The home secretary, John Reid, and the home office seem to be at it again. Successive Chief Inspectors of Prisons — Judge Tumim, Sir David (now Lord) Ramsbotham, the 
current incumbent Anne Owers — have been a thorn in the flesh of the home office and the prison service with their brutally explicit and uncompromising published revelations of the squalid state of affairs in too many (although not all) of our prisons. Instead of taking radical and humane action to clean out these Augean stables, starting for example by massively reducing the swollen prison population by removing the large proportion of prisoners needlessly imprisoned, our predictable home secretary and his department planned to abolish the separate and independent office of Chief Inspector of Prisons by merging it with other inspectorates under a Super-Chief with no special responsibility for prisons. This outrageous project was shot down in the House of Lords, which approved an amendment submitted by Lord Ramsbotham by a 2:1 majority amid scathing condemnation by all the relevant expert groups. At first the home office reacted by jerking its knee in traditional fashion, promising to restore the provision when the Bill returned to the House of Commons:
The House of Lords did a good thing on Tuesday evening. By a large majority it rejected the government's plans to abolish the chief inspector of prisons, a job which has attracted almost universal praise for its essentialness and efficacy. The Home Office reacted with the depressingly predictable promise to reverse the vote in the Commons. Senior posts are usually killed off because they're no longer needed, or have been shown to be unsuccessful at what they're supposed to do. In this case, the opposite is true. At a time of such trauma and chaos in the prison system, it is more than ever necessary to have a fearless and independent figure of stature, who can visit prisons unannounced, conduct thorough inspections and report back uncompromisingly and publicly.
(Marcel Berlins, The Guardian, October 16, 2006)
Later the government bowed to the uproar by putting Tony Blair's gear into reverse (that would be the one he famously boasted to party conference that he didn't have: anyone want to buy a car with no reverse gear?), promising not to seek to overturn the relevant amendment by the Lords to retain the independence of the Chief Inspector of Prisons after all. A rare victory for informed opinion and common sense? Whoooo-a! Here's the rather admirable Tory MP Tony Baldry (did I really write that?) with a letter in the Independent of 26 October 2006:
Lack of proper debate on prisons shames the Commons
Sir: There are times when the proceedings of the House of Commons are shameful.
The Government decided to abolish the Office of Chief Inspector of Prisons, notwithstanding the excellent work done by Judge Tumim, Lord Ramsbotham, and now Anne Owers. The independent Prisons Inspectorate has, among other things, discovered during its time pregnant women in chains in Holloway, assaults by prison staff in the segregation unit at Wormwood Scrubs, outrageous behaviour in the segregation unit at Wandsworth, and mental health treatment at Brixton that the Inspector described as "utterly disgraceful".
The Government gave no time at all for this change to be debated on the floor of the House of Commons at the report stage of the Police and Justice Bill. Under the guise of "modernisation", debate in Parliament is stifled. It was left to the House of Lords to undertake proper scrutiny.
In debates in which the Government could not find a single supporter, the House of Lords savaged the Government's proposals to abolish the independence of HM Inspectorate of Prisons, to the extent that Baroness Scotland, who had conduct of the Bill in the Lords, promised that the Chief Inspector of Prisons would remain. However, that concession was short-lived, because at the last possible moment on third reading in the Lords, the Government introduced some last-minute amendments which would have the effect of again undermining the independence of the Chief Inspector of Prisons by giving the Home Secretary powers to direct how inspections should be carried out.
The Prisons Inspectorate is highly acclaimed nationally and internationally. Why undermine the role and independence of the Prisons Inspectorate?
On 24 October this matter came back before the House of Commons in considering the Lords' amendments and the Government's amendments to the Lords' amendments. Again, because of the Government restricting time for debate, the House of Commons had precisely 20 minutes in which to discuss these issues – clearly totally insufficient to probe the effect and reason for the Government reneging on their concession to the House of Lords.
It is a disgraceful way for the House of Commons to conduct its business, but much more importantly, it is a disgrace that the House of Commons can so cavalierly deal with such important issues as the welfare of prisoners, the state and condition of our prisons and ensuring that there is an effective independent inspectorate to draw attention to what is happening in our prisons.
TONY BALDRY MP
(BANBURY, C), HOUSE OF COMMONS
The home office website itself describes the prisons inspectorate as 'independent':
Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons for England and Wales (HMIP) is an independent inspectorate which reports on conditions for and treatment of those in prison, young offender institutions and immigration removal centres.
