In the past few days, many commentators and bloggers have been saying, apropos the debate over whether Charles Clarke ought to resign as home secretary, that the last example of a minister resigning to take responsibility for the failings of his departmental officials, and not because of any personal responsibility for them, was Lord Carrington's resignation as Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary over the Falklands war in April 1982. Sadly, this misinterprets what really happened. Although I like, respect and admire Lord Carrington, one of the best and funniest ministers I ever worked for, I’m afraid it’s not the case, however widely the myth is believed, that in resigning over the Falklands he was accepting responsibility for the failings of his department’s officials while himself bearing no personal responsibility for the failure of British government policy represented by the Argentine invasion of a British territory.
The Franks report (Cmnd 8787) on the events leading up to the Argentine invasion and the question of who was responsible for them demonstrates very clearly (not in its summary or conclusions but in the evidence that forms the body of the report) that officials repeatedly warned ministers of the mounting danger of an Argentine attack, and tried to persuade Lord Carrington to initiate a meeting of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet to agree on preventive action, but that Lord Carrington had resisted such action and delayed passing on officials’ warnings to the prime minister (Mrs Thatcher) with recommendations for urgent action to head off the attack, probably because he was already embroiled in tense controversies with her on other matters and was not prepared to add to them. 
Because of this, Carrington did carry a degree of personal responsibility for what happened, and it is a reasonable inference from the narrative in Franks that this was the principal reason for his decision to resign. The likeliest explanation of the almost universal misinterpretation of the Franks Committee's account of these events is that while the body of the report contains ample evidence of the personal responsibility of he Secretary of State and his junior ministerial colleagues (who resigned with him) for their failure to alert the Cabinet's Defence Committee and the prime minister and to get their agreement to timely action to forestall the disaster, this evidence is almost entirely ignored in the summary published separately and in advance of the main body of the report. In consequence, almost all media analysis of the report and comment on it were based not on the detailed evidence, but on the quite different summary and conclusions, described by James Callaghan, the Labour shadow Foreign Secretary at the time, as 'a bucket of whitewash'.
A few years ago I wrote a letter to the Guardian (text below) to try to correct widespread misunderstandings on this point. After it was published (on 23 February 1996) I received a personal letter from one of the senior FCO officials intimately involved at the time, confirming the accuracy of my account (which is anyway confirmed by Franks, if anyone takes the trouble to read the whole thing). I was not myself involved in any way at the time and relied for my version of what happened exclusively on published sources.
My Guardian letter read as follows:
I admire Richard Shepherd’s courageous article (The rusty sword, February 21) asserting ministers’ responsibility for their own and their departments’ actions. But his account of Lord Carrington’s (and his ministerial colleagues’) resignation over the Falklands does less than justice to the Foreign Office. The Franks report somewhat resembled the Scott report in producing a good deal of largely inculpatory evidence, while half-fudging its verdict on ministers’ responsibility.
Franks expressly acquitted the FCO of pursuing a policy of its own. He made it clear that it was the ministers of successive governments who chose the policy of seeking a negotiated settlement, and that it was FCO ministers who decided not to pursue a policy of public education in favour of the "lease-back" proposal because of noisy opposition to it in Parliament and the initial opposition of the Falklanders; and it was FCO ministers who decided to postpone the tabling of a paper on the Falklands situation, as advocated by FCO officials, at the meeting of the Cabinet Defence Committee on March 16, 1982, arguably the last moment action might have been taken to deter invasion. Franks’s evidence does not support Shepherd’s suggestion that Lord Carrington was carrying the can for "a significant error of policy" by the FCO.
I declare an indirect interest: I was a member of HM Diplomatic Service at the relevant time, serving in the FCO for some of it, though not personally involved.
[1] This is an edited and somewhat fuller version of a comment on a comment on an earlier post in Ephems.
In a comment on a recent post here, a good question has been raised:
One thing I don't understand about our treatment of foreign criminals is why we we don't deport them, if that's what we're going to do, straight away. What's the point of cluttering up our already overcrowded prisons with people we want to see the backs of?
And the cost?
Wouldn't it be cheaper to send them to some public school for a decade or two?
This seems to me to raise a number of interesting issues that merit a new and separate post. I have offered a number of suggestions as to why this superficially attractive proposal may in fact be a bad idea. (Charles Clarke has been hinting at this possibility in the last day or two.)
There seem to me to be several possible objections.
First, in many cases immediate deportation of a foreigner to his own country following his conviction for a serious criminal offence would amount to letting him off scot free — in contrast to a British national who had committed an identical offence and who would have to spend years in prison, a kind of discrimination in favour of (some) foreigners which would give the Sun and the Daily Mail an attack of the vapours, and the BNP a significant boost. Many would feel that a person who has committed a serious crime in this country ought to be punished for it, although admittedly the basis for that feeling needs to be analysed and debated.
