Political discourse in this country has surely never been more infested with clichés. No-one "resigns": they "fall on their swords". Issues aren’t put aside, they are "kicked into the long grass" or "put on the back burner". No-one has a record unless it’s a "track" record. Every outlook is bleak. Every mistake is either "crass" or, more likely, an own goal. All pursuit is hot. No reaction is without its knee-jerk. Sometimes the cliché is reversed through ignorance of its origin: those who "shot themselves in the foot" were not blundering, but deliberately wounding themselves to avoid being sent to the trenches; Canute never supposed that he could make the tide retreat by ordering it to do so, but demonstrated to his sycophantic courtiers that he couldn’t make the waves obey him. However, complaints like these can be relied on, like admonitions addressed to Mr Rumsfeld, to "fall on deaf ears". And please don’t bother to point out to me that earlier in these jottings I wrote that Jo Moore had "escaped virtually scot-free": I admit that it’s a cliché, but I couldn’t think of a more economical way of saying it.
Charles Kennedy, the engaging (and recently engaged) leader of the Liberal Democrats, has given the game away in his interview with Jackie Ashley in today’s Guardian: "From now on, he insists, the Lib Dems will cooperate with other parties only when it’s in Lib Dem interests to do so and he is as likely to do deals with the Conservatives as with Labour in future." So much for those on the left who have been arguing that proportional representation (PR) for elections to the House of Commons (sneakily referred to as "electoral reform" as if it was self-evidently preferable to the present system) would ensure a virtually permanent centre-left alliance between Labour and the LibDems which would always command a majority in the Commons, and thus be able to govern Britain for the indefinite future, condemning the Tories to perpetual opposition. In fact the LibDems, unattached to any great interest group in the State, and free from any coherent philosophy or ideology, have always been opportunistic, a loose cannon on the political decks which is capable of rolling this way or that, depending on the waves and weather at any given time. The bulk of their MPs at Westminster are certainly leftish – more so on many issues than New Labour, as who isn’t?; but that’s not necessarily true of their members in the country, some of whom are quite happy to work with the Tories in local government so long as it ensures them a place at the top table. PR in elections to the House of Commons would invariably give the LibDems the balance of power and thus make the party with the least support of the three the permanent king-maker. Kennedy’s remark to Jackie Ashley shows that in such a situation they wouldn’t hesitate, if it seemed to be in their interests, to switch their support from a Labour government to a Tory opposition, thus putting the Conservatives into No. 10. No wonder Tony Blair is reported to have lost interest in "electoral reform". PR would be ideal for elections to a democratic (i.e. elected) second chamber, but not for the House of Commons where governments are made and unmade.
Those currently lecturing the Americans about how they "must" behave almost always strike a woefully inappropriate note. "Mr Blair has his work cut out to persuade America to behave in line with the norms of international law. But that does not mean it is not worth trying, even at the risk of offending Britain’s closest ally" – the Observer editorial yesterday. "The Geneva Convention is there to provide a floor below which civilised nations shouldn’t fall. Britain is a civilised nation: we must ["must"!] insist ["insist"!!] that our allies stick by that civilised standard" – Tony Lloyd, the lugubrious former FCO minister, speaking on yesterday’s Frost programme. Don’t these solemn scolds realise how impatiently members of this American administration will shrug off such impertinence, in the admittedly unlikely event that they ever come to hear of it? Remarks like these once again demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of Britain’s limited power and influence in the modern world, especially in its dealings with an American government which has shown that it prefers to act unilaterally in international affairs and that it attaches little or no weight to public opinion outside the USA. It certainly isn’t isolationist: after 9/11, it’s clearly prepared to intervene anywhere to protect its interests and to punish or deter those who threaten them. Those who wag their fingers at such wickedness ought to remember how Britain behaved when "we" were the world’s sole super-power. Scolding the Americans at a time like this is a laughable waste of breath. As the admirable Matthew Parris wrote in the Times on 19 January, "Be sure that frantic private telegrams are winging their way over the Atlantic explaining the embarrassment this [the treatment of the prisoners] is causing Mr Blair. Be equally sure where Mr Bush is putting them."