HM Chief Inspector of Prisons is appointed by the Home Secretary, from outside the Prison Service, for a term of five years. The Chief Inspector reports directly to the Home Secretary on the treatment and conditions for prisoners in England and Wales and other matters as directed by the Home Secretary.
The chief inspector's terms of reference, also on the home office's website, set out in some detail the relationship between the chief inspector and the home secretary, but give the former extensive discretion in carrying out his or her work and stipulate that the inspectorate is independent of the prison service. But now, when the Bill incorporating the Ramsbotham amendment preserving the chief inspector's independence had its third and final reading in the House of Lords, according to Tony Baldry "the Government introduced some last-minute amendments which would have the effect of again undermining the independence of the Chief Inspector of Prisons by giving the Home Secretary powers to direct how inspections should be carried out" — and allowed the House of Commons just 20 minutes to debate the new amendments and extract from the government some indication of their meaning and intentions.
Both the substance of the last-minute amendments and the procedural manoeuvres to prevent any proper parliamentary scrutiny of them appear, on the available evidence, to be utterly scandalous. It's not too difficult to imagine the kind of 'instructions' to the chief inspector that this home secretary (and indeed almost any of his predecessors in living memory) and this home office will think up to reduce or even destroy the chief inspector's scope for inflicting further damage on the government with more revelations about what is going on in our prisons within their responsibilities — and in our names. Shame on them.
(Hat-tip: Bob Knowles, eagle-eyed Indie-reader)
Brian
Jack Straw's proposals for 'reforming' the House of Lords, contained in a long document leaked at the weekend to the Sunday Times and available on its website, are a tepid, boneless, pathetic bit of fudge (to mix several metaphors). I am grateful to the Guardian for publishing today (25 Oct 06) selected extracts from the rather longer letter that I sent on the 22nd, but of course I regret some of the omissions, so I reproduce here the original text as submitted to the Guardian (the edited text as printed is at the end of this post).
The original letter said:
Jack Straw's reported proposals for House of Lords 'reform' are wrong in almost every detail and should be briskly rejected. The government and the party machines already exercise virtually total control over the House of Commons, and these proposals would give them effective control over the Upper House too, whereas the objective should be to restore parliament's power to hold the executive to account, not to demolish it altogether. Straw wants only half of the new chamber to be elected, when it was clear from the last debates and from the Select Committee's unanimous report that most MPs favour at least 80 or preferably 100 per cent elected. Why should half of one of our legislative bodies remain undemocratically appointed? Almost all other comparable western democracies have wholly elected legislatures: what is so uniquely untrustworthy about the British electorate?
What's worse, it seems to be envisaged that the elected half would be chosen on the discredited party list system, putting the membership of the elected part of the Upper House under the control of the party bosses. Since under the Straw proposals the same party bosses would also have a major say in appointments to the unelected section of the chamber, this would give them effective control over the whole House, just as they have over the House of Commons. There's no possible justification for retaining seats for bishops or creating seats reserved for women, Muslims, atheists or any other racial or other randomly chosen groups. Any such attempt to make the House "representative" by manipulating appointments to it is doomed to result in corrupt patronage. Even the suggestion that the chamber should continue to be called the House of Lords, and its members so designated, is absurd: what's wrong with 'Senate'?
Parliament should insist on a genuinely open PR system for electing at least 80% of the members, with party leaders having no say at all in any appointments commission for any remaining unelected element. The Senate should be elected every 8 or 10 years on a different timetable from the Commons, its members disqualified completely from later membership of the Commons and from serving more than two terms in the Senate.
Lastly, there's no possible justification for the disgraceful suggestion that the powers of a largely elected Upper House should be reduced from those now exercised by the Lords, another brazen attempt to tighten the executive's grip on parliament: the continued primacy of the Commons is assured by its theoretically unlimited powers compared with the limited functions of the Other Place, and by the central function of the Commons as the creator and sustainer of governments, not by making the Upper House even more undemocratic and even less able to monitor and check executive power. Time for members of both Houses of Parliament to stand up and be counted!
Perhaps the most squalid of Straw's proposals is that the electoral system for the elected element of the new reformed house should be party lists, with the parties drawing up their national lists of candidates in order of preference (i.e. in order of spineless obedience to the Whips and party bosses) and the voters reduced to voting for this or that party, or at best to choosing our own order of preference from the pre-cooked list of names on offer. Although the results can be plausibly described as PR (because party strengths will be in proportion to the votes cast for them), it's an absolutely indefensible form of it, especially for election to a legislative and deliberative chamber with the duty (among others) of holding the government to account. Some form of PR is obviously essential for the second chamber, in order to ensure that no one party will normally command an overall majority and thus to maximise the chamber's independence from the executive (just as First Past the Post is essential for elections to the House iof Commons in order to offer the best chance that one party will have an overall majority and thus be able to form a government capable of honouring its manifesto promises): but for the second chamber almost any kind of PR will be better than party lists. Even to suggest party lists is an insult to the intelligence of the electorate and to the capacity for independent thinking of our present parliamentarians.