Second, in other cases deportation is a massive penalty, involving disruption of a person's life and the lives of his or her family, especially if they have been living in the UK peacably for years but for a single offence. It would involve serious injustice to impose this on a foreign national not because he genuinely poses a threat to anyone after release from a prison sentence but in order to save the taxpayer money and to relieve the pressure on our jails (for which other and fairer remedies are available if we cared to adopt them).
Third, it would encourage the idea that the assumption, or default position, should be that all foreigners sentenced to a year or more in jail should almost automatically be deported, either at the beginning or the end of their sentences, unless there are specific reasons for not doing so. This indefensible proposition has been boosted by David Blunkett's regulation as home secretary that all such prisoners must automatically be 'considered for deportation' before being released. (The home office's failure to obey this rule is of course the cause of Mr Clarke's current discomfiture.) Because deportation is potentially such a traumatic penalty, there should be no automatic assumption that in the absence of reasons to the contrary, all foreign prisoners serving a year or more should be deported, either at the beginning or the end of their sentences. Once a person — even a foreigner! — has served his sentence and been assessed to be safe for release as posing no likely further threat to society, he or she ought not to be further penalised by being deported, provided he or she was legally in the country to begin with. Deportation needs to be justified by specific and provable evidence in each case. Even foreigners have rights!
Fourth, in many cases it may be almost impossible to establish the nationality status of a prisoner — one of the reasons for non-compliance with the Blunkett diktat.
Fifth, there is a right of appeal against deportation on grounds (such as incompatibility with the person's right to family life under the HRA and the ECHR) which do not apply to appeals against a prison sentence: semi-automatic deportation orders in lieu of (or in addition to) imprisonment would open up a whole raft of appeals which could swamp the immigration appeals system.
Sixth, there are many countries to which it is impossible under the HRA and the ECHR to deport anyone because of the likelihood that the deportee, on arrival, will be tortured, killed or otherwise subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment. It would seem manifestly unjust to deport one foreigner convicted of an offence to his country of origin without having to serve a jail sentence, while another foreigner from a neighbouring country, who had been convicted of an identical offence but who could not be deported because his country practises torture, would have to serve his sentence in a British jail. (This is a variant of the first objection.)
And seventh: There would be little point in deporting to their countries of origin offenders coming from other EU countries, since under EU law there would be nothing to stop them coming straight back. It would seem anomalous and discriminatory to impose the same penalty on EU and non-EU nationals when its practical effect would be so diametrically different.
But your alternative money-saving proposal — send them to a British public school for a few years — has great attractions. Evelyn Waugh noted in Decline and Fall that anyone who has been to an English public boarding school will feel quite at home in prison. If corporal punishment in schools could be re-legalised at the same time, the solution you propose would be made even more seductive.
Others may well either take a different view — or suggest yet more objections to the proposal (immediate deportation, not doing one's bird at a public school).
Update (4 May 06): The Home Secretary's statement yesterday, proposing a new regime under which all foreigners convicted of imprisonable offences would automatically be deported unless they produced cogent reasons why they should not be, raises a host of questions which demand answers before any such draconian project could be accepted. Some of these questions are considered above. Others are usefully discussed at:
http://www.owen.org/blog/500 and
http://www.thesharpener.net/2006/05/03/on-foreign-prisoners-and-xenophobia/ .
Both are strongly recommended.
I don't believe that it will prove possible for the government to reconcile this project with Britain's obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights or the British Human Rights Act which incorporates it in our domestic law. I hope and believe that our courts would declare it incompatible with both those legal instruments, both binding on UK ministers, on the grounds that it would be discriminatory and disproportionate. Any attempt to deprive foreigners subject to virtually automatic deportation of their rights of appeal and, if necessary, judicial review, ought to be strongly resisted by all decent people.
Once again it looks as if the blogosphere is leading the national media in analysing and pointing out the issues raised by ministers' latest flawed and knee-jerk proposals.
Paris, 4 May 2006
With the latest scandal of Home Office incompetence and failure comes another rusty nail in the rotting coffin of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility.
The widely publicised scandal is the Home Office's failure for the past eight or nine years to ensure that foreigners imprisoned for serious crimes — and in many cases recommended by the judges at their trials for deportation at the end of their sentences — are actually deported. The home secretary's written statement of 25 April 2006 admits, following searching questions from House of Commons committees and MPs,
that, to the best of my knowledge, between February 1999 and March 2006, 1023 foreign national criminals, who should have been considered for deportation or removal, completed their prison sentences and were released without any consideration of deportation or removal action. This is deeply regrettable and I wish to outline in this statement how we intend to improve our performance.
It turns out that those who should have been 'considered for deportation', but weren't, include 3 murderers, 2 other killers, 54 guilty of grievous bodily harm, 9 rapists, 4 kidnappers, 41 burglars, 4 arsonists, 52 thieves, 93 robbers, 204 drug offenders, 57 convicted of other violent offences and 39 of other sex offences. The Home Office doesn't know what offences had been committed by another 103. Of the 160 explicitly recommended by their trial judges for deportation, precisely five had actually been deported. Of the 1,023 now identified as having been released into the community without any consideration having been given to deporting them, the Home Office has so far tracked down 107.
