Elga Graves
Sectarianism
There is a crime against
humanity on our doorstep.
It is time to name it
The Cafe
Those trams again
If you want to run away
and never be seen again,
don’t come here
Gerard Rochford
The July poem
The Cafe
Back in 1977 we were told that the Edinburgh tram project was a ‘fixed price contract’. Subsequently legal action by the contractors led to a decision that 90% of the cost overruns on the elements in question were because of changes made by the officials at TIE.
In May this year we were told that £411 million had already been spent and the next day that it was £440 million. Now we are told that cancelling it will cost £750 million and to continue £700 million.
It may indeed be true that TIE’s meddling is responsible for at least 90% of the cost overruns but even then I fail to see how stopping the fixed price contract can involve the contractors in more legitimate expense than actually completing the work will. I would welcome some assurances but only from somebody who has not previously assured us of the success of the project.
In any case nobody involved should ever have a job in the public sector which gives them responsibility for one penny of public money and that includes the politicians.
When Muir Russell took the fall for allegedly keeping from ministers the fact that the Scottish Parliament building costs were also out of control (something evident to everybody else) he was given numerous well-paid public jobs by these same politicians. Ultimately he was asked to chair the enquiry into the Climategate leaks and the hiding of the decline in global temperature where he duly found that nobody in charge was guilty of any serious wrongdoiing and that the politicians had certainly not known. I would like to think that this will not be repeated.
Neil Craig
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There is a crime against
humanity on our doorstep.
It is time to name it
David Mackenzie
When the sun is bright it does not get much better than the west side of Cumbrae, especially if the slabs in Glen Sannox are still sparkling from the wet and the thin ribbon of central Bute is in its brilliant high summer green.
Onto this stage, heading south, came one of the Trident V class submarines, accompanied by two pilot boats with a handful of smaller craft describing foamy circles around it. The general splendour of the scene allowed me for a moment to put aside my knowledge of the boat’s function. It was not beautiful, certainly, but its mass, power and black skin gave it the magnificence of a bull god, while these small boats were acolytes as it processed towards its vast underwater temple in the Kilbrannan Sound.
Once the knowledge floods back in, what can you compare it to? During the Maytime trial in Greenock Sheriff Court in 1999 one of the defendants, Ellen Moxley, put the UK Trident system alongside the incinerators of the Holocaust. I was one of the co-authors of the Trident Ploughshares press release sent out on that day and I recall the negative reactions to the comparison which we got from some of our supporters. One woman asked to be taken off the mailing list and said she felt Ellen had minimised the horrors of the Nazi gas chambers by linking them to a weapon system that had so far not killed anyone. Another hinted that the defendants and the campaigners supporting them had got a bit over-excited and needed to recover a sense of proportion.
A phrase the objectors might have used but which only became popularly current later, though it dates back to William James, was ‘moral equivalence’. What the objectors seemed to be saying was that Ellen was claiming that the active deployment of Trident nuclear weapons was an exact match in moral terms to the Holocaust. I think they were a bit muddled.
It is clear that a relatively low position in a chain of command is not a defence against the charge of failing to prevent the crime.
To my mind moral equivalence means that A is exactly as good or as bad as B. But you don’t need precise arithmetical calculations of virtue or vice to make useful and significant connections between one set of actions or intentions and another. In the case of the comparison in question the connection is palpable. Both involve careful, detailed and deliberate planning that either could or did end in civilian killing of horrifying quality and scale. In the case of the Holocaust we know it is ‘did’. So far with Britain’s nukes it rests at ‘could’. The very fact that ‘could’ might become ‘did’ is itself a powerful argument for making the comparison.
There is another powerful link between the two activities – the Nuremberg trials. It had long been established that the deliberate killing of civilians was beyond the pale but it was the forensic scrutiny of the Nazi atrocities that led to the shared understanding that individuals, organisations and authorities have a clear duty to exercise what freedom lies to their hand to prevent crimes against humanity. Specifically, it is clear that a relatively low position in a chain of command is not a defence against the charge of failing to prevent the crime. Just as it did not suffice for a death camp guard to argue that whether an inmate should be killed or not rested with the commandant it also will not suffice for a Scottish government to argue that under devolution Trident is a matter for Westminster. To be clear, I am not arguing for exact moral equivalence, but I am claiming that the link is germane.
The Scottish government, with its solid parliamentary majority, now has a greatly increased freedom in which to take action against the planning of crimes against humanity that Trident represents and it has an obligation to take such action, even if the constitutional implications are serious and even if, as it should go without saying, the current SNP strategy for achieving extended devolution and national self-determination is put at risk. The first step is to openly identify Trident and all its works as a criminal enterprise
David Mackenzie was a secondary school teacher, education adviser and an education officer before taking a full part in the Trident Ploughshares campaign. He is currently active in the Forth Valley area on nuclear disarmament and on extending allotment provision for local people
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