The home secretary’s political position has until very recently seemed impregnable: he has even been mentioned as a possible future party leader and prime minister. His ascendancy has seemed to be quite unaffected by an unrivalled record of illiberal measures designed, apparently, to carve away, slice by slice, our ancient and hard-won liberties. He has taken and used powers to imprison foreigners indefinitely and without trial on the basis of mere suspicion of their possible future behaviour; he has claimed the right to rely on evidence obtained abroad by torture; he has abridged or abolished the rights to trial by jury, to remain silent when accused, to be immune from prosecution twice for the same offence, and not to have previous convictions revealed to juries before they consider their verdicts. He has sought to intimidate the occasionally liberal among our judges by constant criticism of their sentencing and judgments. He has fought tenaciously to preserve his power to determine the length of prison term to be served by lifers in individual cases, in the face of clear rulings by the European Court of Human Rights that such decisions are for judges, not politicians. He proposes to create a monstrous national database recording extensive information about every one of us, to contain detailed information about all our movements and activities from cradle to grave, thus putting huge and unprecedented powers in the hands of the state at the expense of the citizen. He has filled our prisons to bursting point on a scale unmatched anywhere else in western Europe. He has sought to deter applications for political asylum in Britain by the harsh and inhumane treatment of asylum seekers already here. He has refused to provide the same legislative protection for children against assault by adults that adults enjoy between themselves. His guiding star has always seemed to be the editorial opinions of the most reactionary and mean-spirited of our dreadful tabloids. And after all this, his political clout has gone from strength to strength.
Until now. Suddenly the media are publishing tittle-tattle about Mr Blunkett’s private life: scurrilous allegations, quite possibly unfounded and certainly irrelevant, cover the front pages and dominate the electronic media, none of them having the slightest bearing on his public position, all of them inviting the reply (in Billie Holiday’s immortal words): Ain’t nobody’s business if I do.
What a sad irony that a political leader should flourish, quite unaffected by an abysmal record in public office, only to be badly damaged by an alleged scandal in his private life which has not the slightest bearing on his fitness or functions as Britain’s home secretary!
Brian
28 November 04
http://www.barder.com/brian
I have put on my website extracts from an unsentimental exchange of reminiscences with a school near-contemporary, Tim Weakley, about our experiences at Sherborne more than 50 years ago. Tim is more generous than I. For me, it wasn’t an unhappy time; but the régime was one that wouldn’t be acceptable nowadays, the academic standards were pretty lamentable, the obsession with sport was a trial, the discipline was brutal, and a principal memory is of acres of boredom. I realised only later that school didn’t have to be like that. Compare Tim’s experiences, remembered in tranquillity, with mine, remembered with a certain amount of indignation, by clicking here.
No doubt Sherborne is very different now. I certainly hope so.
Brian
28 November 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/
Mark Littman, QC, has produced a new, short and pithy paper on the [il]legal and political ins and outs of NATO’s attack on Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, drawing on new material that has come to light since his earlier (1999) paper, "Kosovo: Law and Diplomacy". The new booklet, dated 1 November 2004, is called: "Do You Remember Kosovo?", and the attentive reader will spot extraordinary contemporary Iraqi resonances in it. The full text is on my website. There are full references to sources and plenty of links to relevant texts, documents and websites — invaluable for researchers. If you have any comments on the paper, please leave them here (under "Comments" at the foot of this entry — log in as ‘anonymous’, giving your name and/or e-mail address in the body of the text if you wish, not if you don’t), or by sending me an e-mail to brianbarder[at]compuserve[dot]com: I will pass any such comments on to Mark Littman.
Another earlier (June 2000) piece on Kosovo by Mark Littman is still available here. And his comments on the legality, justification and morality (or lack of them) of the Iraq war (2003 and counting), based primarily on the evidence in the Butler Inquiry report, are here.
