estimate, based on the best medical evidence from impartial doctors. That's right - doctors. Not prophets.

"Emerging evidence suggests the release was, at best, based on misguided notions of sympathy and bad medical advice; at worst, it involved a sleazy deal by British businesses — including, yes, BP — to improve commercial ties with Libya."

What evidence? At what point did it "emerge"? This is the whole problem with much of the US media on this story - and indeed with many of your politicians. It's as if you just have to say the words "evidence" and "suspicions" often enough and that'll do to be getting on with. For the four Senators (who as Alex Massie has identified have been peddling almost laughable inaccuracies about this story from the beginning) it's apparently sufficient to point out that there is an awful lot of "coincidence" at play in this case. Well, I'll tell you the biggest coincidence of all - Megrahi just happened to become gravely ill at a time when BP were lobbying for the PTA to be concluded. By the senators' logic, does that mean God was also nobbled by BP?

In any case, how can there be "emerging evidence" that the compassion shown to Megrahi was "misguided"? If you think the values Scots Law is founded on are wrong, that's fine, but it's also an utterly subjective opinion, of no greater or lesser validity than anyone else's. It's not based on evidence, "emerging" or otherwise. An abuse of the language, by any standards.

Finally, if the only link anyone can find between the Scottish government and BP is a single ill-advised letter from Lord Trefgarne, expressly written on his own behalf as a member of the House of Lords as much as on behalf of a council of which BP is only one member, then this conspiracy theory really is looking pretty threadbare. That letter, incidentally, says a good deal more about Trefgarne - a senior member of David Cameron's Conservative Party - than it does about Kenny MacAskill, who I'm quite sure read it dutifully and then promptly disregarded it.

Why is the Scottish government even cooperating in writing with this committee of clowns?

I was going to try to resist the temptation to write yet another full post on almost exactly the same subject as the last one, but it has to be noted in passing that Menendez's latest pronouncement on the Megrahi affair is bordering on the deranged. He's clearly impugning the integrity of Kenny MacAskill and Dr Andrew Fraser by suggesting that "all" witnesses who have declined to appear before the Senate are "stonewalling" and need "to clear their names". The latter point shows an arrogant disregard for UK/Scottish sovereignty by implying that a US committee is the appropriate (and indeed final) arbiter for who is or is not "guilty" in this matter.

He also warns us that he and his colleagues will be "publicly" and "frequently" requesting further documents from the Scottish government. Evidently the world is meant to shudder before America's righteous and tireless pursuit of truth. But what do you want to bet that these requested documents will be - just like the last batch - ones that were published on the Scottish Government website months ago, or ones that haven't been published for the simple reason that the US government denied permission? The man's refusal to do basic homework and his need for others to point out elementary facts that are in front of his eyes - sometimes many times over before the message finally gets home - utterly beggars belief. And any sign of a gracious apology when he realises that one of his previous sanctimonious rants was based on false information or outright ignorance? Don't be daft. This man who presumes to adjudicate upon the integrity of others demonstrably has precious little of his own.

From initially having thought that Alex Salmond should testify in person, I'm beginning to wonder why he's even bothering to cooperate in writing with this committee of clowns. They don't want "The Truth", they want a show-trial with a transparently predetermined outcome. I'm glad that the Scottish government is at least showing strictly limited interest in playing along with their little game.

Holyrood's opposition politicians look like (even) smaller people tonight

The last 48 hours or so have provided yet another textbook example of a lack of imagination on the part of opposition politicians in Holyrood, and (to invert Andrew Marr's infamous phrase) they look like rather smaller people tonight as a result. A much more thoughtful response to the Scottish government's refusal to send ministers and officials to testify in person at the US Senate would have been to echo Jack Straw by noting how unusual - verging on the unheard-of - it would be for such testimony to occur before the legislature of another sovereign nation. That observation would not in any way have compromised the opposition parties' established stance that Megrahi should not have been released. Indeed they could have reiterated that point volubly, underlining that they only oppose the government where there's a principled disagreement, and not for opposition's sake. But it was always too much to hope for that the likes of Richard Baker would show that sort of class. For him, if a decision has got Alex Salmond's name on it, it's an outrage - end of story...

"It is quite extraordinary Kenny MacAskill has ruled out appearing before the US Senate inquiry. He and Salmond are the men responsible for the decision and they are now running scared."

A comment that now begs the obvious questions - is it "extraordinary" that Baker's senior party colleague Jack Straw has also ruled out attending the hearing in person, for near-identical reasons? Would Baker care to tell Straw to his face that he's a coward?

I dare say Labour's response to what I've just said (indeed as far as I can see it's the only conceivable defence they've got) would be that devolution offers the Scottish party scope to diverge in its views from its Westminster colleagues. Well, I'm all for that principle - but in reality, does anyone seriously believe that there would be so much as a cigarette-paper between Baker and Straw in any other circumstance than an opportunity to bash the SNP?

While Annabel Goldie might not have to worry about contradicting her London overlords, her own contribution to proceedings has been pretty poor as well -

"The SNP would be the first to complain if anybody refused to co-operate with them so they must comply with this request from the US Senate."

Come off it, Annabel. Alex Salmond is indeed noted for insisting upon proper respect for Scottish institutions, but the idea that he would be arrogant enough to demand that a senior member of the US government or the governor of a US state should appear before a committee of the Scottish parliament upon request (which would be the rough equivalent of what is being asked of him) is utterly risible.

