You [Gordon Brown] stressed right throughout this morning the importance to you of maintaining international order and international institutions in the world that we now live in. But we were in a situation, you as a Cabinet, were in a situation, of having to go to the House of Commons and ask them to support something for which we had not got the support of the United Nations Security Council? Wouldn’t it have been much better if we had been able to prolong the diplomacy until such time as we had got the support of the Security Council, thereby strengthening international institutions?

This followed a succession of replies by the prime minister in which he had repeatedly stressed that he, like the rest of the Cabinet in 2003 in the run-up to the war, had persisted right to the end in hoping that the problem of Iraqi defiance of the UN and of international law could be resolved by peaceful diplomacy (“the UN route”), thus averting the need for the use of force.  Gordon Brown had insisted that it was only at the last minute that it had become clear that diplomacy and the UN route had definitively failed, making it inevitable that the UK and US would have to go to war.

At this point Lyne put his lethal question.  The resulting exchange (in the format of the Inquiry’s website’s transcript, starting at page 57) is worth reading in full; indeed it’s worth saving to your hard disk, printing out, framing, and hanging above your desk:

17 SIR RODERIC LYNE: You stressed right throughout this
18 morning the importance to you of maintaining
19 international order and international institutions in
20 the world that we now live in. But we were in
21 a situation, you as a Cabinet, were in a situation, of
22 having to go to the House of Commons and ask them to
23 support something for which we had not got the support
24 of the United Nations Security Council?
25 Wouldn’t it have been much better if we had been

58

1 able to prolong the diplomacy until such time as we had
2 got the support of the Security Council, thereby
3 strengthening international institutions?

4 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: If there had been any chance that
5 the Security Council would have been prepared to come to
6 a decision based on its merits, within a few weeks’
7 time, I would have supported that, but countries had
8 made it clear that, irrespective of the merits, they
9 were determined not to enforce the will of the
10 international community.

11 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Which countries?

12 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: A number of countries were making
13 it clear that, irrespective of what actually the results
14 of the investigation were, that although the 1441 had
15 said that they were prepared to consider all necessary
16 measures –

17 SIR RODERIC LYNE: But which countries said that?

18 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: — they wouldn’t be prepared to do
19 so.

20 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Which countries said that?

21 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: I think it was being made clear by
22 a number of countries in the region, and I think France
23 and Germany was making that clear also.

24 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Germany wasn’t on the Security Council.
25 Are you really referring to France here?

59

1 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: Statements were made by
2 President Chirac which were very clear that he was not
3 prepared to support military action.

4 SIR RODERIC LYNE: At that time.

5 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: He was not prepared to support
6 military action and could give no indication that there
7 was a time when he would support military action.

8 SIR RODERIC LYNE: After he made his statement, didn’t the
9 French Government immediately contact Number 10, the
10 Foreign Office, the British Embassy in Paris to say that
11 the British Government was not interpreting his
12 statement in an accurate way?

13 RT HON GORDON BROWN MP: That may have happened, but, you
14 know, I wasn’t the Foreign Secretary or the
15 Prime Minister. The contacts that would be had with the
16 French would be through them.
17 What I knew is that there was very little chance on
18 our assessment that the diplomatic route could lead to
19 success if a number of countries were not in themselves
20 willing to consider the action that would flow from
21 that.
22 Look, I think you have got to understand — and
23 I know the Committee will want to look at this — we are
24 at the beginning of a new phase of the world community.
25 We were in a post-Cold War phase, where the tensions

60

1 between Russia and America are not the paradigm within
2 which people see what they should do as individual
3 states around the world.

Note the way Sir Rod Lyne ruthlessly forces the prime minister to admit that the crucial decision to abandon diplomacy, the UN route, and the UN weapons inspection, when the inspectors and the majority of members of the Security Council were asking for a few more weeks to enable the inspection to finish its work and reach a conclusion, the decision to give up on all that depended on the famous television interview given by Jacques Chirac, the then French President. British ministers chose perversely to misinterpret that interview as meaning that even if the inspectors reported that they had found WMD whose existence the Iraqis had denied, or that the Iraqis had definitively failed to cooperate with them, France would still use its veto to prevent any decision by the Security Council authorising the use of force.  In fact, as even the most superificial scrutiny of the transcript of the Chirac interview confirms, Chirac said the opposite:  that France was not a pacifist nation, and if Iraq was found at some point in the future to be in definite and irreversible further material breach of its obligations, France would accept the need for the use of force.  Sir Roderic Lyne here injects the new and even more lethal information that when British ministers decided to blame their decision to abandon the UN process and go to war on their misreading of the Chirac interview, the French government had urgently sought to tell them, in Paris and in London, that they were misinterpreting the interview.  Our ministers, however, ignored that crucial warning and have continued to this day — for example even in Gordon Brown’s testimony to Chilcot last week — to misinterpret the Chirac interview as in effect the sole justification for their disastrous, premature, reckless and criminal decision to go to war.

For a detailed analysis of what President Chirac actually said in his television interview, including key quotations from it, please see my exchange with Professor Geoffrey Warner in comments on an earlier post, at http://www.barder.com/2300#comment-91331.   It’s reassuring to be able to see from Sir R Lyne’s questioning that the Chilcot Inquiry is fully familiar with the rights and wrongs of this issue:  but it’s dismaying that our prime minister continues, at this late stage, to trot out this by now hopelessly discredited argument as the principal basis for the  fatal decision of the government of which he was a senior member to abandon diplomacy and resort to force, a decision which Gordon Brown is obliged to say he supported and that even now he continues to think was right.  But of course the reality is that he can’t say anything else.

One postscript:  none of the copious media coverage that I have seen picked up the exchanges quoted above as central to the whole debate on the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war.  No commentator that I’m aware of mentioned it as important or even interesting.  One account even sneered at the Chilcot team for its lack of forensic clout as demonstrated by its failure to follow up  the prime minister’s dodgier replies.  The Guardian editorial on the following day said:

Mr Brown began with an unambiguous declaration that the Iraq war was the right policy, embarked on for the right reasons. He then produced an answer for every question that the panel asked, not least the potentially tricky ones about defence spending during Mr Brown’s Treasury years.

Did the Guardian really think that what Mr Brown said in reply to Sir Rod Lyne’s questions quoted earlier amounted to answers?

The Sun-style headline that should have preceded a full account of Sir Roderic’s butchery of our head of government in any self-respecting newspaper would have consisted of one word:  “Gotcha!”

Brian

The UK print and electronic media have understandably picked up and played back some dramatic allegations in a BBC World Service programme first broadcast today (4 March 2010).   The World Service’s Africa editor has produced what appears to be persuasive evidence that during the 1980s civil war in Ethiopia much (or even most) of the famine relief aid channelled from Sudan across the border into the relatively tiny part of the country then controlled by the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was diverted to buy arms and ammunition for the rebel fighters then at war with the Ethiopian central government in Addis Ababa.

Unfortunately the advance publicity for the programme, and alas!, the programme itself, give the erroneous impression that the allegations refer to the enormous international relief operation mounted in the incomparably larger area of Ethiopia under government control — the operation to which massive contributions were made by numerous western and other governments (including Britain’s), UN relief agencies, other non-governmental organisations such as Oxfam and Save the Children, and Bob Geldof’s Live Aid.   Thousands of private citizens in Britain and around the world donated generously both by voluntary contributions to one or other of the relief agencies working in Ethiopia and also through their taxes.  Many of them will be distressed and angry to get the strong impression, as a result of the BBC programme and the publicity for it, that a large part of the money they gave was secretly diverted to buy guns and bullets for the rebel fighters of the TPLF.  In fact, though, nothing of the sort occurred.

The confusion arises from the failure of the World Service programme, and of its advance publicity, to make a clear distinction between (1) the vast international aid programme in Ethiopia proper, and (2) the much smaller, semi-clandestine programme of aid smuggled across the Ethiopian border from Sudan into the limited area controlled by the TPLF rebels.  The two programmes were completely separate.  Very few western governments risked the future of their aid programmes in Ethiopia proper, which could not have continued without Ethiopian government approval and cooperation, by trying also to channel aid to the TPLF rebels in the limited area they controlled.  A few ngo’s, mostly Catholic, did contrive to maintain programmes in both the TPLF area and Ethiopia proper;  some chose to concentrate on helping the TPLF-controlled areas only;  the vast majority opted to concentrate their programmes on Ethiopia proper where many more people faced the prospect of death by starvation.  At the time, and occasionally in the 25 years since, allegations have been made that some aid in the international operation was misused — not of course to buy arms for the TPLF, which by definition had no presence in Ethiopia proper, but by diverting aid from hungry civilians to the government’s soldiers, or by putting money into private pockets by selling on the markets food aid sent to be distributed free to starving people.  All such allegations were rigorously investigated at the time by the intensely scrupulous UN Assistant Secretary-General who co-ordinated and supervised the international relief effort, and virtually all of the specific allegations of diversion or misuse of aid were found to be without foundation.  I was the British ambassador to Ethiopia at the time (1982-86) and personally conducted some of the investigations on the UN Co-ordinator’s behalf, in collaboration with the then Canadian ambassador.  We were able on each occasion to identify the misunderstandings that had led to the unfounded allegations that had been made.  On the rare occasions when genuine abuse was detected, it was immediately stopped.

So the allegations unearthed by the World Service programme of diversion of relief aid to buy arms for the TPLF in fact refer only to the separate programme of relief aid sent to the TPLF rebels by a handful of government and non-government agencies for the relief of starvation in the area controlled by the TPLF.  What a pity, then, that the BBC World Service programme and its advance publicity give the strong impression that the allegations referred to the (almost wholly blameless) international relief programme in Ethiopia proper, when in fact they did not.   For example, the summary of the allegations at the very start of a BBC article about the allegations reads:

The BBC has uncovered evidence that the millions of dollars donated to the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine relief effort, went to buy weapons.

(Note that killer “the millions” – the word ‘the’ later deleted after I had complained of its false implication.)

Also:

BBC investigation reveals aid for Ethiopia’s famine was used to buy arms.
(World Service Africa home page)

The introduction to the recording of the whole programme on the BBC World Service website is even worse:

It was a charity appeal on a global scale. In 1985, an unprecedented array of performers took part in two marathon, televised concerts in Britain and the United States – all to raise money for a terrible famine in Ethiopia. And it worked. It’s thought the concerts eventually generated about two hundred and fifty million dollars in donations from the public. But now, evidence has emerged that the aid agencies charged with distributing that money, were hoodwinked: that millions of dollars were diverted to buy weapons for rebels in Ethiopia – and that the United States knew this was going on.

But it was not “that money” that is now alleged to have been diverted.

Similarly, an article by the maker of the programme started off:

Millions of dollars earmarked for victims of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 was siphoned off by rebels to buy weapons, a BBC investigation finds

which did at least make it clear that it was the rebels doing the siphoning-off, but seemed to imply that it was aid given to Ethiopia proper under the international famine relief programme that was being diverted, whereas in fact it was purely aid channelled to the TPLF through Sudan that was the subject of the allegations.  And, finally, the programme itself begins with a long introduction recalling the genesis of the big international famine relief effort (Michael Buerk’s famously evocative reports, Geldof and LiveAid, etc.), although all this is totally irrelevant to the allegations which formed the centre-piece of the programme that followed.  But the false association between the two separate relief programmes has been set up from the beginning, and you would have to listen very carefully indeed to realise by the end of the programme that there is actually no  association at all between them.

I can’t believe that the BBC World Service, renowned world-wide for its independence and reliability, has deliberately set out to convey the impression that almost the whole international relief effort in Ethiopia in the 1980s was shown by the programme’s allegations to have been corrupted by the wholesale diversion of aid to buy arms and ammunition, when in fact no such thing occurred. At least one of those making the allegations (and perhaps exaggerating them) was a former TPLF leader who had later fallen out with the TPLF and who may now have a personal motive for seeking to discredit it, especially as one of the principal TPLF rebel leaders of the 1980s is now the Ethiopian prime minister, still a controversial figure.  (That’s not to say that there can’t be any truth in the allegations:  only that there could be a political and personal motive for making them.)   A few doctrinaire journalists and others over the years have sought to show that the Ethiopian famine relief operation somehow did more harm than good and that all food aid is intrinsically harmful, even in situations where millions would starve without it;  but I know of no suggestion that any of these had any influence on this particular BBC programme.   Perhaps the programme’s makers simply thought that it would arouse greater publicity and interest if it could be linked with the historic relief programme in Ethiopia in the ’80s which dominated the world’s headlines for so long and which stirred such strong emotions of compassion and concern:  so it would make it a bigger story.  Anyway, whatever the reasons and motives, it seems deeply regrettable that such a damaging and misleading impression should have been created by a much respected arm of the BBC, especially at a time when the whole concept of a large-scale public broadcaster is under ruthless and mercenary attack.

Full disclosure:  I was interviewed at some length for this programme but no part of the interview was used in it.  I have no complaint about that:  I have no personal or first-hand knowledge of what went on in the TPLF-controlled area when I was in Ethiopia, for the simple reason that it was obviously impossible for diplomats accredited to the Ethiopian government to go into rebel-controlled areas.  So I had nothing to contribute that would have added to or subtracted from the allegations which the programme was about.  I pointed this out when I agreed to do the interview.

Brian

The main anxiety arises from the uncertainties implicit in a hung parliament and a minority government dependent on other parties for its survival.  There could be no certainty that such a government could survive for more than a few months or even weeks, although it might — Alex Salmond’s minority Scottish National Party government in Edinburgh, elected by PR (proportional representation), has proved remarkably durable;  but there are few party leaders on the political scene at the moment who can match Salmond in agility.  Many commentators fear the effects of uncertainties like these on the markets, and especially on the willingness of investors to continue to lend money to the government (essentially by buying government bonds).  It’s even suggested that the uncertainty implicit in a hung parliament could cause a collapse in the value of sterling against other currencies, with no-one able to predict with any confidence what kind of government would be in power in Britain in a year’s time, or less, or what kind of fiscal and economic policies to deal with the national debt would be in place in a few months’ time, or whether those policies would be continued over even the medium term.  The devaluation of sterling (by the markets, not by any specific action of government) since the banking crisis and the recession has of course been good for Britain, making us more competitive and restoring sterling to a more realistic exchange rate — at the expense, be it said, of our trading partners.  Beggar-your-neighbour is a game that more than one can play.  But a real collapse of sterling’s value could be catastrophic.   Markets don’t like uncertainty, and uncertainty is the inevitable companion of a hung parliament, at any rate in our system (not necessarily in other countries’ systems, however, for various historical and other reasons, especially in places where power-sharing is a political requirement).

There’s also much speculation about the procedural and political intricacies of a hung parliament.  Could Gordon Brown hang on as prime minister even if the Conservatives had won more seats than Labour, relying on smaller  left-of-centre minority parties to support him in a vote of confidence?  (In principle, yes: there’d be no need for a formal coalition and unless Brown were to go to the Palace and resign, no need or even opportunity for any decision by the Queen to appoint a new prime minister.)

One recent commentator speculated that in such a situation, Brown would have to resign and would advise the Queen to invite David Cameron, as leader of the biggest party in parliament, to try to form the new government.  (Wrong:  this is one situation in which an outgoing prime minister is not required to tender advice on who should succeed him, and even if he or she does offer such advice, the Queen is not obliged to act on it.  It’s entirely up to her to decide whom to invite to try to form a government, although in real life she would almost certainly call on the leader of the biggest party in parliament to have the first go.)

What if the Liberal Democrats, likely to have the next largest representation in the house of commons after the Conservatives and Labour, were to announce — as strongly hinted by their leader, Nick Clegg — that as the Tories had won more votes nationally (or more seats in the house of commons, or both) than any other party, the LibDems would give conditional support to a Tory government under Cameron but not to a continuing minority Labour government under Brown?  Would that force Brown to resign and the Queen to call on Cameron to succeed him?  (Probably not;  Brown might hope to survive in No. 10 Downing Street with the support of other small parties and dare the Lib Dems to bring him down in favour of the Tories.)

What if the LibDems offered to support a minority Labour government on condition that Brown stepped down and was replaced by a new Labour leader and therefore as the new prime minister?  (Very risky.  Brown would have no way of ensuring that once he resigned, the Queen would automatically invite the new Labour leader to form a government, however strongly Brown might have advised her to do so.  Depending on the relative strengths of the parties in parliament, the Queen might well accept Brown’s resignation but then invite Cameron to form a government.)

More uncertainties, then.  Grist for the mills of the political and constitutional pundits, but not for many of the rest of us.  The general view is that such uncertainties and their consequences for sterling, the government’s ability to borrow, and the whole political system, would not be tolerable for more than a few months, and that sooner rather than later the leader of the minority government (whether Brown, Cameron, or, say, David Miliband) would be virtually forced to resign — even if still not defeated in a vote of confidence — and ask the Queen to dissolve parliament and call a fresh election, in the hope that this time the result would give one party or the other an overall majority, thus ending the uncertainties.   (It’s worth remembering however that this is another situation where the Queen is under no constitutional obligation to grant a prime minister’s request for a dissolution and fresh elections:  she would be perfectly entitled to invite someone else to try to form a government capable of winning the support of a majority of MPs if she judged that another election so soon after the last would not be in the national interest.  Unlikely, of course: but not inconceivable.  Another potential uncertainty.)

There’s one important but rather neglected lesson to be learned from all these anxieties and uncertainties arising from the prospect of a hung parliament.  If, as the Liberal Democrats have long demanded (for pretty obvious reasons) and as increasing numbers of other left-of-centre activists and commentators are apparently beginning to agree, Britain were to adopt a system of proportional representation for elections to the house of commons, a certain and necessary consequence would be that there would be a hung parliament after every single election, and not just very occasionally as is the case under our present system of First Past the Post.   We would have to endure these dangers and unavoidable adverse consequences after every election — and there would be no available escape route, as we have now, via the holding of a fresh election in the hope of getting a party with an overall majority out of it, for PR would make such a result impossible.  No UK political party since the 1930s has ever won as much as 50 per cent of the votes cast, so in a proportional system no party could win an overall majority in the house of commons.