These figures defy belief. Dereliction of elementary duty by what purports to be a great department of state on such a heroic scale must be almost unprecedented. Yet the home 
secretary, Charles Clarke, has so far (as of mid-afternoon on 26 April) rejected all calls on him to resign. In numerous media interviews since the release of his statement, in today's combative oral statement to the House of Commons and again repeatedly in answers to questions following that statement, he has asserted that he accepts full personal responsibility for these calamitous failures but insisted that this implies a 'responsibility' for ensuring that urgent corrective measures are now taken, a responsibility for whose discharge he intends to remain in office. But this is a cynical play on words. Acceptance of responsibility for a colossal failure in the department of which he is in charge is meaningless unless he resigns. What else can it mean? That he acknowledges that he, among others, is to blame? Yes, he acknowledges that. But is it not the duty of a minister who acknowledges that he is to blame for failure to resign? It was once so: apparently no more. The only sense in which Clarke genuinely accepts any 'responsibility' is by nimbly skipping to a quite different sense of the word, namely 'duty': he is obliged, he says, to keep his job because he has a 'responsibility' to repair the damage done by his and his department's failures, and to see to it that they don't happen any more.
In questions after this afternoon's statement Crispin Blunt, MP (Con.), a former cavalry officer in the 13th/18th Royal Hussars (Queen Mary's Own), invited the home secretary to reflect on the novel variant of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility that he had just enunciated, namely that the greater the shambles in the department over which a minister presided, the greater his responsibility to remain in office in order to sort it out. Mr Clarke had no answer to that. There isn't one.
This contemptuous rejection of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility is in many ways more damaging to our democracy than the damage to our security done by the release into the community of a thousand or so foreigners who have been sent to prison as criminals and who ought to have at least been considered for deportation. After all, there are in the community many more than 1,023 people who have served their sentences for violent and other crimes but who can't be deported on release because they are British citizens. Many of these are out on licence or probation or other forms of continuing supervision and surveillance, but several recent cases have demonstrated the obvious truth that no amount of supervision can guarantee that such people will not offend again. Of course the failure to assess more than a thousand criminals for deportation represents a shocking indictment of the Home Office and its senior ministers. But they are no greater a threat than the thousands more who can't be deported anyway. By contrast, the hammer-blow inflicted on the doctrine of ministerial responsibility by Clarke's refusal to resign gravely weakens a central tenet of our parliamentary democracy. That he is but the latest in a long line of resignation-averse failed ministers makes matters worse, not better.
Mr Clarke has now admitted that he told the prime minister yesterday that if Mr Blair thought he should resign, he would (a statement of the luminously obvious, incidentally). Mr Blair saw no reason for him to take such a step. According to the Guardian's report this morning,
Downing Street supported him, adding that it did not expect ministers "to know what is going on in every nook and cranny in their department."
This is pernicious nonsense. Quite apart from the fact that an admitted systemic failure on a massive scale can hardly be described as having been buried in some nook or cranny of the department, it is the duty of ministers to know how their departments are discharging their responsibilities, and if they don't know (because no-one has had the guts to tell them), it's their duty to find out. It's also their duty to ensure that the senior officials in their departments can be relied on to keep their fingers on the pulses of all the department's activities — even those in nooks and crannies — and to sound the alarm (including informing the minister promptly and frankly) when things go wrong. Ministers have a duty, too, to ensure that they receive regular and detailed reports on all aspects of the department's activities and to ask searching questions about them. An essential bit of equipment for an even averagely competent and responsible minister is sensitive antennae that will pick up the first rumblings of things not going quite right somewhere in the department. Another is the ability to sense which of his officials can be trusted to spot problems and to discuss them with the political boss before they gallop off into the sunset. The fact that Charles Clarke, although the son of a senior civil servant and Permanent Secretary, has no understanding of these fundamental requirements on the part of a Secretary of State is confirmed by this astonishingly naive and revealing extract from his written statement of 25 April:
The Immigration and Nationality Directorate is working with other relevant Government Departments to continue to strengthen the handling of these prisoners. This includes consideration of the sentencing options and improvements in identifying and processing of these prisoners to ensure that as many are removed from the United Kingdom as soon as possible. I will also bring together the key players from the departments involved at least twice a year at Ministerial level and quarterly at senior official level to create and take ownership of an effective strategy for dealing with these issues. [My emphasis -- BLB]
"At least twice a year"! "At ministerial level" — i.e. not necessarily even at the level of the home secretary himself! "Quarterly at senior official level"! Did none of the home secretary's officials think fit to point out to him the devastating inadequacy of these pathetic undertakings before they were published?