*

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the Scotsman's report on Straw's snub to the Senate is the suggestion from his aides that he is effectively being invited to speak on behalf of the Scottish government, for their decision to release Megrahi. Whereas the Scottish government, for their part, are declining the invitation partly on the grounds that they are effectively being asked to answer for the UK government's collusion with BP over the Prisoner Transfer Agreement. Is there a contradiction here? No, because the Senate committee is indeed absurdly demanding that both administrations answer for the other by muddying the waters in the stated focus of its inquiry between two separate issues that aren't and can't possibly be linked. It seems to me Kerry and co have got to decide whether they're investigating a) the release of Megrahi on compassionate grounds, or b) BP's involvement in the 'deal in the desert'. If they persist with their boneheaded insistence that it's c) "the link between the two", then the least they should be expected to do is specify their grounds for reasonable suspicion that such a link might exist. "Megrahi is a bad guy, BP are bad guys and I've got an election to fight in November" does not constitute such grounds.

"The various claims from the Scottish government raise more questions..."

Or so the US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has said. I don't think she realises quite what a revealing utterance that is, as she's effectively admitting that she and her colleagues (just like John Bolton on Newsnight) have been shooting their mouths off without bothering to inform themselves on the Scottish government's position, and the legal and constitutional basis on which the decision to free Megrahi was made. As far as I can see, there is literally nothing that Alex Salmond has said in his letter to John Kerry that hasn't been pointed out many times before, and therefore nothing that should have come as a surprise to anyone who had been following the story with anything more than a passing interest.

Although I was tending towards the view that it might be a good thing for Alex Salmond or Kenny MacAskill to testify in person before the Senate committee, that was simply on the basis that they had such a watertight case to put forward and were bound to emerge well. There was certainly no moral imperative for them to do so, and any criticism of their decision not to go will ring distinctly hollow, given the open contempt with which the US government has routinely treated external probing into its own affairs, whether by international bodies or the institutions of other sovereign nations. Salmond's refusal to testify in person makes an important statement about equality of esteem between nations, although of course far more importantly it demands an acknowledgment of the clear demarcation lines between two separate issues that the senators are cynically (or perhaps ignorantly) trying to blur - the shady lobbying of the UK government by BP on the one hand, and the actual process that led to Megrahi's release by the Scottish government on the other. If Kerry's committee ever shows the slightest interest in probing a matter the Scottish government actually has responsibility for, perhaps Salmond's response will be different.

David Miliband's severe case of false memory syndrome

Alex Salmond was of course absolutely right to highlight David Miliband's hopelessly clumsy attempts to shift his ground on the Megrahi case, and if this skewering helps to finish off the elder Mili-brother's leadership bid, I certainly won't be crying any tears for him. But listening to the recording of Miliband's latest comments, what leapt out at me the most was his claim that "there is a problem" because we had been told Megrahi's release was ordered on the grounds that it was "certain" he would be dead within three months.

Well, there's a problem all right, David, and it appears to be with your memory. Let's have a look at what Kenny MacAskill actually said at the time...

"Mr Al-Megrahi was examined by Scottish Prison Service doctors on 3 August. A report dated 10 August from the Director of Health and Care for the Scottish Prison Service indicates that a 3 month prognosis is now a reasonable estimate. The advice they have provided is based not only on their own physical examination but draws on the opinion of other specialists and consultants who have been involved in his care and treatment.

He may die sooner - he may live longer. I can only base my decision on the medical advice I have before me."

Now, I wonder where precisely in those words Miliband was detecting such a degree of "certainty"?

I don't want to become a broken record on this subject, but...

From today's Scotsman -

"The First Minister yesterday dismissed claims that holding a referendum on voting reform on the same day as the Scottish elections would save £17 million.

The claim was made by Scottish Secretary Michael Moore who said that holding the two votes at the same time would save the taxpayer money.

But Alex Salmond, who has written to the Prime Minister David Cameron demanding a rethink over the plans, said that holding the AV referendum across the UK would cost up to £100 million and that none of the main parties at Westminster supported that form of proportional representation."

If even a major newspaper still can't get its head round the elementary fact that AV is not any kind of 'form' of proportional representation, what chance have the British public got of making an informed choice, whenever the referendum is held?

The SNP and Labour already have the power to thwart Clegg's opportunism

The Scotsman reports that Alex Salmond has suggested that, by initiating a likely U-turn on the clash of dates between the 2015 Holyrood and Westminster elections, Michael Moore has effectively "conceded" that it is also wrong to hold the AV referendum on the same day as next year's Holyrood poll. In terms of logical consistency, Mr Salmond is of course right, but are the Liberal Democrats ready to admit that to themselves yet? If they agree to a decoupling of next year's polling dates, the whole purpose of their ploy will have been defeated. My guess is that Michael Moore hopes that, if he does end up feeling obliged to devolve control of election dates to Holyrood, he can conveniently delay the transfer of power until well after next May.

But the irony is that, as things stand, the SNP government don't actually need any new powers to thwart the Lib Dems' plan. Labour have been completely supportive of the arguments against holding both the election and the referendum on May 5th - and between them, the SNP and Labour hold some 72% of the seats in the Scottish Parliament. As we all now know due to an issue that has been very topical in recent weeks, under the Scotland Act a two-thirds majority is sufficient to trigger an early dissolution of parliament. I suggested not too long ago that this rule was a touch superfluous, given that a dissolution can also be triggered simply by a short period of time elapsing after a no-confidence motion has been passed without a new government being formed. That, I felt sure, was the much more plausible sequence of events, thus ensuring that the two-thirds rule would never be activated in practice. But, remarkably, we seem to have stumbled on one of the rare circumstances where there might just be a use for it.

Whether the SNP and Labour's common cause on this subject really runs deep enough for them to vote together for an early election (probably in March or April) is of course a very big 'if' - as the two main contenders for power they will be reading the runes and seeking to maximise their own advantage. On the face of it, they're unlikely to be able to agree on a preferred election date for that reason alone. But if by any chance they can, the coalition government's embarrassment will be a sight to behold.