It’s a point that the zealous advocates of PR ought perhaps to ponder.  There are plenty of other objections to PR — I have tried to set out some of the more cogent ones in the past, for example here, here and (especially) here (including in my responses to many comments on them).  But the uncertainties surrounding minority government in a hung parliament constitute a significant objection to PR that the current state of the opinion polls should force us to confront honestly and frankly.  Another ritual recitation of the unfairness of First Past the Post is not an acceptable or adequate response: no electoral system is without its drawbacks and injustices, and those advocating PR have an obligation to show that an endless succession of hung parliaments has fewer bad consequences for sound and predictable government than continuing to live with FPTP, warts and all.   Myself, I think they’ll have their work cut out.

Having said all this, I continue to believe that the Tories will win the forthcoming election with a reasonably workable overall majority, and that all the current fever and panic over a hung parliament will turn out to have been strictly for the media birds — at least until and unless we adopt PR.  But that’s just my very tentative forecast for this week.  I may well change my mind twenty times or more between now and the election, so please don’t hold me to it.  Anyway, predicting the future is a mug’s game, especially when you can’t begin to know how long an unpopular, even if not a minority, government and its policies are going to be able to survive.

Brian

This has been brought into sharp focus by Andrew Rawnsley’s forthcoming book (The End of the Party) of which long extracts covered pages of yesterday’s Observer newspaper (21 Feb 2010).  Rawnsley’s evidently well sourced account of Gordon Brown’s working style is devastating, and not mainly because of the allegations about bullying.  Rawnsley claims to confirm from first-hand and reliable evidence what has long been believed, not just in the charmed circle of Westminster insiders, about how Mr Brown works:  the impossibly long hours; the endless agonising over every decision and reluctance to take it;  the reliance for advice and support on a small clique of personal cronies, to the exclusion of senior ministers, civil servants, MPs, party officials, and anyone else;  the preference for focusing on one big issue at a time rather than coping with the constant stream of problems, large and small, that pepper a prime minister’s desk and require quick and firm decisions;  the congenital inability to delegate, leading to constant interference in the minutiae of departmental ministers’ actions and decisions;  the imperfect handling of his personal relations with ministerial colleagues, officials and other staff, aggravated by frequent rudeness and lack of consideration and by the systematic disloyalty of his personal attack dogs;  the temper tantrums.  And, presumably, the bullying.

None of this is new (although many of Rawnsley’s specific examples are).   Six years ago Tom Bower’s polemical biography of Gordon Brown set out in painful detail all the charges against him now paraded anew by Rawnsley.  Those in, for example, the parliamentary Labour party now holding up their hands in horror at Rawnsley’s revelations surely didn’t need to read either Bower or Rawnsley to know how Mr Brown conducts government business, and the likely consequences for the country of his working style and practices once he was in No. 10.  Yet he ascended the national and party throne unchallenged as soon as Tony Blair finally consented to step down.  Many people have a lot of explaining to do.

And yet, and yet: it’s fair to recall that Rawnsley, and even Bower, are careful to acknowledge Gordon Brown’s considerable strengths.  He is clearly Blair’s intellectual and probably moral superior by a longish chalk, although his famous moral compass failed to steer him into a principled stand against Blair’s crimes of aggression against Iraq and, earlier, Yugoslavia (over Kosovo), or against the torrent of illiberal and oppressive legislation emanating from Blair’s successive home secretaries.  Among senior politicians he has an almost unparalelled grasp of economics and finance.  His response to the banking crisis and global financial melt-down was more prompt, decisive and effective than those of any other national leaders, and spectacularly more so than that of the leader of the opposition.  He is scholarly and well read.  Unlike Blair, he has a deep understanding and knowledge of the Labour party and in some ways a gut sympathy with its traditional principles.  He can evidently be enormously kind, sympathetic and supportive.  Although the peddlers of hindsight now assail his record as Chancellor of the Exchequer, it remains the fact that he maintained solid growth without significant inflation or unemployment for a decade, and by massive spending rescued the principal public services from many years of scandalous neglect by previous Conservative governments.  Even if he alone among world finance ministers had spotted the likely consequences of the international banks’ malpractices with their derivatives and packaging of bad debts to make them look safe, there’s little or nothing that he could have done about it without a broad global consensus that governments must step in and stop it, and no such consensus existed.  He didn’t foresee what would happen, but then which national political leader anywhere on the planet did?  Our present predicament would be somewhat less bad if Brown as Chancellor had spent less on public services and had put away more of the nation’s resources for what a gloating Cameron and a gleeful Osborne refer to as “a rainy day”;  but when public services, on which the most vulnerable people in our society rely, were still crying out for catch-up investment and higher standards of service, how could a Labour Chancellor have justified starving them of resources in order to build up the reserves — especially when Britain’s level of public debt was no higher than that of most comparable countries, and lower than many?  And, finally, the current attempts by the Conservatives (and some LibDems) to lay the blame for the recession on Brown’s Chancellorship are patently contemptible, requiring no rebuttal.

Another reservation has to be made about Mr Brown’s inherent unsuitability for the role of prime minister, and the fact that no-one in the know about it did anything to stop it happening:  no-one should forget the political reality in June 2007 when Brown replaced Blair in No. 10.  Brown and Blair were the two biggest figures in British politics, and had dominated them for a decade.  Even those most apprehensive about the prospects for a Brown premiership had no credible alternative candidate to propose.  Any challenger would have been crushed under the tracks of the Brown juggernaut.  He had been Blair’s obvious, acknowledged and unquestioned successor since the glad confident morning of 2 May 1997 when the two men moved into Nos. 10 and 11 Downing Street.  It’s easy to say now that Brown’s personal and practical flaws should have disqualified him from the succession.  But hindsight, as they say, is a fine thing.  Who else was there?

It’s both a personal and a national tragedy that a man with such strengths and such a record of achievement should have turned out, perfectly predictably, to lack so many of the essential qualities required of a competent prime minister.  No. 10 under Brown is plainly dysfunctional.  The idea that with some gigantic effort Gordon Brown could transform himself into an inspiring, charismatic, systematic, decisive, fast-moving, collegiate government leader, loyal to colleagues and earning their loyalty in return, defies belief.  He’s not that kind of person.  He doesn’t deserve the personal abuse now being heaped on him:  his tantrums and inability to make decisions (and stick to them) and probably his bullying of staff are the symptoms of a deep-seated lack of confidence and sense of inadequacy, for which he should be pitied, not excoriated.  But the fact has to be faced:  he’s never going to be a good or even adequately competent prime minister, and humane pity is no excuse for failure to face the unpalatable reality.  The longer he remains as prime minister, the worse the political consequences for the country and the electoral consequences for Labour will be.  Replacing him will be a messy, painful and damaging process;  but his continuance in office up to the election will be messier, more painful and more damaging still.  Pluck up your courage, David Miliband.  And what about the other vegetables?

Brian

So if you get a message on Skype purporting to come from me, on no account open the link in it to a zip (or any other) file:  and please don’t expect any new Ephems posts or comments or responses to your comments for a while.  I suspect that it’s going to be a question of reinstalling Windows and then a raft of programmes and applications and data files from back-ups.  The mind boggles.

Please don’t think it necessary (or desirable) to post messages of sympathy here.  Of course if you know of a quick and safe way to get System Restore Point working again (the virus has thoughtfully switched it off and it won’t switch on again), or how to change all the registry entries back to how they were yesterday, by all means let me know.  Meanwhile I’m going to absent me from electronic felicity a while.

Update (8 Feb 2010): Many hours of effort by myself and my state-of-the-art, chip-off-the-old-block computer guru have failed to remove the various nasties let loose in my PC by the vile virus that I idiotically unloosed — and the latest news of fresh disasters is that I have now found that I have a Trojan (html/Harnig.A) in my faithful laptop, too, and have no idea how to remove it.  I think I may feel a new computer coming on, but I can’t afford a new laptop as well.  Perhaps a few months without a computer at all will be good for the soul.  Cold turkey, anyone?

Brian

The performance, which is exactly what it was, revealed all the old familiar weaknesses, too:  the evasion of inconvenient detail by elevating the discussion to a grand, sweeping level of generality;  the reduction of all issues to a Wagnerian conflict between Good and Evil, with Blair (surprise, surprise) doughtily championing the former; above all, the constant justification by reference to his “passionate belief” in his own unvarying rightness of every decision, however badly flawed by inattention to the facts, or failure to heed contrary advice, or predictably disastrous consequences.  Self-belief is his trade-mark, and what makes him appear strong and decisive.  Contrary to the placards waved by the anti-Blair protestors outside the building, denouncing BLIAR!, he rarely lies, anyway in the strict definition of the word.  He says things that are not true or accurate, but he passionately believes them to be true when he says them:  there is rarely any obvious intent to deceive.  Challenged to defend his misrepresentation in the government dossier, and in the key house of commons debate on the eve of war, of the intelligence about Saddam’s WMD as definite and beyond doubt (when it was neither), he counters that it was definite and beyond doubt in his own mind, which was all that mattered — to him, anyway.  For Blair, as for Hamlet, “”There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

There’s no need to repeat here the textual analysis of yesterday’s Blair gospel very adequately undertaken this morning by the massed regiments of the commentariat and the bloggers.  But one key attitude was skilfully revealed by some insistent questioning, an attitude that reveals a huge amount about Blair himself and indeed more generally about New Labour: his attitude to risk.  When Sir Roderic Lyne, most tenacious of the Inquiry’s members, pointed out that Blair’s perception of Saddam Hussein as posing a potential threat to the whole world, including Britain, had not been shared by many other governments and people to whom Iraq was much closer and in principle more potentially menacing, Blair replied that –

you are right in saying, “If this and if that”, but you see, for me, because of the change after September 11, I wasn’t prepared to run that risk.  I really wasn’t prepared to take the risk….  given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over 1 million people whose deaths he had caused, given ten years of breaking UN Resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons programmes, or is that a risk it would be irresponsible to take?  I formed the judgment, and it is a judgment in the end. It is a decision. I had to take the decision, and I believed, and in the end so did the Cabinet, so did Parliament incidentally, that we were right not to run that risk, but you are completely right, in the end, what this is all about are the risks.

SIR RODERIC LYNE: Thank you.

RT HON TONY BLAIR: ….my judgment is you don’t take any risks with this issue.

[Chilcot Iraq Inquiry, 29 January 2010, testimony by Tony Blair,
http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/43909/100129-blair.pdf, pp. 90-91]

There’s no serious attempt to weigh the extent of the risk — related to hypothetical future developments rather than to any actual risk to Britain posed by Iraq in 2003, even if you believed at the time that Iraq still possessed some WMD — in relation to the harm certain to be done by launching a full-scale war, with all its predictable and unpredictable consequences for thousands of innocent (and guilty) people.  “You don’t take any risks with this issue.”

This disproportionate response to even remote and hypothetical risk is at the root of the most mysterious and unaccountable decision taken by Blair on Iraq — namely to abandon UN diplomacy and the weapons inspection process before they had had a chance to resolve the WMD problem peacefully, joining G W Bush in the attack on Iraq, even though not one of the conditions he had laid down (according to Blair’s own account and that of several other witnesses) for UK participation in American military action had been satisfied, namely that all peaceful means of resolving the problem must first have been exhausted, that war must be a last resort, and that the UN Security Council must have authorised the use of force:

[p. 127] [SIR RODERIC LYNE:]  At this really critical moment, and obviously a very
15 difficult moment in your life, you had reached the stage
16 where you weren’t going to get a second resolution,
17 military action was imminent. Now, you had been working
18 intensively for months, indeed for a year, to try to
19 create a supportive environment… but you hadn’t actually got
21 a clear and strong international consensus for this
22 action. Public opinion here in the UK was divided. No
23 really major progress had been made on the Middle East
24 peace plan…. We
25 hadn’t got the second resolution, and you were also…
starting to hear warnings from
2 people like Brigadier… Tim Cross,
3 who came to see you in Downing Street and saw
4 Alastair Campbell, I think, that the post-conflict
5 preparations being made by the Americans didn’t look at
6 all good.
7 At this point, you must, I suppose, have had some
8 pause for thought. Did President Bush at this point,
9 when you hadn’t really satisfied the preconditions you
10 wanted to achieve, offer to go it alone and offer you
11 a way out?
12 RT HON TONY BLAIR: I think the Americans would have done
13 that. I think President Bush actually at one point
14 shortly before the debate said, “Look, if it is too
15 difficult for Britain, we understand”. But I took the
16 view very strongly then, and do, that it was right for
17 us to be with America, since we believed in this too,
18 and it is true that it was very divisive, but it was
19 divisive in the sense that there were two groups. There
20 was also a very strong group in the international
21 community, in Parliament, I would say even in the
22 Cabinet, who also thought it was the right thing to do.
….
[p.130]  It was a really tough situation, yes,
15 and in the end, as I say, what influenced me was that my
16 judgment ultimately was that Saddam was going to remain
17 a threat and that in this change in the perception of
18 risk after September 11 it was important that we were
19 prepared to act, our alliance with America was
20 important, and, to put this very clearly, we had been
21 down a UN path that I genuinely hoped would work.
22 I hoped that 1441 would avoid conflict happening.

(Chilcot Iraq Inquiry, 29 January 2010, testimony by Tony Blair,
http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/43909/100129-blair.pdf)

“Even” in the Cabinet there was a “very strong” group that supported the war!  Well, who would have guessed it?

This inability to balance the scale of a specific risk against the drawbacks and dangers of the action necessary to avoid it is further demonstrated by Blair’s definition of the evidence of Iraqi non-cooperation with the weapons inspectors, which he insists constituted a sufficient ‘material breach’ to justify the invasion and occupation of the country:  namely Saddam’s failure to allow the inspectors to take Iraqi scientists out of Iraq to interview them elsewhere without risk of intimidation.  When it was pointed out to him that the chief inspector, Blix, had been reluctant to act in this way for fear that any scientist whom he invited to accompany him for interview outside the country might be killed, Blair replied triumphantly that this just showed what a vile régime Saddam’s had been — true enough, but not an adequate answer to the proposition that Blix’s reluctance made Iraq’s failure to pass this test of cooperation a flimsy basis for a verdict of material breach of Iraq’s obligations under the UN resolutions, a breach so serious as to justify war:

[A]ctually, if you look, both at the Blix reports and we can come to the detail of that and the Iraq Survey Group, [Saddam] was deliberately concealing documentation, and what is more, he was deliberately not allowing people to be interviewed properly.
(Ibid, p. 105)

And for this material breach Iraq was subjected to the ’shock and awe’ of bombardment, invasion and occupation, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were to be killed, and 179 British and 4,374 American servicemen and women were to lose their lives.  Operative paragraph 4 of resolution 1441 had required the Security Council, not the UK or US governments, to “assess” the situation in the event of a report of a further material breach by Iraq:  what assessment could have concluded that the gravity of this breach was sufficient justification for the abandonment of the weapons inspection and the immediate resort to war?

There’s a more general lesson to be learned from this ingrained habit of over-reacting to risk.  It has been characteristic of New Labour under Blair and Brown to be pathologically risk-averse.  The reaction to even the most limited threats of terrorism has been to rush into legislation, much of it designed to permit the imprisonment or house arrest of people who have not committed any offence but who the security authorities think might commit some terrorism-connected offence in the future: hence the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without charge, trial or conviction for any crime, under the vile régime of Control Orders:  and the attempted deportation of foreigners who have lived blameless lives in our country, sometimes for years, on mere unproven suspicion of some indirect involvement with terrorism or other terrorist suspects.  The government has tried to legislate to permit the sectioning and indefinite detention of people suffering from indefinable and untreatable forms of mental illness — not because they have done anything to harm others or themselves, but because some committee of men in suits thinks they might do so in future.  The same government has introduced the even more vicious system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) under which those who have committed any of a huge number of offences, some inherently trivial, may be given a tariff or minimum sentence of imprisonment representing the punitive element in the sentence (for retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation) but who will not be released after serving the minimum sentence — sometimes just a few weeks — but will be kept indefinitely in prison until they can prove to another body of men (and women) in suits that they won’t re-offend if released.  Thousands of people are swelling our already grotesquely large prison population with little or no prospect of ever being released because they can’t satisfy naturally risk-averse parole boards with an unprovable forecast about their future hypothetical behaviour;  only around 3 per cent of those enduring this Kafkaesque, or Stalinist, form of preventive detention are being released each year, the rest being effectively punished indefinitely for offences they haven’t yet committed.  As a result, there are people still in prison years after completing brief minimum sentences for (e.g.) indecent exposure who have in effect been given life sentences. Iraq is attacked, its people slaughtered and its economy laid waste, not because it posed a threat to its attackers but in case it might do so at some unspecified time in the future.  “My judgment is you don’t take any risks with this issue.”

This congenital aversion to risk is not, I believe (passionately or otherwise), driven mainly by any rational fear of the implications of the risk materialising, still less by a rational cost-benefit analysis of trying to avert it.  Ministers, the heads of the security and police services, parole boards and sometimes even judges and magistrates are far too often frightened of being blamed for having done nothing to avert or pre-empt a risk which then materialises.  Faced with an offender who has completed his punishment and is applying for release with promises of good behaviour if his application is approved, the parole board will naturally act on the calculus that if they release the applicant and he promptly re-offends, they will be blamed for failing to foresee the new offence;  whereas if they reject the application and return the applicant to his cell for another few years until he can apply again, the risk to themselves is nil.  (Never mind that rejection runs the risk of a monstrous injustice to the applicant:  that’s unprovable, since no-one can ever know what would have happened if he had been released.)  Similarly, it’s far safer to invade Iraq and overthrow its government than to leave it in place with the risk that it might develop nuclear weapons at some future time and rent them out to some terrorist gang for use in Regent Street, W1;  we’ll never know if that would have happened or not.  The motto is: mind your back.  Never lay yourself open to the charge that you have done nothing in the face of an identified risk, however remote or trivial. Pass yet another law enabling you to lock up foreigners with bushy black beards and back-packs.  Apply your sledge-hammer to every nut.  Public acknowledgement that some risks simply have to be accepted, if the only action to avert them carries heavier penalties than accepting them, ensures that you will be crucified by the tabloids and that your candour will be exploited by an unscrupulous Opposition.  Play safe!

