Last month campaigner Robbie the pict was voted the fourth most influential person in the Scottish justice system. In December he was in edinburgh with his justice bus to talk justice with MSPs. The Firm’s Steven Raeburn bought his ticket and hopped on board, but did justice minister Kenny Macaskill dig deep for to take a ride on Robbie’s Bus?

One of the biggest surprises in last month’s Power 100 poll was the placing of campaigner Robbie the Pict, who finished in fourth place, behind First Minister Alex Salmond, Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini and Donald Findlay QC. It is unlikely anyone would have been more surprised than the man himself, who laughed uproariously when the Firm told him the news. His incongruously high placing affords some recognition to the many years of campaigning he has undertaken, after a life and career that could modestly be described as varied. When the poll was published, Robbie was about to take his campaign on the road in his very own rolling headquarters, The Justice Bus, a 40 foot long office, studio and mobile home, which rather like its driver, has had a chequered history all its own. Pitching up on Holyrood Road right outside the Parliament, Robbie took time out to stop and try to unravel why what he is doing struck such a chord amongst the profession, and what exactly is he trying to do on his Judicial Mystery Tour?
“My aim was to resurrect the profile of the Skye Bridge campaign, which had three parts to it,” he explains.
“First was to stop the actual demanding of tolls, which took ten years. But that was only ever base camp at Mount Everest. The next issue was reparation- to recover money that was wrongly extorted. Demanding a toll without authority is in itself a criminal offence; at common law you cannot profit from a criminal enterprise. If I went not the Scottish Office and extorted £33 million, I’d still be in the jail,”
“The third was to fire a shot across the bows of the present Government who had made promises. We were trusting that they wouldn’t lapse into the usual Unionist response. Those of us who voted SNP were hoping for better.”
After the expiry of six months, to give the new administration time to settle in, Robbie says the campaign had no constructive response, instead receiving rebuttal letters from civil servants. Taking direct action, he believes, was one way to bypass what he sees as a major barrier to justice in Scotland.
“It is an attempt at lateral thinking; change of tactics. You have to take a transcendent solution. We don’t know what the SNP cabinet knew, and this was one way of getting over the permanent civil servant control of Scotland,” he says.
“If you write to the Justice Minister in frustration, you don’t want a letter back from the development department spin doctor who has been shutting down your campaign for a living for the past ten years. That is what we got. I think if we had the opportunity to sit down with the Fergus Ewings and Kenny MacAskills of the world, we could make it very plain to them that there is something very wrong here, and there is most certainly reasonable doubt about the soundness of the criminal convictions.”
Robbie has been campaigning on perceived injustices for the better part of two decades, and in that time he says the need structural reform has increased, as the entrenchment of civil service has control has deepened, restricting the efficiency of political decision making.
“It is an indictment of greed, laziness, lack of principles, lack of control of the civil service,” he says.
“I liked the days when they wrote ‘Your obedient Servant’, and they were servants to the society. They remembered that the taxpayer paid their wages, and that was their first obligation. It was kept in check until 20 or 30 years ago, but now the permanent civil servants are running the show. The elected politicians become puppets and a joke,”
“Scotland is run by the permanent under secretaries of State. That is a terrible situation. At the same time you have a judicial system where there is no abjuration of judicial oaths. The judges have sworn oaths of allegiance to an alien Queen, so it is very hard work trying to get justice if the state is involved. The permanent civil servants are in a position to employ the best quality QCs at the expense of the public to resist complaints by the public. The whole situation is in gross need of an overhaul, root and branch. I hope the SNP cabinet can find the bottle and the wit for that. There needs to be major constitutional reform.”
Robbie was miraculously able to avoid the attentions of Edinburgh’s parking wardens during his Holyrood vigil, and received positive encouragement from members of the public, who bought him coffee, goodwill, and enquired about the progress of the campaign.
“They had never heard about the more terrible things that had been going on in Skye,” he says.
“They didn’t realise it would cost £41.20 to get that bus across the bridge, in each direction. They couldn’t believe that 130 people had criminal convictions; that 499 people were prosecuted. That I myself had 130 separate charges against me for refusing to pay the toll.”
In addition, the area’s MSP Kevin Pringle came on board and sat with Robbie in the bus’s lounge area, where he was given a portfolio of documents in relation to the ongoing Skye tolls – and a slice of cake. Robbie described the overall reception as promising, before taking the bus and the campaign to his second target, the Lord Advocate, where the reception was decidedly more frosty.
“I parked outside the Crown office, which is a building which should be dismantled in my view. It is a bastion of anachronistic imperialism,” he says.
“How dare they set up a Crown office in the capital of Scotland, when it is the English Crown we are talking about? The Lord Advocate occupying it is the Lord Advocate to Scotland, not for Scotland. That preposition is something that should be wholly understood.”
“I asked about the presence of the Lord Advocate; they said there was nobody in her office, she had no personal assistant. One security guard said ‘It is like the Marie Celeste up there. I assure you there is nobody in.’; Scotland was empty; nobody at the helm.”
Despite the stonewalling, it seems that Robbie’s enthusiasm and appetite for campaigning are undiminished. The injustice, he says, gives him energy, and having lived a colourful early life, seasoned maturity saw him finding his focus.
“As you get older you start to take responsibility for the society that you live in. I see life like a football match. You run around until you are say 45, at the latest, contemplate what you are doing in your life, and come out for the second half by doing something positive and solid. You have to look first at how you can be of service, and second, what does the society need?”