Asked in a television interview in what circumstances he thought a minister should resign, if not in these, Clarke replied that resignation would be required only by personal failure or misconduct; implying that a minister could not be held responsible for his department's failures provided that he had been ignorant of them, however culpable the ignorance. No surprise, then, that this self-serving definition was warmly and rapidly endorsed by two of his predecessors, David Blunkett and Michael Howard, neither of them a stranger to debates on culpable responsibility for departmental failures. But even on his own defective definition, by (rightly) accepting personal responsibility for the Home Office's 'systemic' failure in this instance, Clarke should have resigned by now, as Howard, creature of the night, was also quick to point out.
There's a pleasing paradox in the fact that Clarke should have been precipitated into this career-threatening crisis only hours after launching a series of coordinated and ferocious personal attacks on a select few of his media critics, and on a distinguished former Law Lord, who have accused him of creeping authoritarianism because of the steady erosion of our civil liberties over which he has presided under cover of the misnamed 'war on terror'. Mr Clarke's attacks blatantly misrepresent the criticisms that have been made and are unprecedentedly personal in character:
Clarke rounds on 'poisoners' among liberal media critics
· Anger at attacks in Guardian and Observer
· 'Too many' accuse the government of tyranny
Alan Travis, home affairs editor
The Guardian Tuesday April 25, 2006
The home secretary, Charles Clarke, last night claimed that unfounded attacks by his liberal critics on the government's civil liberties record amounted to a new "pernicious and even dangerous poison" in parts of the British media.
He said that too many media critics of the new anti-terror laws and Asbo powers were too ready to accuse the government of destroying democracy and constructing tyranny. "And too many resort to misrepresentation and deceit to try and strengthen their case." He fingered as "poisoners" liberal commentators in the Guardian, Observer and Independent, in a speech last night at the London School of Economics to mark a new phase in the government's offensive over its civil liberties record. In the face of complex debates on the balance between liberty and security, he complained, much media commentary reduced the argument to incorrect, tendentious and simplistic rhetoric. …
Mr Clarke, who yesterday issued a nine-page reply[1] to charges against him by Simon Carr, an Independent columnist, said such pieces were "symptomatic of a more general intellectual laziness which seeks to slip on to the shoulders of modern democratic states the mantle of dictatorial power." He singled out two Guardian columns by Jenni Russell, who had argued that Tony Blair's administration was engaged in a "furious power grab" and removing the safeguards that protect everyone from the whims of government.
"These are ridiculous assertions, unsupported in a long article by any hint of understanding the balance of powers which currently exist in our society, whether legal or political," claimed Mr Clarke. His attack followed an unprecedented exchange of emails over the weekend between Tony Blair and the Observer columnist Henry Porter. He also focused his anger on a recent lecture by Lord Steyn, the former law lord, reported in the Guardian as an attack on the government's creeping authoritarianism. Mr Clarke said that Lord Steyn had accused him of seeking to "nobble the judiciary" – an accusation he found offensive and absurd.
As the Guardian report rightly commented,
In fact Lord Steyn did not accuse the home secretary of "nobbling" in his Guardian article on Saturday. He was referring to comments by Mr Clarke that he had found it frustrating that he had not met any of the law lords and voiced his concern that a "cosy relationship between ministers and the law lords would be a worrying development".
Either Mr Clarke doesn't understand the concerns and criticisms voiced by judges, civil rights champions, the liberal media, and many others — in which case he has no business being home secretary, regardless of his responsibility for that department's failures over the non-deportation of criminal foreigners: or he does understand them but deliberately chooses to misrepresent them and to seek to blacken his critics — in which case he has no business being in democratic politics at all.
It is sad to have to write in these terms about Charles Clarke, in many ways a serious and reflective politician of far greater sensitivity than any of his recent predecessors, not to mention that he and I still somehow contrive to preserve a commitment to the same political party. But I write not only as a long-time supporter of Old Labour but also as a former civil servant who has seen good and bad ministers come and go — good ones mostly going, bad ones mostly coming. Many of us had cautious hopes, when he succeeded the appalling Blunkett, that he would discreetly assert his authority over a famously incompetent, illiberal, power-hungry and unprincipled home office, bring it under proper political control, reform its management and systems, and begin to repair some at least of the ravages of his predecessors. Alas, no such thing has happened. Once again the home office has brought its latest boss under its own control, and destroyed him in the process. Come back, Roy Jenkins: almost all is forgiven!
The Opposition, Conservative and LibDem, is right to call for Charles Clarke's resignation. It will be another scandal if he succeeds in clinging to office on the basis of a bad pun.
[1] Interestingly, I have failed to find Charles Clarke's 9-page reply (14 pages according to The Independent) to Simon Carr's column in the Independent anywhere on the Home Office website, despite prolonged and ingenious searches and the fact that the media have widely reported and quoted it, including a long edited version in The Independent itself. It may be over-charitable to attribute this apparent shyness to yet another example of home office incompetence. Or did it suddenly dawn on its author that as the deportation scandal broke over his generously proportioned head, this was not the ideal time to leave on the record a swingeing attack on the media? Perish the thought.
Update: Many thanks to Phil, whose comment below shows that he has a better mastery over search engines than I do, and that the mysterious multi-page attack by Charles Clarke on Simon Carr's Independent column is still to be found on the Home Office website after all.
