On facing pages of Wednesday's Guardian (24.5.06), Simon Jenkins, a past editor of The Times, and Ronald Dworkin, Bentham professor of law at University College London and eminent philosopher, between them make mincemeat of New Labour's style of government and multiple costly failures (the Jenkins article), and of the prime minister's catastrophic misconception of the role of human rights in a just and secure society (Dworkin). Simon Jenkins documents with icy precision the disastrous ways in which New Labour has carried to new depths of miscalculation their enthusiastic programme of Thatcherite privatisations, and the exorbitant cost to the public purse and the public interest that these have entailed. He shows how nonsensical new directorates and units for 'delivering' ever more far-fetched objectives and targets have proliferated in departments across Whitehall in response to the never-ending stream of ministerial demands, many of them designed solely as responses to ignorant campaigns in the more reactionary tabloids.
Among the causes of this virtual collapse of rational government, Jenkins cites:
…too much intervention, too much "initiativitis", too many consultants, too many demoralised managers, too many targets and nothing ever joined up. The evil is not size – big and small departments are equally at sea. There is plainly overcentralisation. The government has seized every corner of the public sector and polluted it with the political short term. But where to go next? To suggest a grand, old-fashioned royal commission to find an answer might seem banal. But all the political community is doing at present is howling at the moon. There must be a case for someone to stand back from the frenzy and ask where that once-great institution, British public administration, went completely off the rails.
One answer to Jenkins's sad question must be that the process of dismantling our once unified, transparent, accountable public service was begun by Mrs Thatcher, enthusiastically abetted by her political foe, Michael Heseltine. Both of them systematically tore up virtually every one of the principles established by the great Northcote-Trevelyan reforms [pdf file] of 1853. After Labour's glad confident morning in 1997, a new ministry of whose members hardly anyone had any experience of ministerial office, led by a prime minister blessed, or cursed, with an impenetrable confidence in his own judgement and political skills, continued the process begun under Thatcher to disastrous effect. I have commented elsewhere on the catalogue of sloppy government procedures and cut corners revealed by the Butler report, Sir Robin Butler's 2004 review of the intelligence failures leading to the Iraq débacle of 2003: but it was Sir Robin Butler himself, as he then was, the first Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service to serve the new Blair administration, who must surely bear some of the responsibility, along with his successors, for his failure to insist from the earliest days, when Blair was still learning his ministerial trade, on ministers following proper procedures: taking decisions in properly minuted meetings, ensuring that responsible departments and their ministers participate in decision-making that affects their portfolios, using the Cabinet and Cabinet committees to ensure that the doctrine of collective responsibility is safeguarded, drawing on the expertise, experience and judgement of civil servants even if their recommendations and criticisms are ultimately rejected, giving ministers in charge of departments enough elbow-room to develop and execute policy without constant nagging and interference from No. 10, resisting the temptation to give too big a role to young and inexperienced political advisers and public relations spinners from the prime minister's own Press Secretary downwards, relegating day-to-day pressures from the 24-hour media and the itch to satisfy their demands to their proper place, low in the hierarchy of government priorities. Unless all these elementary rules are observed, the notion of ministerial accountability to parliament and people becomes meaningless; and, worse, costly blunders will sooner or later come to be made. Si monumentum requiris….
We should also treasure Professor Dworkin's concise and elegant demolition of the multiple heresies in Mr Blair's crude approach to human rights and their relationship to public safety and the proper response to risk. Perhaps his key points are summed up in these words:
…some injuries to individuals are so grave that they cannot be justified by declaring that that is what the public wants. A civilised society recognises rights precisely to protect individuals from these grave harms. It might well be in the public interest to lock up people who the police think dangerous even though they have committed no crime, or to censor people whose opinions are offensive or unwelcome, or to torture people who we believe have information about impending crimes. But we do not do that, at least in ordinary legal practice, because we insist that people have a right to a fair trial and free speech and not to be tortured. We insist on these rights even though the majority would be safer and more comfortable if we ignored them. Of course it is terrible when deluded terrorists or criminals on probation kill innocent people. But the increased risk that each of us runs is marginal when we insist on enforcing human rights rather than abandoning them just because they have proved inconvenient. It is one of Britain's most honoured traditions to accept the marginally increased risk as the price of respect for individual human dignity. That is what self-respect requires. It is dangerous gibberish to say that the public has a right to as much security as it can have; no one has a right to security purchased through injustice.