The Straw proposals for preventing the abuse of the second chamber as a career springboard for the House of Commons (by banning its members from standing for the Commons for five years after serving in it) are much too feeble. Members of the second chamber should be banned from serving more than two eight- or ten-year terms in it, and banned for life from standing for election to the House of Commons once elected or appointed to the second chamber. These bans are absolutely essential if members of the second chamber — let's call them Senators, right? — are not to be vulnerable to the kind of bullying, blackmail and threats by the Whips and other party leaders to which career politicans in the House of Commons are constantly exposed, and which are at the root of the executive's success in seizing almost total control of the legislature.
For similar reasons, it's outrageous that the prime minister of the day and the other party leaders should be involved in any way in the selecting the members of the commission responsible for appointing the non-elected members of the second chamber (if any). Like the proposed party lists, this is a brazen attempt to ensure that the party apparatchiks will have effective control of the membership of the second chamber, especially if only half of its membership is to be elected, as Straw proposes. (Half elected! More like half-baked.)
The Straw proposal to perpetuate the reservation of even a reduced number of seats in the second chamber for Church of England bishops is surely among the most obviously offensive, discriminatory, indeed asinine, of all his ideas. On what possible principle can it be asserted that bishops have a superior right to membership of a democratic legislature compared with any other group of people chosen at random: engineers, say, or Lieutenant-Colonels, or members of the Football Association? To try to head off the charge of discrimination by proposing, as Mr Straw actually does, that the appointed element should also be fiddled to include other 'faith groups' besides the C of E bishops makes the whole idea even more fatuous. Who is to say which faith groups should be so privileged? Christian Scientists? Scientologists? Flat-earthers? Faith healing evangelists and devil exorcists? Satanists? Every last Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist splinter group, however barmy or malign? How is the vast army of British atheists and those with absolutely no interest in religion to be assured of representation alongside the supernaturalists? The Church of England can remain the legally Established Church if that's still important to it — a matter of supreme indifference or incomprehension to about 99 per cent of the population, I imagine; but there's no perceptible reason why establishment should entitle it to this undeserved legislative privilege.
Then again, why should seats be reserved for women? Why not for the physically and mentally handicapped, the unemployed, the blind, the illiterate, and every other group sometimes subjected to discrimination? Indeed, why not for men? All these people, from the grandest bishop to the humblest devil-worshipper, every woman and every other member of every single victim group except children, is or should be free to stand for election to the second chamber: and we should not be ashamed or too arrogant to emulate other more sensible democracies by letting the electorate choose between them, not some self-important group of men and women in suits vetted beforehand by the same old time-expired and power-hungry politicians.
And lastly (phew!), why this excessive tendresse towards the existing life peers? Most of the old hereditary peers were booted out, rightly, with precious little ceremony: the appointed life peers have known for the past nine years that Lords reform would eventually threaten their sinecures: why should we be made to tolerate their continued privilege of legislating for us without our ever having had any say in the matter, until every last one of them has either died or been bribed by an unnecessary 'redundancy package' to stand down? This would, by Straw's own admission, take years. All together, now: "Why are we waiting?"
As promised, here's the abbreviated text of my letter as published in today's Guardian:
Jack Straw's reported proposals for House of Lords "reform" are
wrong and should be briskly rejected. The government and the party
machines already exercise virtually total control over the House of
Commons, and these proposals would give them effective control over
the upper house too.There's no possible justification for retaining seats for bishops or
creating seats reserved for women, Muslims, atheists or any other
racial or other randomly chosen groups. Any such attempt to make the
House "representative" by manipulating appointments to it is doomed
to result in corrupt patronage. Parliament should insist on a
genuinely open PR system for electing at least 80% of the members,
with party leaders having no say in the appointments of the remaining
unelected element.Brian Barder
London
Well, much better than not publishing it at all.
