Professor John Robertson OBA

The Herald today has the above carefully-worded front page report on the Aberdeen to Glasgow train derailed at Carmont in Aberdeenshire on August 12, 2020 after hitting a landslide following heavy rain in an area where a drainage system was incorrectly installed.

The use of the term ‘The Crown’ to refer to the UK Government in this legal context is accurate, but also archaic and deceptive in media reporting supposedly aimed at informing readers when what matters is that hte UK and not the Scottish Government is responsible.

Throughout there is no mention at all of the key fact that responsibility for the rail infrastructure is entirely with Network Rail and that:

Network Rail is responsible to the [UK] Secretary of State for Transport, currently Heidi Alexander (Labour) and at the time of the accdident in 2020, Grant Shapps (Con), as it is an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the [UK] Department for Transport.

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/network-rail

The reader is left with the impression that this ‘Network Rail’ may well be, in the absence of clarification, the responsibility of the Scottish Government. At the time of the accident, in 2023, BBC Scotland’s James Cook tried the same trick in a attempt to shift blame onto the SNP Government by shouting at Michael Matheson, Scottish Transport Secretary as if he was responsible.