Brian
27 November 04
http://www.barder.com/brian/
Seven years in No. 10 Downing Street and two major wars: the grinning, boyish Tony Blair who entered No. 10 on that glad, confident morning in 1997, those double-handed hand-shakes with the adoring crowd, the high hopes — all that suddenly seems a very long time ago. The tired, haggard prime minister who came out into the press room to face the cameras and the hacks to record his congratulations to George W Bush, immediately after the US presidential election result had become known, could have been another person altogether: receding hair, lined face, grim expression, reading his prepared statement with a dying fall in every sentence, turning immediately to leave the room when he had finished it, ignoring the frantic interrogative shouts of the journalists. He looked much the same at his brief press conference in Washington with a President Bush who, for the first time, looked years younger than the British prime minister;
Tony Blair after the Washington visit 
the only wan smile came at the end when he turned to urge Bush not to say ‘Yes’ after a journalist had asked the President whether he regarded Blair as his poodle.
Can it be that a political leader whose hallmark until now has been his phenomenal self-belief, the absence of any scintilla of doubt about the rightness of every decision he makes, whose every belief is “passionate”, whose values and morality are governed by his religious faith — can he have begun at last to ask himself what he has done?
Iraq, November 2004
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
…
We shall march prospering, – not through his presence;
Songs may inspirit us, – not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done, – while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more triumph for devils and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Life`s night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain,
Forced praise on our part – the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!
– Robert Browning, The Lost Leader, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845).
Brian
13 November 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/
This is an unabashed plug for an excellent play at an interesting venue over a good pub. But you’ll need to hurry to see it. The play, ‘Cumquats’, is currently running only until Saturday 27 November 2004, at 7.30pm, at the Landor Theatre, 70 Landor Road, London, SW9 9PH, three minutes’ walk from Clapham North tube station, Clapham High Street. Click on map .
Tickets cost £10.00, or £8.00 concessions. You can book either by telephoning the box office on 020 7737 7276 (there is a 24 hour answering machine service), or by filling in the form on the website (http://www.landortheatre.co.uk/ — click ‘Programme’ and ‘Book here’).
The theatre is above the Landor pub, whose burgers attract rave reviews (e.g. http://www.restaurantspy.com/uk/london/landor.htm) but where a large glass of wine costs £3.80… and there are numerous excellent restaurants near Clapham North tube and on Clapham High Street.
For more about the theatre, visit http://www.geocities.com/pubtheatre/landor.html (ignoring the grocer’s apostrophe there).
The Landor pub
Here’s what it says about ‘Cumquats’ on the theatre’s website:
>>The play follows the progress of two friends as they struggle with life after the First World War. Espionage, treason and theology combine in a brooding study of repression, illusion and the frailty of man’s estate. Two friends struggle with life after the First World War. Blackmail, espionage and theology combine in a brooding study of repression, illusion and the frailty of man’s estate.
Oscar von Rensburg, a decorated War hero, is inspired by the vision of the Angel of Mons to become a theologian. His new brand of zealous evangelism, however, is unpopular in Oxford and he plummets through the strata of academia. Meanwhile his friend Douglas Appleford is blackmailed on account of his homosexuality into using his Home Office position to give information to the Russians. To his horror Douglas is promoted and charged with finding the mole in the Home Office. He retreats into alcohol and dissolution until one evening he sees what appears to be the ghost of Oscar’s love on a Soho cinema screen. This event binds together the lives of the two men in a destructive spiral. Kieron Barry’s seventh play is directed by Adrian Fear. Their previous collaboration, last year’s Black Soap, was critically acclaimed and revived earlier this year. < <
Strongly recommended for Londoners. Excellent performances by a professional and attractive cast in an intimate theatre space, easily reached by bus or tube: and highly affordable. Book now!
Brian
13 November 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/
The Guardian Letters Wednesday November 10, 2004
Shame of Hue and Falluja
Your editorial (Fearful in Falluja, November 9) rightly expresses alarm at the Iraqi provisional government using emergency powers, “like so many other Arab regimes, that would have been normal in the bad old Ba’athist days”.