And Professor Dworkin concludes:
The 20th-century tyrannies have taught us that protecting the dignity of human beings, one by one, is worth the increased discomfort and risk that respecting human rights may cost the public at large. The Human Rights Act, which makes that convention part of Britain's own law, was one of the great achievements of this government. It is sad that Blair's political weakness has tempted him to rubbish ideals of which he and the country should be proud.
The concept that some risks have to be accepted in order to protect vital principles of justice, human rights and democracy in a civilised society has been badly damaged, perhaps terminally, by the ignorant ravings of the tabloids and the exploitation of the largely irrational fears of ordinary people.
The sadness is that a fundamentally well-meaning government has betrayed the decent and enlightened principles of its own party by failing to stand up to and expose these illiberal and self-interested pressures, preferring instead to pander to them and seek vainly to appease them. The new home secretary's declaration of war on his own hapless officials — a war which he can be by no means certain of winning — is but the latest example. The whole style and stance are designed to look and sound macho; Dworkin is right, though, to sum it up as "Blair's political weakness". All of us are paying a steep price for that weakness and the blunders that flow from it: but the steepest price of all is being paid each day by the people of Iraq.
Brian
Messrs Cameron and Davis of the Conservative Opposition, and the usual suspects among the tabloids, are having a field day over the ‘admission’ by the ‘director of removals and enforcement’ (you couldn’t make it up) in the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office, David Roberts, in his evidence to the home affairs select committee, that he hadn’t got the faintest idea how many illegal immigrants there were in the country. Taunted by David Cameron over this at today’s prime minister’s questions, the prime minister — instead of enquiring how a Cameron government would propose to count illegal immigrants — fell back on the tired old trope of putting the blame on the system inherited (nine years ago!) from the government’s Tory predecessors, including especially Michael Howard’s ill-favoured régime at the Home Office. True to form, in the words of the Times report, “Mr Blair sent a letter to Mr Reid saying that he wanted additional progress made in tackling the stock of failed asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants.” I bet he does.
It must be only a question of time before our new home secretary, “Dr” John Reid, announces that he will shortly — i.e. next week — introduce a new Illegal Immigrants (Enumeration) Bill 2006, under which:
- All illegal immigrants will be required to declare their illegal status to an immigration official on entering the country;
- All illegal immigrants will be required to report every week to their local police station so that the numbers and whereabouts of all illegal immigrants may be collected from all over the country and the statistics laid before parliament;
- Special illegal immigrant reporting centres will be set up on all remote beaches and at small airstrips where immigrants enter the country illegally so that they can declare themselves to immigration officials and be counted on arrival;
- In addition to the existing queue channels at airport arrivals for British and other EU nationals, Commonwealth citizens, and Others, there will be a new channel for Illegal Immigrants;
- There will be a new offence of failure to count and report an illegal immigrant, punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment, followed by automatic deportation to a country of the home secretary’s choice except where the offender can show just cause why he should not be deported (e.g. because he is a British citizen or because despite being a foreigner he can prove that he has been condemned to death in his country of origin).
“Dr” Reid will append to his Bill a certificate of its compatibility with the Human Rights Act and a stern warning that he knows the address of any judge who has the impertinence to suggest otherwise.
Cutting-edge technology will be employed for keeping track of the numbers of illegal immigrants coming into the country. Sales of those clickers for counting people in queues will soar.
Amid all this hilarious knockabout stuff, however, one menacing snippet emerged. According to the BBC’s account, “Mr Roberts said he could ‘understand the public’s frustration’ but the system would be tightened up when new ‘electronic borders’ came into effect.” The prime minister also foreshadowed yet more draconian border controls in answer to PQs today:
Mr Blair also outlined two measures to help the country reclaim control of its borders. He said: “First of all, we need to introduce electronic borders. And secondly, we need identity cards both for foreign nationals and for British nationals if we want to track people coming in and out of our country and know the identity of people here.”