Why are so many media and political commentators so sloppy about checking their facts and ensuring the accuracy of what they say? I have lost count of the numbers who claim to be waiting to see the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) before commenting on conditions at Guantanamo, ignoring the strict rule that the ICRC reports in confidence to the host government (in this case the Americans) in these cases and doesn’t generally publish such reports (if it did so, few governments with anything to hide would give the ICRC access, and those detained unjustly or treated inhumanely would be the losers). Others talk glibly of the five thousand, or four thousand, killed in the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11, ignoring the latest estimate showing that the figure is under 3,000 – which is bad enough, without needing to be exaggerated by almost 100 per cent. I also flinch when I hear our political leaders boast of "our" victory in Afghanistan, as if we and the Americans were equal partners in the enterprise. I happen to think that the US operation was much more successful than most of us had expected – it overthrew the repulsive Taliban régime and inflicted massive damage on the ability of al-Qaeda to continue its terrorist headquarters operations in Afghanistan – and that it was a measured, proportionate response to the attacks on the United States on 11 September; but "our" role in it was highly marginal, and the use of "we" to describe what the Americans have done and are doing betrays a sad inability to face up to our current relative, even absolute, impotence.
On other matters, too, commentators have a curious knack of focusing on the wrong issue. When Stephen Downing recently had his murder conviction quashed as unsafe after he had served 27 years in jail, most comment fastened on the rotten way his "confession" had been extracted from him, although subsequent rules and procedures make it unlikely that this particular malpractice by the police can be repeated in the future: whereas the real scandal, affecting people now in jail and those imprisoned in the future unless action is taken to put the thing right, was that Downing was made to serve another 10 years’ imprisonment after his "tariff" had expired because he resolutely refused to admit his guilt and was therefore judged to be unqualified for parole or release on licence. Since he was in fact almost certainly innocent of the crime for which he was convicted, this savage additional punishment for proclaiming his innocence constituted a double injustice. (Moreover, attacks in the press on the failure of the Court of Appeal to declare Downing innocent, or – even more far-fetched – to "apologise" to him, revealed a striking ignorance of the functions of the Appeal Court which ten minutes’ research could easily have corrected.) On a more trivial level, Stephen Byers’s political adviser, Jo Moore, has been excoriated by politicians and the media for sending out an indiscreet e-mail proposing to take advantage of the 11 September attacks to release inconvenient departmental news that would be helpfully overshadowed by the bigger international story of the day – although this is the sort of calculation that all public relations and information officers make all the time, every day, and it is mere hypocrisy to affect outrage over Ms Moore doing it too. In fact the much more serious charge against her was her alleged mistreatment of the civil servant responsible for information in the department by issuing orders to him that he was professionally unable to obey, leading to his ejection from that appointment and his sideways move to a less responsible job. But on that much more reprehensible charge, Ms Moore has escaped virtually scot-free.
It’s obviously wrong to keep human beings in cages. But some of the comments by politicians and the media on the treatment of the al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo seem unrelated to available evidence or to any serious consideration of relevant international law. The picture of crouching, hooded, handcuffed, mittened prisoners which has caused such indignation was explicitly taken on their first arrival, and tells us nothing about their conditions once processed and caged. Professor Adam Roberts, in a definitive article in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday, has shown that al-Qaeda prisoners almost certainly don’t qualify for Prisoner of War status under the Geneva Conventions (although questions of doubt over status ought to be resolved by a "competent [not necessarily international] tribunal"); to qualify, their operations need among other things to have been conducted in accord with the laws of war, which obviously they weren’t – so that their categorisation by the Americans as "illegal combatants" does make a certain amount of sense. None of this can justify treating them inhumanely, whatever their status; but are we sure that they are being treated more inhumanely than many US citizens in penitentiaries all over the United States – or, for that matter, than the suspected terrorists, not convicted or even charged with any offence, imprisoned indefinitely at Belmarsh prison in London? All the same, the cages can’t be justified on any reckoning.
This is a submission to the Lord Chancellor’s Department from back in January 2002, commenting on a seriously defective government white paper of November in the previous year. Includes links to other documents on the subject — my letters in the Times, and a separate paper critical of Lord Jenkins’s proposals for Proportional Representation in elections to the House of Commons. Full text of submission here.
Brian