Perhaps Ayad Allawi is taking a leaf out of our own government’s book: it too, alone among western European countries, has been using special powers under a “state of emergency” declared after 9/11 to send foreigners to prison without charge or trial, purely on the basis of what the home secretary thinks they might do. It is a blatant fiction designed to relieve the government of its human rights obligation under national and international law to allow those whom it imprisons to have a fair trial.
If the law lords in their forthcoming decision fail to overturn it, there will be an urgent need for parliament to do so. What a disgraceful example for the nation of Magna Carta to set to the world, including Iraq and “many other Arab regimes”!
Brian Barder (Diplomatic Service 1965-94),
London
http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1347202,00.html
[cf. my original text, omissions or changes in bold:
Your editorial (Fearful in Falluja, November 9) rightly expresses alarm at the Iraqi Provisional Government "using emergency powers, like so many other Arab regimes, that would have been normal in the bad old Ba'athist days."
Perhaps Mr Allawi is taking a leaf out of our own government's book: it too, alone among western European countries, has been using special powers under a "state of emergency" declared after 9/11 in order to send foreigners to prison without charge or trial, purely on the basis of what the home secretary thinks they might do in the future, without having to show even the probability that they have done anything wrong in the past.
The state of emergency is a blatant fiction designed exclusively to relieve the government of its human rights obligation under national and international law to allow those whom it imprisons to have a fair trial. If the law lords in their forthcoming decision on this outrage fail to overturn it, there will be an urgent need for parliament to do so without further delay. What a disgraceful example for the nation of Magna Carta to set to the rest of the world, including Iraq and "many other Arab regimes"!]
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
10 Nov 04
Instant (or as the technical jargon has it, knee-jerk) reactions to great disasters are not always trustworthy, but a few first scrappy thoughts, on the morning after the day before, may be in order.
The magnitude of the disaster can hardly be exaggerated. Bush’s pious words in his victory speech about reaching out to all Americans and working to deserve the trust of those who voted against him can be dismissed out of hand. Margaret Thatcher in similar circumstances quoted a prayer, frivolously attributed to St Francis of Assisi, about bringing harmony where there was discord before going on to behave more divisively and ruthlessly than any other prime minister in living memory. There is no reason in the world why such ruthless and single-minded promoters of narrow sectional and ideological interests as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and the rest of that gang should interpret their 3.5 million majority of the popular vote as anything other than a mandate for an even more brazen smash-and-grab raid on foreign and domestic policy than anything we have seen in the past four years when their mandate has been at best open to question. With total control of both houses of Congress, and (after a few Bush appointments expected within the next four years) of the Supreme Court, as well as of the White House and the executive departments of state, the neo-con clique has secured an unshakeable grip on all the levers of power available to the world’s sole super-power, together with a new self-confidence derived from an irrefutable mandate. In international affairs we must brace ourselves for an accentuation of all the trends of the past four years: brazen disregard for international law, treaties, agreements and consensus; readiness to use force, with or without broad international support, in pursuit of narrow American commercial and security interests, narrowly defined; misrepresentation and exaggeration of the international terrorist threat in order to maintain a permanent ‘war’ mentality in the US and its allies, used to justify the steady erosion of basic civil liberties and essential principles of the rule of law; unquestioning support for Israel’s Likud despite the consequent disqualification of the US as a viable intermediary in the search for a middle east peace settlement. In domestic affairs the ideology of the Christian fundamentalist right, with those uncanny echoes of its twin and rival, Islamic fundamentalism, will dictate and justify a wholesale attack on the rights of women and gays, the abandonment of serious measures of gun control, the airy dismissal of any argument for reducing America’s gluttonous energy consumption bender or for any other measures to reduce the threat posed by global warming (did you hear Bush’s climatology adviser on the Today programme on 4 November attributing all the fuss about climate change to a plot by uncompetitive European companies to hobble more vibrant American competitors by limiting their use of energy? — very scary indeed), a ban on abortion and stem cell research, and the determined substitution in policy-making of religious, faith-based, evidence-free ideology for rational analysis and sober assessment.