Such is the governing philosophy of cowards.

Brian

Professor Warner’s paper, “Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell and the 45-Minute Warning”, is at

http://www.barder.com/alastair-campbell-jonathan-powell-and-the-45-minute-warning.

It’s a useful advance brief for those planning to watch and listen to Tony Blair’s evidence to the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry on Friday, 29 January 2010.  (For the same purposes please also have a look at http://www.barder.com/2334 before Friday.)  Today’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry by Sir Michael Wood, Elizabeth Wilmshurst and David Brummell has been very gripping, and some of the documents that were dramatically declassified during the morning session are fascinating.  All these are available on the Iraq Inquiry website, itself a model of how to make available to all of us with internet access a huge mass of vital information, much of it only recently declassified.

I will be glad to pass on to Professor Warner any comments on his paper that may be posted here, all of them welcome.

Brian

One of the most intriguing documents to emerge from the Hutton inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly was an e-mail, dated 19 September 2002, from the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, to Alastair Campbell, his director of communications and strategy and John Scarlett, chairman of the JIC, with a copy to Sir David Manning, the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser. Referring to the soon-to-be-published government dossier on Iraq, Powell asked: ‘Alastair – what will be the headline in the [Evening] Standard on day of publication? What do we want it to be?’ (Hutton Enquiry, Appendix 13(20).)

When it appeared, that headline was: ’45 Minutes from Attack’ and it was printed over an article by the paper’s political editor, Charles Reiss, which began:

‘Saddam Hussein’s armoury of chemical weapons is on standby for use within 45 minutes, Tony Blair’s dossier revealed today. The Iraqi leader has 20 missiles which could reach British military bases in Cyprus, as well as Israel and Nato members Greece and Turkey.’

Some people – including both Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell – regard (or portray) this as pure coincidence. Others may feel that, far from being coincidental, it was part of a deliberate strategy designed to emphasise the immediacy of the threat from Iraq and so justify military action if and when the latter was deemed necessary. Let us, therefore, examine the matter in more detail.

On 1 September 2002 Alastair Campbell noted the following conversation with the prime minister in his diary:

‘TB was becoming more and more belligerent [with regard to Iraq], saying he knew it was the right thing to do…He was developing the line that the UN route was fine if it was clearly a means to resolve the issue, but not if it’s a means to duck the issue. Equally, it was clear that public opinion had moved against us during August’ (Alastair Campbell, The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries, London, Hutchinson, 2007, pp. 632-33.)

Two days later, Campbell noted that

‘We [he and Blair] went through some of the hard questions on Iraq. The hardest was “Why now? What was it that we knew now that we didn’t before that made us believe we had to do it now?” It was not going to be at all easy to sell the policy in the next few months…The toughest question was what new evidence was there? He said the debate had got ahead of us, so we were going to do the dossier earlier, in the next few weeks…Today was about beginning to turn the tide of public opinion and it was going to be very tough indeed.’ (Ibid., p. 633.)

To sum up: Blair was determined to take a tough line on Iraq, but he was worried about securing public backing for his stance. Both he and Campbell agreed that ‘new evidence’ would be needed if it was to be instrumental in convincing the public, and the publication of a dossier – which had been considered earlier – was now a matter of urgency. Despite subsequent attempts to downgrade the importance of the September dossier, it is clear that it was regarded at the time by both the prime minister and one of his closest advisers as a very important document, which it was hoped would begin ‘to turn the tide of public opinion’ in favour of strong action against Iraq.

This interpretation is confirmed by the effort which was put into the production of the dossier as well as Campbell’s minute to Scarlett on 9 September 2002, which contained the following passage:

‘The media/political judgement [of the dossier] will immediately focus on “What’s new?” and I was pleased to hear from you and your SIS colleagues that contrary to media reports today, the intelligence community are taking such a helpful approach to this in going through all the material they have’ (Hutton para. 173) .

As it happened, some important ‘new evidence’ had just been received. Reported at the end of August 2002, it was incorporated into a draft JIC report of 5 September 2002 in the following words:

‘Intelligence…indicates that from forward and deployed storage sites, chemical and biological munitions could be with [Iraqi] military units and ready for firing within 45 minutes’ (Hutton, para. 178)

This ‘intelligence’ was not all that it seemed, but there is no evidence to suggest that it was not believed at the time. And it was certainly important enough to be included in three places in the dossier: in the prime minister’s Foreward, in the Executive Summary and in the body of the text. When the dossier was published on 24 September 2002, Andrew Gilligan was asked on the BBC’s Today programme to say what he thought was ‘the most dramatic’ paragraph in the dossier. Gilligan replied that ‘it’s not that kind of document’ and that it ‘is actually rather sensibly cautious and measured in tone’. But he added:

‘There are…a couple of sexy lines designed to make headlines for the tabloids like the fact that he [Saddam] can deploy within 45 minutes if the weapons were ready and that he could reach the British bases in Cyprus’ (Butler Report, para. 510).

In a footnote Butler explained that he had written to ‘some 60 editors of national and regional print and broadcast media’ to ask them whether they had been briefed by the government, either before or after the publication of the dossier, about the 45-minute story. ‘All who replied’, the footnote continued, said that they had not been briefed beforehand, but there was

‘some evidence…that some journalists had had their attention drawn after its publication to passages in the Prime Minister’s Forward. Some Editors noted that the “45-minute story” attracted attention because it was of itself an eye-catching item in a document containing much that was either not new or rather technical in nature.’ (Butler Report, fn. 5 to para. 510)

A few comments are in order at this point. 1) We are not told how many editors did or did not reply, let alone who they were. 2) What does ‘before publication’ mean in this context? Government documents are usually issued to the media under a time and date embargo before they are made available to the general public. Thus, editors and reporters could easily have seen and read the dossier before it was officially published, although it had in effect already been published for them. 3) It is clear that some papers did focus on the 45-minute story, including The Sun, the most widely read and perhaps the most influential tabloid, to which we know Tony Blair and his spin doctors attached much importance. 4) The statement that ‘some editors’ found the 45-minute story ‘eye-catching’ shows that if the government did indeed seek to highlight its importance as part of a campaign to win public opinion over to a tough stance against Iraq, it succeeded.

One of the members of the current Chilcot inquiry, Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, clearly believes that this issue is an important one, for he questioned both Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell on the latter’s e-mail of 19 September 2002. Freedman had, in fact, already caught the former out in a material misstatement over the 45-minutes story, when Campbell had stated in the course of his testimony on 10 January 2010 that

‘I noted in the Butler Report that…the Butler Committee wrote to 60 editors and senior journalists to ask whether the government had been seeking to promote this 45 minutes point as a major part of the September dossier and uniformly they said, “No, we had not.”’

Freedman subsequently asked Campbell what headline he had wanted to see in the Evening Standard. ‘ ‘Look,’ replied Campbell,

‘by then – and you can – I know that we have a – and maybe I have a reputation for sort of worrying and obsessing about headlines. The truth is I don’t and I never did for a very, very large period that I was in Downing Street because I reached the point of understanding…[that] it is not really about one headline…it is whether you are communicating over time your objectives clearly, your strategic thinking clearly, and whether you are getting your message through to the public. So Jonathan enquiring like that, fine. As to whether I replied or what I replied, I haven’t got a clue.’

Freedman returned to the charge.

‘So when you saw, Evening Standard: “45 minutes from attack…There are some Brits 45 minutes from doom” [the latter quote was from The Sun]…Express: Saddam can strike in 45 minutes”. Were you surprised by those headlines?’ ‘I’m not surprised by anything that most of the British newspapers write on a daily basis.’

Campbell glibly replied before descending into an unchacteristic incoherence:

‘but all I can say to you is it was – when we were preparing that – and it is really why it is so unfortunate that the debate developed as it did subsequently, when the BBC broadcast the broadcast that they did – actually I think it was a very, very important development in government communications, and I think – I think there is a risk arising out of this that in future very difficult international crisis situations that develop, because of the controversies that have subsequently flowed, the politicians and – they take – they don’t take the decisions that maybe they should.’

Getting a grip on himself, Campbell then launched into his much quoted defence of the September dossier, saying that he defended ‘every single word’ of it. (Chilcot inquiry, Cambell testimony, pp. 111, 117-18 [emphasis added], http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/42384/20100112am-campbell-final.pdf).

At this point, Freedman, perhaps believing that he would not receive a proper answer, failed to press home his original question. He should have done so, and he might also have asked Campbell whether he was pleased with the headlines and, if so, why.

Campbell had been much more defensive when asked about the same point at the Hutton inquiry in August 2003. He then said,

‘Whether I discussed it [Powell’s e-mail] with Jonathan I do not know, but I did not reply to the e-mail. When asked whether he had had any hand in the Evening Standard’s headline, he replied, ‘I did not. I do not write headlines for the Evening Standard.’

He continued:

‘There was not a great briefing to draw attention to one particular part [of the dossier]’, which, as the Butler inquiry subsequently showed, was not entirely true. Campbell went on to say that it was his recollection that there were ‘maybe two or three newspapers that had as their main story the point about 45 minutes’, a statement which was also misleading. (Campbell testimony, pp. 62-64 http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/transcripts/hearing-trans12.htm ).

Eight days later Freedman asked the same question of Jonathan Powell: ‘What did you want its [the Evening Standard's ] headline to be?’ ‘I had no idea’, Powell replied:

‘I was asking Alastair what it would be, which relates back to an in-joke from opposition time, when he once came to us and told us that he had dealt with a particular problem to do with Ken Livingstone and there would be no coverage of it at all, and 20 minutes later, somebody brought in a copy of the Evening Standard with Ken Livingstone splashed right across it. It was a reference back to his skills at seeing what the Evening Standard might say. So it was a bit of a sort of a dig, I am afraid, rather than a serious point.’

Unfortunately, Freedman once again dropped the ball, merely commenting that ‘Historians might find that detail very helpful’ (Chilcot inquiry, Powell testimony, pp. 63-64, http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/42825/100118pm-powell.pdf).

No one would argue that the Powell e-mail of 19 September 2002 and the subsequent press treatment of the September dossier was a ‘smoking gun’ proving that Tony Blair had already at that stage decided upon war with Iraq. However, the use made of the 45-minute story and the obfuscation in which his advisers have engaged in order to obscure their actions and motives do suggest that the prime minister and his immediate entourage were doing nothing to discourage the impression that there was cogent justification for a resort to armed force. Quite the reverse, in fact.

G.W.
26 January 2010

The issues in this debate are complex, especially for non-lawyers and those unfamiliar with the arcane language and procedures of the UN, especially the Security Council.  It’s a sign of terminal egotism to quote one’s own earlier writings, but looking back at what I wrote on this blog back in April 2005, when the main relevant documents had either leaked or been released, I seem to recognise what might serve almost as a brief for the Chilcot Inquirers when they start to question this week’s key witnesses.  So with all due apologies, I am re-posting my article of 29 April 2005 immediately below.  Those equipped with exceptional stamina may also care to read the second part of the article, which deals with some other related issues.  That is at http://www.barder.com/194.    Here’s Part 1.  The passages now in bold type seem to me of special interest as Lord Goldsmith’s own explanation of the apparent change in his opinions between 7 and 17 March 2003, and one that has not been widely mentioned in recent commentaries.

Part I: Was the Iraq war legal? Reflections on the Attorney-General’s advice to the prime minister

April 29th, 2005

The main importance of the 13-page ‘advice’ of the Attorney-General on the legality (or lack of it) of going to war against Iraq without a second UN resolution authorising it, given to the prime minister on 7 March 2003, lies in the harsh and unforgiving light it sheds on the same Attorney-General’s ‘opinion’, published 10 days later on the 17th, in which he set out his apparently unreserved and categorical view that even without a second resolution, the war would be legal. It’s not that he ‘changed his mind’ in those intervening 10 days. On the 7th, he set out the arguments for and against legality, warning that the arguments against might well prevail if the issue came to a court, and laying down the conditions needing to be satisfied if there was no second resolution but the war took place and an argument had to be constructed for its lawfulness. Contrary to widespread speculation before the full text was at last released on 28 April 2005, the 7 March 2003 advice doesn’t come down on one side or the other as to legality: it sets out the arguments on both sides, and concedes that “I accept that a reasonable case can be made that resolution 1441 is capable in principle of reviving the authorisation in 678 without a further resolution”, about as guarded a conclusion as can be imagined from even the most recklessly confident lawyer (which by all accounts Lord Goldsmith is not). By the 17th, the attempt to secure a second resolution has collapsed (not because of any French threat to veto it, but because a clear majority of the Security Council’s members disagreed with it): Lord Goldsmith has asked the prime minister whether his test for the legality of a war without that resolution is satisfied – i.e. that “there are strong factual grounds for concluding that Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity. … we would need to be able to demonstrate hard evidence of non-compliance and non-cooperation. … the views of UNMOVIC and the IAEA will be highly significant in this respect”: and Mr Blair has replied[1] that that test is indeed satisfied, meaning that he has “strong factual grounds” and “hard evidence” that Iraq has failed to get rid of its WMD, despite a report by the chief UN weapons inspector on the 7th that Iraq has begun to cooperate, that a number of missiles have been destroyed, and that the inspectors still can’t find any WMD. We now know, of course, how much credence should have been attached to Mr Blair’s “hard evidence” that Iraq still had WMD and had failed to comply with UN resolutions requiring Saddam to get rid of them.

In the light of Mr Blair’s assurance, then, the Attorney-General at last comes off the fence and declares that in his independent, unpressurised opinion the war will be legal. Ignorant of the overwhelming doubts, qualifications and warnings in the advice of ten days earlier, the Cabinet, parliament and much of public opinion accepts this categorical declaration of legality, and Britain goes to war.

Ministers are thus correct in arguing that the Attorney-General did not “change his mind” between 7 and 17 March 03. What did happen was that he finally made up his mind. But there remains a fatal inconsistency between the 7 March advice and the 17 March opinion: in the first, Goldsmith acknowledges the highly arguable character of the case for legality, warning that the contrary case will be regarded by many as at least equally strong, and indeed quite likely to prevail in a court of law (and this is regardless of the strength or otherwise of the ‘evidence’ of Iraqi non-compliance). In the second, he sets out the argument for legality shorn of any warning that it is highly debatable and that it might well be rejected if the issue were to come to court. The point about inconsistency is lucidly and powerfully set out in an article in the Guardian of 29 April 2005 by Lord Goodhart, the LibDem spokesman for constitutional affairs. It’s obligatory reading for those who want to find a way through the fog of allegations and counter-allegations about the probity of the prime minister’s conduct in this affair.

There are perfectly sound reasons for insisting that in general the advice of the Law Officers to the government should not be published: the possibility of publication could well inhibit any Attorney-General from giving frank and politically inconvenient advice on intensely controversial issues, an essential part of his functions. But there can be no excuse for having withheld from the cabinet, parliament and the country the fact that Goldsmith had advised the prime minister in such clear language that the case for the legality of a war without a second resolution was so iffy that if it had to be argued in court, it might well fail. The Attorney-General’s ‘opinion’ of 17 March was stated as if the arguments for legality were firm and unambiguous, thus providing a reliable legal basis for going to war – and the cabinet and parliament accepted it as such. Yet the secret advice of the 7th shows that it was nothing of the sort. Lord Goldsmith had been unwilling to go further than saying that he accepted that “a reasonable case can be made that resolution 1441 is capable in principle” of being interpreted as reviving the authority for the use of force given by the Security Council ten years earlier in the completely different context of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Just as the secret intelligence evidence for Iraq’s WMD was deliberately misrepresented by the prime minister as being firm and conclusive when in fact he knew it to be patchy and sporadic, so the Attorney-General’s opinion that the war would be legal was deliberately misrepresented by the prime minister as firm and conclusive, by his suppression of the all-important caveats and warnings in the 7 March advice. Neither the flimsy intelligence nor the hesitant and qualified opinion on legality justified a decision to go to war. The extent of the flimsiness of the intelligence and the qualified nature of the legal justification were concealed from parliament and the country, and probably even from the rest of the Cabinet, in order to secure endorsement of a decision which Mr Blair had actually taken a year earlier at his fateful meeting with President George W Bush. Suppressio veri, the suppression of the truth, is morally indistinguishable from lying.

There are two other interesting and significant aspects of the 7 March advice that are worth airing. I discuss them in Part II [below].

For the full text of the Attorney-General’s advice of 7 March 2003 on Iraq war legality, in readable form, not requiring you to download a PDF file, please see http://www.barder.com/politics/international/attorney/advice-7-march on my website. The original is available (in a poor photocopy of the typescript, in PDF format) on the No. 10 Downing Street website[2].

Brian Barder
http://www.barder.com/ephems
29 April 2005

Up-dates, 24 January 2010:

[1] Not only did Mr Blair reply giving Lord Goldsmith the assurance he had requested:  Lord Goldsmith also flew to Washington and received a similar assurance from the State Department.  It seems to have been these assurances that Lord Goldsmith relied on to justify omitting the doubts and reservations expressed in his 7 March opinion from the much shorter, published opinion of the 17th, 10 days later.  But this of course in turn depends on an interpretation of Security Council resolution 1441 as authorising any UN member state to make its own unilateral finding of fact about Iraqi behaviour as warranting resort to the use of force without any need for a second resolution of the Council endorsing and authorising it.  The pros and cons of that controversial interpretation, including what we now know to be the government’s arguments for it, are discussed in detail in the first part of my blog post at http://www.barder.com/194 (the second part of the post quoted above).