This apparently refers to plans to check us all electronically out of the country every time we leave it, as well as (more defensibly) every time we re-enter it. Presumably more than simply showing our passports on departure will soon be required: passports will be electronically scanned, irises and finger-prints checked, ID cards (soon) produced, scanned, recorded. Hundreds of people’s flights will be delayed every time a passport photograph, iris, finger-print record or ID card doesn’t match the intending passenger. The long queues for immigration control at Heathrow and other airports and ferry terminals of those who have just landed will be matched by similarly long queues of those who hope to be allowed to depart. Check-in time for departure will obviously have to be increased to three hours or more. The question whether any illegal immigrants identified in the departures queue should be allowed to leave will have to be decided in each individual case by a senior immigration official. It will all add immeasurably to the excitement and glamour of international travel.
“O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!”
Brian
The government is throwing another of its anti-judiciary tantrums over the confirmation by Mr Justice Sullivan of an earlier court decision that the nine Afghan asylum seekers, who bloodlessly hi-jacked an aircraft six years ago to get themselves out of the clutches of the Taliban, can't safely be deported to Afghanistan, because of the risk that they would face death, torture or other inhuman treatment if sent back, and that to deport them in such circumstances would breach their human rights under the European Human Rights Convention (ECHR) and the UK Human Rights Act (HRA). The prime minister and the Lord Chancellor are both talking menacingly about the possible need to amend the HRA to enable the government to rid the country of the hi-jackers and other foreigners 
protected from deportation by the courts, arguing that allowing the Afghans to stay in Britain would encourage future hi-jackers, and that the court decision strikes a wrong balance between the nine men's human rights and the security of the state.
This is dangerous populist grandstanding, deliberately intended to confuse the issues and to give the misleading impression that the legal position can be changed by amending the HRA. In fact there are two separate issues here. First, there's the question of deterring future hijacking by punishing the Afghans for their crime. They were duly tried and sentenced for the hi-jacking, but their convictions were subsequently overturned by a duly constituted court of law because the judge at the original trial misdirected the jury. No new legislation by Mr Blair or Lord Falconer can retrospectively change that outcome, however unfortunate it might have been. So the formal, if unrealistic, position is that the men have been prosecuted for the hi-jacking and have been acquitted on appeal.
Secondly, there's the question of deporting the nine as a further deterrent to future hi-jacking: presumably even Messrs Straw, Clarke and Reid, the relevant home secretaries, wouldn't suggest that there's any risk to British security from allowing these nine refugees to remain in Britain on the grounds that they are likely to hi-jack aeroplanes again. However, both our ministers and the English courts are bound by a decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) according to which the obligation to respect the human rights of putative deportees cannot lawfully be overridden by the duty of governments to protect national security. That decision is being challenged and may possibly be reversed in the future by a fresh decision of the ECtHR, but until it is, no amount of tinkering with or repealing the HRA can affect the legal position. Either Mr Blair and Lord Falconer know this and are deliberately pretending that it is not so, in which case they are — how shall I put it? — guilty of an irresponsible attitude to the truth (there's a shorter word for that) and intentionally misleading public opinion: or they are genuinely ignorant of the legal position, which would be remarkable in two qualified lawyers and would manifestly disqualify them both from holding their high offices.
David Cameron's Conservative Party is also apparently committed to amending or even scrapping the HRA, on the same far-fetched grounds, if they win the next election — an interesting sidelight on the real Cameron beneath the revisionist small-L liberal skin. But at least Cameron, unlike Blair and Falconer, has the excuse, however feeble, of not being a lawyer and not having access to the advice of the government's legal advisers. The Times newspaper had an ignorant and perverse piece on the subject on 12 May. The jackals of The Sun trot along behind, snapping and snarling. Such are New Labour's malodorous allies.
But the Tory press isn't all bad. There's an excellent summary of the legal position in an article of 11 May 06 in the Daily Telegraph by their Legal Editor, Joshua Rozenberg. Someone should send a copy of it to No. 10 Downing Street and to the Lord Chancellor's apartments at the Palace of Westminster. It's sad, isn't it?, that the Blair government, in its terminal death-throes, should be bent on undermining, or even destroying, the best single thing it has itself done in the past nine years, instead of glorying in it — and exacting from the Tories a high political price for their threat to undo it.
Update (16 May 2006): The comments below and the blog entries to which they include links, Tony Hatfield's 'Retired Rambler' post of yesterday — together with its two predecessors of 13 and 11 May), and the 'Ministry of Truth' entry, also of yesterday, both throw invaluable light on all the many issues raised by the current disreputable campaign against the Human Rights Act and its parent European Convention being pursued by Mr Blair, "Dr" John Reid, and the Murdoch press. All these should be required reading for anyone interested in these matters.