Update (6 pm 25 Oct 06): The lethally damaging commentary on the Straw paper posted earlier today on the Ministry of Truth blog is well worth reading (also see trackback below). It comprehensively demolishes several of the more outlandish passages in this dreadful document. Re-reading the Straw paper for the umpteenth time, I found myself repeatedly laughing aloud at the perverse absurdity of many of its arguments. It's also extraordinarily sloppily written — surely not by the parliamentary staff of the Leader of the House? And if not by them, by whom? The heart sinks at the prospect, in the coming weeks and months, of all these barmy arguments being solemnly aired in the media and the blogosphere as if they deserved respectful consideration (it's already happening in the letters pages of The Times). The spectacle of the Leader of the House of Commons acting as the handmaiden of the executive in its battle to increase its control over the second chamber as well as over the Commons is also deeply disheartening: the Leader of the House should be putting the interests of parliament before those of the government, not vice versa. Bad show, Straw.
Brian
The Chief Legal Adviser to the US State Department, John D Bellinger, says that foreign governments should stop calling for the closure of Guantanamo and instead help 
resettle some of the more than 400 prisoners there, according to various press reports, including this from the BBC.
Some of these reports have recalled that the Americans have offered to send the "British residents" (i.e. prisoners who have had permission to live in Britain but are not British residents) back to the UK but that the British government has refused to accept them. But that is only part of the truth:
The US has offered to return nine British residents detained at Guantanamo Bay, provided they are kept under 24-hour surveillance if set free in the UK, it was reported today. The offer was made in June this year during secret talks in Washington, but was refused by the Government on the grounds that as the men were foreign nationals, they have no legal right to return. Although the men are accused of terrorist involvement, British officials say that there is not enough evidence to justify the level of surveillance demanded by the US and that the strict conditions stipulated are unworkable and unnecessary, according to documents obtained by The Guardian.
They do not pose a sufficient threat," the head of counter-terrorism at the Home Office is quoted as saying by the newspaper. [Times report of 3 October]
There's room for argument about the extent of the British government's responsibility for people who lived in the Uk, not British citizens, who have been kidnapped by the Americans as "enemy combatants" on suspicion of being terrorists and who have fetched up in Guantanamo, detained without charge or trial for years. But there's no room at all for argument about the illegitimacy of the American attempt to impose extreme conditions (24-hour surveillance!) on their willingness to allow these people to return to the countries where they previously lived, and on the decision by the former host country on whether to have them back. British ministers are quite right to say, however belatedly, that the Guantanamo régime is unacceptable and that it is the responsibility of the United States government to close it unconditionally. Other governments have no obligation whatever to help to pull these American chestnuts out of the fire for them.
By the way, the British home office's comment that the Guantanamo prisoners "do not pose a sufficient threat" to justify subjecting them to 24-hour surveillance is reminiscent of the extraordinary remark by UK police and security sources on the two "terrorist suspects" in Britain who were subjected to harsh control orders but who have absconded, their whereabouts currently unknown to the police, –
Police and security sources maintained that the two are not threats to security in Britain.
If they are not threats to our security, why were they subjected to control orders with the deprivation of liberty that these unconscionable measures impose? If the former UK residents in Guantanamo don't pose a sufficient threat to warrant 24-hour surveillance if allowed to return to Britain, what on earth are they in Guantanamo for?
To such absurdities and injustices are security authorities and panicky governments reduced when the basic safeguards of due process are sidelined and suspended.
Brian
I ought to resist the temptation to add to the torrent of mainly indignant comments on the question whether Jack Straw has the right to ask constituents wearing the niqab, the veil with a slit for eyes but otherwise covering the whole face and head, to lift the veil when they visit his MP's surgery for his advice and help (he has stressed that they are 
free to decline to do so if they wish, but that none has ever done so). But one highly relevant point seems to have escaped the multitudinous commentatariat. This has emerged with lethal clarity in the case of the Muslim classroom assistant (a kind of teacher's aide) suspended for refusing to carry out her classroom duties without wearing the niqab even when a male member of the school staff — such as the teacher she is assisting — is present. The school should perhaps have spotted the danger signals when she was initially interviewed for the job:
Mrs Aishah Azmi applied for a job as a bilingual teaching assistant at Headfield C of E Junior School in Dewsbury. She reportedly understood that she was to be interviewed only by a woman member of the school's management. She went into the interview without the veil (or niqab) she usually wore as an outward sign of her devout observance of the Muslim faith, wearing it in the presence of adult males. After a few minutes, the male head teacher entered the room, and Mrs Azmi apparently pulled the veil out of her bag and put it on. [Yorkshire Post, 17 Oct 06]
Here, surely, is the rub: not just that the veil implies separateness (as Tony Blair remarked in his much criticised comment on the case), although it does, nor that it must hinder the teaching of children when they can't see their teacher's facial expressions as vital back-up to what she is saying, although it does that too, nor that the spectacle of an adult wearing a voluminous tent-like gown from head to foot with only a slit for eyes must be deeply frightening to many non-Muslim children, although it would have scared at least one of my children half to death. The really objectionable feature of the niqab, as practised by Mrs Azmi and, one assumes, other niqab-wearers, is that it's worn only in the presence of men, with dire and quite unacceptable implications regarding the wearer's attitude to relations between men and women in a free society. The woman who covers her face (as well as her hair and anything revealing the shape of her body) lest a male should see them, but who is happy for any of these gender-specific items to be seen by other women and by children, is proclaiming her fear that the revelation of her gender to a man, any man, is liable to madden him with lust and drive him to sexual assault. She is saying that a non-sexual relationship between a man and a woman is impossible, because of the inescapably magnetic sexual attraction of women, all women, and the animal inability of men, all men, to resist or control their aggressive sexual instincts. Such propositions are wholly incompatible with the mores of a civilised society and we should not be afraid to say so. They display an attitude which insults all women almost as much as it insults all men.
