Release of the Lockerbie Bomber.

On August 20th Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan man convicted of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland was released from prison in Scotland on compassionate grounds. The release was actually put back by a week because in this metaphor I was playing the role of al-Megrahi and the flight 103 role was being played by President George W Bush's visit to London in 2003. Obviously for that to be accurate flight 103 would have had to have crashed because the pilot simply ran out of talent but the metaphor only really existed to distract from two inescapable facts;

1. Libya has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa. When all that capacity comes on line the country is expected to be the tenth largest oil producer in the world.

2.Britain is in a very sorry state of affairs. It's small strategic oil reserve commonly known as Scotland was plundered heavily during the miners strike and by successive Governments keen to cover up holes in their economic policies. It is now expected to run dry and contribute to the looming energy crisis which, according to a pessimistic report released on 1/9/09, is expected to hit Britain as soon as 2017.

Therefore the al-Megarhi release was simply an attempt by Britain to secure Libyan oil concessions and because the timescales involved exceed the length of any British Parliament was a matter for the civil service or "the state" rather then any elected political party. The fact that the final decision was left to the Scottish Government was an attempt to create a rift between Scotland and the English civil service in Whitehall. The thinking behind this is that economically speaking Scotland is an unsustainable disaster area so when the oil reserves run out Whitehall would prefer it if Scotland achieved independence and became the EU's economic problem.

Since the story exploded into an almighty row Britain has released an avalanche of documents to convince everyone that no oil concessions have been received in return for al-Megrahi's release. I for one believe them because I said it was a British plan, I didn't say it was a good plan.