New Statesman Scotland
Justice can be affronted in many ways. One is when people such as the Guildford Four or the Birmingham Six are banged up for years for crimes they did not commit. But another is when the law finds someone guilty and then treats him or her too leniently. Last week, a sheriff in Hamilton handed down a year's probation and 300 hours of community service to Douglas Ramsay, a 19-year-old van driver who had mowed down and killed two teenage girls by his "clownish" driving. Not surprisingly, the girls' parents are hurt and outraged. The sentence was denounced by the AA and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents as being no deterrent. And Phil Gallie, the Tory spokesman for justice and home affairs, is urging the Crown Office to appeal the sentence and is pressing for a change in the law.
But the law does not need to be changed. The various Road Traffic Acts are not the only option. There are other shots in the legal locker. If the Crown Office saw fit, it could reach for the Common Law of Scotland and indict killer drivers with culpable homicide - a grave offence that carries heavy penalties. "But the trouble with culpable homicide are juries," says one Scots legal eminence. "In the past, juries have proved very reluctant to convict on culpable homicide. Most of them are drivers themselves. So, to an extent, they identify with the accused." But juries are also members of the public. And if public opinion is becoming seriously restive about reckless clowns behind the steering wheel, then culpable homicide may be the option for the Crown to consider. It might work as a more effective deterrent. And it might seem a bit more like justice to bereaved families.
Now that Ken Livingstone has done the business, we can expect to hear a lot more of what this diary has learnt to think of as Cockney economics. Cockney economic theory runs something like this: London is now so powerful, so prosperous, so dynamic, so chock-full of entrepreneurial folk that it funds the rest of the UK. Everyone north and west of Watford (and particularly the Scots) are pensioners of London. The Cockney economists - Ken among them - are now shrilling that enough is enough, and are demanding some of their "subsidy" back. So this diary says to Scotland: be warned. Expect loud whingeing from inside the M25. And try not to mention the £150bn or so of oil and gas revenues that have flowed out of Scottish waters into the Treasury. That would never do.
Still on the subject of Big Oil: much of what happens in Scotland - and particularly in the north-east of Scotland - is decided in Houston, Texas. Houston is, quite simply, the world capital of the offshore oil industry. It is usually worth listening to what the men in Stetsons and nicely tooled cowboy boots are saying. And at the recent Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, they were making it plain that, if the world wanted to keep the oil and gas coming out of the ground, it will have to get used to pumping it out of very deep water indeed, down to and including 10,000 feet.
These are bone-crushing depths. No human can work down there. Which means there will be a huge market for sub-sea robots, devices the oilmen know as unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs. Within the next few years, the industry is expected to spend a whopping $4bn or so on these machines. So, this diary would like to ask, are our shipyards and engineering shops in there pitching for the orders? And if not, why not? This is the kind of state-of-the-art, stuff-of-the-future that Scots engineers and designers used to relish. Can we still do it? Or are we waiting for funding from the National Lottery?
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