Brian
I reproduce this without comment.
The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
- H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, 26 July 1920, article "Bayard vs. Lionheart" (reprinted in On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe).
Outside a shop in Woolhampton, Berkshire, just along the road from a highly recommended brasserie, well placed for travellers along the A4.
But why no apostrophe for cake’s?
[Photograph by kind permission of my mobile phone.]
Brian
The ‘Times Guide to English Style and Usage‘ (Times Books, London, 1999), setting out the stylistic and grammatical rules for that once majestically authoritative organ, comes a conspicuous cropper over that old chestnut, ‘beg the question‘, seeking to correct one howler only to commit another even worse (because much more common):
beg the question do not confuse with ask the question. To beg a question is to evade it.
No, it isn’t. It’s a much more sophisticated concept than that:
Beg: 6. To take for granted without warrant; esp. in to beg the question: to take for granted the matter in dispute, to assume without proof.
1687 Settle Refl. Dryden 13 Here hee’s at his old way of Begging the meaning. 1680 Burnet Rochester (1692) 82 This was to assert or beg the thing in Question. 1788 Reid Aristotle’s Log. v. §3. 118 Begging the question is when the thing to be proved is assumed in the premises.
[Oxford English Dictionary, Second ed.]
and:
"Beg the question: 1. In strict use, the English equivalent of Latin petitio principii, used in logic to mean the ‘fallacy of founding a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved as the conclusion itself’ (Fowler, 1926). Gowers (1965) cited as an example, capital punishment is necessary because without it murders would increase. 2. In general use, the meaning is much more likely to be ‘to evade a difficulty’ or ‘to refrain from giving a straightforward answer’. Examples: Let’s…beg the question of just who was in love with whom–H Jacobson, 1986 [etc]" [Burchfield, Fowler's Modern English Usage, 1996]
Ah! Perhaps that’s where the Times Style Guide got that idea that begging the question means evading it! Bob Burchfield is of course infallible, but with his distinguished lexicographical background the great man was inclined to be too lenient with mistaken modern usage ("In general use"). In refraining from denouncing that wretched ‘evade’ usage as simply wrong, Burchfield was being descriptive, not prescriptive, as another, more hard-hearted successor to Fowler might have been. But in any case, much the commonest misuse of ‘beg the question’ in current down-market parlance is surely neither in the sense of ‘ask the question‘ nor ‘evade the question‘, but almost invariably ‘prompt the question’: "When you say you didn’t pay for your peerage, it begs the question whether you expected it in return for your loan to the party even if you didn’t actually buy it." Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Let’s agree that to beg the question is to ‘[found] a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved as the conclusion itself‘. It’s neat, it’s elegant, it conveys a subtle concept in just four short syllables. And it’s right. Don’t let’s allow the Visigoths to hijack it to mean something entirely different for which an alternative, perfectly clear and concise, formulation is anyway available.
While we’re not on the subject of ‘evasion’, we should also pronounce a curse on those who think that prevarication is something to do with procrastination or delay. At least the Times Style Guide gets that one more or less right, although it doesn’t quite get the central concept of deviation: to quote the OED again, to prevaricate is
To deviate from straightforwardness; to act or speak evasively; to quibble, shuffle, equivocate (from the Latin prævaricari — to walk crookedly, hence, to deviate from a straight course, hence from the path of duty)
– which doesn’t beg any questions at all.
Confession: I suppose I had better admit that the December 2005 Times Style Guide online does make a rather feeble attempt to correct that entry in the 1999 book:
beg the question has a confusing variety of meanings, so is best avoided. Especially, do not confuse with "ask" or "raise" the question.
Cowards! What use is a style guide that says how a phrase shouldn’t be used but is scared to say how it should? And to crown that little evasion, the online Style Guide actually fouls up the book version’s entry on ‘prevaricate‘ by asserting, quite wrongly, that it means ‘to defer action, to be dilatory‘ — exactly what it doesn’t mean. It’s that confusion with ‘procrastinate’ again. The Times ain’t wot it used to be: Ichabod!
PS: The Guardian online Style Guide is spot on with begging the question and perfectly acceptable on prevaricate. Times editorial staff please copy.
Brian
The Guardian’s Good Friday editorial (14 April 06), "Fight the Good Fight", exhorting religious liberals (Christian and other) to redouble their efforts against the fundamentalists while striving not to disown secularists and anti-religionists, goes into a curious contortion in seeking to define its attitude to faith schools:
…there are specific battles to fight, for example against the teaching of creationism, the extension (and the maintenance) of faith schools and the defence of free speech.
Er — what exactly is that all about? The Guardian is evidently and predictably against the teaching of creationism, and may be presumed to be in favour of the defence of free speech, but how far does that ‘against’ stretch in the absence of an essential ‘and’? Can it be that in a respectful nod to Good Friday, the Guardian is engaging in constructive ambiguity on the neuralgic subject of faith schools, striving not to antagonise either vaguely liberal Christians, rampant atheists, or bet-hedging agnostics who go to church in the hope of getting their young into the best of the local schools, places in which happen to be in the gift of the Vicar?
