An article about visitors’ books in the Sunday Times Style magazine supplement of 17 February refers to "Tresco, the privately owned Channel Island", which won’t please any readers of the Sunday Times in the Scillies. The Guardian the other day referred to something "praying on my mind", a confusing combination of images. And I have finally given up e-mailing the long-suffering Guardian Readers’ Editor with examples from his newspaper of "whom" where "who" is required (as in "the person whom we had always thought must be responsible for the crime"). It’s sad to think that so few English-speaking people now alive know the difference between the subject and the object of a verb, still less that between a nominative and an accusative, or even what a verb is. It’s probably the mark of a senile fuddy-duddy to suspect that those who can’t express themselves with reasonable accuracy in their own native language are unlikely to be able to think accurately or logically, either. Not so many years ago, accuracy in expression and above all accuracy in the statement of facts were regarded as prime requirements for civil servants, diplomats and even journalists. Now they seem to have become optional extras, and those who value them are pedants.
Milosevic undoubtedly is, or has been, a thug, a crook and a nasty dictator. All the same, I can’t help feeling queasy about his current trial by the so-called International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, presided over by a British judge of whom hardly anyone seems hitherto to have heard. A fascinating article in the Guardian of 16 February by Dr John Laughland, author of a forthcoming book on the tribunal, powerfully reinforced my queasiness. For starters, Laughland points out that the Hague tribunal was created in 1993 by the UN Security Council, "a body which has as little right to set up a court as it does to raise taxes". The International Court of Justice (ICJ), also at The Hague, but not by any chance related to the tribunal, is of course a primary organ of the United Nations established by the UN Charter itself, and I can find nothing in the Charter that implies even indirectly that the fifteen governments who happen to constitute the Security Council at any particular time have the power or authority to set up courts to try individuals or to send them to prison for the rest of their lives. Milosevic’s basic challenge to the tribunal’s legitimacy in international law looks, to this layman anyway, worryingly well founded.
Laughland goes on to dismiss any comparison between the Yugoslav tribunal and the international military tribunal which tried the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg at the end of WW2. The Nuremberg court was set up by the sovereign powers to which Germany had surrendered, and the crimes for which the accused were on trial were "war crimes" – crimes against the peace, starting an aggressive war and waging it in ways that were contrary to the rules of warfare established in international law. The court didn’t claim to represent "the international community" or to be making new laws apart from establishing that the planning and execution of a war of aggression constituted a criminal act in international law. By contrast, in June 2000 the Hague tribunal’s prosecutor refused to begin an investigation of allegations that NATO had committed war crimes in Yugoslavia by launching a military attack on Serbia (including Kosovo) without the authority of the Security Council or in self-defence. The close identification of the main NATO countries with the establishment and funding of the tribunal, and the tribunal’s refusal to look into an inherently plausible allegation of a Nuremberg-type "crime" committed by NATO, raise a disturbing question about the tribunal’s impartiality and thus about its credentials for trying Milosevic and others.
Perhaps most striking of all, Laughland remarks, almost as an aside, that "It had always been obvious that the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia were illegal under the post-war United Nations-based system. Not only were the attacks not approved by the security council, that body was not even consulted. Indeed, speeches by world leaders—including Blair’s speech on "the doctrine of the international community" given in Chicago on April 22 1999—made clear that the very purpose of the Nato attacks was to overturn the old international system and to replace it with a new one." This is significant support for the propositions in my own detailed and documented analysis of the NATO attack on Serbia, available elsewhere on my web site, and in the critiques by Mark Littman QC and by Denise Mumford.