In particular, they establish (among other things) that: six of the nine Afghans had served their full sentences, and the other three were nearing completion of their sentences, when their convictions were quashed and they were acquitted; the reason for the quashing of their convictions was not an irrelevant technicality, but a major flaw in their (second) trial — their first trial had ended when the jury failed to agree on verdicts; Mr Justice Sullivan's acid denunciation and repudiation of the home secretary's actions in relation to the Afghans which has prompted so much feverish protest, not least from the prime minister, had nothing to do with the Human Rights Act or Convention, but concerned the home office's impudent flouting of a clear judicial decision under which the Afghans should have been given leave to remain so that they could settle down and get jobs instead of being left in limbo in defiance of the law; and, with uncanny similarity, the case of Anthony Rice, the "sex attacker who killed a mother-of-one while on licence from a life sentence [and who] was 'too dangerous' to be released", turns out on closer investigation also to have almost nothing to do with human rights legislation, since the 
reasons for his release boil down to administrative incompetence on the part of the probation board and others responsible for the decision to release him on licence — aggravated by an unforgivably misleading report on the matter by the Chief Inspector of Probation, Mr Andrew Bridges. If the real facts surrounding these incidents can be established, with a wealth of chapter and verse, by a handful of bloggers using little but the Web and their memories, is it really credible that those who brief the prime minister and the home secretary, senior civil servants and legal advisers with all the research resources of government at their disposal, and who do the donkey-work for tabloid (and Times and Telegraph) leader-writers, with all the cuttings libraries and internet access available to newspaper offices, were not able to do so? Were ministers' and newspapers' misrepresentations of the facts down to ignorance, or were they deliberate?
Either way, it's plainly scandalous that such serious matters should be so damagingly distorted in the way they are presented by both the government and parts of the press.
Brian
I have just come across an interesting post and discussion on The Sharpener going back to last November about the West Lothian question — why should a Scottish MP speak and vote in the House of Commons on subjects such as education which have been devolved to the Scottish parliament and which are no longer the responsibility of the House of Commons in respect of Scotland? This question will become even more relevant if and when Gordon Brown, representing a Scottish constituency, becomes prime minister at Westminster. As the Sharpener’s discussion shows, the Tories’ proposed solution to West Lothian is nonsensical, and neither the LibDems nor the Labour Party seem to have an answer at all.
In fact the answer stares us in the face, as I have ventured to point out in a comment on the Sharpener discussion:
The principal, perhaps the only, obstacle to recognising the answer to the West Lothian Question is the extraordinary national blockage about federalism. By the same token, the issue here is not so much what system we should introduce to make sense of West Lothian: it’s understanding what system we have already got, and then making sensible provision accordingly.
What we now have as a result of devolution (active or dormant) in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London is a federal system. The inescapable logic of this is that the national parliament at Westminster has got to become the federal parliament, with powers limited to those subjects not devolved to the regions, or shared with them. The present anomalies discussed in these comments and this post arise from the attempt to make the Westminster parliament function as both a national federal parliament and a parliament for England, simultaneously. This is unsustainable — and will become more obviously so when a Scottish MP, Gordon Brown, representing a constituency in a country with its own devolved parliament, becomes the federal prime minister of the whole of GB and NI. It can only be a matter of time — probably a long time, given the British preference for muddling through and ignoring anomalies rather than facing up to the logical and imperative need for further change — before we (or our great-grandchildren) bite the bullet, and after extended agonising and obfuscation, draw up a proper written federal constitution, establish one or more parliaments and executives for England, decide on a sensible distribution of powers as between the federal centre and the regions, including some shared powers, and stop fussing about all members of the federal parliament at Westminster (ie the House of Commons and the federal Senate) being entitled to speak and vote on all matters within federal competence. If countries such as Australia, the US, Germany and Canada can make a federal system work either very or tolerably well most of the time, there’s no possible reason why we can’t learn to do so too.
All ’solutions’ to the West Lothian Question that seek to dodge or ignore this now actually existing federal reality, and its implications, are doomed to get us into an even bigger muddle than we’re in already, as the preceding discussion shows.