All the more peculiar when three pages earlier, the inimitable and indefatigable Polly Toynbee is inveighing eloquently against faith schools, on (one would have thought) absolutely impeccable grounds:
Ask most Labour MPs and they abhor the devious abuse of religious schools and the segregation they cause. It’s not "choice", since most parents would never choose faith schools if they were not the flag for assembling the better pupils locally. Baroness Morgan, until last year a close Blair ally as No 10′s director of government relations, spoke out boldly against religious schools in the Lords. (Note how everyone leaving No 10 suddenly speaks their mind – and it is rarely the mind of their leader.) ICM polling shows that 64% of voters think "the government should not be funding faith schools of any kind" – a surprisingly strong position. So what on earth is a Labour government up to – and why don’t Labour MPs refuse to let this happen?
Why indeed? Why don’t Labour MPs rebel against a whole host of illiberal and reactionary policies constantly confronting them under New Labour’s increasingly unLabour rule?
Brian
Late in March 2006 the London Review of Books published a 12,700-word article entitled ‘The Israel Lobby’ by two distinguished American academics: John Mearsheimer, Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The article demonstrates, with a wealth of specific detail, the extraordinary power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States to influence both public opinion and government policy, noting that the lobby is able to stifle much criticism of Israel and of US policies over-tilted towards Israel by accusing critics of anti-semitism. The lobby draws its support and resources from a much wider range of feeds than just American Jews (many of whom indeed disapprove of it and dissociate themselves from it), including also many Christian fundamentalists and Zionists, senior and highly placed neo-conservatives in and around President George W Bush’s circle, and influential Israeli party and government leaders, journalists and academics. The article describes, with chapter and verse, the lobby’s role in pushing for the attack on Iraq and in raising the temperature over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and argues that the extraordinary and unique power and influence of the lobby serve the interests of neither the United States nor Israel, not least because it disables Washington’s capacity for acting as an even-handed mediator and peace-maker between Israel and Palestine. The authors also point to the negative effects of many lobby-inspired policies on the standing of the US in the Arab and Muslim worlds and on America’s freedom of manoeuvre in the effort to dig up the roots of international terrorism.
Perhaps the most striking and saddening thing about this manifestly important contribution to the debate on a major area of international affairs is that it has never been published in any organ of the American media. It is still available in its original form as an 80-page academic paper and on the website of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, but not in the pages of any American newspaper or periodical. It fell to the UK’s London Review of Books to publish a revised and edited version of it. As the professors themselves wryly write in the article itself, "It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one." To such a condition of virtual censorship and timidity has the political debate been reduced in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
But the two professors have not been protected by having published their provocations overseas from a storm of abuse. The Chicago Tribune has published a useful summary of the controversy following the publication of the article in the LRB, including –
When Walt recently stepped down as dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, some speculated he was forced out because the university was taking heat for their essay, "The Israel Lobby." Harvard published a news release saying the change long had been in the works. Both Harvard and the University of Chicago have argued universities must be a forum for controversial ideas like those discussed in the essay.
As former US Ambassador Edward Peck wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
The expected tsunami of rabid responses condemned the report, vilified its authors, and denied there is such a lobby—validating both the lobby’s existence and aggressive, pervasive presence and obliging Harvard to remove its name.
Mearsheimer and Walt have been vigorously attacked in the American media and by US academics: by, among others, the Jewish Press, the New York Daily News (‘“There Is No Israel ‘Lobby’”’[!]), written, astonishingly, by David Gergen, professor of public service at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Center for Public Leadership, former White House adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton; the ‘Weekly Standard’ ("no point in feeding these gentlemen’s paranoia"), ‘IsraPundit’ (‘Eliot Cohen on the Post’s op-ed page has an excellent comeback “Yes. It’s antisemitic”’), the Washington Post, the New Republic ("two political scientists, [Mearsheimer and Walt], have recently sallied forth with a paper that puts The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to shame"), and many more. It’s sad to have to record that Melanie Phillips in her online diary and David Clark in the Guardian’s new Comment Is Free rolling blog have joined this melancholy chorus. Such attacks go far to confirm the authors’ claim that would-be critics of Israeli influence on US middle east policies are constantly intimidated into silence, or at best into pulling their punches, by the knowledge that any breath of criticism will be denounced as evidence of anti-semitism.
The article should be required reading by the doughty warriors of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, ever ready to leap to the defence of Israel, right or wrong, with the wholly unjustified implication that they speak for all British Jews. I’m one of them[1], and they rarely seem to speak for me. So far as I can tell, the Board has so far maintained a dignified silence on the subject of the LRB article. Long may it continue.
[1] On my father’s side only, so strictly speaking I’m not, although I’m glad that I didn’t have to rely on Heinrich Himmler and his merry men to recognise the distinction.
