Inside Track Interview


The Eck’s factor


Mandy Rhodes Editor


He is back rocking a big majority and already the First Minister is flexing his not inconsiderable muscle over the independence of Scotland’s justice system


Just over a month ago, Alex Salmond


jumped out of his helicopter and stood victorious once again on the manicured lawns of Prestonfield House Hotel and announced his party’s victory in the Scottish elections. And despite winning an historic majority of


seats in Holyrood, the First Minister humbly proclaimed that the SNP may have won more seats but it ‘did not have a monopoly on wisdom’. It was an unexpected olive branch from the


normally combative Salmond whom many assumed would now have a mandate to do as he pleased but he indicated that he was willing to work with anyone in the interests of Scotland and announced that he had already spoken to all the other party leaders and welcomed their pledge to provide constructive opposition. He later said that he would head a majority government that acted like a minority government; being open, accessible and listening. Tis made quite a change from the Salmond whom the opposition accuse constantly of picking fights. But just as the whir of the helicopter’s


blades was fading to a memory and only a few short weeks into the new term of government, the mother of all rows has broken out. Te source of the conflict is the impact the Supreme Court in London has on Scots law by dint of its authority to hear Scottish criminal cases which have a breach of human rights potential. It’s an issue that has been bubbling below the surface for some time within legal and political circles but it dramatically erupted last month into the newspaper headlines and the public psyche when the UK’s Supreme Court overturned a judgement by Scotland’s highest court to


16 Holyrood 13 June 2011


convict Nat Fraser of murdering his estranged wife, Arlene, following her disappearance in 1998. Te FM reacted with surprising fury, lashing out at a London-based court that he said was ‘second guessing’ Scotland’s justice system and had ‘no role’ to play here. Lord Hope of Craighead, one of two


Scottish judges to sit on the Supreme Court, and who was accused by Salmond of “routinely interfering in criminal appeals in Scotland”, responded in an article in the Times by saying that the First Minister had misunderstood both the law and the facts. What has since unfolded has been an unseemly row between the SNP Government and the legal establishment both north and south of the border and mainly played out in the letters and opinion pages of Scotland’s newspapers. Neither Salmond nor his Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, have minced their words, and in what some would see as an undignified attack, they have questioned the knowledge of Scots law of the judges that sit in the Supreme Court. MacAskill even suggested that their


“Don’t start a debate unless you are prepared to have a debate”


only knowledge of Scotland was reserved to the Edinburgh Festival, described the court as ‘ambulance chasing’ and threatened to withdraw Scotland’s funding of it. Salmond, meanwhile, has repeatedly referred to Lord Hope, in fairly disparaging terms. By the very nature of the Scottish legal


profession, the SNP has found few friends willing to go public and the party has been roundly accused of using aggressive rhetoric to turn this into a political matter. But whatever the motives, undoubtedly, most people, ardent unionists included, would now agree that there is an issue over the relationship between Scotland’s judicial system and the UK’s Supreme Court that needs to be resolved. Salmond has announced an expert review group, headed by Lord McCluskey, a former Solicitor General, to investigate the matter and it will report in a few weeks. To further muddy the waters, McCluskey himself has described MacAskill’s language on this as being ‘unsuitable’. Salmond and I sit down in the drawing room of Bute House for what should be a positive,


uplifting kind of post-election interview. Tis, however, on the day the Scotsman newspaper describes him as being ‘Humpty Dumpty’, living in an Alice in Wonderland fantasy in regard to the Supreme Court affair. Salmond is incandescent and in no mood


to forgive or to discuss much more than the here and now. With steely determination and brushing off all my attempts to divert the direction of travel for the interview, he lists what he sees as the many inaccuracies in the Scotsman’s coverage of the Supreme Court debate, he decries the quality of its journalists, its editor and its stories and says that while there are many things that he himself does not understand, he categorically does not understand the Scotsman newspaper. “Even if I was the most pronounced unionist


in the world and thought the whole idea of Scotland was a silly historical aberration and thought that the Scottish justice system was the worst legal system in the world, if I was editing the Scotsman newspaper, then I would still ask myself ‘why would anyone buy my newspaper rather than buying a rather better alternative’ and they might do it because I have a unique insight and support for the Scottish dimension and hopefully, once you have that, you get better journalists and better writers but what I don’t understand is that the editor sees circulation going down and down and yet the response is to publish more and more of this stuff.” In response to whether MacAskill was


unwise to make his ‘Edinburgh Festival’ comments and whether he regrets some of the language used, he says that his Justice Secretary was speaking to police and these were ‘off the cuff remarks and that is all’. I say that I had heard him saying those comments myself during a radio interview. Tis observation only inflames the situation and despite his newly acquired habit of sipping Green tea, there is no calming him. “Te Edinburgh Festival remark was meant


to illustrate the fact that the Supreme Court has a majority of judges in it who may or may not have a knowledge of Scots law and it was a colourful way to illustrate it and I don’t think anyone seriously would take exception to that in terms of the debate. I mean, why is that shocking, Mandy?” Because it has muddied the water in what should be a serious debate, I suggest. “Well, sorry, but Lord Hope did an article


last week for his close friend and dinner companion Magnus Linklater [editor of the Times in Scotland] and when was the last time


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