Brian Barder's blog

With the aim of assisting the Chilcot Inquiry with its preparations for questioning Tony Blair about how he led us into war with Iraq, I have put some key texts on my website — at

http://www.barder.com/tony-blair-and-iraq-some-texts

– in the hope that the questions arising from them won’t be overlooked.

I have also sent them to the Inquiry from its excellent website — where, incidentally, you can watch its proceedings, live, in streaming video (and watch a recording of the day’s proceedings after they have finished).

There are of course many other equally damning texts on the public record, but I think we can rely on the Inquiry’s secretariat to have assembled them for the Inquiry’s members already.

Update (27 November 2009): We are now getting some striking revelations in, especially, the oral evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry yesterday by Sir Christopher Meyer and today by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, plus Greenstock’s written submission to the Inquiry, transcripts of all of which are now available on the Inquiry’s website (http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/).  Meyer was of course British ambassador in Washington and Greenstock UK ambassador to the UN at the critical times.  All this will repay careful reading and analysis.  Meanwhile ‘Lavengro in Spain’ corrects an extraordinary howler by the BBC in a post on his blog here, to which I have added some further preliminary comments relating to the Greenstock evidence.  Please also see J’s comment, below, on this post and my response to it.

Brian

The EU’s appointments of the Belgian prime minister Herman van Rompuy (what comical names these foreigners do have![1]) as permanent Chairman (“President”) of the European Council, and (subject to the approval of the European parliament) of the EU’s (British) Commissioner for Trade, Baroness (Cathy) Ashton, as High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, are both, on the evidence, imaginative and sound.  Van Rompuy has a solid reputation for his skill in negotiating compromises and accommodations between the warring Flemish and Walloon communities in Belgium, exactly the skill required for steering the 27 egos of the European Council towards the compromises and accommodations that are essential if the Union is to speak with one voice on deeply controversial and divisive issues.  Moreover van Rompuy’s low-profile and unassuming manner is an asset if the 27 heads of state and government who comprise the Council are not to feel their status as elected national leaders threatened by a more flamboyant and assertive Chairman with ambitions to cut a figure on the world stage.  Cathy Ashton has won golden opinions, respect and even affection in Brussels and beyond during her year as EU Commissioner for Trade, one of the most demanding jobs in Europe.  The opportunities for identifiable personal triumphs in that role are naturally limited — much of the work is dismayingly technical and has to be conducted discreetly behind closed doors, and success often depends on the decisions of foreign governments over which the Commissioner has no control — but despite this she already, in just 14 months, has a respectable list of achievements to her name.  Her unprepared statement on her new appointment struck exactly the right note of firmness, efficiency and modesty.

But true to form, the UK media have excelled themselves in sneering dismissal of the two appointments.  Here is the Daily Mail:

Herman Van Rompuy is the ‘shrewd master of the shabby compromise’
Belgium’s Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy has been named new EU president.  Devoid of patriotism and contemptuous of democracy, Herman Van Rompuy perfectly embodies the culture of the EU.  His sole political ideal is the creation of a federal superstate, destroying national identities across Europe.
Daily Mail, 20th November 2009
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229670/Herman-Van-Rompuy-shrewd-master-shabby-compromise.html

And:

The EU stitch-up: Low-profile Labour crony made foreign minister so fanatical Belgian federalist can be President

The Daily Express:

£32,000 A YEAR EU BOSS NOBODY WANTED

The Times:

A Belgian federalist and a former chairwoman of Hertfordshire Health Authority were ushered into Europe’s two grandest jobs last night as it stumbled on to the world stage.

[Hat-tip: Thoughts of Nigel blog]

Even the generally pro-Europe Guardian could scarce forbear to sneer:

The great EU stitch-up
Little-known Briton gets foreign job
From obscurity to the most powerful woman in UK

– shouted the lead story on the front page of the print edition, although interestingly the headline was changed in the online version to a more sober “Herman Van Rompuy and Lady Ashton chosen to lead EU“, no doubt amended when Alan Rusbridger choked on his cornflakes over the ‘great EU stitch-up’ headline.