Brian
Asked by A. Marr on the Sunday A.M. show on 9 April 2006 whether he would challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership of the Labour Party (and the key to No. 10) when Tony Blair finally steps down, the egregious Alan Milburn (remember him? don’t confuse him with the other one, wotsisname Byers) replied:
That is a really good question and it deserves a really, really good
answer. The answer is when we have a vacancy. At the moment there isn’t
a vacancy. I think personally it is highly unlikely, but that is a
bridge that I think we all need to cross.
A bridge we all need to cross? Before we come to it? Now what can he have meant by that, I wonder. Rather delphic for a would-be prime minister. And how to reconcile the two parts of the reply: [Will you stand for the leadership against Gordon Brown?] "The answer is when we have a vacancy." — i.e., Yes. But then: "I think personally it is highly unlikely" — i.e. probably No: but that’s only his personal opinion.
One other small mystery. Not a word of this exchange appears in what purports to be the BBC’s transcript of the Marr-Milburn interview. Surely my wife and I, and all the newspaper columnists who have reported and commented on it, can’t have imagined that we heard and saw it?
And just in case you’re a Labour Party member and might be tempted to vote for Mr Milburn when we have all crossed that mysterious bridge, here’s a note of how Alan Milburn spoke and voted on key issues since 2001 (From Public Whip and How they Work for You):
* Moderately for introducing a smoking ban.
* Very strongly for the reduction of parliamentary scrutiny.
* Moderately for introducing ID cards.
* Very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals.
* Quite strongly for introducing student top-up fees.
* Quite strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws.
* Very strongly for the Iraq war.
* Moderately for the fox hunting ban.
* Very strongly for equal gay rights.
Well, at least he got it right on gay rights.
Brian
There’s unnecessary confusion in the media, especially in television current affairs and newspaper review discussions, over bird flu (rather pompously referred to by some as ‘avian’ flu). The confusion sometimes amounts almost to obfuscation. I’m no expert (as this piece will probably make all too clear), but there seem to be two quite separate dangers, one limited and the other almost unlimited, but both too often rolled by commentators into one, thus exaggerating the first and under-stating the second.
The first is the danger that some humans may catch bird flu from contact with an infected bird or its droppings. This would certainly be serious for those catching the disease, for poultry farmers in the affected area(s), and, in the worst case scenario, for consumers of chicken and eggs and other poultry meat, namely almost all of us. But since in our kind of society relatively few people live in such close proximity to potentially infected birds as to be vulnerable to catching the infection from them, and since so far the evidence suggests that very few infected birds — perhaps just one — have so far reached our shores, not many people in Britain could expect to be exposed to major risk, and even if a bird-to-human infection does break out, it ought not to be impossibly difficult to contain it both geographically and in its consequences. There should be, and it seems that there is, advance planning going on to deal with this kind of situation, and it ought not to be exaggerated in order to sell newspapers or television advertising time.
The second danger is altogether different. Most scientists with specialised knowledge of these matters tell us that sooner or later (although it’s impossible to predict when) the virus, once caught by a human or humans from a bird (as has happened in several countries in Asia and elsewhere), will mutate into a new virus capable of transferring infection from one human to another: a pandemic[1]. Past experience shows that such a virus, once mutated in this way, will be exceptionally virulent and easily caught, that it will be fatal in a high proportion of cases, that hundreds of thousands of people in Britain alone may die of it within a quite short space of time, and that it will not be possible to produce a single vaccine which would give effective protection against it until the virus has mutated and the first infected people have been identified. Even then, it will be up to four to six months before the vaccine can be developed, mass-produced, and distributed to the most vulnerable groups — by which time very large numbers of people will already have died from it. This is not a current danger, because so far as we know the virus has not yet mutated. It might be many years before the mutation occurs, or it might occur next week. The greater the number of people infected from birds, the likelier it is that the virus will mutate relatively quickly into a version that passes from human to human.
The media reaction to the second danger, the pandemic, has generally been first to confuse it with the first danger and then either to pooh-pooh it as scare-mongering, or to dismiss it with a shrug as something that might well be ghastly if it happens, but about which there’s nothing to be done, so that there’s no point in worrying about it. Both reactions seem wrong-headed. If and when the pandemic occurs, it may be difficult to over-state its implications and the numbers and categories of people likely to be affected. Moreover, action can be taken, and is being taken, to minimise the impact of the pandemic by ensuring in advance that drug companies are ready at very short notice to develop the relevant vaccine and to put it very rapidly into mass production for distribution to people most at risk (whether in the UK or overseas), and eventually for a high 
proportion of the UK population. There is an enormous amount of clear and vital information on the excellent Department of Health Pandemic Flu website, ranging from short summaries of the situation, prospects and measures being taken, in leaflet form, "Pandemic Flu: Key facts" (pdf) to an encyclopaedic "Pandemic Contingency Plan" with a wealth of scientific, legal, social and medical detail about what is likely to happen and what can (and will have to) be done to minimise the casualties, including wide-ranging restrictions on ordinary social and other activities.