[2] The photocopy of the Attorney-General’s advice of 7 March seems no longer to be available on the No. 10 website.  But it’s there on the Guardian’s website, at http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2005/04/28/legal.pdf (PDF file).

Brian

….but at least he’s better-looking than Gordon

[Hat-tip: http://mydavidcameron.com/]

The document clearly implies that Blair was already planning for military action even though he continued to insist to the British public for almost another year that no decision had been made.
[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6991087.ece]

The implication of this is obvious, and reflects an extraordinarily widespread misconception on the part of commentators on the Iraq affair and current evidence about it to the Chilcot Inquiry:  it seeks to persuade us that if a government undertakes contingency planning for a possible future course of action, it must have taken a firm decision to adopt that course of action, and if it denies that any such decision has been taken, those denials are lies.  The fallacy in this proposition should be obvious.  According to the Guardian, John Witherow is now in his 13th year of editing the Sunday Times, the longest-serving editor in the history of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper empire.  Did Mr Witherow not read his newspaper’s front page story before it was published, and if so didn’t this particular sentence strike him as not entirely kosher? Would the Sunday Times have allowed such a shoddy comment to appear on its front page when Harry Evans was its editor?

Tony Blair and Jack Straw are open to devastating criticism of numerous aspects of their records on Iraq;  the assertion that they, and some of their colleagues, may even be guilty of war crimes, is by no means far-fetched.  In such a situation, it’s surely a sad waste of precious ammunition to challenge Blair’s denials (until the last moment) that any decision had been taken to commit UK forces to the attack on Iraq on the absurd grounds that planning for possible participation in military action had begun a year earlier.  Nor are those denials in any way inconsistent with Blair’s conditional promise to George W Bush that Britain would take part in military action alongside the Americans if peaceful means of resolving the Iraq problem had been tried and had failed, leaving the use of force as the only remaining option.

The real and central charge against Blair, Straw and all those who connived at the UK decision to take part in the attack on Iraq is that peaceful diplomatic means of resolving the problem had not been exhausted when that fateful decision was taken in March 2003:  the UN weapons inspectors could and should have been given more time to determine whether Iraq actually possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction.  The use of force, in other words, was not the last resort.  It was hopelessly premature.  Because it was premature and not a last resort, a clear majority of members of the Security Council, including three of the five permanent members, were not willing to authorise it.  Without that UN authority, it was illegal under the UN Charter and thus contrary to international law: in the damning words of the Foreign Office’s deputy legal adviser, it amounted to “the crime of aggression”.

Banging on about the theory that Blair had taken a firm decision to use force a year before the invasion, or that his promise to Bush that Britain would do so was unconditional, is illogical, contrary to the evidence, and an unwelcome distraction from the real issues — which are grave enough, in all conscience.

Brian

In The Observer of 20 December 2009 Blair’s biographer Dr Anthony Seldon said he didn’t think Tony Blair should apologise for having taken us to war.  Well, I don’t think he should, either;  but I do think he should explain why he did it when he did.  I submitted the following letter to The Observer for publication on the same day, a few hours before leaving for a three-week family holiday in Ethiopia.  I discovered some time later that the letter had been published, essentially unchanged, in the issue of The Observer of 27 December 2009.  The text as submitted reads:

Sir,

Anthony Seldon (All that I admired about Tony Blair is being destroyed by his lack of humility, Dec 20) criticises Tony Blair for various misjudgements in his handling of the Iraq war, but mysteriously does “not believe that he should apologise for the fact of taking the country to war.”  True, apologising would be meaningless, but Mr Blair clearly owes the Chilcot Inquiry an explanation of his catastrophic decision to join the US in attacking Iraq.

According to the evidence already given to Chilcot, and as Blair had consistently stressed to Bush, it was a condition of UK participation in the war that it must have the prior approval of the Security Council, which Blair manifestly failed to get.  The FCO lawyers had warned that attacking Iraq without UN authority would “amount to the crime of aggression” and the Attorney-General[*] warned until the last moment that the legal justification for war was at best shaky.  Two of Blair’s most senior and trusted advisers have told Chilcot, and must have told Blair at the time, that in their view the weapons inspectors should have been given more time before any resort to military action, as the inspectors themselves had asked.  The military have confirmed that our forces could have disengaged right up to the last moment.  None of the conditions for UK military action stated publicly by Blair on television and elsewhere had been satisfied.  A clear majority of Security Council members and of our EU partners thought the use of force at that time would be premature.

Blair would have had ample justification for holding back.  Was it that he feared bitter accusations of cowardice from Bush and the loss of his matinée idol status with American public opinion?  The Iraq Inquiry, and all of us, including Dr Seldon, are entitled to know why, at the supreme crisis of his political life, our prime minister and a supine Cabinet took our country into an illegal, premature, unnecessary and disastrous war when he could so easily have declined to do so.  All his other blunders, described by Dr Seldon, were relatively insignificant compared with this.

Yours sincerely
Brian Barder (HM Diplomatic Service, 1965–94)
[*] In my letter as submitted and published, I erroneously attributed this warning to the Lord Chancellor instead of the Attorney-General.

I have written previously that evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry suggests that although in his dialogues with President G W Bush, well before military action began, Blair seemingly committed Britain to joining the Americans in using force against Iraq if and when that became necessary and unavoidable, he appears to have attached to that promise the proviso, explicit or implicit, that the use of force must be a last resort, to be undertaken only when all other methods of securing Iraqi disarmament had been tried and had failed, and only if it had been authorised by the UN Security Council as required by the UN Charter under international law.

It’s possible to ask how he could have made even such a qualified promise to a foreign head of state and government without the prior agreement of his Cabinet, and no doubt that question will be put pressingly to him when he testifies to Chilcot.  But as I argued in my letter to The Observer (above), the more important question is surely why Tony Blair agreed to commit Britain to take part in Bush’s war with Iraq when war was manifestly not the last resort;  when the possibility of a peaceful resolution of the problem by allowing the weapons inspectors more time had still not been by any means exhausted;  when UN Security Council authority for the use of force at that time could not be obtained because a clear majority of the Council thought the use of force then would be premature; and when our major EU and other partners and allies were strongly opposed to starting a war at that time.  In other words, not one of Blair’s conditions, apparently communicated in advance to Bush, for joining the US in military action against Iraq had been satisfied when the attack began.  Yet we went to war anyway.

Why?

Tony Blair still owes us an explanation.  Only when we get it can we make the final judgements about how it all happened and which of our political and other leaders were more or less to blame.  Then and only then it will be time to move on.  Meanwhile I’m not the only one ‘obsessively’ concerned to get some answers.

[1] Prevarication:  a statement that deviates from or perverts the truth; that is intentionally vague or ambiguous; the deliberate act of deviating from the truth.  [WordWeb]  Nothing to do with delay (procrastination).

Brian

“When it came to it, when the diplomatic process clearly was not going to resolve the issue, post [UN Security Council resolution] 1441 and when the French pulled the plug, then military action became the only means of response.” [Transcript, Campbell evidence to Chilcot, p.41, lines 17-20]

This grossly misrepresents what happened.  The diplomatic process (i.e. the UN weapons inspection backed up by UN threats of force if Iraq failed to cooperate with it) could still have “resolved the issue” if the premature and illegal US-UK attack on Iraq hadn’t pre-empted it.  A sizeable majority of the Security Council wanted to give the inspectors more time, for which the inspectors themselves had asked. The transcript of President Chirac’s famous TV interview shows that France never “pulled the plug” (i.e. never said “never”) as UK ministers have subsequently repeatedly claimed – a deeply misleading excuse that Alastair Campbell has now repeated. Blair would have been fully justified in disengaging from the US military action, even at the last moment, on the grounds that diplomacy and the UN weapons inspectors still had a chance of resolving the issue without blood needing to be spilled.  The indictment against Blair (and his cabinet colleagues) is that the war was not the last resort.  Campbell, in his evidence, wrongly and repeatedly said in effect that it was.

It’s interesting that Alastair Campbell (for whom in many ways I have a lot of respect, perhaps perversely) carefully avoided basing his allegations about the French position on the famous TV interview given by President Chirac on 10 March 2003, a few days before the US, UK and a few others abandoned the diplomatic effort and went to war:  an interview that has constantly been misquoted and misinterpreted ever since, as the transcript shows.  Instead, Campbell referred to secret Anglo-French talks which he had attended at the time.  Without being able to see the record of these talks, and being unable to know even who took part in them, none of us is in a position to question Campbell’s assertion that in the talks the French defined their position in a way that made it fruitless either to give the inspectors more time to complete their work or to hope that if the inspection definitively failed, the Security Council would be prepared to authorise military action against Iraq in order to compel compliance with the Council’s own mandatory resolutions, without a French veto or No vote.  All we can say is that as late as 10 March, the French President set out his government’s position in the famous television interview at considerable length, in exhaustive and subtle detail:  and nothing that he said indicated a determination to ‘veto’, or even to vote against as part of a Security Council majority (which would not constitute a veto) any resolution to authorise force against Iraq at any time in the future in any circumstances.  On the contrary:  Chirac several times pointedly reminded the interviewer that France was by no means a pacifist country.  It’s also worth reminding ourselves that everything said by Chirac in the interview precisely corresponded with the views of a solid majority of Security Council member governments at the time.

Of course it’s possible that in Mr Campbell’s secret talks the French took an irrevocably negative position, totally different from that defined by their President publicly on 10 March, indeed so negative as to justify Washington and London in embarking on a ferocious military attack on and invasion of Iraq without a vestige of authority from the Security Council as required under international law.  But that seems, on the face of it, rather unlikely.  And if the position of France was that defined in the Chirac television interview, Mr Campbell really ought to stop using France as an excuse for an action that was unwarranted, illegal, in breach of our Charter obligations, unnecessary, premature, opposed by much of the world including some of our closest allies and partners — and without question not the last resort.

Update (21 January 2010):  Professor Geoffrey Warner, in a comment on this blog post (below), has questioned my interpretation of the Chirac interview, quoting a passage from the transcript in support of his (and Alastair Campbell’s and Jack Straw’s and Tony Blair’s) opposite interpretation.  In a long response I have quoted back several other extracts from the Chirac interview which in my continuing view support my (and many others’) interpretation, namely that Chirac never said Never, only Not Now. My exchange with Professor Warner is at

http://www.barder.com/2300#comment-91331.

Brian (back from Ethiopia)

Meanwhile we sit and shiver in sub-zero London and wonder whether our daughter in snow-bound New York is going to make it onto her flight to Heathrow.  Global warming?  Pah, humbug.  Lord Lawson must know something that we don’t.

Many thanks to all those of you who have contributed to lively debates on this blog during the year, and especially those who have challenged my more opinionated and partisan posts.  No-one has so far convinced me that our peculiarly British form of preventive detention (Indeterminate sentences for Public Protection or IPPs) can be justified under any civilised system of justice;  or that Tony Blair didn’t mean it when he appeared to say that if he had known that there were no WMD he would have had to think of a different, equally bogus, reason for attacking Iraq;  or that we’re doing more good than harm in Afghanistan or that if we withdrew all British forces tomorrow, the Pakistan régime would collapse, handing over its hydrogen bombs to al-Qaeda (I don’t see the Americans pulling out just because the British did); or that if we all try hard enough we can prevent the planet warming up to more than 2 deg.C;  or that Tony Blair is a middle east peace envoy when he very obviously isn’t;  or that Labour promised a referendum on the Lisbon treaty (or, even if it did, that any government of sound mind would have dared to hold one); or that when government spending is keeping the economy alive (just) pending the long awaited renaissance of demand and supply in the private sector, cutting government spending is a jolly wizard idea — don’t they teach them economics at Eton?;  or that Britain will sink beneath the waves if we don’t pay off our national debt within three weeks of the next election;  or that al-Megrahi should have been left to rot in his Scottish prison until he died — or that there’s no room for doubt about his share of guilt for the Lockerbie bombing;  or that Tony Blair — why do I keep coming back to the old rogue? — would have made an absolutely spiffing President of Europe, even if such a job existed, which it doesn’t;  or that if we keep on fighting the War on Drugs, we’ll eventually win it, any more than we did in Iraq or will in Afghanistan; or that everyone in the country watches a programme called, weirdly, “Strictly”, or that anyone I know watches ‘the X Factor’.  But on all these great matters, Ephems’s meat and drink in the past year, I readily acknowledge that I could be wrong, and on some of them I hope I am.

So I wish a happy Christmas to those visitors to this site who are of a religious disposition and members of the appropriate sect, and jolly holidays to the rest: and to everyone, my best wishes for a much better year in almost every respect than 2009 has been.  It’s a relief to say goodbye to this low dishonest decade (no, I know 2010, not 2009, will officially be the end of the decade, but at least 2009 marks the end of the Noughties.  Good riddance to it!).

*AFK: Away from Keyboard (but you knew that really).

Brian

‘”If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?” Blair was asked. He replied: “I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]“. Significantly, Blair added: “I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.”‘ (Guardian, 12 December 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/12/tony-blair-iraq-chilcot-inquiry)

Some of the evidence already given to the Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq war has sought to distinguish between, on the one hand, President George Bush’s concentration on régime change as the main purpose of invading and occupying Iraq, and, on the other hand, Tony Blair’s realisation that compelling Iraq to obey UN resolutions requiring Iraq to get rid of its Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) was the only objective capable of securing UN authority for the use of force. He also appeared to understand that UN authority might well be a necessary condition for getting the support of parliamentary, media and public opinion in the UK and the rest of the EU for going to war.   Admittedly this version of events doesn’t explain why Blair, having failed to secure UN authority for the use of force, nevertheless went ahead and committed British forces to fight alongside the Americans in the attack on Iraq;  more than one Chilcot witness has pointed out that when UK efforts to get UN approval failed, Blair still had the option, even at that late stage, of refusing to allow British participation in the US military action on the perfectly honourable grounds that his proclaimed condition for participation — UN authority — had not been satisfied.   Blair was forced to try to square this circle by devising a far-fetched and almost universally unconvincing legal fable according to which Security Council resolution 1441, read with earlier UN resolutions passed in the context of the first Gulf war, contained an implicit authority for using force against Iraq without the need for further UN authority.  As Hans Blix, the senior UN weapons inspector at the time, writes in the Guardian of 14 December 2009:

In these circumstances [the UK] developed and advanced the argument that the war was authorised by the council under a series of earlier resolutions. As Condoleezza Rice put it, the alliance action “upheld the authority of the council”. It was irrelevant to this argument that China, France, Germany and Russia explicitly opposed the action and that a majority on the council declined to give the requested green light for the armed action. If hypocrisy is the compliment that virtue pays to vice then strained legal arguments are the compliments that violators of UN rules pay to the UN charter.
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/dec/14/blair-iraq-regime-change-inspections]

So all this depends on Blair’s fundamental position that WMD and what was still widely believed to be Iraq’s failure to get rid of them were his, and Britain’s, justification for the war.  Blair had repeatedly acknowledged that in international law war could not be justified by the desire for, or desirability of, régime change.  He had even claimed, until the last moment, that Saddam Hussein could still save his régime and continue to rule Iraq if at that eleventh hour he were prepared to comply with the UN’s demand that he disarm. (That must have caused some consternastion in Washington!)

Now, in his religious affairs interview, he admits for the first time what so many had always suspected:  that even if he had known at the time that in fact Saddam had no WMD, he would still have “thought it right to remove him”:  and, even more damningly, that in that case “you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.”  Never mind that by his own admission, without the WMD justification the Security Council would never have authorised a war — the Council wouldn’t even authorise it at that time even when there were still apparent grounds for believing that Iraq had WMD.  In his interview with Fern Britton Blair never mentions the question of international law or the absolute obligation to act in accordance with it.

A letter by a certain Ronnie Paris in the Guardian on 13 December 2009  sought to defend Blair’s reply to Fern Britton on the grounds that Blair had only said he would still “have thought it right to remove” Sadam even if he had known that Saddam had no WMD — not that he would necessarily have agreed to take part in military action to remove him in those circumstances.  But Blair’s admission that without WMD and disarmament as justification for war, he “would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat” makes it clear that he would still have gone to war to remove Saddam:  if he had meant only that he would have thought it right to do so but would not have taken any military steps to achieve it, why would he have needed to think up and deploy “different arguments” for removing him?  In any case, the theme running through the whole interview echoes a familiar Blair mantra:  “In the end, you’ve got to do what you believe is right.”

The only possible conclusion to be drawn from Tony Blair’s reply to Ms Britton is that his real purpose in committing Britain to the war was régime change (just as régime change was George W Bush’s openly avowed purpose — illegal, but at least honest);  that he based his campaign for UN approval on WMD only because he knew it was the sole legal justification for the war that the Security Council might eventually recognise and approve, even though by their haste in resorting to war Bush and Blair forfeited any hope of UN legitimacy;  and that had he known or believed that Iraq had no WMD (as of course turned out to be the case), he would still have gone to war, having dreamed up some other excuse for it, the nature of which, six years later, Mr Blair has apparently not yet worked out.

The mystery, therefore, is why Blair should have made this suicidal admission in an interview given just a few weeks before he’s due to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, and soon after some at least of the evidence to the Inquiry had offered him a partial defence against one of the most damaging accusations against him (namely, that his very early promise to Bush of UK participation in an eventual war against Iraq had been recklessly unconditional;  it’s now clear that Blair did impose a correct and proper condition for British participation in the war, i.e. that it should have UN approval in advance, although it’s still not clear just how clearly that vital condition had been spelled out to the Americans).  Now Blair has deprived himself of any credit or defence even on that count.

