New Statesman Scotland
There is some scratching of legal heads over the BBC's determined efforts to broadcast the entire trial of the two suspects of the Lockerbie bombing. The Corporation wants to broadcast every minute of what is expected to be a very lengthy business (a thousand witnesses have been named) and to transmit sound and pictures over its internet channel, BBC Online. This, it says, would be a far more satisfactory state of affairs than relying on one or two minute daily summaries from a reporter standing in the Dutch rain outside the High Court-in-exile at Camp Zeist. And as the proceedings are being piped into courtrooms in New York, London and Lockerbie for the benefit of the families, surely the trial is being broadcast anyway? No, say the judges: closed circuit is one thing, broadcast is something else entirely.
But what is puzzling some lawyers is this: having had its application turned down by two Scots courts, the BBC now wants to appeal to the Judicial Committee of Her Majesty's Privy Council. But has this whole business got anything to do with the Privy Council? According to the Scotland Act of 1998, the PC is there to settle arguments over where Holyrood's power ends and Westminster's begins (or vice versa). The issue of whether or not cameras are allowed into a Scots court is a matter of Scottish legal procedure. And that, according to the act, has nothing to do with Her Majesty's Privy Council. Or has someone, somewhere, decided otherwise?
All of which raises another interesting question. If crucial Anglo-Scottish constitutional and legal conundrums are to be decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, just who are they? All that the usual reference books say is that the JC of the PC comprises the Lord High Chancellor Derry Irvine, the 12 Lords of Appeal in Ordinary (two of whom are Scots judges) and "other Privy Councillors who hold or have held high judicial office and certain judges from the Commonwealth". There does not seem to be any women among them, although there may be a few black and brown faces among the "certain judges from the Commonwealth".
But the really interesting thing about the JC of the PC is that they are the last people in Britain with the legal power of life and death. Their collective word can send people to the gallows. We may have stopped hanging our convicted murderers, but some of our ex-colonies carry on that fine old tradition. And as the JC of the PC is the final court of appeal for many of these countries, there are people in jails in the West Indies whose lives may depend on the ruminations of these elderly gentlemen in London.
One of the many dismal facts to emerge from the case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot a teenage burglar, is the large and growing incidence of crime in country areas. And we are not just talking about locals relieving the gentry of the occasional salmon or pheasant. Farms all over Britain are being plundered of sheep, cattle and other valuable livestock.
Farmhouses and farmyards are being raided for their tractors, four-wheel drive vehicles, "quad" bikes and anything else that can be moved and sold. It seems that rural Britain is not the secure idyll of which so many city folk dream (and hope to inhabit). And rural Scotland is worst of all, where farm raiding has shot up by 37 per cent in the past year. Fife, Strathclyde and Tayside appear to be the most heavily ransacked areas.
But it struck this diary that for every criminal preying on honest farmers, there has to be a dishonest farmer anxious to buy the plunder at knock-down prices. According to the farmers' insurers NFU Mutual, a lot of thieving is done to order. So that ruddy-faced loon in battered tweeds leaning on the dyke contentedly admiring his beasts might just be the "mister big" of the rural racketeers.
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