Westminster won’t admit Scotland’s involvement in illegal Iran war

Westminster is making Scotland complicit in Trump’s illegal, Zionist-led war on Iran. That is: concretely, materially and operationally complicit, via a publicly owned airport in South Ayrshire.

Scotland’s Government claims it cannot legally close Prestwick to US Air Forces without Westminster, but the UK Government will not publicly account for its decisions.

Westminster — An obfuscated Labour letter

In early March, Scotland’s External Affairs Secretary Angus Robertson wrote to Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, seeking urgent reassurance.

The Scottish Government-owned airport, Robertson noted, was “not provided information about the purpose or mission of the aircraft using their facilities.” He asked, plainly, whether Prestwick or any Highlands and Islands Airports Ltd sites had been used as part of Trump’s strikes on Iran.

He offered to receive sensitive information, even on ‘Privy Council’ terms (a voluntary confidentiality pact between government and opposition). These terms would’ve shielded information from the wider public but at least inform Scotland’s newly re-appointed SNP government.

Jones’s response, dated 10 March and only obtained by the National through an FOI request — the UK Government did not publish it voluntarily — is a masterclass in the language of non-answer. The UK Government, speaking through Jones, said it:

maintains a rigorous oversight of all military and allied activity within UK airspace and infrastructure

Meanwhile, Jones wrote that civilian facilities:

continue to play an important role as stopover points for our NATO allies

Jones assured Scotland that the First Minister, John Swinney, would nonetheless:

continue to be briefed on security matters relevant to his official responsibilities.

What Jones did not do, at any point, was confirm that Scottish airports were not used in the strikes.

In effect, the Scottish Government had to use FOI powers to find out that the UK government would not tell it anything. That sentence should be read again slowly.

Stop the War Scotland called this plainly what it is. The UK Government is:

deliberately obscuring information in an attempt to minimise its own role in this illegal war.

The UK Government’s public line is that that civilian airports in Scotland:

are not being used by the US to launch military strikes

But this arrives alongside a studied refusal to engage with the specific questions that Robertson put to Jones in writing. It is a denial that denies nothing verifiable. It is next to uselmeaningless.

Yet more democratic deficit

John Swinney says his hands are tied. He is almost certainly right, and that is the fundamental point.

The powers required to exclude foreign military aircraft from Scottish airspace — national security, aviation, air transport, defence, foreign affairs — are all reserved to Westminster. Swinney has said he looked “very closely” at the issue yet found no legal route.

Swinney’s referenced the “enormous concern and unease” Scots feel about the conflict, the consequences for energy prices, cost of living, mortgages, the environment, and so on. He’s sought meetings with UK ministers. His ministers wrote letters that required FOI requests to retrieve. Still nothing.

Trump warmly congratulated Swinney — a “good man” — on his recent election win. The two looked chummy together in the Oval Office (see top) and Swinney was the only devolved leader to attend Trump’s Windsor Castle banquet in 2025.

However, Swinney “politely declined” to return to Washington in April, amid the war. (He blamed the May elections but has separately called for “de-escalation” in the Iran war.

But Scottish Greens MSP Patrick Harvie is done waiting:

The First Minister has previously said he would look into banning the use of publicly owned Scottish infrastructure like Prestwick in the US war efforts, yet months later, there has been no action.

Harvie’s broader framing is worth quoting directly: Trump has shown “contempt for Scottish and international law,” kidnapping Venezuela’s president, threatening Greenland and Cuba, waging war in Iran.

This is exactly why we should have nothing to do with this war-mongering White House regime.

He is calling on the Scottish Government to move regardless — to use whatever power it has over airport contracts and kick US military operations out.

The Scottish Socialist Party has made the same argument as Greens, pointing also to RAF Lakenheath in England and calling on Keir Starmer to ban the use of UK bases entirely. He will not, of course.

Scotland pushes for independence vote, Westminster refuses

Featured image via the White House