It’s all there on a recent post on my blog
Brian
You can read a (not unduly detailed) diary of our week in Paris in the spring here. There are some pictures of the holiday here. When you have loaded the Flickr page of thumbnails, click on the first picture to see a larger version, then click the left-hand thumbnail of the two over on the right of the screen to see the next one, and so on. To see any picture full size, click "All Sizes" at the top of the picture; then use your browser's 'Back' button to get back to the previous screen for the next picture. The croissants are as splendid as ever….
Brian
I recently posted in Ephems a piece about the undesirability of deporting foreign nationals from Britain immediately after they have been convicted of serious offences, instead of keeping them in prison and then if necessary, in extreme cases, deporting them after they have served their sentences. I wrote this shortly before the rumpus exploded that was to blow Charles Clarke out of the water for the failure of his department to fulfil its statutory duty (imposed on it, misguidedly, by Mr Blunkett during his time as home secretary) to 'consider for deportation' all foreigners who had been sentenced to a year or more in prison. In a predictably panicky reflex reaction to the portrayal by the tabloids of Britain's streets running with blood as a direct consequence of the home secretary's error, Messrs Blair and Clarke announced plans for new legislation to make it mandatory and automatic, save in the most exceptional cases, to deport all foreigners convicted of any offence, however trivial and regardless of individual circumstances, for which imprisonment could have been the penalty — even when it wasn't. Outraged by these hardly credible proposals, I submitted a letter to The Times on the subject, which that newspaper predictably didn't publish. As one or two people of impeccable judgment to whom I have shown it have commented favourably on it, I venture to reproduce it here. The immolation of Mr Clarke, in Mr Blair's auto da fe after the dismal local election results of last week, by no means indicates that the Blair-Clarke proposals for deporting foreigners en masse, regardless of their circumstances, will now be dropped: on the 
contrary, we may expect the good Dr Reid to whip the file smartly out of his Pending tray at the first opportunity, and to see how he can make them if anything even more draconian — to demonstrate that his machismo exceeds even that of his predecessor and their boss. It may yet get even worse. Already an anonymous civil servant, in a comment on my earlier Ephems item, has warned that the home office is planning a new régime under which foreigners will be deported first and permitted to appeal against their deportation only afterwards — from abroad. This was indeed foreshadowed in a little-noticed and obscurely worded passage of the prime minister's notorious 12-point proposals for tightening Britain's security, listed in the introductory statement at his press conference on 5 August 2005:
In any event we will consult on legislating specifically for a non-suspensive appeal process in respect of deportations.
It's hard to believe that the British courts would let him get away with such a monstrous denial of due process, but we have been warned, and intensive vigilance is required if we are to ensure that this and the other 'automatic deportation' proposals are fiercely resisted in parliament, the media, the blogosphere and every other nook and cranny of public discourse, the moment they are resuscitated. Anyway, here's what I wrote (on 4 May 2006, the day of the local elections and before the prime minister had put the match to Charles Clarke's political funeral pyre) in my abortive letter to The Times:
Sir, Foreign nationals who have served their sentences and paid their debt to society for past offences pose no more danger to society when released than the far more numerous British citizens who are in the same position but cannot be deported. Instead of pointing this out in order to calm irrational public fears whipped up by circulation-hungry tabloids, Messrs Blair and Clarke, true to form, have themselves panicked, and obeyed their gut instinct, when threatened by revelation of their own incompetence, to give themselves yet more powers in hasty and ill-conceived legislation, pandering to ignorance, prejudice and xenophobia. The home secretary already has ample powers to deport any foreigner whose presence he believes is not conducive to the public good, and the onus is rightly on him to show in each case that he has reasonable grounds for his belief. Under Mr Clarke's new proposals this onus is to be reversed: any foreigner convicted of any imprisonable offence, even if not sentenced at trial to imprisonment and even if not recommended by the trial judge for deportation, will have to produce reasons why he or she should not be deported — an intrinsically impossible task. This regime will hugely increase the sense of insecurity and alienation of foreign nationals living in the UK on whose contributions to our national life (and sense of belonging) our prosperity and indeed our security depend. It poses a corresponding threat to thousands of British citizens living abroad. It implies that foreigners who commit even quite minor offences in Britain will be punished twice for the same offence, while Britons who commit identical offences will not: so it is patently discriminatory and obviously disproportionate. If ministers were genuinely concerned about the threat to our security from former prisoners of whatever nationality re-offending after release, they would reform the system so that far fewer people would be sent unnecessarily and unproductively to prison in the first place, and turn prisons from places where people are brutalised, criminalised and exposed to a drug culture almost guaranteed to ensure that they will re-offend, into places where they may learn literacy and job skills and be freed from drug dependency. Instead, ministers are recklessly bent on a vindictive new regime calculated to make a bad situation worse, imposing on the immigration service and the courts a new burden which will in practice be impossible to bear, as well as making us an even more unfair and xenophobic society — all in the hope of saving their own political skins. If the 'consultation' process is to have any meaning, these proposals should be rejected with contempt.