That the niqab culture reflects a woman's fear of all men was disingenuously confirmed by some remarks quoted in a report in today's Times:
Hushna Begum, 31, wears a veil similar to Ms Azmi’s, with just her eyes showing through a narrow slit. She told The Times, however, that she thought nothing of taking it off in front of male clients while working as an interpreter.
"I have worn a full veil for about ten years, but when I was working as an interpreter I didn’t wear it, I just took it off,” she said. “Our religion is not that strict, so wearing a veil is a personal decision, but I think everyone has the right to wear it. I always wear mine outside because it makes me feel protected from men, not just white men, but all men. But when I was working as an interpreter taking if off just seemed to be the right thing to do.” [My emphasis -- BLB]
Of course no-one seriously suggests that the niqab should be legally banned in Britain, or indeed anywhere else. People should no more be prevented from appearing in public in this particular distinctive form of dress than they should be prevented from shopping in Sainsburys dressed as the Queen of Sheba or even as Lady Godiva — even women. But no-one should be allowed to insist on wearing a costume that prevents him- or herself from doing the job for which they are employed and paid, as the niqab obviously does in the case of teachers or their assistants; and those who exercise their freedom to wear the niqab in other circumstances should be left in no doubt that the attitudes towards inter-gender relations that it implies are unacceptable to the great majority of their fellow-citizens and incompatible with full participation in British society.
Tailpiece: It hasn't been sufficiently noticed that the school which employed Mrs Azmi is a Church of England school. Would a Muslim school in Britain have employed a Christian woman who insisted on wearing a prominent crucifix in and out of the classroom? I merely pose the question, to which (for all I know) the answer might be "Yes, why not?".
Update, pm 21 Oct 06: Phil of Existing Actually makes a very similar point, supported by an extraordinarily revealing letter published in the Independent on 20 October.
Brian
In today's (17 Oct 06) Times, Martin Narey replies to criticism of his performance as head of the Prison Service at the time of a riot at Lincoln jail in 2002. The criticism is made by the then home secretary, David Blunkett, in his diary ("The Blunkett Tapes"), shortly to be published in book form and recently serialised all over the newspapers and on radio and television. Narey's blistering attack on Blunkett, more damaging and revealing than anything similar than I can remember in the case of a still active politician, is absolutely essential reading.
Blunkett has already categorically denied that he spoke and behaved in the way described by Narey. But on the BBC Radio's Today programme this morning, Narey said that although he hadn't kept a diary, on this occasion he had made full notes of the telephone conversation at the time, that he had given an account of it to the then Permanent Secretary at the home office, and that he had spoken subsequently to Blunkett's private secretary about it (to warn that if Blunkett really wanted the army called in to deal with the prison riot and was really prepared to contemplate the use of machine-guns with the attendant likelihood of loss of life, he would first have to find a new head of the Prison Service). Narey also said that two (three?) prison governors had been with him when he was talking to Blunkett on the telephone and that they would vouch for Narey's account of his end of the conversation and of his immediate reactions.
It seems to me almost inconceivable that Narey would have risked publishing an exaggerated or downright false account of Blunkett's behaviour and words on this occasion without being able to cite corroboration in his contemporaneous record of them and the evidence of those to whom he spoke at the time. Presumably Blunkett's private secretary at the time would also have been listening in and could be expected to challenge Narey's account if it had been incorrect. On the balance of probabilities, if not proven beyond reasonable doubt, and unless fresh evidence emerges to the contrary, it seems impossible not to believe Narey's story or to disbelieve Blunkett's denial.
