THAT PETROL EMOTION

EXTREMELY LITTLE HAS BEEN MADE OF LATE as to the history around the issue of the so-called “Lockerbie” bombing, and one needs to look into the back copies of Private Eye magazine to see “proof” and “photocopies of documents” (the inverted commas are mine and are used for legal reasons) about the British, United States, Australian and German governments being aware that Pan Am flight 103 was about to be destroyed in mid-air and warning all embassy staff not to board it. No newspaper took the story up at the time.


NOW WITH THE RELEASE AND APPARENT COMING DEMISE of the terrorist-bomb-detonator-buyer Abdelbaset-al-Megrahi we will never know why our Western governments wanted this plane destroyed, but it is surely something far more sinister than issues of selling oil and favours over the counter or under it.

AT THE TIME OF THE EVENT, in 1988, the issue of Libyan terrorism or of any Muslim threat to our way of life was small beer compared to a mopping-up job that had been started yet not finished over questions relating to which governments would end up looking after the little children of Eastern Europe when the Berlin Wall came down, shortly after the Lockerbie disaster, in 1989.

THE IDEA THEN THAT THERE would, twenty years later, be 1,350 mosques in Britain, or that there would have been a third oil crisis, just as bad as the first one, started in the sixties by Colonel Khaddafi, was not on the list of conceivables. But now this is handy. As handy as it was to blame Libya for a bombing that obviously had nothing to do with them, it is now handy to let al-Megrahi go and cause an uproar about a “deal” having been done between Gordon “Gormless” Brown, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and any one of a series of Khaddafis to “hush up” the affair.

THE AFFAIR WAS HUSHED UP a long time ago, and the smokescreen of “feeling compassionate” about al-Megrahi, or dealing in oil futures, is stuff and nonsense.