Put these proposals in the shredder, Dr Reid. Please.
Brian
As well as the broad implications of Tony Blair's reshuffle of 5 May, on which I have recently commented here, there are some interesting points to be made about the personalities involved — and in particular, I can't resist the challenge thrown down by Patrick and Martin Kelly to offer a view about the unexpected removal of Jack Straw from foreign affairs and his even more unexpected replacement by Margaret Beckett.
Jack Straw seems to me to deserve respect for his obvious grasp of the minutiae of his Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary's brief: it was as much a pleasure for the listener as it evidently was for Mr Straw to hear him reel off with gleeful relish the exact wording of some UN Security Council resolution in reply to a probing question from John Humphrys on the Today Programme, and to observe his expert technique for dealing with the BBC interviewers' constant attempts to interrupt him (he would pause for breath only in mid-sentence, never between sentences. Remarkably effective). He knew what he was talking about and was clearly fascinated by it, if sometimes in a tiresomely legalistic way. More importantly, in recent weeks he had begun to exhibit welcome flashes of independence in his utterances on Iran, pouring surprisingly sharp scorn over any idea of using military force (especially nuclear weapons) despite the Americans' refusal to rule out that option. Certainly he has been consistently more direct, and more reassuring, on this subject than the prime minister, who has largely contented himself with echoing His Master's Voice from the Pentagon: "There are no plans…", far short of a denial (and, incidentally, manifestly untrue). This discrepancy has inevitably prompted speculation that Blair has dismissed Straw on instructions from Washington, however expressed: Downing Street has strenuously denied that charge, but as we all know, there are more ways than one of indicating displeasure over too much independent talk from the underling of a junior ally, and it would be very hard to believe that Blair has received no vibes of concern from across the Atlantic. If there's any truth in this, it's an unqualified outrage.
However, the urge to beatify Mr Straw in his new role as victim has to be resisted, on at least two grounds. First, if he knows or even suspects that the real reason for his dismissal is American dissatisfaction with his utterances on Iran, his proper course would have been to resign and not to accept any alternative government appointment, thus keeping himself free to make public the circumstances of his departure: something that plainly ought to be in the public domain. (Even if, as seems almost inconceivable, his demotion had nothing to do with Iran or the Americans, his acceptance of such public humiliation by agreeing to take on the much less prestigious and influential job of Leader of the House of Commons hardly earns respect.)
Secondly, he has done nothing to earn public forgiveness for his deplorable role over the aggression against Iraq. He was widely rumoured to have been "unhappy" about the legality, or lack of it, of going to war without the express authority of the United Nations — hardly surprising, if so, given that his own officials, including in particular his legal advisers, are widely believed to have opposed the war and to have advised all concerned that it would not only be illegal without a 'second resolution', but also almost certain to end in tears. Straw must have known, too, that the Attorney-General's private advice to the prime minister was deeply sceptical about the legality of war without UN authority, yet he connived with Blair at the fraudulent pretence that the Attorney-General's subsequent brief parliamentary statement of the arguments adduced by some in favour of the legality of the war, even without a second resolution, represented the Attorney-General's own conveniently amended view of the legal position (which we now know it did) and reflected his original formal advice to the government (which it did not). This connivance in duplicity over a matter as grave as the illegal use of force, and this failure adequately to reflect in Cabinet and in his private dealings with the prime minister the overwhelming view of his own officials and lawyers, are black blots on Jack Straw's record. If he pressed his own and his department's view strongly and was overruled, he should have resigned, and publicly stated his reasons. Had he done so at a sufficiently early stage in the run-up to the war, it's entirely possible that Blair would have failed to get a majority in the House of Commons for going to war, and that consequently Britain would not have been involved. Blair would probably have been forced to resign, and the whole course of our nation's history in the past three years might have been different. This is a heavy burden for Jack Straw to have to carry. Some good, patient, enlightened work since then can't entirely erase that record.