Perhaps the explanation, as so often with Tony Blair, is the simple one:  his infinite capacity for convincing himself of his own rightness, which he sees as the sole justification and indeed criterion for action.  He can’t accept, apparently, that even his judgement is fallible:  that he is capable of being wrong:  that he ought to listen to those who disagree with him about the rights and wrongs of what he wants to do:  and that the leader of a democracy has an absolute, unqualified obligation to obey the law.  Deciding what you believe is “right” and then devising arguments that can be used to justify your decision is a sure recipe for disaster.  He still, evidently, doesn’t get it.

Brian

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
http://www.barder.com/ephems/

________________________________

28 Oct 09:  Me to Guardian letters

THIS MESSAGE IS NOT FOR PUBLICATION
FOR THE GUARDIAN LETTERS EDITOR FROM SIR 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

___________________________

8 Nov 2009:  me to Guardian letters and the Guardian readers’ Editor

Dear Guardian Letters and Readers’ Editors,

With reference to my message below, to which I have had no reply, and the relevant corrections not (I think) having been published, please now see http://www.barder.com/2180.

If you didn’t copy my original message to George Monbiot when you received it, I would be obliged if you would forward this one to him now.

But I still remain inexplicably loyal to the Guardian!

Best wishes,
Brian Barder

____________________________

11 November 2009:  Guardian Readers’ Editor’s office’s researcher to me

from     Readers.Editor@guardian.co.uk
reply-to Readers.Editor@guardian.co.uk
to         Brian Barder
date      11 November 2009 17:22
subject Re: Tony Blair: not a ‘peace’ envoy

Dear Sir Brian,

Many thanks for your email and your request for correction.

The announcement by the Quartet of the appointment of Tony Blair as Middle East envoy placed his role directly in the context of “advancing the search for peace in the Middle East”. His remit does not include negotiation between the parties, but it is intended to move the region toward peace in line with the Quartet’s aims: “As representative, Tony Blair will bring continuity and intensity of focus to the work of the Quartet in support of the Palestinians, within the broader framework of the Quartet’s efforts to promote an end to the conflict in conformity with the roadmap.”  The means are described in the passages you quote, but the ultimate aim is (explicitly) broader.  Therefore I do not think the reference to Blair as “peace envoy” in George Monbiot’s column requires correction.

On your second point, Tony Blair is not “UN envoy” and I will pursue a correction on that point.

With best wishes,
Charlotte Dewar
Researcher, readers’ editor’s office

_________________________________

12 November 2009:  me to researcher, Readers’ Editor’s office

For Ms Charlotte Dewar, Readers’ Editor’s office, from Sir Brian Barder

Dear Charlotte,

Thank you for your ingenious defence, in your email of yesterday (below), of George Monbiot’s description of Tony Blair as a, or the, “Middle East peace envoy”.  I’m afraid, however, that I don’t buy it.  Of course the appointment, like any appointment by the Quartet, was by definition “in the context of” or “within the broader framework of” the Quartet’s overall objective of bringing peace to the region:  but to say that this makes Blair a ‘peace envoy’ is a bit like saying that when my butcher sells me a leg of lamb “in the context of” the preparations for a dinner party tomorrow, that makes the butcher my cook, or, even more improbably, my wife.  In any case, it’s unnecessary to engage in minute textual analysis and interpretation of the Quartet’s announcement of the appointment when its scope has been publicly (and brutally) defined by the leading member of the Quartet with the explicit agreement of at least two of the other three members:

MR. MCCORMACK:  …The urgency of recent events has reinforced the need for the international community, bearing in mind the obligations of the parties, to help the Palestinians as they build institutions and economy of a viable state in Gaza and the West Bank, able to take its place as a peaceful and prosperous partner to Israel and its other neighbors.

To facilitate efforts to these ends, following discussions among the Principals, today the Quartet announces the appointment of Tony Blair as the Quartet Representative. Mr. Blair, who is stepping down from office this week, has long demonstrated his commitment on these issues.

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.

As representative, Tony Blair will bring continuity and intensity of focus to the work of the Quartet in support of the Palestinians within the broader framework of the Quartet’s efforts to promote an end to the conflict in conformity with the Roadmap. He will spend a significant time in the region working with the parties and others to help create viable and lasting government institutions representing all Palestinians, a robust economy and a climate of law and order for the Palestinian people. Tony Blair will be supported in this work by a small team of experts based in Jerusalem to be seconded by partner countries and institutions. The Quartet representative will report to and consult regularly with the Quartet and be guided by it, as necessary….

QUESTION: Tony Blair’s mandate is apparently limited to this institution building. Does he have any authority to do actual political negotiating for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

MR. MCCORMACK: Well, Mr. Blair’s focus will be on building those Palestinian institutions which will form the basis of a Palestinian state. And I would say that without those institutions and without those institutions being developed, you’re not going to have a Palestinian state. So the idea of the political negotiations and the building of the institutions within the Palestinian state are really of almost equal importance as you’re not going to have a Palestinian state in the absence of one of those two, success in one of those two areas.

So Secretary Rice and President Bush are going to focus on the political negotiations, as they have, and Mr. Blair is going to focus his considerable talents and his efforts on building those Palestinian institutions. I daresay that that is going to be a — take as much time as he is ready to devote to the issue, and I know that he is ready to devote a considerable amount of time to building those institutions.

So I would expect that you can — you would continue to see the same basic breakdown or division of labor in trying to bring about a more peaceful Middle East, bring about a Palestinian state. And Secretary Rice will focus intensely and President Bush will focus intensely on those political negotiations, advancing the Israeli-Palestinian track, advancing the Israeli-Arab track in those negotiations. I’m sure that Secretary Rice and Mr. Blair are going to talk. Of course, they’re going to need to communicate very closely not only though the formal mechanism of the Quartet, but I would also expect on a more informal basis as well.

[State Department press briefing, Sean McCormack, Spokesman, June 27, 2007[ (Emphasis added)
http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2007/jun/87471.htm

And:

US to keep Blair out of Middle East
By Tim Butcher in Jerusalem Daily Telegraph: 12:01AM BST 20 Jul 2007

Tony Blair was told by the United States yesterday that he had no authority to tackle political negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians as he spent his first full day as special envoy to the Middle East.  Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, insisted that America would retain leadership of the "political track" while Mr Blair would work on raising funds for the Palestinians, as well as building their economy and infrastructure.

It was the clearest account yet of the former prime minister's role in the Middle East on behalf of the international Quartet - the European Union, United Nations, the United States and Russia. He will be more an envoy to the Palestinians than a peace envoy.

"I think his mandate was made clear by the Quartet when they issued the statement," said Miss Rice.  "There is also a political track that for a variety of reasons the United States is committed to lead in co-ordination with the Quartet."

Mr Blair's role "is something that is completely complementary and if we all work together, and there is plenty to do, perhaps we can finally deliver," she said.

While she couched her comments amid lavish praise for Mr Blair, it amounted to a diplomatic snub after his representatives had earlier made clear he wanted to play a key role in peace negotiations.

Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, who is understood to have been put out by Mr Blair's appointment, backed Miss Rice, saying Mr Blair's mandate is to "build the Palestinian institutions".

Miss Rice was speaking before Mr Blair attended his first full meeting of the Quartet in Lisbon.  "I know that Tony Blair is an experienced, capable, historic figure and he's going to bring an energy to the international commitment to a Palestinian state that is capable for its own people," she told Sky News. "There is a very good sense that his dedication now to helping the Palestinians build the institutions of statehood, to move forward on economic development and to press forward on helping to create a strong Palestinian partner is very well timed as we try to move forward toward the establishment of a state."  (Emphasis added)
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1558029/US-to-keep-Blair-out-of-Middle-East.html]

The same remarks are reported similarly at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-469639/Rice-Im-charge-Middle-East-peace-Blair.html.

And:

[Former Russian prime minister] Mr Primakov’s remarks added to the controversy over Mr Blair’s new job which has turned out to be a lot less ambitious than first forecast. Instead of a Middle East envoy empowered to negotiate peace terms between Israelis and Palestinians, the mandate was trimmed to one in which the former prime minister would be the Quartet’s representative to help to build the economy and institutions of the Palestinians. At the time of the appointment last month, Mr Blair’s people made clear he was itching to extend the scope of the mandate to include peace building. But following his first meetings this week with officials from the Quartet, as well as Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, Mr Blair now appears to have accepted the mandate in spite of its limitations.  “Mr Blair is happy with the mandate as it will allow him to do the job that he wants to do,” a spokesman for his office said.  (Emphasis added.)
[Daily Telegraph, 12 Jul 2007]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1557271/Russians-sceptical-over-Blairs-Middle-East-role.html

It’s superfluous, after quoting such unambiguous textual evidence, for me to recall watching on CNN television a press conference on the middle east at the UN at which Condoleezza Rice, then US Secretary of State, presided at a long table on the platform, flanked on both sides by about 14 or 15 officials of various kinds, each a specialist in some specific aspect of the negotiations.  Tony Blair was at the far end of the table on Ms Rice’s right.  Various reporters tried to ask Blair questions relating to the peace process but in every case Condoleezza Rice deflected the question to herself and answered it.  It was more than half an hour into the press conference before someone at last asked a question about institution-building in Palestine and Ms Rice finally allowed Mr Blair to answer it — the first time Blair had been permitted to utter a single word.  Throughout this time Tony Blair’s face, occasionally shown in close-up, looked unmistakeably grim.

You’ll know that the new US administration, having inherited the lead role in the Quartet with responsibility for the middle east peace process, has actually appointed a “peace envoy” for the middle east, in the person of former Senator George Mitchell.  It’s not easy to explain how this could have been done without an obvious conflict with Tony Blair’s role if Blair was already the Quartet’s “peace envoy”.    Indeed, in September when President Obama met the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Abbas, and then held his first trilateral meeting with the two leaders, he was “joined by Secretary Clinton, General Jones, Tom Donilon, and [George Mitchell]. For the trilateral meeting, the President was joined by Secretary Clinton, General Jones, and [George Mitchell]. In their meetings, Prime Minister Netanyahu was joined by Foreign Minister Lieberman, Defense Minister Barak, and National Security Advisor Arad. President Abbas was joined by Secretary General Yasser Abed Rabbo, Negotiations Affairs Department Director Saeb Erekat, and Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki.”  If it had been the case that Tony Blair was the Quartet’s “peace envoy”, how could he have been excluded from these key meetings?  Clearly he’s not, and never has been.  I’m astonished that the Guardian, with all the expertise on the middle east that’s available to it, should have even considered contesting the point.

In the light of all this irrefutable evidence, would the Guardian now care to reconsider its decision not to publish a correction of Mr Monbiot’s reference to Tony Blair as a “peace envoy”?  In view of the direct bearing that all this has on the choice of a President (Chairperson) of the EU Council of Ministers, it would seem obviously desirable to publish that correction without further delay.  When you’re in a hole….

Until I hear further from you, I shall postpone putting an addendum to http://www.barder.com/2180 on my website to take account of your email of yesterday and this reply.

Regards,
Brian (Barder)
12 November 2009

___________________________________________

Corrections and clarifications:  Corrections editor

The Guardian, Wednesday 25 November 2009

A letter (Outraged by the Blair pitch project, 28 October, page 33) said that Tony Blair had been proclaimed United Nations envoy in the Middle East. Mr Blair acts on behalf of the “Quartet” comprising the UN, the United States, Russia and the European Union.
____________________________________________

12 November 2009:  me to Guardian Readers’ Editor

from     Brian Barder
to         Siobhain Butterworth <reader@guardian.co.uk>
date      12 November 2009 12:47

subject Re: Tony Blair: not a ‘peace’ envoy
12 Nov 2009

Dear Siobhain Butterworth,

My reply (below) to Charlotte Dewar, addressed to the email address given in her message (Readers.Editor@guardian.co.uk), has been returned as undeliverable (“Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 No such user“).

Might I ask you to pass the message on to Charlotte — or, better still, deal with it yourself?

Thanks.
Regards,
Brian Barder
12 November 2009
_______________________________________________

23 November 2009:  me to Guardian Readers’ Editor

from     Brian Barder
to         Siobhain Butterworth <reader@guardian.co.uk>
date      23 November 2009 18:04 subject Re: Tony Blair: not a ‘peace’ envoy
From Sir Brian Barder for the Guardian Readers’ Editor

Dear Siobhain Butterworth,

Please refer to my exchange of emails with your colleague Charlotte Dewar, and my messages addressed to yourself, reproduced below.

As I have still had no reply to either of my messages of 12 November, and since to the best of my knowledge you have still not corrected the Guardian’s erroneous descriptions of Tony Blair’s middle east role to which I have alerted you, with extensive supporting evidence, I now propose to place the document attached to this message, comprising copies of the principal messages to and (in one case) from your office, on my website (http://www.barder.com/).  I shall also make a suitable comment on our exchanges with a link to the texts of our emails in my blog, as a follow-up to my blog post at http://www.barder.com/2180.

If there is any further comment you would like me to include in addition to the text of Ms Dewar’s brief email of 11 November, I shall of course be glad to add it.  In that case, I would appreciate an early reply with any text you want me to add.  If I hear nothing from you by, say, the start of working hours on Friday, 27 November, I shall take it that you have nothing further to say and I’ll then go ahead and put the attachment to this on my website.

Whether you choose to reply or not, I assure you that I have no intention of stopping either my subscription to the Guardian or my flow of letters submitted, with fluctuating degrees of success, for publication in it!

Regards,
Brian Barder

23 Nov 2009
________________________________________________

23 November 2009:  Do Not Reply at Guardian.co.uk to me

from     DoNotReply@guardian.co.uk
reply-to DoNotReply@guardian.co.uk
to         Brian Barder
date      23 November 2009 18:04

subject Thank you for your email:
Re: Tony Blair: not a ‘peace’ envoy

Thank you for emailing the office of the Guardian’s readers’ editor, Siobhain Butterworth.  We can’t reply to every email but we do read them all.

Please excuse the automated response but we want to let you know what happens when we hear from you.

Corrections: it is the Guardian’s policy to correct significant errors as soon as possible, other errors may be corrected at our discretion. It helps us work quickly if you identify the article by providing the date, headline and page number or a link to it. If you have emailed us with a request for a correction we will not usually send you a response unless the article directly affects you. Corrections generally appear in the paper’s daily Corrections and clarifications column and/or online within a few days. A full archive of corrections printed in the paper is available online:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/series/correctionsandclarifications

Complaints: if you have written with a complaint or comment about the Guardian’s journalism I will reply to you if I intend to review it or plan to write about it in my weekly column.

Other queries and requests:  if you have written to us about an advertisement, a missing section, an issue relating to the circulation of the newspaper, a technical problem you are having with the website, a reader offer, a competition, or if you have a general query, we will pass your email to the relevant department.

Please note that this mailbox is open to all Guardian journalists.

Best wishes
Siobhain Butterworth
Readers’ editor  The Guardian
T +44 (0)20 7713 4736

This email has been automatically generated. Please do not reply to this email

_______________________________

All right, Ms Butterworth.  I can take a hint.

Brian

The commentators’ consensus on Gordon Brown’s apparently successful teasing of David Cameron at PMQs on Wednesday about his and other Cameroons’ Eton educations (“[Tory] inheritance tax policy seems to have been dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton”) is that Labour has been reduced to playing the class war card, and that this is somehow deeply reprehensible.  “We can join in condemning Brown for trying, with his demented smirk, to let slip the dogs of class war,” writes Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times.  Surely a little bit OTT?  Some media comments seem to have missed the point that the reference to Eton’s playing fields echoes the Duke of Wellington’s famous (but probably apocryphal) remark that “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”, which was actually a compliment to Eton, or at any rate to its playing fields.  Anyway, what’s wrong with accusing the toffs on the Tory front bench of having been brought up in a rarefied and privileged subsection of society — Eton, the Bullingdon club, and all that — which makes it difficult for them to empathise with the problems of ordinary people?  No-one is saying that every Tory front bencher is a toff, or that there are no toffs in the Labour leadership.  But the sad fact is that class pervades almost every part of life in Britain (or at any rate in England), although it’s considered a bit off to mention it in polite society;  and it’s an indisputable fact of their fundamental founding principles and historical records that the Conservative party exists primarily to defend and promote the interests of the upper and upper middle classes — the landed gentry, the industrialists and financiers, the employers, the businessmen and entrepreneurs:  in general, the rich;  while the Labour Party, originating in and still perfectly properly linked to the trade union movement, is there to defend the interests of the working and lower middle classes — the employees and the unemployed, the public sector workers, the public services on which the have-nots depend, the most vulnerable and defenceless in society: in general, the poor and the less well-off.  Why else do the Tories try to insist that the most urgent problem facing Britain is the enormous budget deficit and national debt, while Labour sees tackling unemployment and accelerating recovery from the recession as a much more pressing requirement?  All right, New Labour has often forgotten, blurred or even betrayed that basic Labour mission, but the generalisation about the fundamental difference between the two parties remains valid.  The squeamish and mealy-mouthed can bleat all they like about the wickedness of fighting the class war, especially if the fight is laced with humour as it was by Brown on Wednesday (who was his script-writer?).  But it goes to the heart of our politics and there’s absolutely no reason not to say so.

*   *   *   *   *

Like almost everyone else on this side of the Atlantic, I feel very sorry for Gary McKinnon, the autistic computer hacker who’s likely to face extradition to the United States, there to be tried (and if convicted, as seems likely since he admits most of the charges, imprisoned) for inflicting serious damage on the Pentagon’s computer security systems.  However, anyone with an open mind reading the statement by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, in parliament on 1 December, and his comprehensive replies to questions on it, explaining in detail why he has simply been legally unable to intervene to prevent McKinnon’s extradition, is bound to conclude that the case against extraditing the man doesn’t really stand up. Johnson had cogent replies to all the doubts, complaints and worries constantly aired in the media as reasons for blocking the extradition.  The issues have gone through exhaustive examination in court after court at every available level, always with the same result.  There is still a possibility of judicial review and another appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (nothing to do with the EU), and Johnson promises not to let extradition go ahead until both processes have been exhausted.  But the final outcome looks bad for Gary.

