Ian Hamilton QC

Torture forgivable in England…Official… 

In an astonishing speech at Hertfordshire University on 19th October 2006 Lord Phillips, England’s Lord Chief Justice asks himself the question, might torture be forgivable where it saves countless lives? This is how he answered. 

‘THE CLASSIC ANSWER IS THAT THE LAW CAN NEVER JUSTIFY THE USE OF TORTURE, BUT IN A SITUATION SUCH AS THAT THE EXECUTIVE MIGHT BE FORGIVEN FOR ACTING IN A MANNER THAT WAS UNLAWFUL.’ 

Himmler could not have put it better. 

We have asked the Scottish Parliament and Executive to utterly repudiate their association with this view. We await their answer. 

EDITORIAL COMMENT

The use of torture by the state is barbaric. Be you ever so humble the law will protect you even against the state. This is a basic precept of civilisation.  Consider this. Jean Charles De Menezes is not gunned down, but is taken alive. The police ‘know’ that he is a terrorist and bombs are about to go off. He maintains his innocence, and is put to the torture….Need I go further? The English police will now know that torture can be forgiven. It is as if the great speeches of Hartley Shawcross and David Maxwell Fyfe at Nuremburg were never made.

Torture is abhorrent. It debases the torturer and those who sanction it. But there is another reason. It doesn’t work. Put De Menezes to the torture and he will name someone, and he too will name someone. You start a chain of tortured people, all innocent while the real terrorists go about their business. War is a failure of diplomacy; torture is a failure of intelligence. We cannot turn our backs on torture chambers. The German people did, and paid a terrible price. 

For long the writer has been worried that the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates has been silent on Guantanamo Bay and Rendition. His silence is shameful. Deny justice to the weakest among us and you deny it to us all. This precept applies to the prisoners of our ally as it does to our own. Now that the Lord Chief Justice of England says state torture is ‘forgivable’ the Dean must most urgently dissociate himself and the Faculty of Advocates from any such thing.

Yet the Dean has not been alone. We know of the Church silent. Where is the Church militant? Ayr Presbytery discussed the question of rendition and cravenly decided to do nothing. Prestwick Airport is in Ayr Presbytery. The torture flights refuel there. Think of this.

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. He was taken to Guantanamo Bay and then sent on rendition. As his aircraft approached Prestwick there passed a procession of the unco guid going to church. It was led by the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates and the Moderator of the Presbytery of Ayr. As the aircraft landed they passed by on the other side.   

 

 

By our Lowland correspondent

If you listen to any Scot you will hear a lament for what never was. You will hear a lament for a Highland civilisation. The very words are an oxymoron. What civilisation?

If a civilisation is to be judged it must be judged by its achievements. All around the Highlands in a few rickle of stones we see these achievements.

DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE. Highland domestic architecture consisted of four dry-stane walls with some heather clods on the roof, and a hole to let the smoke out.

TOILETS? You used the straw at the end of the room where the cow lived. Then mucked the midden out in the spring.

WASHING FACILITIES? None. There is no evidence that washing facilities existed.
 
ECLESIASTICAL ARCHTECTURE?  Very little. Rodel in Harris comes to mind and a few others, all derivative. There was no native school of architecture. The present Iona is a Lowland invention.

ROADS?  Before General Wade they had none. The holes in their brogues were to let the water out; not, as now, for decoration.

AGRICULTURE? Prior to the Forty-five there had been no change in Highland Agriculture for 1200 years.

MEDICINE?  None. Their doctors were a hereditary office. At least they didn’t kill as many as the lowland doctors.

LAW?  None. No domestic Highland law has come down to us, and there is not a hint that any ever existed. The whim of the Clan Chief, who was also the local warlord, was law. The Clansmen had to submit or die. The Clan Chief is now the laird. Think what an outcry there would be if he still had both law-making and executive powers. As for war: the fiery cross was an unsophisticated form of conscription which none dared ignore.

ART? None. The illuminations in the Book of Kells may be an exception, but Trinity College Dublin does not agree.