All the same, I believe Straw's departure from the FCO to be deeply regrettable, especially as his successor is to be a woman of undoubted good practical common-sense and decency but with absolutely no experience of international affairs: for that lack of experience will make her warm plasticine in Blair's hands. Given Blair's careless and impetuous style of decision-making, his marginalising of experienced officials' advice, the degree to which he is in thrall to the most reactionary and wilful US President of modern times, his impatient scorn for legality and his quite unwarranted confidence in the rightness of his own instincts and judgment, the prospect of No. 10 having even greater dominance than hitherto over the country's Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary is genuinely frightening.
The other most regrettable element in this typically ad hoc reshuffle must be the arrival of "Dr" John Pooh-Bah Reid at the Home Office. [Pooh-Bah: " A pompous ostentatious official, especially one who, holding many offices, fulfills none of them" -- The Free Dictionary.] I can shed no tears over the belated and clumsy dismissal of Charles Clarke, a
serious man reputedly concerned about civil rights in a way that David Blunkett was not, but who was too weak to stand up to the prime minister, the police and security services, the prison officers' union or his own Home Office officials with their incessant demands for ever more sweeping powers for the state at the expense of the liberty of the citizen. The irony is that the immediate cause of his downfall was not his failure to defend our historic rights and freedoms against the assaults of the authoritarians, nor even his failure to control and manage his own department or to find out for himself which of its statutory duties his officials were failing to perform, as a competent and responsible senior minister ought to have done: instead, he was brought down by the prime minister's cowardly failure to dispel a tabloid-driven and completely false impression that Clarke had in some way caused a national crisis by debouching onto our streets a horde of foreign rapists and murderers, all of whom he should have summarily deported. In fact, of course, the Home Office's failure to 'consider' for deportation foreigners who had served a year or more in prison, and had been released, left the situation exactly as it has always been: foreigners, just like British citizens, are released after serving their sentences, and are free (if legally in the country) to 'walk the streets' just like anyone else. If the fear is that almost 60 per cent of them go on to commit fresh offences, the remedy is obviously to do something to educate people in prison, give them job skills and get them off drugs: the fact that a small proportion of those concerned are foreigners is neither here nor there. So Clarke had to go, even if for all the wrong reasons.
But if one were to draw up a list, necessarily very short, of Labour parliamentarians most likely to stem the flow of new, panicky home office legislation on crime and terrorism, to allow the department to get on with its existing job: most likely discreetly to drop the nonsensical and sinister project for ID cards and a national database: most likely to agree not to renew the operation of the Control Orders regime and to limit drastically the scope of ASBOs: most likely to resist Downing Street's crazy and illegal demand for the automatic deportation of all foreigners convicted of any theoretically imprisonable offence, regardless of individual circumstances: most likely, in short, to begin to retrieve our civil rights and to resist their further erosion — surely the name at the bottom of that list would be that of "Dr" John Reid, whose brief inglorious reigns in seven previous Cabinet posts give absolutely no indication of sensitivity to civil rights or other humanitarian concerns. From flawed frying-pan into an uncontrollable fire!
And, finally, unlike Martin Kelly's comment mentioned earlier, I can find nothing in this reshuffle to suggest that it is designed to smoothe the eventual transition from Blair to Brown, or that it represents a movement to the left. If a transitional ministry had been intended, it's hard to see how it could have been done without any consultation with Gordon Brown — and despite a great deal of obfuscatory waffle on the Chancellor's part in his interview earlier today with Andrew Marr on the BBC programme Sunday AM, he could not in the end avoid making it clear that he had indeed not been consulted, except in the most general way. Moreover, Brown's allies involved in the reshuffle all seem to have been put into notably controversial and success-resistant appointments. It would be difficult to see Reid's arrival at the Home Office as a movement either to the left or towards a peaceful transition to a new Brown ministry; and the same goes for the change at the FCO, designed to remove any threat of independent challenge to Downing Street in the field of international affairs. Almost everything about the reshuffle is callous, cynical, clumsy, reactive, and unrelated to any over-arching strategy other than prolonging indefinitely Tony Blair's tenancy of No. 10. In practice it seems likely to create more problems for him than it solves. It has made him some potentially dangerous enemies. Now we'll see what they are made of.
