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Could the UN connection
have cost Willie MacRae
his life?
James Wilkie
I agree with David Thomson’s remarks (17 April) on the death of Willie MacRae in April 1985. Of course he was investigated by MI5 and the other intelligence agencies because of his successful campaign against government nuclear plans, but there is another virtually unknown factor in the case – his very active membership of the Scotland-UN committee, where he was one of its two legal advisers. This is where the tie-up with his close confidant John McGill (FSA Scot) of Kilmarnock began to attract the attention of MI5 or whatever.
John McGill is an extremely energetic organiser, ex-SNP at the time, and was the founder, secretary and leading light in Scotland-UN at the height of its international diplomatic activities, to the severe embarrassment of Margaret Thatcher’s regime in London. After her so-called ‘repeal’ of the 1979 Scotland Act, when the referendum had ended with a perfectly adequate majority and a perfect orgy of government corruption, Scotland-UN was formed to take the Scottish case to the United Nations and the international community generally. This it did to no small effect in the course of a relentless, no-holds-barred 18-year diplomatic war that it waged in the major international institutions all round the world.
For example, one of its successes, in the early 1980s, was its destruction of a Thatcherite attempt at a ‘final solution of the Scottish question’ by obtaining a declaration from the Council of Europe in Strasbourg that there was no demand for devolution within the UK. Scotland-UN killed that with a diplomatic offensive that went to the government of every CoE member state. That must have stung in Downing Street, and it was still a current issue in 1985. Thatcher had no answer to it, as can be seen from her replies to Dennis Canavan’s relevant questions at Westminster. She could only bluff.
He drove straight to the police with large-calibre bullet holes in his car,
but despite an ostensibly comprehensive forensic examination there
have been no leads to this day.
James Wilkie worked for the United Nations in Africa and Asia as well as for the Austrian chancellery and foreign ministry
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