I was interested to learn that the Scottish Government has decided not to recommend the Queen pardon a man hung after being found guilty of being part of a conspiracy to murder 236 years ago. Jacobite Alan Stewart was executed for his alleged role in the killing of Colin Campbell of Glenure as he led a party harrying the Stewarts of Appin in 1752 near the site of the present-day Ballahulish Bridge. Stewart was tried by a jury mainly made up of Campbells in that clan's heartland of Inverary and not surprisingly he was found guilty. A less partisan jury may have given him the benefit of the doubt. Two things struck me. One; if Stewart didn't do the killing, how can he be pardoned for a crime he didn't commit? Secondly, this is ancient history and if the Scottish Government has time to look into such matters, it might be better to consider more recent events. Scotland's name is blackened to this day by the 1948 massacre of 24 ethnic Chinese rubber plantation workers in Malaya by a patrol from the Scots Guards. The claim made at the time, and which is maintained by the British Government to this day, that the men were shot while trying to escape has been shown to be bogus. But the exact truth of what happened and why it happened is still very murky. This doubt makes it easy for those who wish to portray the Scots Guards as a Scottish Waffen SS. And by association, that in some minds makes all Scottish soldiers as akin to evil Nazi stormtroopers. And it's not much of a leap to tar the whole Scottish nation with the same brush too. The facts of the Batang Kali Massacre need to come out. Some of the participants claim they were sent to the settlement with orders to murder the male workers there as a warning to ethnic Chinese not to mix it with the British Army. The Scottish Government will no doubt argue it has no jurisdiction in this matter. Jurisdiction is a highly flexible concept and where's there's a will, there's a way. A call from the Scottish Government, after due consideration of the matter, to the British Government demanding a proper inquiry would certainly up the pressure on Whitehall to do the right thing.