Brian
The image evoked by the prime minister's deeply weird reshuffle, coming just hours after confirmation of a defeat for the Labour Party described in today's Guardian editorial as one of the worst since the second world war, is not that tired old cliché about deckchairs so much as the issue of increasingly mad orders from the bunker into the ruined city above. No, I don't for a moment suggest that there's any comparison — or any other comparison, anyway — between Tony Blair and Hitler. Blair's no fascist; the government he has headed has done very many of the good and necessary things that we're entitled to expect a Labour government to do; he has rare political skills and instincts; he makes ruthless use of his hitherto all-conquering charm and charisma; he has kept the party in power for nine years and three successive elections, an unparalleled achievement for a Labour leader. The party owes him.
But it is now clear to almost everyone except, apparently, him, that the game is up: it's time for him to go. Too many things are going wrong — even leaving aside the towering criminal blunder of Iraq (a bit like 'leaving aside' the giant rhinoceros — "massive powerful herbivorous odd-toed ungulate of 
southeast Asia and Africa having very thick skin and one or two horns on the snout" — in the living-room). Too many senior ministers in key jobs have been frog-marched by the No. 10 mafiosi into deeply flawed policy commitments which look increasingly unsustainable and which increasingly cast doubt on the political antennae of their sponsors. There have been too many ministerial changes in too short a time: "Dr" John Reid, moving into his eighth Cabinet post, illustrates the desperate character of the latest game of musical chairs. Above all, there have been too many initiatives, too many targets, too fierce a blizzard of new legislation; simply too much frantic change, apparently for change's sake — permanent revolution on a scale that Trotsky and Mao (and indeed Mrs Thatcher) would have exulted in. And with the stresses and fears aroused by unceasing 'reform', comes mounting evidence that not only can't ordinary civil servants and doctors and nurses and teachers cope with the raucous and menacing demands made on them for change and yet more change: they aren't left alone for long enough to get on with the existing systems they are trying to run.
The time inevitably comes when this sense of inability to cope with ever more extreme demands explodes into resentment and then into resistance. The teachers lambast the hapless Ruth Kelly; the nurses (egged on by an insensitive leadership) shout down Patricia[n] Hewitt; the Home Office, struggling to keep on devising, and ramming through an increasingly restive parliament, two or three major new crime and terrorism Bills each year, turns out not to have been able to operate its own legal duty, self- and Blunkett-imposed, to consider all imprisoned foreigners for deportation. Things, to quote another worn-out cliché, fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
But down there in the bunker, the leader, increasingly frustrated by failure and resistance to change, increasingly convinced that his place in history will depend on his success in bringing about reform, reform, and more reform (not least in the hope that so much reform will obscure the sight of that rhinoceros), barks increasingly demented orders, switches his generals from front to front, orders a few to be shot and gives others the option of suicide, and refuses to countenance any talk of a successor, even though the Crown Prince is there in the anteroom drumming his fingers on the table and looking incessantly at his watch. The embattled leader is increasingly convinced that only he can save the faltering campaign from disaster: he has never had any faith in the wisdom of the party that sustains him, scorning its traditional values as unmodern and in need of reform, and now even his formerly faithful band of brothers and acolytes, the couch potatoes of No. 10, begins to fail him. Very well, then: "Après moi…"
Can there ever have been such indecisive and cowardly generals? Bring on the men in white coats!
Brian
Ephems is off to Paris tomorrow for a week Away From Keyboard, or AFK, as the knowing anoraks say. No more new posts after today, for a week; no more comments on comments, however misguided (or provocative or laudatory). Ephems will spend the week basking, not in the sun (the forecast is for almost continuous showers) but in the warm glow of having been awarded pride of place in last week's Britblogs of The Week for a recent post. Thanks for that, Tim.
On our return we'll be scouring the blogs to find out the significance, if any, of next Thursday's local election results. Luckily for Labour, we had already cast our postal votes before the Affairs Clarke and Prescott broke. I don't include La Hewitt in that galère since it seems to me clear that the fat little finger of blame points unerringly at the bellowing nurses and their misguided cheer-leader, not at the Secretary of State, however patronising her manner. Canberra Girls' Grammar, I put that down to, topped up by Newnham. But her middle name is Hope.
Happy May-Day!
Postscript after our return: You can see a not-too-solemn diary of our week in Paris here .
Brian