One major piece of essential preparation is collaboration with drug companies to minimise the lead time between the start of the pandemic and the availability of a specific vaccine to inhibit its spread and reduce its impact, initially on most vulnerable health and other workers, then on other groups found to be most vulnerable. In the words of the Contingency Plan:
Once WHO has recommended that production of a pandemic vaccine proceeds, manufacturers will need to switch from seasonal influenza vaccine production. We are working closely with other countries, the World Health Organization, the European Commission and manufacturers to ensure that a vaccine can be developed as quickly as possible once a pandemic flu strain emerges and to put arrangements in place to ensure production of vaccine for the UK population. … Even with advance work to improve our preparedness for vaccine production, the lead time before a new vaccine becomes available in quantity is likely to be at least 4-6 months. There may be no vaccine initially and then availability will depend on production rates. At the same time, international demand for vaccine will be high. Vaccine will have to be distributed equitably and administered to pre-determined priority groups first, according to nationally agreed recommendations. The Department of Health (England) will lead on purchasing and supplying a pandemic vaccine on behalf of the whole UK, liaising with the devolved administration Health Departments.
Already contracts are being drawn up and negotiated with drug companies to ensure that some vaccines and antiviral agents will be available before the pandemic even though their effectiveness will be uncertain until the pandemic virus is isolated and identified:
The Department of Health recently announced its intention to purchase 2 million doses of H5N1 vaccine. The vaccine will be suitable for research purposes, and could be offered to frontline healthcare workers if the risk of a pandemic increases. Production capacity: The capacity for vaccine production will depend upon many factors. The overall world-wide manufacturing capacity is based on the demand for annual routine influenza vaccines. This varies considerably between countries. National immunisation policies are based on selective immunisation of identified risk groups. The UK achieves high coverage in the main risk group (those aged 65 and over) and delivers nearly 13 million doses of trivalent influenza vaccine each year (i.e. about 20-25% of the total population).
But even with all possible preparatory work, the death toll from the pandemic is likely, on past form, to be extremely severe and perhaps catastrophic, with an immense impact for many years on the survivors world-wide:
The mortality worldwide in 1918-19 has been estimated to be upward of 20-40 million. In some areas this reduced life expectancy by around 10 years. In England and Wales, 200,000 excess deaths [i.e. deaths in excess of what would normally be expected] occurred of which 150,000 were ascribed to influenza – just over 3,000 deaths from influenza per million population were recorded in 1918 and 1,170 per million in 1919. In 1957, which was on the whole a milder illness, the global death toll was estimated to be around 2 million. An excess 30,000 deaths occurred in England and Wales of which 6,716 were ascribed to influenza itself. Estimates ranged from 1.3 to 3.5 deaths/1,000 cases. An estimate from 29 general practices was 2.3 deaths per 1,000 cases attended. Two thirds of the deaths were in people aged over 55 years.
The evidence so far seems to confirm that everything that can be done is being done. Some of the Contingency Plan’s warnings convey a kind of gallows humour:
Services such as death registration and funeral directors will have an increased work load.
Difficult and controversial decisions will have to be made once the pandemic begins, probably initially in a developing country where many people have been infected by birds and where there is little or no capacity for producing or distributing vaccines, even when the new human-to-human virus has been isolated and identified. Effective vaccination of even a fraction of, for example, nearly 130 million Nigerians would be a huge task requiring energetic international action and funding; and the issue of priority as between the provision of scarce vaccines to millions of immediately vulnerable Nigerians and to countries such as the UK which would start to experience the pandemic only later would be intensely difficult to resolve.
Meanwhile it makes sense to assume the worst and to start to familiarise ourselves with the measures of personal hygiene and social control that will become necessary. That Department of Health website is a very good place to start. But don’t listen to those glib commentators in the press and on television and radio who say that it’s all scaremongering. This is sooner or later going to be a very serious crisis, and possibly a huge catastrophe.
[1]Pandemic: "Of a disease: Prevalent over the whole of a country or continent, or over the whole world. Distinguished from epidemic, which may connote limitation to a smaller area." OED, second ed.
Update: Since writing the piece above, I have read the front-page story in today’s London Sunday Times under the banner headline: Schools will shut in 100,000 flu death fear, credited to the keyboard of the newspaper’s Political Editor, who doesn’t seem to have consulted the Department of Health website, extensively quoted above but not in the Sunday Times, before writing it. Why Mr Cracknell should have singled out the possible closure of schools from among the numerous measures contemplated in the event of a pandemic in order to minimise the spread of the infection is inexplicable, at any rate by me; the DoH Contingency Plan clearly spells out the pros and (weighty) cons of closing schools and rightly concludes that such decisions would have to be taken at the time in the light of circumstances. The same Sunday Times article also seems to confuse antiviral drugs with vaccines. The story seems designed to arouse fear rather than to provide information; or, if not designed with that purpose in mind, likely to have that effect. And on the front page!
Brian (who belongs to at least three of the most vulnerable groups and is already trying to bag a place in the vaccine queue)
