New Statesman Scotland
The news that one of the RAF's Tornado aircraft came down in the sea within a few hundred yards of the nuclear power station at Torness in East Lothian raises all kinds of awkward questions for Scotland. The most important is what would have happened if the aircraft had not missed but had whacked into the reactor hall? Like all nuclear power stations, Torness is engineered to contain explosions from within. But how would it have coped with an aeroplane packed with rockets and bombs running into it at a few hundred knots from the outside?
Which raises another question: why is the air exclusion zone around such a sensitive installation only one mile? What emergency procedures have been put in place in the event of an "incident"? And given that Torness is one of the two nuclear stations that together provide more than 30 per cent of Scotland's electricity, what would have happened to our supply if Torness had been disabled by an aeroplane falling through the roof?
Questions, surely, for Holyrood and its executive? Alas, no. Military aircraft come under the heading of defence, a subject that is out of bounds to the Scottish Parliament and executive. Air exclusion zones come under aviation, which is another no-go area. And although we rely on nuclear power for most of our electricity (probably more than any country in Europe), the power stations that generate it have nothing to do with parliament. So our MSPs fret and complain but they can do nothing. Schedule Five of the Scotland Act 1998 rules, OK?
Now that a majority of our MSPs have signed the SNP's motion calling on Her Majesty's Government to dump the law that prevents Roman Catholics ascending to the British throne (or even marrying the incumbent), the ball is back in Tony Blair's court. This diary suspects that opposition to reform will be fiercer among the Anglicans of England than it will be among the Presbyterians of Scotland. The reasons are historical. The reformation in England was a much more bitter and bloody business than it ever was in Scotland. Many hundreds died south of the border compared to a handful of folk (mainly Protestants) in Scotland.
So when it came to penning the famous Westminster Confessions of Faith (in 1647), the Anglicans, not the Presbyterians, insisted on inserting caveats about Popish "superstitions and sinful snares" and characterising the Pope as "that antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition".
This diary suspects that Tony Blair is enough of a historian to know that when push comes to shove the English are a much sterner people than the Scots.
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