One issue that surely calls for further debate is the apparent one-sidedness of the US-UK Extradition Treaty under which the Americans are applying for McKinnon’s extradition.  The Tory front bencher Damian Green (yes, he of the home office mole and his leaks) confronted the home secretary with what looks on the face of it to have been a damaging admission by the lady who’s now the government’s chief legal adviser and was then a minister of state at the home office.  According to Green, –

Baroness Scotland, the Government’s Attorney-General, said in 2003:
“when we make extradition requests to the United States we shall need to submit sufficient evidence to establish ‘probable cause’. That is a lower test than prima facie but a higher threshold than we ask of the United States”.  [Official Report, House of Lords, 16 December 2003; Vol. 655, c. 1063.]

The question of the material difference, if any, between prima facie evidence and probable cause is legally intricate, and goes to the heart of the criticism of the treaty.  But here too Alan Johnson spelled out what seemed to me a convincing case for rejecting the view that the treaty is unfairly tilted against the UK and in favour of the US.  Altogether Johnson’s performance on all this was exemplary:  calm, reasoned, patiently and conscientiously dealing with all the points raised.  Only once did he seem to show irritation, when he complained of being “patronised” by “Mr. Douglas Hogg (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)”, an undoubted toff, and not just on the evidence of his famous moat.  The home secretary, equally famously a former postman, is in no danger of being accused of toffery, which may explain why he objects to being patronised by those who are.

*   *   *   *   *

Perhaps the biggest shock of the week, though, has been the unexpected sacking of no less a personage than Malcolm Tucker, the prime minister’s infamous press secretary in the brilliant BBC political series The Thick of It, written by Armando Ianucci.  As one of the reviewers of the Sunday papers in the oddly-named Andrew Marr Show this morning (6 Dec 09), Ianucci accurately summed up what had happened to Tucker by saying that he had “been resigned”.  Tucker is an undisputed monster, yet it was impossible not to feel just a little sorry for him watching his face contort as he saw on a television set in the minister’s office the “breaking news” strapline announcing that he had resigned (he hadn’t).  Ianucci did however remind Andrew Marr that only the first part of a two-part episode of The Thick of It had so far been broadcast, hinting broadly that we might not have seen the last of the tyrannical, foul-mouthed press secretary.  Tucker, we’re repeatedly assured, bears no resemblance whatever to any No. 10 press secretary past or present, alive or dead.  You’d better believe it.

*   *   *   *   *

In an aside during the Andrew Marr Show press review, Mr Ianucci made a casual remark to the effect that the evidence given so far to the Iraq Inquiry had confirmed the suspicion of firm decisions having been taken to use force against Saddam but repeatedly being denied until the eve of the war.  I’m sure Ianucci is much too busy to sit for hours watching or listening to the Iraq Inquiry hearings, but he surely can’t be too busy to spend a few minutes reading my recent blog post that argues the opposite?   The evidence given to the inquiry by Tony Blair’s principal foreign affairs adviser at the time of the run-up to the war did indeed provide a convincing defence against the charges that Blair had taken the firm decision to go to war with Iraq months before any such decision was announced, or that he had given George W Bush an unconditional undertaking that we would go to war alongside the Americans.  But this was not evidence of a British diplomat’s slavish deference to his political master, nor obedient willingness to defend to the death everything Blair had said and done, as Ianucci seemed to assume:  for the official concerned went on to tell the inquiry that in his view, and contrary to Blair’s, the UN inspectors should have been given more time to complete their work in Iraq before the decision was taken to invade: and, even more wounding for Blair, that Blair had had the option at the time, since all peaceful means of getting rid of Iraq’s supposed WMD had not yet been exhausted, of refusing to allow British forces to play any part in the American military action.  Nothing slavish about that!

Brian

]]> http://www.barder.com/2271/feed 9 http://www.barder.com/2263 http://www.barder.com/2263#comments Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:10:28 +0000 Brian http://www.barder.com/?p=2263 Two weeks ago, the UK press ran a sensational story about a patient, diagnosed by medical specialists as having been for years in persistent vegetative state (PVS) with no consciousness or ability to communicate, discovered through a state-of-the-art scanning system to have been fully conscious throughout, and now enabled to communicate through a specially designed computer keyboard.  The Guardian’s account, published on 24 November 2009, began:

For 23 years Rom Houben was ­imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him during their daily rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died. But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.  Doctors presumed he was in a vegetative state following a near-fatal car crash in 1983. They believed he could feel nothing and hear nothing. For 23 years.

Then a neurologist, Steven Laureys, who decided to take a radical look at the state of diagnosed coma patients, released him from his torture. Using a state-of-the-art scanning system, Laureys found to his amazement that his brain was functioning almost normally. “I had dreamed myself away,” said Houben, now 46, whose real “state” was discovered three years ago, according to a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel this week.  Laureys, a neurologist at the ­University of Liege in Belgium, published a study in BMC Neurology earlier this year saying Houben could be one of many cases of falsely diagnosed comas around the world. He discovered that although Houben was completely paralysed, he was also completely conscious — it was just that he was unable to communicate the fact.

Houben now communicates with one finger and a special touchscreen on his wheelchair – he has developed some movement with the help of intense physiotherapy over the last three years.

[Guardian, 24 November 2009]

In September 2006 I wrote a post for this blog (at http://www.barder.com/568):

“Persistent Vegetative State”: some background to last week’s story

September 9th, 2006

Last Friday (8 Sept 06) the Guardian ran a (perhaps deservedly) sensational front page story announcing that “For first time, doctors communicate with patient in persistent vegetative state: Brain scans showed woman was able to imagine playing tennis and walking round her flat”….  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1867567,00.html]

I went on to express surprise — in 2006! — at the failure of the Guardian’s September 2006 story –

…to connect the latest developments with the extensive work already done on Persistent Vegetative State issues over many years, and its implications for patients who have been diagnosed as being in PVS.  A world expert and author of break-through research on the subject is Professor Dr Keith Andrews, Director of the Institute of Complex Neurological Disability at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability in Putney, London (on whose governing body I was privileged to sit for some years).  An early and still centrally important paper on PVS by Dr Andrews and his collaborators was “Misdiagnosis of the vegetative state: retrospective study in a rehabilitation unit” (Andrews K, Murphy L, Munday R, Littlewood C., British Medical Journal, 1996; 313: 13-16).  Based on his studies of a sizeable sample of patients referred to the Royal Hospital after having been diagnosed by specialists elsewhere as being in PVS, Dr Andrews concluded (in the words of a later article) that –

Out of 40 patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, 17 (43%) were later found to be alert, aware, and often able to express a simple wish. The study is one of the largest, most sustained analyses of severely disabled people presumed to be incapable of conscious thinking, communication, or awareness of their surroundings. The author, London neurologist Dr. Keith Andrews, said, “It is disturbing to think that some patients who were aware had for several years been treated as being vegetative.”

So in 2006 I was citing a paper on PVS published in 1996 about the disturbing frequency with which patients were being misdiagnosed as being in persistent vegetative state when in fact they were fully or partially conscious, and could often be enabled to communicate using recently developed techniques.

Once upon a time newspapers kept a clippings library to enable their writers to refer back to earlier material about an apparently new story that they were about to write. Now Google News — and their own hard disks — could easily do that job of elementary research for them. Yet they still regularly announce the invention of the wheel with a fanfare of trumpets. The hacks really ought to have a notice stuck to their computer monitors bearing the legend: “There is nothing new under the sun”. It’s as if the collective consciousness of the media is itself in persistent vegetative state.

But the really worrying moral of this curious tale is that at least 13 years after the publication of a major article about the common misdiagnosis of patients wrongly thought to be in PVS, and techniques for re-establishing communication with a high percentage of them, patients are still, in 2009, being wrongly diagnosed. Each time a patient is rescued from this nightmarish imprisonment in his or her own body, conscious but unable to communicate, the medical triumph is trumpeted as if such a thing had never happened before. The question we should be asking is how many other misdiagnosed patients are languishing in their mental prisons, listening to their doctors and relatives discussing whether to turn off their life support machines? How many life support machines have been switched off while the patient lies there, unable to communicate his awareness of the fate about to destroy him? And lest anyone should suppose that a person trapped in such a nightmare would surely welcome death as a merciful release, it’s worth remembering that not one of those rescued by Dr Andrews from their misdiagnosed condition, and able at last to describe the experience of the captive years, ever said that he or she would rather have died.

Update [pm 5 Dec 09]: Comments by Tony Hatfield and Peter Harvey (below) discuss serious doubts about the genuineness of the technique, known as Facilitated Communication or FC, used to enable Rom Houben, the subject of the current reports, allegedly to communicate.  The links helpfully supplied by Tony in his comment point to a mass of evidence that this is either a hoax or a sad case of self-delusion, and that the texts supposedly being typed out by the patient are actually being composed by the facilitator holding Houben’s finger to peck at the letters on the flat keyboard, supposedly in response to faint twitches that she claims to detect in his finger.  The video clip of this process seems to me to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the unfortunate Mr Houben is not in any sense doing the typing or even controlling it.  It seems unlikely therefore that this patient can in fact now communicate, and doubtful whether any particular level of consciousness has really been detected in his case, although the jury is still out on that.

However, as to the restoration of communication, the almost certain lack of credibility of this case, and apparently of FC generally, can’t be taken as discrediting well documented cases of patients wrongly diagnosed as in PVS and ultimately found not only to have been conscious at some level throughout, but also to be able to communicate, however laboriously, by blinking, or exerting slight pressure of a heel, elbow, ball of a thumb, or other part of the anatomy, on a button that operates a buzzer — one buzz for ‘yes’, two buzzes for ‘no’, or whatever.  These cases are, I believe, well documented and not seriously challenged.  In the case of the researches conducted by Professor Dr Keith Andrews at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability, referred to in my 2006 blog post and quoted above, Keith Andrews and his assistants several years ago developed a ‘SMART’ (Sensory Modality Assessment and Rehabilitation Technique) kit that used stimuli of all five senses, even including taste, in order to try to identify some means by which a supposedly vegetative patient might be able to do enough to answer a question ‘yes’ or ‘no’: a twitch, a slight pressure, a blink, a frown.  Once that’s established, the rest follows:  the patient can communicate words by indicating ‘yes’ when the correct letter of the alphabet is read out, and so on.  Computers using predictive text can then speed up this process.  I don’t think that ‘locked in syndrome’ can seriously be dismissed as illusory, or that it can never be unlocked by techniques such as those discussed.  Below is a selection of the comments on one of the websites referred to by Tony Hatfield which appear to bear this out.  But in any case the purpose of this post is not to suggest a verdict on the genuineness or otherwise of the particular Houben case which has revived media interest in the whole subject in recent weeks, nor of FC generally, but rather to point out that there’s a long history of research and clinical practice in this field, including some virtually indisputable successes, going back for well over a decade.  Even if the Houben case were, improbably, to turn out to be genuine, it certainly wouldn’t be the first of its kind, as much of the mainstream media has been suggesting.

Here are some of the relevant comments, with their URLs for those wishing to check:

Locked-in syndrome is a condition, usually caused by a brainstem stroke but also sometimes caused by traumatic brain injury, in which the patient is fully aware and awake but unable to communicate because nearly all voluntary muscles are paralyzed. Usually, locked-in patients can only blink their eyes. From my perspective it is a fate worse than death. The most famous case of being locked-in is Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French journalist who developed locked-in syndrome after suffering a stroke in 1995. Bauby could communicate through blinking his left eye, which was the only part of his body over which he had any control left. Amazingly, he was able to dictate slowly and painfully his experiences by blinking when the correct letter of the alphabet was reached by the person transcribing his memoirs, which were published as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and later made into a movie.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/11/another_contender_for_the_worst_reportin.php

I work in brain injury advocacy, and have been active in the young people in nursing homes campaign here. I know of several people discharged from hospital with PVS diagnoses who are now clearly, independently communicating (in a couple of cases, become peer support leaders/advocates around YPINH [Young People In Nursing Homes] issues themselves)
Posted by: Maria Strong | November 25, 2009 6:08 AM

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/11/another_contender_for_the_worst_reportin.php#comment-2100686

I don’t think adaptive technology is advanced enough, but one twitch for yes, two for no, seems doable. If human fingers could detect the twitch, technology would be able to.
Posted by: LW | November 25, 2009 10:23 AM

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/11/another_contender_for_the_worst_reportin.php#comment-2101041

“I don’t think adaptive technology is advanced enough”
Oh yes it is. For years, Dr Stephen Hawking has been able to ‘talk’ just by twitching a single muscle. And he’s not alone, there are dozens like him who can use the same basic technology to communicate.
Posted by: sophia8 | November 25, 2009 11:10 AM

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/11/another_contender_for_the_worst_reportin.php#comment-2101163

Indeed, the technology IS advanced enough. There are AAC devices that respond to tiny finger twitches, eye blinks, even gaze-tracking (i.e. all you have to do is scan the board and hold your gaze for a moment on the picture/word/letter you want). Cost is an obstacle to getting access to the more advanced systems, but they do exist. This man’s speech therapist ought to know that, same as she ought to know that FC is complete bunk.
Posted by: borealys | November 25, 2009 12:11 PM
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/11/another_contender_for_the_worst_reportin.php#comment-2101348

Notably, though, [Professor Stephen Hawkings has] been declining lately. He can’t work the clicker as easily as he used to. He’s starting to have to use a form of communication that might be described as facilitated, though it’s not what’s shown in the video above. He works closely with an undergrad (who may, by now, be postdoc; I don’t know), who has gotten to know him well enough to be able to predict what he’s saying before he’s finished selecting the particular word. To avoid tiring Hawking, the student sometimes lists a series of words, stopping when Hawking indicates that he’s found the correct one. Notably, Hawking still has facial control, so people can read his emotions to some degree. Even so, it still takes considerable patience on the student’s part. It is very tedious compared to the facilitated communication triumphs that are sometimes claimed.
Posted by: Calli Arcale | November 25, 2009 12:48 PM
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/11/another_contender_for_the_worst_reportin.php#comment-2101442

Brian

In the testimony by Sir David Manning, the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser during the key period preceding the attack on Iraq in March 2003 and a major influence on policy at that time, Sir David repeatedly stressed that Blair’s promise to Bush that in the event of a US attack on Iraq Britain would join the Americans in the resort to armed force was always on the explicit condition that they would “go down the UN route” and assemble through the UN a coalition of allies acting with UN authority.  The implication of this, whether or not it was ever made explicit, was obviously that force would be used against Iraq only when all diplomatic possibilities (i.e. through the UN) had been tried and exhausted.  Force was to be the last resort.

Manning also made it clear that  while the Americans had openly regarded the objective as ‘régime change’ — getting rid of Saddam Hussein — the UK side had always made it clear that régime change could not be a legitimate objective justifying the use of force if and when diplomatic efforts had been exhausted.  The only objective in British eyes capable of winning UN approval was Iraqi compliance with numerous mandatory UN Security Council resolutions demanding that Iraq must rid itself of Weapons of Mass Destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological).  However, it is now clear that in both Blair’s and Bush’s eyes, it was almost inconceivable that Iraq would comply with the resolutions so long as Saddam was in power, and they thought it highly unlikely that Saddam could be overthrown without the use of force, sooner or later.  To that extent régime change and forcing Iraq to disarm in compliance with the resolutions came to virtually the same thing: you probably couldn’t have one without the other.

Sir D Manning’s assertion that Blair consistently laid down the condition of action through the UN for British participation in any future military action against Iraq is fully borne out by a re-reading of the so-called Downing Street Memos, the secret documents from March 2002 that have been leaked and are available in full on the Web (e.g. here).  These papers have been widely interpreted as evidence that Tony Blair had firmly committed himself to British participation in an American attack on Iraq at least a year before the attack took place, and that in giving several public assurances right up to the eve of the attack that no decision had been taken to go to war with Iraq Blair had been lying.  Manning’s evidence, and the Downing Street Memos re-read in the light of it, demonstrates that this is not so.  Blair had always insisted on “going down the UN route” and as a result of his insistence that unless Bush went to the UN first Britain would not participate in the attack Bush decided to go to the UN, however reluctantly and despite strong pressure from the neo-cons and others in his administration not to do so.

It’s certainly clear from the leaked documents, and will no doubt be confirmed in other witnesses’ evidence to Chilcot in the coming days and weeks, that contingency planning for an attack on Iraq began in both Washington and London many months before it took place.  But it was contingency planning only, not involving a firm decision to use force, anyway on the UK side. Since both leaders believed, reasonably enough, that Saddam would not even consider complying with the UN resolutions unless he could be convinced that non-compliance would lead to a military attack on Iraq, it was legitimate and logical to begin to deploy armed forces in Iraq’s neighbouring countries well before any decision had been taken to use them.

It’s also true that both Blair and Bush were clearly convinced that all attempts to secure Iraqi compliance with the resolutions without the use of force were highly likely to fail, so that in their eyes force was almost inevitable in the end.  Because of this mindset, much of the drafting of the relevant documents tended to assume that force would indeed eventually be used, that Britain would participate once its conditions had been satisfied, and that to ensure that the use of force would be legal under international law (both for its own sake and also to bring the maximum number of allies on board while obtaining wide support from UK and to a lesser extent US domestic public opinion), it would be essential to act at all times in a manner best calculated to persuade the Security Council first to authorise a concerted peaceful effort to oblige Saddam to comply with the resolutions by disarming, and when that effort failed, to authorise the use of force to compel compliance –  which in Bush’s and Blair’s minds also meant overthrowing him and his régime.  In the eyes of the American neo-cons and hawks, the proceedings in the UN were purely for form’s sake: going through the motions to get the UN’s blessing, if possible, for what they reckoned would have to be done anyway.  It’s fair, though, to believe that Blair genuinely wanted to exhaust all peaceful means of forcing Iraq to disarm (which would probably bring about régime change) before any resort to the use of force, partly to avoid the bloodshed and horror of war, but also because until peaceful means had been exhausted, the Security Council would not authorise the use of force.  Despite some waverings, Bush basically decided to go along with this.

