Alex Salmond at the Brookings Institute

UK and No. 10 complicit in torture and rendition in Libya - Is this 'Britishness'?

Watch the first five minutes or so of this, and listen to the categorical denials of senior UK spooks about involvement in rendition and torture.

MI6 is the intelligence arm of the UK government - the one that denied involvement in rendition and torture, denied complicity with Moussa Koussa and the brutal Gadaffi regime - the government that presumed, with barefaced hypocrisy, to criticise the Scottish Government’s legal, moral, principled and humane release of a dying criminal, Megrahi.

The hands of New Labour and Blair and Brown are all over this one, and the benighted Coalition were involved until the Arab Spring caught them with their pants down.

Is this the special nature of the quality of 'Britishness' that is used to justify arguing that Scots should not seek their freedom from a discredited regime, the UK and Westminster government and the poisoned Union that is now crumbling by the day?

Number 10 were up to their dirty necks in the Gadaffi regime, until Cameron expediently jumped on board a NATO and French initiative when he saw which way the wind was blowing. The UK will piously back democracy and freedom anywhere in the world when its suits their purpose - except of course Scotland's democratic and human right to end a union they were bribed and coerced into over 300 years ago.