The argument that NATO’s war was not just illegal, but also unnecessary and unsuccessful, has also received increasing support from such knowledgeable observers as General Sir Michael Rose, former head of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, who wrote in a review of a flag-wagging book by the US General Wesley Clark that "neither was the result of the war a victory in the classic sense, nor were Nato’s specific objectives met. These were, first, the prevention of more civilian suffering in Kosovo, second, the disruption and destruction of the Serb forces carrying out atrocities against the Kosovo Albanians, and third, the enactment by Milosevic of the demands set out at Rambouillet by the international community… in the 11 weeks following the onset of hostilities on March 24, 1999, thousands of people were massacred and 1m driven from their homes in a programme of ethnic cleansing by the Serbs that accelerated after Nato began its bombing campaign. Militarily, the Serb army was scarcely damaged. Finally, at a political level, the one remaining point of disagreement at Rambouillet that led to the war (that of giving unrestricted freedom of movement for Nato troops in Yugoslavia) was never conceded by Milosevic… It is clear that the solution to Kosovo always lay in "democracy in Belgrade", as Biljana Plavsic, former president of Republika Srbska, once explained to Clark. Unfortunately, the bombing of Yugoslavia not only weakened the existing domestic opposition to Milosevic but delayed the start of the democratic process." Rose also pointed out that the Kosovo campaign failed utterly to demonstrate that "the strategic use of air power… is capable, by itself, of delivering the sort of strategic goals demanded by Nato in 1999", concluding that "It will be a lasting tragedy if our politicians and generals continue to believe that bombing alone can deliver solutions in such complex humanitarian situations" [Sunday Times Books section, Culture magazine, 18 November 2001]. The Americans’ experience in Afghanistan has clearly done nothing to call that conclusion into question.
I have spent far too much computer-time and energy recently on lobbying and campaigning for sensible and democratic reform of the House of Lords—too much, because I don’t kid myself that even the most frenzied efforts on my part are really going to have the slightest effect on the eventual outcome. But the government’s white paper proposals are so outrageous, so insulting to the intelligence of those who elected their authors, that some activity to help defeat them has seemed imperative. If the government had its way, every single element in the new second chamber (still, incidentally, to be called the House of Lords despite becoming lordless) would effectively be chosen by the political party bosses: most would be directly appointed by the parties, some would be appointed by a supposedly independent Commission—half of whose members would be chosen by the parties, and even the measly 20 per cent to be "elected" would be chosen by the closed party list system which means that the party bosses, not the electorate, would decide which individuals would get in. Thus the reforms, so-called, would actually strengthen the grip of the parties (and thus of ministers) on parliament, when all impartial observers, and a good many partial ones like me, agree that the executive is far too powerful and the capacity of the House of Commons to call the government to account far too weak.
So I have been drafting resolutions for my local Labour Party to send to Robin Cook, the Leader of the House of Commons and the man supposedly responsible for shepherding the government’s blueprint through parliament; sending a "submission" (revealing term) to the Lord Chancellor’s Department in response to the invitation to comment on the white paper, and asking my MP to pass a copy on to Robin Cook, who sent a reasonably appreciative if slightly patronising reply; getting a letter published in the Times (my second on this subject in two years); and sending another "submission" to the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration. Two small rewards for all this activity: one, the discovery that my MP is already on-side, having long favoured a wholly elected second chamber, despite this being anathema to the government; and second, a favourable reference in the Select Committee’s Report (paras 63–64) to my submission, including an extended quotation from it, a distinction which on a quick reading seems not to be shared with any other non-parliamentarian writer of any of the 72 written submissions to the committee. This of course has the effect of reinforcing my admiration, already warm, for the Select Committee’s incisive and independent-minded Chair, Tony Wright, who makes more solid sense in a three-minute interview on television than half an hour of some flannelling minister. (My submission is also available on the Select Committee’s web site.)
PS: The government bases its fanatical opposition to the idea of a wholly, or even mainly, elected second chamber to its fear that such a chamber would challenge the "primacy of the House of Commons". But what ministers really fear is a challenge by either chamber of parliament to the primacy of the executive or to the executive’s iron grip on the House of Commons. All the more reason for an elected second chamber with the democratic credentials to challenge the government when necessary: the limitations on the second chamber’s powers plus the fact that it’s the House of Commons which makes, sustains and breaks governments (as well as being the forum in which all their principal ministers sit) are more than enough to ensure that the Commons continues to be the principal chamber and to have the last word in the event of conflict.
Footnote (August 2005): My MP, mentioned above, is now no longer Tony Colman since I moved house to the Tooting constituency (Labour MP: Sadiq Khan); and Tony Colman is no longer MP for Putney, having lost his seat at the last election.