The Blunkett Tapes in any case amount to implied corroboration of Nary's charges. They portray a man prone to violent losses of temper, to intemperate and often obviously unwarranted attacks on his own officials, to vicious (and subsequently regretted) ciriticisms of his ministerial and other party colleagues, to extreme bouts of cloying sentimentality and self-pity, to chaotic and irresponsible misbehaviour in his private life, to a careless disregard for the basic principles of civil liberties and the functions of the judiciary, to other major lapses of judgement, to a virulent form of populism that time and again put placating the right-wing tabloid press above all other factors in determining policy, to an attitude to the prime minister verging on the obsequious, and to the delusion that unquestioning loyalty to Tony Blair should invariably override any obligation to address the rights and wrongs of any particular issue, including most conspicuously Iraq. That Blunkett should have imagined for one second that publication of these diaries, even with all the hindsight and retrospective editing to which he has subjected them, could rescue his reputation from ruin, is the ultimate demonstration of the delusional state that he inhabits. It is tragic that he evidently lacked even one trusted friend willing to brave his wrath by telling him not to dream for a moment of publishing his tapes, but rather to burn them.
It's impossible not to feel sympathy and even admiration for a man who overcame such disability and such difficult home circumstances to rise so close to the top of the political greasy pole, but who then saw his career ruined by his own excesses and defects. This is the real stuff of tragedy. David Blunkett describes vividly in the diaries the physical and mental toll that his achievements took on him: how he sometimes felt he was going mad, or suffering from clinical depression; the exhaustion and the loneliness. His successes seem to have been won at the cost of an unbending belief in his own rectitude and judgement, however damning the frequent evidence to the contrary. As a result he continually reopens his own old wounds in the doomed attempt at self-justification, even over behaviour and events which manifestly condemn him.
The question has to be asked: how did a man so irremediably flawed in character, judgement and behaviour come to be appointed a minister, when his crippling defects must have been known to the prime minister, other political colleagues, senior officials, and many others? Once appointed, how and why was he kept in office long after his unsuitability for it had become obvious? When forced by his own folly to resign, what on earth possessed the prime minister to re-appoint him to Cabinet rank within just a few months? Did Blair really tell Blunkett, as alleged in the diary, that re-appointment as a Cabinet minister would be "therapeutic" for him?
Tony Blair has some explaining to do, on this as on rather a lot of other issues.
Update (18 October): Today's Times carries impressive support for Martin Narey's account of the responses to the Lincoln prison riot, and further calls into question David Blunkett's self-serving version of events:
Extracts from a letter by Richard Childs, former Chief Constable of Lincolnshire Police, on David Blunkett
“I have read conflicting accounts of the way David Blunkett and Martin Narey behaved on the night of the riot at Lincoln . . .
“As I was there on the ground, I am qualified to give a view about how the Prison Service and Martin Narey behaved. My officers were, after all, containing the situation whilst the Prison Service made its decisions. Had there been any ‘dithering’ I would have been the first to be aware of it and forced to act.
“There was no dithering . . . the only way to resolve the ‘crisis’ was in the way in which Martin Narey and Phil Wheatley resolved it.
“Comparing the colourful recent past of Mr Blunkett and his repeated personal and professional ‘challenges’ with the measured, considered and mature approach I saw in Martin Narey and his senior and junior colleagues at a time of high drama, I know whose version of events I accept. In addition, I know who I would prefer to be in charge at a time of ‘crisis’ — and it certainly is not David Blunkett.”
The Times quotes other participants in events described in Blunkett's diary as contradicting the Blunkett version of them and rejecting his harsh criticisms of the way others conducted themselves at the time. For example, –
Mike Granatt[,the former head of the Government’s information service], who was at the heart of the Government’s unit for dealing with civil crises, is the second former top civil servant to question Mr Blunkett’s version of events in Whitehall. Mr Blunkett describes in his diaries a meeting at Downing Street in February 2003 to assess the threat of an attack on Heathrow at which he raised a series of questions. He also describes a meeting in January 2003 involving Special Branch and MI5 about an alleged ricin plot at which he said people were in a “right old panic”. But Mr Granatt, who attended both meetings, said last night: “I simply don’t recognise what he is talking about.” Mr Granatt added: “He rationalised everything into, ‘He was the only one who was right’. It is interesting that eventually we did exactly what he argued against.”
And a senior Cabinet minister is quoted as saying that he fully accepted Narey's account of Blunkett's behaviour over the Lincoln prison riots:
[He]said that they [sic] fully accepted Mr Narey’s account, which rang true given Mr Blunkett’s inclination to panic in tight situations.