There’s no mystery about these dreary media distortions.  Most of our print media are hysterically Europhobic, and incapable of printing anything positive or even straightforwardly factual about the EU.  For months they have been building up the notion that Tony Blair was in with a chance for European Council ‘President’, when anyone with an ounce of political nous knew very well that such an idea was beyond satire.  So the appointment of a Belgian with a funny name had to be represented as a snub to Britain, and Lady Ashton’s appointment as apologetic compensation.  Even worse, the fatuous idea that Blair might be appointed encouraged a gross misrepresentation of the job as “President of Europe”, misreading ‘President’ to imply an executive President, to be on a par with President Obama and the President of China, instead of the title of President being merely the French for ‘Chairman’.  Sweden, as current EU Presidency, circulated a paper to the Council before the appointments were discussed and agreed, designed to stress that the principal function of the President would be to chair, steer and manage the meetings of the European Council.  Clearly Tony Blair’s ambition was a good deal grander than that.

Two other distortions are worth noting.  Almost all UK media coverage has harped on the ‘obscurity’ of the two appointees, sneering that no-one had ever heard of them.  It’s of course true that neither van Rompuy nor Cathy Ashton are household names in Britain, or even probably elsewhere in Europe.  But this trumpeted obscurity is partly a function of the failure of the UK media to report day-to-day news of the EU or of individual continental European countries unless they either touch on some argument with Britain, or make the mainland Europeans concerned look ridiculous and therefore funny, or demonstrate the rottenness of the EU and the general incompetence of foreigners.  Van Rompuy after all has been prime minister of Belgium since 30 December 2008 at a time when a close European neighbour and host to the EU’s institutions has been passing through a major constitutional and political crisis; Lady Ashton has for more than a year occupied one of the most demanding and difficult positions in the whole EU with considerable flair and success, and was formerly a member of the UK Cabinet and Leader of the House of Lords who steered the controversial Lisbon Treaty through the House of Lords with conspicuous skill.  It’s true that she is a former Chair of Hertfordshire Health Authority: but then it’s not so long ago that Barack Obama was a community organiser in Chicago, a more obscure position than almost anything Lady Ashton has ever done.  Nor has Cathy Ashton’s work in UK politics gone unrecognised:  in 2005 she was voted “Minister of the Year” by the parliamentarians’ own house organ, The House Magazine, and “Peer of the Year” by Channel 4.  In 2006 she won the “Politician of the Year” award at the annual Stonewall Awards, awarded to those that have made a positive impact on the lives of British LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) people.  (A wonder the Daily Mail hasn’t yet picked that one up as fodder for another sneer.)  In several of her UK ministerial jobs and especially as EU trade commissioner, she has acquired quite extensive experience of international negotiations, useful preparation for her new role.

But the other distortion is more significant.  The consultation process within the European Council leading up to the unanimous agreement on the two appointments has been widely denounced by our media as a ‘stitch-up’, seamy horse-trading, and worse.  Those proclaiming the greatest outrage over the process have tended to be the loudest opponents of so-called EU ‘federalism’, term misused to mean a propensity for the EU to turn itself into a single centralised supra-national super-state.  Some have even denounced the appointments as undemocratic because we, the people of Europe, were denied the opportunity to vote on who should hold these important posts.  Yet if there had been any question of holding Europe-wide elections to the posts of “President of Europe” and “Europe’s Foreign Minister” (to adopt the media’s nursery-language abbreviations) , that would unquestionably have prompted a storm of Europhobic invective at this new evidence of Britain being dragged unwillingly into a European super-state.  A European Council President (and to an only slightly lesser extent a High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) with the unique authority derived from having been elected from right across Europe would have outshone the 27 nationally elected heads of state and government who at present exercise overall control of the Union’s affairs, and are responsible each to his or her national parliament and electorate for what they do.  Direct election to the Council Presidency would indeed have marked a decisive step towards a supra-national sovereign EU.  But our Europhobic newspaper proprietors and their obedient leader-writers had no qualms, apparently, about using even this as a stick with which to beat the leaders of our continent and the union of independent sovereign states to which we belong — just.