LOYALTY? None. They resorted to murder and called it honour. They even made treaties with Westminster to try to overthrow the Scottish government. The Treaty of Westminster/Ardtornish is an example. England was to take the Lowlands and the MacDonalds the Highlands. The stability of Clan Campbell was the one constant factor that stopped the Highlander betraying his country. Clan Campbell saved Scotland. Yet to this day Clan Campbell is reviled as treacherous because of its loyalty to the greater concept of a Scottish nation. As early as 1306 Bruce’s friend Neil Campbell of Lochawe saved the newly crowned king, when the MacDougals ambushed him and tried to murder him.

MUSIC? I’ll grant you music, but only the music of the pipes. The music of the Forty-five was written by Lowlanders, nearly all by James Hogg, who published words and music in his 1792 Jacobite Reliques.

We Lowlanders invented the Highland myth for our own ends. We were always a little afraid of the Highlanders. They were very close to us, and very fierce and mobile. We granted a commission to Rob Roy MacGregor to keep the border quiet, and ever since have blackened his character for doing so. We have felt guilty about them, and still do. Largely this was caused by the terrible aftermath of Culloden. No Lowlander in his right mind fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie. Sixty years previously the Stuarts had hunted us over the bleak moors for minor liturgical reasons, and had kept trying to betray us to the English Church.

The Cameronians, the oldest regiment in the British Army, was raised by a Presbyterian Minister to fight the Stuarts. So scunnered were they with the Stuarts that they were the only regiment never to drink the ‘loyal’ toast, persisting in this until their disbandment in 1962. Yet we sat by after Culloden and let the Hanovarians and their English allies murder and pillage. It gave us a guilty conscience. We felt we should do something for the Highlanders. We did. We romanticised them.

As for Bonnie Prince Charlie. He was an unscrupulous Italian adventurer who brought destruction on everything he touched, and then ran away. The only Lowland Scots who had any good to say of him were those who went to his Royal Balls at Holyrood. Edinburgh matrons on the make will suck up to any royal. It is the same today.

I intend some time to comment on the Clearances, and how there was no resistance. They went like sheep. I will also comment on the origins of our national dress: of how the bare-arsed highlander wrapped himself in a length of tweed because he hadn’t the skill to make trousers: and of how this evolved into the national dress of a nation, that a generation previously would have shot anyone seen in a kilt.

Yet there is one great and abiding difference between the Highlander and any other ignorant tribes-people. As soon as they got away from the clan system they salted the world with their ability.

BUT WHY has the image of barbaric murdering Highlanders gone out world wide to depict honest, plodding, industrious Lowlanders like me? IT’S JUST NOT FAIR.
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Our market research showed a surprising amount of hostility to this article. As an annexe to this issue we append an analysis of it by Mike MacKenzie of Easdale.

In these pages I have raised matters I want answered before I die, and I am an old man.

What did Gaelic civilisation give us during the clan system.The Celtic Church lived and died before the clans were established. The clans gave us MacPherson’s Ossian, one epic poem of doubtful provenance.

Did they make any other contribution? Their oral tradition was not strong enough to break through as Homer broke through. Once the Clan system was broken the Gael’s ideas fertilised the world. Why not before? I want an answer, not abuse. Am I wrong to challenge the romantics?

One thing I know is that the many nations of Scotland have now united to make one whole nation, but maintaining our wonderful differences.  How did this come about? While England fumbles with its identity, we Scots, old Scots and new Scots alike, are sure enough of who we are to look about us and ask these questions.

Furthermore. Why do we grovel to take English honours? Is a life of service to Scotland not honour enough?
As for abuse. It is a form of affection and is meant to hurt no one, fatface.

The next edition will appear soon. Write for it. Try to keep it to 600 words or less. Send your contribution to write@ianhamiltonqc.com

ALAN COCHRANE, you big four-eyed, fungus-faced, Tory mouth-piece.

You railed against devolution and continue to do so. You supported the poll-tax.

Now DAVID CAMERON, the UK’s undigested Tory says you were wrong to oppose them. Even yon nice, big, fat Tory MICHAEL FRY has come over to independence. Alone in your wee muddy ditch you’re left firing your pop-gun in support of people who’ve run away. Now the Goldie oldies are bending their creaking backs to put on their running shoes. You’re the last lone Tory on the range? Hiyoe Cochrane!

Or maybe you just like being the BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE of the Scottish press. Sing us a wee lament, fatface.

Och maybe I’m being too hard on you, big man. I like you well. You’re one of the family, even if you’re the daft one. Every village needs its idiot, and you’ve aye been ours.