For all these reasons, a huge US-UK (especially UK) effort was made to secure a Security Council resolution demanding Iraqi compliance with the earlier resolutions, including full cooperation with the UN weapons inspectors whom Saddam was compelled to re-admit to the country, and making it clear that if Iraq was again guilty of a material breach of its obligation to comply, military action against him would follow.  There was then a lengthy negotiation of the text of a draft resolution between the 15 members of the Council, involving at least one significant textual concession by those (mainly France, Russia and China) opposed to the use of force for the immediate future until the weapons inspectors had had much more time to complete their work, and a corresponding concession by the US and UK which wanted the resolution explicitly to authorise force as soon as Iraq committed a “material breach”.  The result was resolution 1441, adopted unanimously by all 15 members of the Council — a remarkable triumph of mainly British diplomacy and a bright feather in the cap of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK’s Permanent Representative on the Council.

So on the charge of lying when he said that no firm decision to go to war against Iraq had been taken until the eve of the invasion, Tony Blair must be acquitted.  On the charge that he committed himself to British participation in US military action against Iraq without laying down firm conditions for that participation, he must also be acquitted.  Nothing in any of the leaked documents, nor in those made available by the Butler Inquiry into the use of intelligence in the run-up to the war, contradicts the Manning evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on 30 November 2009 which supports those acquittals.

*   *   *   *   *

On the more serious charge, however — that Tony Blair took Britain to war before all possibilities of a peaceful solution had been exhausted and without the authority of the Security Council, Sir David Manning’s evidence is damning, especially when read alongside that of Sir Jeremy Greenstock on 27 November 2009.  Here the verdict hinges in part, but not exclusively, on the proper interpretation of Resolution 1441.  In his secret advice to the prime minister on 7 March 2003 the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, the government’s principal legal adviser, warned that it was doubtful whether resolution 1441 could safely be relied on as authorising the use of force against Iraq by any UN member state without a further resolution explicitly conveying Security Council authority for force to be used.  Ten days later, on 17 March, Lord Goldsmith published in Hansard a different opinion, asserting that since Iraq had been found to have committed a ‘material breach’ of its UN obligations, the authority for the use of force in a much earlier Security Council resolution had been ‘revived’ by the terms of resolution 1441;  and that if the Council had meant to require a further resolution before force could be used following a ‘material breach’, resolution 1441 would have said so, whereas all the resolution had actually required was that in the event of a report of a material breach, the Council would meet to ‘consider’ it, not to take a ‘decision’ on it.  In his evidence to Chilcot, Sir Jeremy Greenstock amplified this argument in support of his own view that the war was ‘legal’ by referring to the ‘negotiating history’ of the text of 1441.  During these negotiations, France, Russia and others had pressed for the inclusion in the text of a specific reference to the need for the Council to take a further ‘decision’ — i.e. to pass another resolution — before force could be used if another material breach was reported.  The UK and US had resisted this, and the end result had been that 1441 had required the Council only to ‘consider’ the situation following a reported material breach, not necessarily to take a decision on it.

This argument for the interpretation of 1441 as authorising the use of force without the need for a further Council resolution has however failed to convince the great majority of authorities on international law.  The Attorney-General himself warned in his earlier, secret, opinion that if the matter came before a court, it was doubtful whether arguments based on the negotiating history would be admissible since there were no impartial records of those negotiations.  It is anyway contrary to common sense to assert that in promising to ‘consider’ the situation following a further material breach, the Council was denying itself the right to decide what to do about it.  Under the Charter it is for the Security Council, not any member state or states, to decide when the use of force should be authorised.  Above all, the UK had made the most strenuous efforts to get the Council to agree to a second resolution explicitly, or at least implicitly but unmistakably, authorising the use of force, but had completely failed to muster the necessary nine votes in favour of such a resolution, since a clear majority on the Council favoured giving the inspectors more time — perhaps six months — to complete their work before war could be justified.  It is obviously difficult to argue that the Council, in adopting resolution 1441, had intended the resolution to convey authority for any member state to go to war with Iraq without the need for another resolution conferring that authority when a clear majority of the Council had refused to agree to precisely any such resolution.  Not only the Attorney-General but also the FCO’s legal advisers, specialists in international law as Lord Goldsmith was not, had advised that going to war without a second resolution would be illegal — and therefore, as the deputy legal adviser said in her letter of resignation, would amount to the “crime of aggression”.  To make matters worse for the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and for Tony Blair in No. 10, Ms Wilmshurst made it clear that she was not just expressing her own view:

My views accord with the advice that has been given consistently in this office before and after the adoption of UN security council resolution 1441 and with what the attorney general gave us to understand was his view prior to his letter of 7 March.

And just to give the knife a final twist, both Sir Jeremy Greenstock and Sir David Manning, both of whom had been active at the very heart of these great events, told the Chilcot Inquiry that in their own personal view the inspectors should have been given more time to complete their work before any member state resorted to the use of force. When Manning was asked whether the UK had had any options when its efforts to get a second resolution collapsed and the US prepared to go to war forthwith, he replied that of course we had: we had had the option of refusing to take part in the US invasion.  It is rarely indeed that the former senior adviser to a prime minister publicly condemns his former master in such explicit terms.

On the balance of the evidence so far, therefore, Tony Blair stands condemned for having failed to stand by the condition he had laid down for joining the Americans in the attack on Iraq;  for joining in the use of force before all other options had been exhausted, since force was not a last resort, even if the then Attorney-General’s and Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s interpretation of 1441 is accepted;  and if it isn’t, for using force without the authority of the Security Council and thus in contraversion of the UN Charter and of international law — “the crime of aggression”.

The importance of this indictment is that it does not depend on any particular interpretation of resolution 1441.  There was no need to go to war when we did, whether or not we did so with legal authority.  The majority of Security Council members wanted the inspectors to be given more time before there needed to be a decision — by the Council, not by Washington or London — that the time had come to use force.  Even if you accept the Goldsmith-Greenstock argument that resolution 1441 gave authority for the use of force (which few legal experts do), it doesn’t mean that using force when we did was justified;  the case for regarding it as tragically premature is overwhelming. The Manning and Greenstock testimonies have surely put the matter beyond doubt.

Critics of the war in general and of Tony Blair and his Cabinet in particular need therefore to be careful about their targets.  Continuing to denounce Blair for having committed us unconditionally to war many months before the decision was first announced will only muddy the waters:  Blair has a strong defence against that charge.  It will be more effective to concentrate on the issues where, anyway at this stage of the Inquiry, he has little or no defence available.  He took us to war when it was unnecessary and inadvisable to do so, and probably in breach of international law into the bargain.  That’s quite enough to be going on with.

There are other matters on which Tony Blair is convincingly accused of having lied:  in misrepresenting the strength and volume of the intelligence indicating that Iraq had WMD;  in promising not to go to war without the Council’s authority unless a majority in the Council was in favour of giving that authority but was frustrated by “an unreasonable veto”;  in claiming that the French had said they would never in any circumstances at any time allow a Security Council resolution authorising the use of force to be adopted — and that this had prevented us from getting the second resolution we had sought, neither proposition being true.  But before pronouncing judgement on these charges, we must await the further evidence that will be given to the Chilcot Inquiry.  Meanwhile we can enjoy the luxury of watching the oral evidence live on streaming video, of watching past oral evidence and reading the transcripts of it, and of reading the written submissions, thanks to Sir John Chilcot’s insistence on maximum transparency in the face of Gordon Brown’s expressed preference for secrecy.  Bravo, Sir John!

Brian

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

BBC Newsnight, 6 February, 2003  Jeremy Paxman and Tony Blair

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/2732979.stm

JEREMY PAXMAN: … Will you give an undertaking to this audience, and indeed to the British people that before any military action you will seek another UN Resolution, specifically authorising the use of force.

TONY BLAIR: We’ve said that that’s what we want to do.

JEREMY PAXMAN: But you haven’t given an explicit commitment that those are the only circumstances under which British forces will be used.

TONY BLAIR: I haven’t but what I’ve said is this – those are the only circumstances in which we would agree to use force except for one caveat that I’ve entered.  And I’ll explain exactly why I’ve done this. If the inspectors do report that they can’t do their work properly because Iraq is not co-operating there’s no doubt that under the terms of the existing United Nations Resolution that that’s a breach of the Resolution. In those circumstances there should be a further Resolution.   If, however, a country were to issue a veto because there has to be unanimity amongst the permanent members of the Security Council. If a country unreasonably in those circumstances put down a veto then I would consider action outside of that.

JEREMY PAXMAN:

But Prime Minister, this is, you say, all about a man defying the wishes of the United Nations. You cannot have it both ways.  If one of the permanent five members of the Security Council uses its veto and you, with your friend George Bush, decide somehow that this is unreasonable, you can’t then consider yourself absolutely free to defy the express will of the Security Council. What’s it for otherwise?

TONY BLAIR: First of all, let me make two points in relation to that. Firstly you can’t just do it with America, you have to get a majority in the Security Council.   Secondly, because the issue of a veto doesn’t even arise unless you get a majority in the Security Council. Secondly, the choice that you’re then faced with is this. If the will of the UN is the thing that is most important and I agree that it is, if there is a breach of Resolution 1441 which is the one that we passed.   If there is a breach and we do nothing then we have flouted the will of the UN.

JEREMY PAXMAN: We have flouted the will of the UN.

TONY BLAIR: If we don’t act in those circumstances. Look …

JEREMY PAXMAN: Are you saying there’s already an authorisation for war?

TONY BLAIR: No, what I’m saying is this. In the Resolution that we passed last November we said that Iraq, it’s actually interesting to look at the Resolution. Iraq had what was called a final opportunity to comply. The duty of compliance was defined as full co-operation with the UN Inspectors. The Resolution then goes on to say “any failure to co-operate fully is a breach of this Resolution and serious consequences i.e. action, would follow”. Now, we then also put in that Resolution that there will be a further discussion in the Security Council. But the clear understanding was that if the inspectors do say that Iraq is not complying and there is a breach of that resolution, then we have to act.  Now if someone comes along and says, OK I accept there’s a breach of Resolution 1441 but I’m issuing a veto I think that would be unreasonable. Incidentally I don’t think that’s what will happen. I think that we will, if the inspectors do end up in a situation where they’re saying there is not compliance by Iraq then I think a second resolution will issue.

FEMALE: Do you not agree that most of Britain don’t want us to act alone without the United Nations, and do you not agree that it’s important to get France, Germany and Russia on board with support to help us?

TONY BLAIR: Yes I do. I agree with that. That’s what I’m trying to get. So –

JEREMY PAXMAN: Why not give an undertaking that you wouldn’t go to war without their agreement.

TONY BLAIR: Because supposing one of those countries – I’m not saying this will happen, I don’t believe it will incidentally. But supposing in circumstances where there plainly was a breach of Resolution 1441 and everyone else wished to take action, one of them put down a veto. In those circumstances it would be unreasonable.

Then I think it would be wrong because otherwise you couldn’t uphold the UN. Because you’d have passed your Resolution and then you’d have failed to act on it.

JEREMY PAXMAN: And who are we to say it’s “unreasonable” as you put it?

TONY BLAIR: You say that, if in circumstances where the inspectors – not us – have come back to the UN and said we can’t do our job. Now look – I think it’s a perfectly simple way of putting this thing and incidentally, I don’t believe we’ll get to the stage of vetoes and so on. I think we’ll be in the position that you’re talking about. Now the reason I wanted this to go down the UN path last year. I mean, in the summer people were thinking you were about to start the war.  Myself and other people said, no, we’ve got to take this back to the United Nations and go through the UN route. And I think we will be in circumstances where the UN passed the second Resolution and I take it in the sense from what you’re saying I think this is where the majority of people are. Is that if the UN did pass a second Resolution people would support it.

LAURA SEWELL: I’d like to know if the UK and the US just ignore the UN, just go ahead with war without a UN Resolution. How can you expect any other country to listen to the UN in the future?

TONY BLAIR: Well, that comes back to the point that we’re making. The first thing is that it would be odd to say that we’d ignored the UN since –

LAURA SEWELL: What if you go against a UN Resolution, are you not –

TONY BLAIR: We mustn’t go against the UN Resolution.

SEWELL: If you go without the UN Resolution.

TONY BLAIR: The point that I’m making is this. There are only one set of circumstances. I mean the reason I won’t give the absolute undertaking that Jeremy was asking me to give, is because of this one set of circumstances where Resolution 1441, the one that has been passed, where everyone’s agreed on. If that is breached and the inspectors say, no I’m sorry we can’t do our job and in those circumstances the Resolution 1441 effectively says well then a second Resolution issues. If someone then at that point vetoes wrongly, what do we do?

FEMALE: It’s only you that thinks it’s wrong, like George Bush thinks that they’re doing that unreasonably.

TONY BLAIR: No, no –

FEMALE: It’s the point of the veto, not that that can happen in that sort of situation.

TONY BLAIR: What happens is that there are 15 members of the Security Council, there’s five permanent members and the five permanent members have got the veto. The other ones don’t. Now, the issue of a veto only arises if we’ve got a majority of people on the Security Council with us, so there’s not – Britain and America that would be doing this on our own in any event.

____________________________________________________

BBC Newsnight, 21 April 2005  Jeremy Paxman and Tony Blair

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/apr/21/labour.uk3 :

Paxman: Did you see the Foreign Office legal advice which said military action against Iraq would be ‘illegal without a further UN resolution’?

Blair: No, I had the attorney general’s advice to guide me. But again this thing has been built in to, you know, a –

Paxman: You didn’t see that Foreign Office advice saying that an invasion would be illegal without a second UN resolution?

Blair: No, because I had the attorney general’s advice.

Paxman: You didn’t see it?

Blair: Yes, I didn’t see it. But I had the attorney general’s advice, and the attorney general made it absolutely clear that provided we could show that there were breaches of the United Nations resolutions …

Paxman: The attorney general is a political appointment, Prime Minister. Shouldn’t you have seen the Foreign Office legal advice?

Blair: But the attorney general’s advice is the advice he gives us as the law officer. He acts in an independent way in doing that.

….

Blair: Look, I want to make this point to you because you can go on, over and over and over, about these events that have happened. In the end, I had a decision to make back in March 2003. We had 250,000 UK and US troops there; we had Saddam not in compliance with UN resolutions. I tried desperately hard to get a second UN resolution. I couldn’t get one. Now I had a decision to make as to whether to leave Saddam there, in breach of UN resolutions, and end up in a situation with the international community humiliated and him emboldened, or to remove him. I decided to remove him. Now, you can go through these issues about my integrity, my character, the legal advice – because the legal advice, actually, the legal issue, was exactly the same as the political issue – or you can accept that in the end a decision had to be taken; there was no middle way, there was no fence to sit on. I took that decision. Now, I know people strongly disagreed with it. I’m sorry. In the end, I had to take the decision as prime minister that I thought was right for the country, and I did so. This was not an easy decision to take; it was a hard decision. … I took the decision I thought was right, and if I had not taken that decision, then what? You’d have Saddam Hussein and his sons still running Iraq; you wouldn’t have 8 million Iraqis going out voting at the polls; you wouldn’t have change spreading across the Middle East as it is.

________________________________

House of Commons, 25 Feb 2003 : Column 124

http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030225/debtext/30225-05.htm

The Prime Minister (Mr. Tony Blair): To those who say we are rushing to war, I say this: we are now 12 years after Saddam was first told by the UN to disarm; nearly six months after President Bush made his speech to the UN accepting the UN route to disarmament; nearly four months on from resolution 1441; and even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament through the UN. I detest his regime—I hope most people do—but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN’s demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully. …

… There is one issue on which I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. He said that it would be preferable for the disarmament of Iraq to take place by means of the UN route. I agree: that is exactly why we have tried to use the UN route. With respect, however, the question is this: if disarmament cannot happen by means of the UN route because Saddam Hussein is not co-operating properly, then what? We shall be left with a choice between leaving him there, with his weapons of mass destruction, in charge of Iraq—the will of the UN having therefore been set at nothing—and using force.

[....]

Tony Worthington (Clydebank and Milngavie): Every day, particularly in the American press, it seems that a report emerges about how the Americans will administer Iraq, and which particular general will do so, after the war is over. Will the Prime Minister assure me that he has not been party to any such agreements and that he agrees that the consequence of taking the UN route is that Iraq, after the war, will be administered by the United Nations until a democratic state can be set up there?

The Prime Minister: Again, the point that my hon. Friend makes is entirely right and justified. All I can say to him is that no decisions have yet been taken on the nature of how Iraq should be administered in the event of Saddam’s regime being displaced by force. I said earlier that I thought that the role of the UN had to be well protected in such a situation. The discussions that we are having on that matter are proceeding well. When we have reached conclusions and decisions, we can announce them so that people can discuss them. …

Mr. Duncan Smith: I asked earlier—as a number of hon. Members have done—about contingency plans for government if military action takes place in the event of Saddam Hussein being deposed. Will the Prime Minister now clear up some of that confusion? First, will he say whether contingency plans for future government are being discussed and formulated right now between members of the UN and the US and UK Governments? I understand that Kofi Annan has described those arrangements to members not just of the Security Council, but of the General Assembly, so will the Prime Minister share with the House and for the benefit of the British people what such contingency plans may well entail, so that they can secure in their minds whether there are not just short-term plans, but long-term plans as well?

The Prime Minister: Such contingency plans are being discussed. The reason why I have not given the details of those discussions is that they are not yet concluded. There is no point in us speculating about them before their conclusion, but, yes, they are being discussed among members of the UN, with the key allies. I would like to make it clear that whatever disagreements there are—for example, among European countries at the moment—it is still important, when all this is done, that we try to reach the broadest common agreement in the UN as to what the nature of any future regime in Iraq may be if it comes to conflict and, in particular, how we make sure that there is the proper humanitarian provision for people in Iraq.