One feature of the appointment procedures which has attracted special opprobrium as constituting a ‘stitch-up’ was the agreement between the minority left-of-centre Social Democratic grouping in the EU and the right-of-centre Conservative grouping to which the German Chancellor and the French President both belong, and which has a majority in the European parliament, that the Council of Europe’s new President should be from the latter grouping and the new High Representative from the former.  Nothing wrong with that, in fact:  we don’t complain when the party with a majority in the house of commons insists that one of its own number should have the job of prime minister.  The idea that this understanding was designed to disqualify Blair, supposedly left-of-centre (don’t laugh), from the President job, is far-fetched:  Blair never even got to the starting blocks.  But it does highlight the utter folly of the British Conservatives in resigning from the majority right-of-centre grouping in Europe and forming instead a new grouping comprising a rag-bag of assorted misfits of the (mainly) far right.  (For more on this theme, and other aspects of it, see the informative post by Lavengro here.)

Tailpiece:  Returning for a moment to the richly comic Blair bid for “the Presidency of Europe” (not):  I described in an earlier post on this blog (here) my abortive attempt to persuade the Guardian to correct its erroneous descriptions of Mr Blair’s middle east job as “Middle East peace envoy” in one place and “UN envoy in the Middle East” in another, when in fact he is neither.  In its eventual, long-delayed reply, the Guardian admitted that “UN envoy” was wrong, but tried to argue that “peace envoy” was a defensible description, and accordingly declined to publish a correction.  In my response to this I cited conclusive evidence that the Quartet, which had appointed Blair, had been at pains to ensure that he was kept well away from the peace process, on which the United States took the lead.  Predictably, perhaps, the Guardian has ignored this;  anyway, by now it’s oldish hat.  But in the wildly improbable event of Blair having being taken seriously as a candidate for European Council  President, the extent and character of his middle east appointment could have assumed some significance.  I will put the evidence for the limited scope of Mr Blair’s middle east job in a further post on this blog soon.  Watch this space.

[1] For the avoidance of doubt, and in view of an anxious enquiry from an old friend, I apparently need to point out that my reference to the “funny names” that some foreigners have is a dig at the chauvinists of the Sun and other tabloids who entertain their readers by making jokes of foreign-sounding names, apparently unaware of how comical many of us (often including our names) seem to foreigners.

Brian

In an eloquent article on Our Kingdom, David Marquand, the academic, former Labour MP and later chief adviser (1977-78) to Roy Jenkins as President of the European Commission, laments that the Britain he’s proud of, the Britain that “stood alone against Nazi Germany for twelve long months”, that welcomed foreign exiles and was a beacon of free speech and peaceful protest, no longer exists.  Despite having consistently supported UK membership of the European Union, Mr Marquand is –

now getting more and more favourable to a referendum – not on the Lisbon Treaty, which is a side issue, but on the one question that really matters: in or out? I’m pretty sure that the Europhobes would lose, just as they did in 1975, but even if they won there would be a silver lining. British secession from the EU would be a disaster for Britain, but it would be a good thing for Europe. Its progress towards federalism would still be slow and halting, but at least the UK would no longer be there, throwing spanners in the works at every opportunity. And – a bigger bonus – the UK would probably break up. Scotland and (probably) Wales would not want to leave their continent, even if England did. I’ve always been against the break-up of Britain, championed so brilliantly by Tom Nairn, but I’m increasingly coming to feel that it offers Wales, where I was born, and Scotland, where both my grandmothers were born, their best hope of escape from the deadly UK mixture of authoritarian illiberalism, gross inequality and small-minded insularity.

