Continuing serious and widespread concern and criticism of the Scottish Government’s stubborn will to abolish Scots law’s requirement for corroborating evidence to secure conviction saw a retreat today by new Justice Secretary Michael Matheson.
The nub of the story is that is not a retreat at all but a simple parking of the issue – to protect the SNP vote in the 2016 Scottish election.
This is becoming a habit.
Transport Scotland recently announced that the decision on the award of the contract to deliver the existing and expanded west coast Clyde and Hebridean Ferry Services network will not come until ‘towards the end of May 2016′. This careful phrasing deceives the gullible who are likely to forget that the election to the Scottish Parliament comes on 6th May 2016.
The particular need to take these matters out of contention in the specific period of the run up to and the date of the Scottish Election next year tells its own story – and Michael Matheson was baldly explicit in describing this threshold today.
The suggestion has to be that the SNP Scottish Government knows that what they see as their likely resolution of each of these matters is not going to find public favour; and would cost them votes if they made these decisions known before the May 2106 Scottish election.
The SNP Scottish Government has form in this specific manoeuvre – in a case firmly in the consciousness of Dunoon and the Cowal peninsula in Argyll.
The then SNP Transport Minister, Stewart Stevenson, deliberately postponed the announcement of the decision on the final nature of the ferry service between the town centres of Gourock and Dunooon. When the 2011 election was safely in the bag – and an overall majority obtained by the SNP, Stevenson announced with political impunity that this service was to be passenger only. The local ferry action group had campaigned hard for a second vehicle and passenger ferry on the route.
On the present and most serious issue of the Scottish Government’s continuing determination to drop the requirement for corroboratory evidence in securing convictions, a retired judge, Lord Bonomy carried out a review of the government’s proposals on the safeguards to be put in place in the absence of the need for corroboration. Bonomy found that corroboration ‘should still apply to evidence obtained by hearsay and confession’.
This demonstrates that the Scottish Government was – and most probably still is – happy to see and even working to enable convictions to be secured on uncorroborated hearsay ‘evidence’ alone.
This could not be a more perilous direction for Scots law to take. Such a situation would be – will be – a nightmare for justice.
It can only produce a justice system which is inherently unjust and which will certainly, as the legal profession warns – lead to a greater percentage of unsound convictions.
We will return very shortly to the specific issue of hearsay, to the intrinsic difficulties in its acceptance as evidence in court – and to the consequences of abandoning corroborative evidence in securing convictions in the specific types of cases which are driving the government’s strategy in this move: rape and other sexual crimes and domestic violence.
The Scottish Criminal Bar Association has welcomed the postponement today, saying that when the proposal was first revealed they had viewed it as a very dangerous move. They do not, though, appear to realise that the Scottish Government is being very clear that this is not the end of the matter; that they remain determined to abolish corroboration and will bring it back in the next parliamentary session in a new package of measures.
Rookie Justice Secretary Michael Matheson looked and sounded doggedly stubborn – to the point of shrillness – on this, as he spoke in the chamber today.
The Law Society of Scotland, which had universally opposed the move from the outset, also strongly welcomed today’s announcement. Their President went on to say: ‘Deferring this until the next parliamentary session will allow for further consideration of this complex area of law and further scrutiny of necessary safeguards within criminal proceedings.’
In their responses to the postponement, both the Scottish Criminal Bar Association and the Law Society of Scotland, being lawyers and advocates and not politicians, have missed the key factor about the situation after the May 2016 Scottish Election.
Given the storm surge of Scotland-wide support for the SNP today, with the party predicted to take up to 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats in the coming 2015 UK General Election, it would be naive to imagine anything but an almost completely SNP unicameral chamber at Holyrood next May.
There will be few, if any, opposition members – so there will be little, if any, genuine debate on anything the SNP Scottish Government wishes to do – and there will be no brooking of it.
Scotland will be a one-party state, governed by an already markedly authoritarian regime. That is now all but inevitable, with all of the profound challenges to democracy that such a situation entails.
The Scottish Government, in pursuing the abolition of corroboration against the absolute opposition of the Scottish legal profession, has already shown that it has no doubt that it knows better than the profession.
