Lockerbie, Labour and Realpolitik
It is, perhaps, a surprise that a human figure, as revered as a priestly relic; part wax effigy, part mortal remains and part fancy sits at the end of the South Cloisters of one of our great Universities, University College, London. UCL was the first to embrace secularism, and so it is not surprising that one of the founders of Utilitarian Philosophy should be awarded such a fêted, if not slightly grisly position within its cloisters. His name, as I am sure you will know, is Jeremy Bentham.
He is best known for a sentence contained in, A Fragment on Government (1776):
..it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong
Along with John Stuart Mill, Bentham promulgated what is essentially a social liberal worldview. But Mill digressed and disagreed. His later views were partly different and sometimes ran counter to Bentham’s well known assertion. Mill objected to the idea that there are social wholes that are superior to those individuals who constitute them. There are no super empirical entities, like the Law or the Church. In other words Mill rejected that there is a super entity of any kind that has a moral monopoly but still asserted that maximization of pleasure or happiness is therefore the moral end and the logical next step from that is to invest our government with the authority to attain it. Mill is careful to build in caveats, the principal one being that, although governments should pursue a utility rule, exceptions should be made on moral grounds.
Either that or you give free reign to despots and tyrants who claim to make the trains run on time.
And so we come to Lockerbie.
The Labour government is in the stocks over leaked papers that reveal a certain amount of “assistance” given to the Libyan Government over the release on medical grounds of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi which run counter to denials given at the time. If ever there was a better paradigm of the conflict between the happiness of the greater number and the exception that must be made to assure us of the primacy of natural justice, I don’t know one. All governments are responsible for either conducting or assisting global commerce. If they withdrew on moral grounds, or forced domestic traders to do so, we would be riding bicycles and knitting our own iPods. The previous Labour government is accused of trading a prisoner for oil; not just my words, but also those of Sir Bernard Ingham, who, at the time of the Lockerbie disaster visited the crash site with Mrs Thatcher and observed:
Three miles east of the town, we were taken to the nose cone of the plane in a field, surrounded by belongings and bodies, and the gruesome visible remains of two stewardesses frozen in death in the wreckage. It seemed an awful intrusion just to look, but there was no point in going unless we took in the full horror.
..They eventually put Abdelbaset al-Megrahi behind bars, only for our contemptible politicians to release him after only eight years allegedly on compassionate grounds but really to oil the wheels of trade with Libya.
There can be little doubt in most peoples’ minds that the motivation for al-Megrahi’s release was realpolitik and the weighing of the needs of the few, in this case the victims on Pan Am flight 103, against the needs of the many, that being us.
We pay our money and we make our choice. If we abandoned such deals on purely moral grounds, global commerce from and into the UK would almost cease. Implicit in the dealings of the last Labour government was not only an acknowledgement that the reality was unpalatable, and therefore to be kept a secret, but that it was a vital necessity, without which government as we understand it would cease to function.
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February 2, 2011 at 07:50 -
Mirrors my earlier piece on ‘what is Justice’ , yet again the Labour Party unable to live in anything other than economic cloud cuckoo land.
The next gem to come on the statute book delayed until May is Labours 2010 Bribery Act. Which in law a company director is responsible for ‘bribery’ by any employee anywhere in the world, even unto buying somebody a drink. Of course crime does not exist in the socialist utopia.
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February 2, 2011 at 08:36 -
Mr. al-Megrahi’s survival beyond the few months suggested by the prognosis at the time should not give rise to damnation of that prognosis : the ‘time you have left’ is merely the expression of a range of possibilities in a single statistic and, as with all such simplifications, bound to be ‘wrong’. The reason given — that he was released on compassionate grounds — is therefore plausible. … Were it not for a foul stink surrounding the evidence relating to the case.
I have heard and read so often the allegation that his release was aimed at smoothing the petroleum trade with Libya but have yet to find any such allegation even slightly convincing.
Given the available evidence — and so little evidence has been made available — a much more convincing hypothesis is that the British government and the Scottish Executive were anxious to avoid, at any cost, the appeal that Mr. al-Megrahi had launched, which was about to begin.
He might be guilty ; we simply don’t know. Is the Scottish legal system inadequate to a proper review of the evidence ? Dr. James Swire might be forgiven for thinking it so.
ΠΞ
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February 2, 2011 at 09:50 -
I’m not convinced either way – called sitting on the fence. Though I will say that your own home is a better place to be when it comes to coping with cancer than a prison or even a hospital so you naturally survive longer. And as you say time left is a finger in the air figure based on the average time people live for. Every individual is different and they could die the next day or 2 years after the figure given.
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February 2, 2011 at 08:47 -
A great deal of intrigue and skulduggery surrounds this case – and always will. I remember a Christian minister who’d lost his daughter in the Lockerbie bombing telling us that he didn’t believe for a moment that the Libyans were responsible for the atrocity. He also went on to tell us that VIPs had been warned not to take that flight beforehand.
It could be concluded that the Labour government was aware of this, and wanted to release the man to appease the Libyan government. If so, it was probably the only morally right decision they took… -
February 2, 2011 at 10:05 -
There was never any doubt that the Labour government, Benthamites to a man, wanted Megrahi back in Libya. The media must have forgotten the very public row between Holyrood and Westminster over Megrahi’s inclusion in the Prisoner Transfer Treaty. (They also appear to have missed the deal for British construction companies to build Libya’s first panopticon.)
This selective amnesia appears to have extended to Scotland’s appeal court. The court, no doubt willing participants in this Machiavellian plot, gave the same legal advice directly -yes, directly- to Megrahi and his legal team:-
“The Scottish Ministers have a statutory power to release a serving prisoner on licence on compassionate grounds. Advice has been issued as to the exercise of that power. Broadly speaking, in the case of a prisoner suffering from a terminal illness, life expectancy of less than three months may be considered a condition appropriate to occasion early release. It is not suggested that the applicant presently meets that criterion.”In his blog, Scottish advocate Jonathan Mitchell, set out the law and argued that MacAskill did ‘the right thing for the right thing for the right reason’.
Michael Sandel has a lot to answer for: I have no doubt that when his lecture on Kant is aired on the BBC, the blogs will be bursting with theories that MacAskill was influenced by the Krauts.
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February 2, 2011 at 10:38 -
I never believed for a moment that Megrahi was the guilty party in this affair, or even one of the many guilty parties. A fall guy, maybe, but no more.
Nor did I ever believe that the release was made for any reason other than heavy pressure from London, which expected trade concessions as a result, for the reasons you have commented on so wisely.
“Compassionate grounds” was a mere smokescreen to cover the Scottish executive’s embarassment at being told what to do.
Practically anyone in the UK who has thought about these issues at all will have come to the same conclusions.
But undoubtedly nobody in power wanted his appeal to go ahead; how much dirty washing would have been revealed in public, and what on earth would we have done in the event of an acquital?
The whole thing stinks beyond measure. It’s fortunate, but entirely fortuitous, that Labour are on the hook for this one. There but for the grace of God…
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February 2, 2011 at 12:28 -
I’ve heard so much speculation and rumour, supported by so little verifiable evidence surrounding this case that I no longer know what to believe. I suppose in time, we’ll learn more. I can only conclude that there are people with pressing reasons for not releasing the whole truth. Who those people are is difficult to determine, but fingers point so many ways.
So many victims, so many grieving relatives.
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February 2, 2011 at 13:45 -
I’d like to think we’ll know more in time, but it seems to me that the release of Megrahi was designed to make sure we wouldn’t.
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February 2, 2011 at 12:46 -
Remind me, what was the national identity of IR655 airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes in July 1988?
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