It’s a tempting idea, but the temptation needs to be resisted:  unless it’s a rhetorical trope, it’s a death wish.  I have posted this comment on David Marquand’s article:

“I’m proud to be European as well as British and English and a Londoner.  It’s obvious to me that Britain’s future lies either in Europe or else in rapid decline and obscurity.  The ravings of the Europhobes are incomprehensible: why should anyone take seriously the paranoid xenophobic lies of the Sun, the Murdoch press and the Conservative party?  The prospect of at least five and possibly ten years of a Tory government under Cameron and Hague, oscillating between Europhobia and Euroscepticism, constantly dragging its feet in Brussels, constantly whingeing about wanting to claw back its ‘right’ to treat British workers worse than anyone else in Europe, constantly trying to extract petty chauvinist advantage by blackmailing our European partners with the threat of an obstructive veto, constantly blaming every national failure on Europe, constantly undermining our standing in Washington and the rest of the world by puerile displays of vindictiveness and disloyalty in Brussels — doesn’t that prospect depress you?

“If it does, then I can see how the idea of an In/Out referendum, almost certainly in my view resulting in the UK’s withdrawal (or expulsion) from the European Union (“It was The Sun Wot Won It“), might have a kind of masochistic attraction.  As Marquand rightly says, it would be a disaster for Britain.  If it led to the disintegration of the United Kingdom, with Scotland and perhaps Wales seceding and rejoining the EU, (and Northern Ireland probably joining the Republic of Ireland), leaving England to sink without trace, it would be not just a disaster but a catastrophe.  But the luxury of being able to tell the swivel-eyed Europhobes and Eurosceptics that it served them right, and would teach them a salutary lesson, would be pitifully small compensation for seeing our once proud country swirl relentlessly down the drain.

“If we must have a referendum on UK membership of the EU, let it be preceded by a period of several years in which an enlightened British government awakens from its torpor and starts to play an active and constructive role in Europe, not fatuously claiming a “leadership” role (who else in Europe these days accepts Britain as a leader?) but engaging seriously and whole-heartedly with the French and the Germans and the Poles and Spanish to put yet more flesh on the bones of the great European idea, to develop its benign identity in world affairs and to help it to play as effective a role in tackling the world’s horrendous problems as the United States, Russia, India, China and Brazil.  Before we hold this referendum, let’s have a government that shouts from the rooftops that as partners in Europe we’re part of an exciting and imaginative enterprise of a kind never seen before, a new kind of partnership among sovereign states which transcends nationality yet preserves and safeguards all that’s best in national identity.  Before that referendum, let’s have a government that recites five times every day before breakfast the enormous benefits that flow to our economy, our culture and our way of life from our European membership card.  Let’s see a great national crusade to expose and kill with ridicule the tawdry lies and psychotic scaremongering and Europhobic ranting of the tabloids and their Eurosceptic groupies.  Only then, when national awareness of what’s at stake has been raised to a moderately mature and adult level, can we dare to risk that referendum.  Until then, it would be a form of national suicide, a victory for ignorance, prejudice, chauvinism, xenophobia, cowardice and a shameful failure of vision.  For all our shortcomings and failures of courage and optimism, we surely don’t deserve that.  It’s far too early for us Europeans to surrender to defeatism.

“And, by the way, what is this plucky little Britain that “stood alone against Nazi Germany for twelve long months”?  Better ask the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the South Africans, the Free Poles, the Indians, the East and West Africans and the West Indians, the Free French, and a host of other tough and welcome allies.  I bet their memories won’t be as short and flaky as ours seem to be.  It’s fashionable and politically correct now to sneer at the Empire.  I’m old enought to remember, though, that we weren’t sneering at the Empire in 1940.  How shaming that it’s now their turn to sneer at us!”

Brian

Last month I submitted a letter to the Guardian pointing out that the same day’s issue had wrongly described Tony Blair’s job in the middle east as that of ‘peace envoy’.  What happened next is described in a further email which I subsequently sent to the Guardian‘s letters editor and ‘readers’ editor’, and on which comment is superfluous.  Unsurprisingly, I have had no reply from the Guardian to either message, and the Guardian has, so far as I can see, published no correction to either of its published errors.  I wrote as follows:

FOR THE GUARDIAN LETTERS EDITOR FROM BRIAN BARDER

Yesterday I submitted to you a letter for publication (copy below) pointing out that George Monbiot, in his article in yesterday’s Guardian, had wrongly described Tony Blair as the “Middle East peace envoy” whereas the Quartet’s statement of his appointment, which I quoted, showed that his mandate was to encourage foreign investment in Palestine and related matters — nothing to do with the ‘peace’ process.