The compensating benefits of this deeply disturbing prospect are few and flimsy.
(1) There’s a certain justice in Bush and those who manage him being obliged to confront the horrendous problems they themselves have created, aggravated or sought to ignore (Iraq, the middle east, the US budget and trade deficits and job losses, climate change, nuclear proliferation, global poverty). Better in some ways that a Republican rather than a Democratic administration should be forced eventually to take the deeply unpopular measures that will become necessary to deal with these problems, perhaps paving the way for a Democratic party victory in 2008 under a Hillary Clinton (John Edwards?) who will not have had their party’s image and record undermined by four years of clearing up President Bush’s messes.
(2) Bush’s re-election should provide a powerful impetus for the development of a united EU capable of offering a liberal, secular, enlightened, socially responsible alternative to the neo-con obscurantist ascendancy in power in America for the next four years. It will still be necessary and desirable to work with, rather than against, the US administration whenever possible, not least in the hope of exercising a degree of influence and restraint over it, but also because in tackling global issues little can be achieved without a degree of American participation. But if Europe is to play a steadying and civilising role, its governments will need to display much greater unity of purpose, achieved through careful diplomatic preparation and consensus, than was constructed over Iraq, on which united EU opposition to Bush’s premature and illegal war might well have prevented it. The instinct of the British prime minister in particular to fly to Washington at the first sign of crisis will need to be converted to an automatic urge to go first to Paris and Berlin (and if necessary to Rome and Madrid and Warsaw) so that Europe can speak to America with one persuasive cautionary voice.
(3) We must never forget that 55,557,584 American voters voted for Kerry – almost as many as every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom, some 11 million more than the entire UK electorate – and that many among those millions are as devastated as any of us in Europe and elsewhere in the world by what has happened. We owe it to them to keep alive an acceptable model of international and national behaviour to which they can point as a better alternative to the havoc and destruction which the neo-con ascendancy will doubtless continue to wreak on their country and the world. We also have some responsibility towards the millions of moderate Republicans whose votes for Bush will have been reluctant and hesitant, perhaps dictated more by a feeling that it would be unsafe to change the commander-in-chief in time of war than by any commitment to the neo-cons’ bleak agenda. By demonstrating that there is a viable alternative to Bushism which can be effective while civilised, which can make progress in tackling horrendous problems without being ruthlessly indifferent to the effects of violence, and which acts on a rational assessment of evidence rather than on faith and bigotry, the European democracies may help, if only at the margins, to detach enough of yesterday’s decent Republican voters from their allegiance to the neo-con hijackers of their party to permit the formation of a broad coalition of moderate and rational Americans by 2008, large and determined enough to avert a repetition of the grim events of 2004.
(4) A Kerry victory, while overwhelmingly welcome in its own right, would largely have absolved Tony Blair from national demands that he be held to account for his role in the Iraq disaster: for the dishonesty, for the misleading of parliament and people, for the broken promises, for the unprincipled shifts of purported purpose and justification, for the breaches of international law and the undermining of the United Nations Charter, for the torpedoing of EU unity of response and influence, for the shameful aspersions cast on European allies and partners, for the resort to passionate belief instead of to calm reason, for the casual sidelining of essential democratic procedures and process, for sheer misjudgement endlessly repeated. If Kerry had won, Blair would have been able to claim that a line should now be drawn under the events leading up to Bush’s war and that a new US administration meant a clean, fresh start. If the crass and murderous misjudgements and errors of Kosovo and Iraq are not to slip into the received wisdom as qualified successes which may legitimately be repeated elsewhere in the future, it’s essential that those responsible (especially for Iraq, because that quagmire remains to be drained) should continue to be confronted by the evidence of their failures. So long as the Bush-Blair axis remains at the helm, these vital questions must continue to be asked.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
4 November 2004