And this man was home secretary.
Brian
Q. What's the connection between (1) the public comments on Iraq policy by General Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, and (2) the television comedy drama "The Amazing Mrs Pritchard" in which a lively supermarket manager finds herself (without at any stage really intending it) standing for parliament, heading a new political party, winning her seat and becoming prime minister?
A. The response to both reflects a deep-seated mistrust of professional politicians of all parties, and of party politics. This is entirely understandable after the lamentable performances of the leaders of both our main political parties in recent years, up to and including the present. But it is deeply dangerous, and should be sending up alarm flares.
General Dannatt's Daily Mail and Today Programme interviews have prompted much editorial and commentariat approval as an honest assessment that most of us believe to be accurate: that our military presence in Iraq (having been established not by invitation but by our having 'kicked the door in') is not welcome, that it is part of the problem rather than of the solution, that it didn't cause but does exacerbate the violence, and that we should withdraw very soon. Amen to all that!
But many of those who agree with the analysis are also pointing out that a senior serving officer who publicly challenges the declared policies of the elected government of the day commits a serious breach of a fundamental constitutional principle. In a democracy, the elected government is entitled to the obedience and discretion of all its public servants, both civilian and military. Ministers need to heed, but not necessarily to comply with, the warnings and recommendations of its officers and civil servants, who in turn have a duty to give frank and uninhibited advice based on their professional skills and experience even, indeed especially, when they know that their advice will be unwelcome. This continuous flow and counter-flow of advice and response between officials (military and civilian) and ministers can't, though, be conducted publicly, mainly because the likelihood of publication has a fatally inhibiting effect on what both officials and ministers will feel free to say to each other, but also because public knowledge that senior officers or civil servants have expressed disagreement or reservations about a particular government policy constrains the government's freedom to pursue that policy if ministers so decide (as they must be constitutionally free to do) notwithstanding officials' disagreement.
The implication of this doctrine for officials is clear. They must be free to give their political masters frank advice in private without fear of adverse consequences for their future careers or influence with ministers. They are entitled to know that their advice is properly considered. But the opinions of unelected officials, however sage, can't override the policies of their elected masters. The duty of the official whose advice has been considered but rejected by ministers is to accept their decision and to do everything possible to ensure its successful implementation (and public defence). If the official feels so strongly that government policy is misguided, unjust, fraudulent, or immoral that he can't in conscience participate in its implementation, then he may either seek a transfer to another area of government, or else resign. (Even after a resignation there will be constraints on the former official's freedom to go public with his views where this may entail publication of classified information whose disclosure may damage the public interest. But that raises several different issues.)
It follows inexorably that General Dannatt was wholly out of order in going public with his opinions in the way he did: he should have resigned if he feels unable to carry out government policies with which he so strongly disagrees, and if he won't resign, he should be dismissed. It is a measure of the weakness of the government that the prime minister clearly feels unable to sack the erring general for fear of the storm of protest that would break out if he did so. "How could Blair sack him for telling the truth?", a Daily Mail lady journalist asked plaintively in a television programme this morning. It's because so many innocent people in and out of politics would ask just such a wrong-headed question, and because there's such widespread agreement with the General's views, that the prime minister couldn't indeed fire the General, and was forced back into the humiliating strategy of pretending, however implausibly, that he entirely agreed with everything the General had said. Many British people have come to trust an army General's analysis of the crisis more readily than that of their elected prime minister. We may still be grateful, all these years later, that President Truman was not similarly inhibited by fear of popular outrage from dismissing General MacArthur in 1951 despite that General's enormous status as a hero of the second world war.
"The Amazing Mrs Pritchard" depends on the same assumptions about most people's deep distrust of professional politicians and their instinctive preference to listen instead to those outside the political establishment. The idea that an apolitical supermarket manager could run for election to parliament, found her own new political party, win the election on a tsunami of popular enthusiasm, and form a government, all in the course of a single election campaign, is of course far-fetched: only the extraordinary talents and 
charisma of the magnificent Jane Horrocks make you half-believe in the fairy tale while she is on-screen. But there's a significant underlying message — that an honest and ordinary citizen, untarnished by the deceipts and compromises of the party system, just might attract sufficient popular support for a brave challenge to the politicians to sweep her (or, much less likely, him?) into power. And a less scrupulous populist leader than Ms Horrocks's Mrs Pritchard might prove more difficult to sweep out of power than it was to sweep her into it.