You haven’t published my letter in today’s Guardian, as of course is your right, and I don’t complain about that.  But instead you have published a letter from a Jonathan Smith which describes Mr Blair as “UN envoy in the Middle East” and accuses him of not understanding “that the basic requirement for a mediator is a transparent neutrality…”, etc.  Had you published my own letter, it would have been clear that Mr Blair is the envoy of the Quartet, not of the UN, and that he is not in any sense a ‘mediator’.  Thus a large part of Mr Jonathan Smith’s letter is beside the point, being based on mistaken assumptions about Tony Blair’s role.  I am baffled by your choice of such an obviously flawed letter for publication, especially as you had the origin and exact text of Blair’s terms of reference in front of you in the letter which I had submitted, but which you chose not to publish.  (Perhaps you chose not to read it, either?)

I hope that you or the Readers’ Editor, to whom I am copying this, will now publish in the Corrections and Clarifications column corrections to George Monbiot’s reference yesterday to Tony Blair as a ‘peace envoy’ and to Jonathan Smith’s letter’s references to him as a ‘UN envoy’ and a ‘mediator’, since all three descriptions are wrong and misleading.  The fact that the ‘peace envoy’ error is so common right across the media surely makes a correction all the more desirable, especially as it has a bearing on current discussion of Mr Blair’s candidature for President of the EU Council of Ministers?

I may put a copy of this message on my blog for the amusement of its readers, but I’ll defer doing so until either I have your response, or else the errors concerned are corrected in the Guardian’s Corrections column, in which case I’ll acknowledge that in my blog.

Regards
Brian Barder
28 Oct 09
[Address etc. supplied]

2009/10/27 From Brian Barder

Text of letter submitted yesterday but not published

To the Guardian Letters Editor from Sir Brian Barder
[I submit the following letter for publication.  I am not submitting it for publication to anyone else.]

Sir,
I enjoyed George Monbiot’s proposals for Tony Blair’s future (Making this ruthless liar EU president is a crazy plan. But I’ll be backing Blair, October 27), but was sorry that Monbiot joined the many commentators who erroneously describe Blair as the “Middle East peace envoy”.  According to the statement of June 27, 2007 by the Quartet — the US, Russia, the EU, and the UN — on Blair’s appointment,   “As Quartet Representative, he will:

• Mobilize international assistance to the Palestinians, working closely with donors and existing coordination bodies;
• Help to identify, and secure appropriate international support in addressing, the institutional governance needs of the Palestinian state, focusing as a matter of urgency on the rule of law;
• Develop plans to promote Palestinian economic development, including private sector partnerships, building on previously agreed frameworks, especially concerning access and movement; and
• Liaise with other countries as appropriate in support of the agreed Quartet objectives.”

How much if any success Mr Blair has achieved in these challenging but specific tasks since June 2007 I don’t know, but  as the Americans stressed publicly at the time, it’s a strictly limited mandate almost entirely unconnected with the peace process — just as it’s a bit of an exaggeration to describe as “President of Europe” an appointment as President (or more accurately in English, Chair or Chairperson) of the EU Council of Ministers, whoever gets the job.

Yours sincerely
Brian Barder
London SW18
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
27 October 2009

Anyway, just for the record, and whatever you may have read dozens of times in the newspapers,Tony Blair is not anyone’s middle east peace envoy.  Nor is he a UN middle east mediator.   And if common sense prevails, he isn’t going to be ‘President of Europe’, or even chairman of the EU Council of Ministers, either.  Once again the moral is:  don’t believe everything you read in the papers — especially what you read in newspapers that are too busy to correct their mistakes.

Brian