The UK’s ‘devolution’ arrangements are complicated and either stupidly inconsistent or elegantly tailored to meet varying local requirements, depending how you look at it.

Here is the official summary:

Devolution of powers

Following referendums in Scotland and Wales in 1997, and in both parts of Ireland in 1998, the UK Parliament transferred a range of powers to national parliaments or assemblies.

The Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly were established, and took control in 1999. The arrangements are different in the three parts of the country, reflecting their history and administrative structures.

Find out about the responsibilities and powers of the devolved administrations in each part of the UK using the links below. You’ll find further links to the websites of the devolved governments, which include information about how their government works and how their public services are run.

The UK Parliament and devolved matters

The UK government remains responsible for national policy on all matters that have not been devolved, including foreign affairs, defence, social security, macro-economic management and trade.

It is also responsible for government policy in England on all the matters that have been devolved to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

The UK Parliament is still able to pass legislation for any part of the UK, though in practice it only deals with devolved matters with the agreement of the devolved governments.

So ‘foreign policy’ stays in Whitehall.

But what’s foreign policy? Scotland has its own office in Brussels to lobby the EU for largesse. So do English regions. But unless there is a direct, specific and immediate impact of a decision on the devolved territories themselves, these bureaucrats do not get involved in what you might call ‘classic’ foreign policy either dispensed by the EU or bilaterally or both (how to respond to the Russian invasion of Georgia, repression in Burma, measures (or not) against Cuba).

The problem arises when events happen which do not fit tidily into neat categories designed by officials.

Such as, for example, a decision taken by a devolved body within its legal powers which attracts considerable annoyance overseas.

Which is what the Lockerbie bomber Al-Megrahi controversy at root is all about:

This is not to suggest that Mr MacAskill is doing anything untoward, nor to question the legitimacy of the Scottish justice department. It’s just that the case of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi shows that it is impossible to contain decisions on policy in the borders of a nation.

The ramifications of this decision – in particular its relationship to the future relations of the developed world with Libya – are out of all proportion to the usual questions of Scottish justice, important as they are. We can now add a foreign policy dimension to the West Lothian question. Scottish domestic policy can sometimes lead British foreign policy.

If this is what is happening. Maybe it’s the other way round?

Faced with a number of difficult conflicting pressures and attendant choices(demands/expectations from Libya, likely anger in USA, huge commercial gains or losses, Justice, Compassion), did Whitehall in cahoots with the Scottish government devise this formula to release Al-Megrahi but hope to brazen out the ensuing rows by piously ascribing the decision to Scottish humanitarianism?

The official documents released in London and Edinburgh are designed to reinforce the idea that the only issues at stake were those of the case itself and the ‘compassionate’ circumstances surrounding it. But of course senior people in the FCO and No 10 and indeed other Departments will have pored over the issues too (or if they did not they should be sacked for incompetence), since the manifest foreign policy angles fell squarely within their remit. Where’s all that paperwork?

My old friend Mark Allen (ex-SIS, now with BP) is shown to have had a role in bringing BP’s interests to HMG’s senior attention back in 2007.

This Labour Government have tried to sneak their way round accepting responsibility for the foreign policy aspects of this problem and are now properly looking bedraggled and dishonest. The Times quotes Nick Day, ex-MI5:

Nick Day, a former MI5 agent and the chief executive of the business intelligence firm Diligence, which has helped British companies to enter Libya, said: “It was an open secret on the ground there that other oil firms were not encountering the same difficulties that BP had … because the issue of al-Megrahi was unresolved.

“Any government has the overwhelming priority of ensuring the economic wellbeing of the country, protecting national security and furthering bilateral relations. This is clearly what Britain was doing in this case — and there is nothing wrong with it. The problem is that governments do not always feel able to tell people the whole truth.”

Just so.

What I want to know is, what if anything did the Labour Government agree with the USA (then the Bush Administration but subsequently Obama’s people) about how if at all the issue of Al-Megrahi might be handled as part of the Huge Deal which brought Libya to end its WMD programmes?

Maybe there was nothing agreed on this aspect, but an understanding to kick the can down the road. Which was done, until Al-Megrahi became terminally ill?

That’s the nub of it all.

Foreign Policy on a grand scale.

Memo to next UK government: if you play at that top table, accept the responsibility for honestly explaining tough decisions which goes with it.