So there's a question to be answered: has public distrust of politicians of all parties sunk so low that there might be broad popular acceptance of the hi-jacking of policy-making by unelected generals, perhaps retrospectively sanctified by a sufficiently charismatic general being democratically elected as head of a political party, either new or already established? We have been protected from any such perversion of democracy hitherto by the professionalism and commitment to democratic principles of our senior military leaders: but how firmly committed to those principles does General Dannatt seem to be, judging by his actions last week? Of course I am not suggesting that he himself harbours personal political ambitions; but once the principle is breached with impunity, as it has just been breached, others less scrupulous may be encouraged to exploit the precedent.
On the whole I would prefer to see a supermarket manager in No. 10 rather than a General, especially if the supermarket manager is anything like Jane Horrocks, and despite the grim precedent set when a grocer's daughter did actually govern us from Downing street for more than a decade. But a decent democracy requires that power be exercised by men and women who have been tried, tested and honed in the heat of the political kitchen, whose views and foibles and limitations we know, whose innate honesty we believe in, and who demonstrate that we trust them by winning election within, not from outside, the political system. In short, by politicians, alas.
Brian
As New Labour steers further and further to starboard, 'Dave' Cameron's Cameroonian New Tories steer ever more recklessly to port (as many media commentators have been pointing out in the backwash of the party conferences). There is no better demonstration of this than a comparison between the party conference speeches of the incumbent home secretary, "Dr" John Reid, and his New Tory opposite number, shadow home secretary David Davis.
There's a double irony here: Davis was the original odds-on favourite to succeed Michael Howard as Conservative Party leader and standard-bearer of the Tory Right, until his speech at the Tory selection conference fell flat (actually it wasn't at all bad) and young fresh-faced Dave Cameron surged into both the lead and the leadership, from a position on what passes in the Tory Party as the left. David Davis is evidently a fast learner: amid the traditional Tory stuff about crime in his conference speech there's a genuinely liberal, reformist passage about the need to reduce re-offending by tackling the lack of education and skills training in prisons, by getting prisoners off drug and alcohol dependency, and by ensuring that they maintain their links with their families while in prison and that they have homes and jobs to go to when they come out.
Compare those impeccable and enlightened sentiments — requiring considerable courage in the context of a speech to a Conservative Party conference — with Reid's threadbare, populist rants:
…the public want to see more fairness in our approach to law and order. People want to know that the government is on the side of the victim, not protecting the criminal. That's fine by me, because it's this party, and has always been this party, that's on the side of the decent, hard-working majority in our country. Why? Because we believe in rights balanced by responsibilities… And why shouldn't violent offenders pay towards the healthcare costs of their victims? … And let's be clear. It cannot be right that the rights of an individual suspected terrorist be placed above the rights, life and limb of the British people. It's wrong. Full stop. No ifs. No buts. It's just plain wrong.
(Note the slippery way in which Reid implicitly equates a terrorist suspect with a terrorist: and contrasts him with "the British people" and their rights, as if a person suspected of 
involvement in terrorism, perhaps mistakenly, perhaps despite being entirely innocent, is not one of the British people with rights that are vital to his ability to clear his name by due process. Chipping away at our civil rights doesn't tip the balance in favour of ordinary people: it tips the balance against all of us.)
Postscript: I have been asked recently in a personal message why I put inverted commas (known to the less fortunate as 'quotes') round John Reid's preferred handle, "Dr". It's because while Reid has a perfectly respectable PhD in economic history from Stirling University, in my experience the widely observed convention is that holders of PhDs, other than the exceptionally vain, don't use the handle "Dr" unless they are either medical doctors or else professional academics. PhDs are two a penny in politics and many other walks of life, and it would devalue the currency if they all started to call themselves 'Dr'.
The other reason for those inverted commas is that in my view John Reid is an illiberal, authoritarian, reactionary, and intellectually illiterate bully. I know, I know, that's not a valid reason. But it goes against the grain to bestow a title indicating possession of a doctorate of philosophy, and thus a degree of intellectual distinction, on such a person as Dr John Reid. OK, he's entitled to it. And I never got beyond a BA (and a 2:2 at that!). So you can, if you wish, attribute those inverted commas to envy. But please read those two party conference speeches and ask yourself whether, if you didn't know who had made which speech, you would be able to tell which was from a Labour front-bench MP and which from his Tory opposite number. And which was delivered by a Doctor of Philosophy.
(And now young Mr Cameron announces that he is running as the champion of the National Health Service, even as Ms Patricia Hewitt for New Labour applies her little axe to its roots. Truly the times they are a-changin'.)
Brian