It seems increasingly clear that the government’s White Paper proposals for ‘reforming’ the House of Lords are – well, stone dead, dead as the proverbial parrot, deceased, defunct: they are the government’s late proposals. Official hints abound of willingness to compromise on an elected element somewhat bigger than the government’s hilarious opening bid (20 per cent): there’s speculation that they might go up to thirty, conceivably even forty per cent—anything so long as it’s less than fifty. The hundreds of MPs and members of the present House of Lords, of all parties, who are demanding a hundred per cent elected second chamber, or failing that an absolute minimum of 80 per cent, will need steady nerves and strong stomachs to hold out against these weasel offers of ‘compromise’. In case they will not be moved, another scenario is now being prepared as a neat fall-back position for the leadership. It has been broadly hinted at by Mr Blair, and repeated this morning on the Frost programme by Charles Clarke, the unelected and constitution-free Chair of the Labour Party, and it runs roughly as follows: "There are as many opinions about how many members of the second chamber should be elected as there are members of parliament, so the chances of reaching a broad consensus are negligible." In the absence of consensus, it’s plainly implied, the only sensible course is to leave matters as they are—a wholly appointed chamber, still with its hereditary element, its bishops and judges, and the legions of life peers of whom hundreds owe their seats in the national parliament to their nomination by Tony Blair or William Hague (plus a few who actually nominated themselves). So much for modernisation.
Another pair of ghastly clichés currently uglifying the political debate: the level playing field, and at the end of the day. Few who demand that a playing field be untilted can ever have attempted the task, even with the relevant earth-moving equipment. Evidence that the other cliché is irredeemably dead was provided last week in a radio interview by our breathless Education Secretary, Estelle Morris, earnestly disclaiming any ministerial responsibility for widespread truancy since she couldn’t stop parents telling their children not to bother to go to school: "At the end of the day, in the morning, if a parent…" If Ms Morris’s day ends in the morning, when does it begin? Something else that bugs me, not exactly a cliché, is the misuse of "presently" to mean "currently", or simply "now", threatening to rob us of its useful connotation of "fairly soon but not immediately": ‘Tony Blair is presently our Prime Minister, but is expected to make an announcement about his future presently’ [just an example—don't get excited].
Neither political party, whether now in office or with a realistic prospect of being in office in the future, seems willing to grasp the presumptively painful stinging nettle of the legalisation of drugs, nor even to open a debate on its pros and cons. The LibDems have flicked an experimental finger at the nettle but have hastily drawn back as soon as their political adversaries and the more reactionary of the media have pronounced the ancient curse: Soft on drugs! Yet everyone knows perfectly well that drug-taking, from cannabis to cocaine to heroin, is now so widespread in our (and every other western) society that our present laws stand not the faintest chance of stamping it out; that those laws potentially criminalise thousands of otherwise law-abiding and valuable citizens; that it is the illegality of drugs which forces users into the arms of professional crooks, and which drives up drug prices to levels which almost compel some users to steal, mug and assault in order to finance the habit; and that it is primarily—perhaps only—the indiscriminate illegality of all drugs that leads users on from the relatively harmless cannabis to the far more harmful and addictive drugs: they have to cross the Rubicon of illegality to go to the professional drug dealers for hash, and it’s those same dealers who eventually persuade them to move on to the hard stuff.
So it was encouraging to find, back in July last year, that an old friend from Cambridge days and an old Diplomatic Service colleague, Keith Morris, had concluded from his four-year exposure to the harshest realities of the war on drugs as British Ambassador to Colombia, the drugs capital of the world, that the "war" was unwinnable and that the only hope of progress in bringing this social disaster under control was by legalisation—even decriminalisation would not be enough. His Guardian article of (appropriately enough) 4 July last and his subsequent radio and television interviews made the case with eloquence and courage. The article, widely reproduced in a multitude of other web sites, is well worth re-reading. After describing the appalling human and material cost of prosecuting this endless and unwinnable war, Morris wrote: "There has been a cultural change which has led to the recreational use of drugs being seen by the younger generation as normal. It is now part of a global consumer society that demands instant gratification. Laws cannot change that. All they can do is create a $500bn criminal industry with devastating effects worldwide. It must be time to start discussing how drugs could be controlled more effectively within a legal framework." That strikes me as clearly right. It seems a pity that our political masters apparently lack Sir Keith’s realism and frankness.