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FROM OUR INVITATION TO ALAN COCHRANE you will see that this blog is open to all, even unionists. (Even to MIKE RUSSEL and we can’t be more tolerant than that.) We want comment in pieces of about 500 words. Send your contributions to write@ianhamiltonqc.com    

 

…Colin’s gone.

Being Lord Advocate is like being as old as I am. Nobody knows you’re there until you make a nuisance of yourself, and even then nobody cares. The Blog is not like that. We wish Colin well, good, honest radical that he once was. It’s a lonely business when all that’s left in your life is a title. You set off with high ideals, sacrifice them, and end up a lord. You know then your life is over, and you wonder if it’s been worth it. Good bye, Colin. I aye liked you. You were better off when you were sib to Jim Sillars and Alex Neil. Good luck in the House of Lords. But I’ll tell you this: You’re still too honest a man to like it.

Welcome to the new Lord Advocate. Not because she’s a woman. There are plenty of women. Welcome because it’s a continuing break with the New Club/Muirfield nexus.

Our only reservation is why choose a civil servant. She’s from the huddled masses of the fiscal service, underpaid, underpraised, and we suspect although we’ve never tried, undersexed. That she will give independent advice to the executive is a joke. The New Town backscratchers never did. They valued their jobs too much. Has she been chosen to make the fiscal service think that they too can gain high office? If so it’s a con to keep them underpaid. There aren’t enough high offices.

But where will she go when her time’s up? Colin Boyd has gone back to private practice. She’s got none to go back to. Can she go back to the fiscal service of which she’s now the boss? If so at what rank? Will a new Lord Advocate want his predecessor in a position to undermine him? Meantime is the executive paying into her pension fund while she’s a minister? Or even her salary as a fiscal? It’s the first time that a civil servant has been a government minister. We suspect another Labour Party fiddle. Watch them scurry to cover up.

Anyway welcome! Your name’s on everyone’s lips. We just wish everyone could spell it…………………………………   

As we approach the May election, the greatest contest in our political history, the means of mass communication are in the hands of one side alone. The unionists control broadcasting and television. The six o’clock news says it all. Matters controlled by the unionist government are given overwhelming coverage. The inference is that we Scots will continue to support non devolved matters such as atomic submarines, atomic missiles, atomic energy, foreign wars, rendition, the American alliance and Tony Blair. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We say to Tony Blair and his cronies, ‘This is not a national election. This is an international election. We are different from you. We are a separate nation.’ We are the mongrels of the world. We are the Highlanders and the Lowlanders, the Pakistanis and the Indians, the Mohammedans and the Jews, the Hindus and the Buddhists, the Irish and the English, all joined together, each preserving our differences yet each asserting that we are all Scots: One Scotland; One nation. So it always has been; so it is now. There is no such thing as a pure bred Scot.

The BBC speaks only for England. So long as the unionists control the BBC we are voiceless. The election coverage will be perverted. The news will continue to be skewed in favour of the union. Westminster will be portrayed as the centre of the universe. Those Scots Quislings who have chosen to go to the better ministerial jobs at Westminster will be paraded before us as proof that the Union works. It does for them. Did you ever see a poor unionist politician?

Until after the election the BBC must be put into the hands of independent nominees. This is the only way to ensure fair broadcasting. The irony is that we Scots (and Welsh) pay for a constant stream of Southern propaganda through our BBC licence fee. A strike of payment of this fee is long overdue. In a banana republic the first utility to be taken over is the broadcasting media. In this banana kingdom it is already in the hands of the unionists. One-sided broadcasting is no longer supportable. The blog advocates withholding the licence fee.

Goodbye Douglas. We seldom met, but when we did you always had a smile and a kind word. We walked together in the same direction. You chose the political road and I chose a lonely one. We walked side by side, with only a hill between us, and we both hoped to meet again at journey’s end.

In the last months, while in great pain, you suffered also because you felt you hadn’t done enough for Scotland. I understand. We old men don’t sleep well. I write this at four in the morning of your memorial service, which I now don’t think I’ll make. 

Often we old men lie looking into the darkness. Wondering where the years have gone, and why we have done so little. We know we will die with a great love not quite fulfilled.

You should not have fretted. We all feel the same. No one can do enough.

FAREWELL, DOUGLAS. You died without any honours, except the greatest one of all, that you served your country.