________________________________

Friday 7 March 2003

PMOS afternoon briefing – 6 March 2003

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page3224

Briefing from the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman on: Iraq, Smallpox and EU Structural and Cohesion Fund.

Iraq

Asked if there was any significance in the Prime Minister’s use of the plural in stating in his MTV interview today that he would still consider going ahead with military action against Iraq without a second Resolution if ‘countries’ applied an unreasonable veto , the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) said that the UK’s position had not changed. He pointed out that in the rest of the Prime Minister’s reply to the question that had been put he had also underlined once again his belief that a second Resolution would be achieved. This view was based on the fact that the UN had passed Resolution 1441 unanimously last November and it was clear that the Security Council would want to uphold that decision. Put to him that the Prime Minister had in the past only talked in the singular about one country’s ‘unreasonable veto’ and whether his departure from that today was significant, the PMOS suggested that journalists were in danger of ‘over-parsing’ hypotheticals. He reiterated the point that the Prime Minister believed a second Resolution would be upheld. Consequently, questions relating to the situation should that fail to happen were hypothetical.

Put to him that today’s change of phraseology was not indicative of a hypothetical situation inasmuch as the Prime Minister had spelled out in his recent Newsnight interview that he would be willing to go to war without a second Resolution in the face of an unreasonable veto (singular), the PMOS resolutely rejected the premise of the question and repeated that the issue was indeed hypothetical because of the Prime Minister’s strong belief that a second Resolution would be passed. Challenged that this view, of itself, was hypothetical, the PMOS said that it was what the Prime Minister believed. The argument had to be taken in stages. The first stage was a belief that a second Resolution would be passed. What happened after that was hypothetical.  [....]

Asked to confirm categorically that the Prime Minister had not deliberately set out to refer to ‘countries’ in the plural, the PMOS said he was making the point that the Prime Minister was not signalling any change in his position, as his entire answer showed. He continued to believe that a second Resolution would be passed. Anyone who thought he had changed his position was ignoring reality. Pressed as to whether the word ‘countries’ had been a slip of the Prime Ministerial tongue, the PMOS said that he already answered the question. If people were reading any significance into the Prime Minister’s choice of words and honestly believed that he thought he was not going to achieve a second Resolution, then they were sorely mistaken. Put to him that he wasn’t answering the question being put, the PMOS repeated that nothing had changed in the substance. The Prime Minister continued to believe that he would get a second Resolution. Put to him that the fact that three countries were now threatening to use their Security Council vetoes was a perfectly adequate explanation for the Prime Minister’s change to plural usage today, the PMOS said that it was important for people to recognise that no one was voting for or against anything today.

___________________________________________________

Excerpts of TV interview by President Chirac to TF1 and France2,  10 March 2003

http://www.david-morrison.org.uk/other-documents/chirac-20030310.htm

THE PRESIDENT – It’s not for you or me to say whether the inspections are effective, whether Iraq is sufficiently cooperative. In fact, she isn’t, I can tell you that straightaway. …  But it isn’t for you or for me to decide that, that’s for the inspectors to whom the UN has entrusted the responsibility of disarming Iraq to say. The inspectors have to tell us: “we can continue and, at the end of a period which we think should be of a few months” – I’m saying a few months because that’s what they have said – “we shall have completed our work and Iraq will be disarmed”. Or they will come and tell the Security Council: “we are sorry but Iraq isn’t cooperating, the progress isn’t sufficient, we aren’t in a position to achieve our goal, we won’t be able to guarantee Iraq’s disarmament”. In that case it will be for the Security Council and it alone to decide the right thing to do. But in that case, of course, regrettably, the war would become inevitable. It isn’t today. …

We unanimously chose the path of disarming him. Today, nothing tells us that this path is a dead end and, consequently, it must be pursued since war is always a final resort, always an acknowledgement of failure, always the worst solution, because it brings death and misery. And we don’t consider we are at that point. That’s why we are refusing to embark on a path automatically leading to war so long as the inspectors haven’t told us: “we can’t do any more”. And they are telling us the opposite….

That led to the proposal of a new resolution setting an ultimatum. To start with, there was talk of 17 March, then of a possibility of a British amendment to postpone the date of the ultimatum a bit, it’s of little consequence. In other words, we move from a course of action involving the pursuit of the inspections in order to disarm Iraq to a different one consisting of saying: “in so many days, we go to war”.

Q. – And you don’t want that?

THE PRESIDENT – France won’t accept it and so will refuse that solution.

Q. – If need be, she will threaten to exercise her veto? (…) That way you will scupper the resolution.

THE PRESIDENT – I repeat: France will oppose that resolution. Now what does that mean? There are fifteen members of the Security Council. Five permanent members and ten members who change every two years. For a resolution to be adopted, it must have a majority of nine members. So the first scenario which is today, this evening, the most probable, is that this resolution won’t get a majority of nine members.

Q. – The Americans are saying the opposite. Colin Powell thinks he will get it.

THE PRESIDENT – I’m telling you what I feel. I firmly believe, this evening, that there isn’t a majority of nine votes in favour of that resolution including an ultimatum and thus giving the international green light to war.

Q. – In other words, France wouldn’t need to use her veto?

THE PRESIDENT – In this scenario, that’s exactly right. In this scenario, France will, of course, take a stand. There will be nations who will vote “no”, including France. Some will abstain. But, in any case, there won’t, in this scenario, be a majority. So there won’t be a veto problem.

Q. – And if the opposite happens?

THE PRESIDENT – Then, the second scenario: what I believe this evening to be the views of a number of people change. If this happens, there may indeed be a majority of nine votes or more in favour of the new resolution, the one authorizing war, to put things simply. If that happens, France will vote “no”. But there is one possibility, what’s called exercising a veto, it’s when one of the five permanent members – the United States, Britain, Russia, China and France – votes “no”, and then even if there is a majority in favour of it, the resolution isn’t adopted. That’s what’s called exercising a veto.

Q. – And, this evening, this is your position in principle?

THE PRESIDENT – My position is that, regardless of the circumstances, France will vote “no” because she considers this evening that there are no grounds for waging war in order to achieve the goal we have set ourselves, i.e. to disarm Iraq.

_________________________________

TV interview Chirac-Amanpour, 16 March 2003

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/16/60minutes/main544161.shtml

PRESIDENT CHIRAC: France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American either. We are not just going to use our veto to nag and annoy the US. But we just feel that there is another option, another way, another more normal way, a less dramatic way than war, and that we have to go through that path. And we should pursue it until we’ve come [to] a dead end, but that isn’t the case. …

AMANPOUR: Do you believe that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction; for instance, chemical or biological weapons?

PRESIDENT CHIRAC: Well, I don’t know. I have no evidence to support that… It seems that there are no nuclear weapons – no nuclear weapons program. That is something that the inspectors seem to be sure of.
As for weapons of mass destruction, bacteriological, biological, chemical, we don’t know. And that is precisely what the inspectors’ mandate is all about. But rushing into war, rushing into battle today is clearly a disproportionate response

________________________________

House of Commons, 18 Mar 2003 : Hansard Column 767

http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030318/debtext/30318-07.htm

Mr. Alex Salmond (Banff and Buchan): The Prime Minister says that the French have changed position, but surely the French, Russians and Chinese always made it clear that they would oppose a second resolution that led automatically to war. [Interruption.] Well they publicised that view at the time of resolution 1441. Is it not the Prime Minister who has changed his position? A month ago, he said that the only circumstances in which he would go to war without a second resolution was if the inspectors concluded that there had been no more progress, which they have not; if there were a majority on the Security Council, which there is not; and if there were an unreasonable veto from one country, but there are three permanent members opposed to the Prime Minister’s policy. When did he change his position, and why?

The Prime Minister : First, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely wrong about the position on resolution 1441. It is correct that resolution 1441 did not say that there would be another resolution authorising the use of force, but the implication of resolution 1441—it was stated in terms—was that if Iraq continued in material breach, defined as not co-operating fully, immediately and unconditionally, serious consequences should follow. All we are asking for in the second resolution is the clear ultimatum that if Saddam continues to fail to co-operate, force should be used. The French position is that France will vote no, whatever the circumstances. Those are not my words, but those of the French President. I find it sad that at this point in time he cannot support us in the position we have set out, which is the only sure way to disarm Saddam.

___________________________________________________

http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1390 :

Myth 6: “The French position is that France will veto no whatever the circumstances. Those are not my words, but those of the French President.” (Tony Blair, House of Commons, 18 March 2003)

Fact: President Chirac has consistently argued the US and UK misrepresented his position. Consider what Chirac actually said: “My position is that, regardless of the circumstances, France will vote “no” because she considers this evening that there are no grounds for waging war in order to achieve the goal we have set ourselves, i.e. to disarm Iraq.” It seems Tony Blair, not for the first time, was being very selective with the information available to him – the words “this evening” were never included in the British Government’s accounts. For the record, on 10 March 2003, Chirac did make it clear that he supported war if, after a few months, the inspectors said Iraq was not co-operating, “In that case, regrettably, the war would become inevitable.”

Also, the idea that a veto can somehow be ‘unreasonable’ is completely fictitious. Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, told Tony Blair in his legal advice, “I do not believe that there is any basis in law for arguing that there is an implied condition of reasonableness which can be read into the power of veto conferred on the permanent members of the Security Council by the UN Charter. So there are no grounds for arguing that an ‘unreasonable veto’ would entitle us to proceed on the basis of a presumed Security Council authorisation.”

__________________________

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/bushs-celebrity-critics-blairs-version-of-history-and-others-553981.html

The Independent, 22 July 2004  Letters :

From Sir Brian Barder

Sir: Historians will be grateful to Clare Short for pressing the Prime Minister in the Iraq debate on Tuesday on why, having failed to get the Security Council’s agreement to a second resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq, he nevertheless committed Britain forthwith to joining the US in its attack on Iraq , thus preventing the UN inspectors from continuing their work for the few more weeks or months that Hans Blix had asked for.

Mr Blair asserted, surprisingly, that he would have preferred to give Blix more time, but that continued inspection could only have been effective if supported by a further UN resolution containing an ultimatum with a deadline for Iraqi compliance, failing which force would be used. But, said Mr Blair, “certain countries” (clearly meaning France) had opposed any ultimatum in any circumstances: and since there would have been no point in a resolution without an ultimatum, he had given up on the UN and concluded that there was no alternative to using force.

Ms Short correctly pointed out that this misrepresented what had happened: a majority in the Council, including France, Russia and Germany and most of the non-permanent members, wanted to give Blix more time, but were not prepared to leave it to the US and the UK to make the judgement on whether Iraq had failed to comply and to decide when force should be used, decisions that were for the Security Council in the future.

The issue was not whether there should be an ultimatum, as the Prime Minister claimed, but whether the Security Council should give Washington and London carte blanche, before Blix had had a chance to complete his inspection, to decide whether and when to launch an attack on Iraq, without a further opportunity for the Council to consider that decision in the light of Blix’s eventual findings.

That “automaticity” was what the US and UK were demanding, and it’s not at all surprising that the great majority of Council members wouldn’t agree. The transcript of the television interview with President Chirac on 10 March 2003 in which he set out France’s position, does not support the accusation later made by our ministers that France would have vetoed the use of force in any circumstances: France, like most of the other members of the Council, was not prepared to agree to authorise the use of force at that time, before Blix had had time to complete the inspection, nor to delegate that decision then and there to Washington and London.

It seems important that Mr Blair’s version of these crucial events, on which the illegality of the war largely hinges, should not be left uncorrected on the historical record.

Sir BRIAN BARDER
London SW18
The writer was a member of HM Diplomatic Service, 1965-94

________________________________

Extracts from Sir Patrick Wright’s letter in The Independent, 15 July 2004

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-wright-the-pm-thinks-the-debate-is-over-he-is-wrong-553205.html

I am surprised that neither Lord Hutton nor Lord Butler drew particular attention to the e-mail published in Lord Hutton’s report, in which the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, virtually complained that the first draft of the infamous dossier did not adequately support the case for going to war – a complaint that must at least have created some “subconscious pressure” on the intelligence community to do better. I also find it curious that the Butler report states, as a matter of fact, that the dossier “was not intended to make the case for a particular course of action in relation to Iraq”.

Surely Number 10 must have been aware of the pressures on President Bush, both from his senior advisers and from the Israelis, to remove Saddam Hussein by military action? Bob Woodward’s and other insiders’ accounts of the Bush administration make it clear that Messrs Cheney and Rumsfeld, among others, had been pressing from the early months of the administration to target Iraq – pressure which the President initially resisted in favour of concentrating on Afghanistan.

Sadly, the events of 11 September increased this pressure, given the unfounded allegations – still widely believed in the United States, but well dismissed by the Butler report – that Saddam Hussein’s links with al-Qa’ida made him in some way responsible for the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Ministers repeatedly assured us, in the months before the invasion, that “no decisions had been taken”. It was, however, clear to many of us that decisions had indeed been taken in Washington; and indeed that those decisions were irreversible once coalition troops had started to gather in Kuwait and the Lower Gulf. (As an aside, I can record that I was twice assured by a British minister at that point that we would not join the Americans in an invasion if we failed – as of course we did – to get a second resolution in the United Nations Security Council.)

The trouble for Tony Blair was that the United States administration was blithely quoting at least four different cases for going to war, including the need to change the Iraqi regime. Not only was this unacceptable to the British government’s lawyers; the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, had assured Parliament that it was no part of HMG’s policy to change other people’s governments.

This tends to be forgotten when ministers argue, as the Prime Minister did on Wednesday, that “the wider world is a better and safer place without Saddam.” This may be true. But was it worth the expense of lives on all sides to achieve that?

There will no doubt be criticism that the Butler report is a whitewash, as indeed there was over the Franks report after the Falklands. As a former colleague who worked closely with Robin Butler in Harold Wilson’s private office, and later when he was Cabinet Secretary, I find his report as balanced and fair as I would expect. Its weakness – which is no fault of the author’s – is that it does not go into the legal or political case for the Iraq war. Nor does it explore the extent to which advice was sought or received from our diplomatic posts, or indeed from the Foreign Secretary himself.

Both the Hutton report and, to a lesser extent, the Butler report have revealed evidence and argument about intelligence which would have been unthinkable in the early 1980s. But the crucial missing evidence is still what diplomatic and political advice was put forward by officials, and what legal advice was conveyed by the Attorney General. The Prime Minister tried on Wednesday to give the impression that the arguments are now closed. I do not believe they are.

Lord Wright was chairman of the JIC, 1982-4, and head of the Diplomatic Service, 1986-91

______________________________________

Note:  Emphasis added throughout.

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

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

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

So much for the background. As usual, the argument is beset by confusions. Here is a representative sample.

Alan Johnson

1. The Home Secretary has sacked Professor Nutt on the grounds that he could not be the government’s principal adviser on drugs and simultaneously “campaign” against the government’s drugs policy. But the allegation of impropriety involved in a government ‘adviser’ publicly criticising government policy in the area of his advice seems unsustainable. Professor Nutt is not a civil servant nor even a government employee. The Advisory Council which he chaired until sacked is described in the official home office website as “an independent expert body” (emphasis added); its independence is fatally undermined if all its 30 or so members, all leading experts in the various fields, can’t comment publicly on any aspect of drugs policy unless they adhere to the government’s line, even when they disagree with it. Professor Nutt was a part-time Chair of the Council and unpaid. He should have been free to say what he liked. If he criticised government drug policy, as he did, the government’s response should have been to answer his and the Council’s criticism by setting out publicly its reasons for disagreeing with the advice of the Council and the scientific evidence on which that advice was based.

2. Alan Johnson has correctly drawn a distinction between the Council’s responsibility for offering advice, and ministers’ responsibility for deciding policy. It is true that the Council’s remit includes giving advice on policy matters as well as providing factual, scientific information on which ministers may if they wish base their policies: under its terms of reference, the Council’s duty is to

…keep under review the situation [regarding] drugs which are … or appear to them likely to be misused and … capable of having harmful effects [amounting to] a social problem, and to give [Ministers] advice on measures … which in the opinion of the Council ought to be taken for preventing the misuse of such drugs or dealing with social problems connected with their misuse, and in particular on measures which in the opinion of the Council, ought to be taken.

But the matter in dispute primarily, almost indeed exclusively, concerns the Council’s analysis of scientific factual evidence regarding the potential ill effects of various drugs, and which are more or less harmful than others. Of course this has policy implications, but it’s obviously the case that the Council is better equipped by its expertise in various fields to assemble and analyse the factual evidence of the harm done by different drugs than ministers or their civil servants. If ministers decide to adopt policies which imply a rejection of that expert analysis of facts, as they have done, it’s incumbent on them to explain publicly the basis on which they have rejected it.

3. Alan Johnson observes, also correctly, that there are reputable scientists, some of whom he has named, who disagree with the analysis by his Advisory Council of the evidence regarding the relative harmfulness of cannabis and other drugs. But if ministers are going to cherry-pick which scientific advice they are going to accept, even if it conflicts with the advice of the scientists whom they have picked out to advise them as members of the Advisory Council that they have appointed, there seems little point in having officially selected advisers at all.  By seeking out opinions which contradict the findings of their own officially selected experts, the government lays itself open to the suspicion that it is choosing the advice to fit its pre-determined policies, instead of getting the best available advice and only then formulating policies based on it. Do I hear echoes of the Attorney-General, in the run-up to the attack on Iraq in 2003, casting around for a legal authority willing to devise a legal justification for the attack, when the overwhelming consensus among international law specialists (including the Foreign Office’s own legal advisers) was that any attack without UN authority would be illegal?

4. Johnson and his supporters (including, for example, the irrepressible Ann Widdecombe in today’s Guardian) argue that the decision on which category to put cannabis in should take into account other factors besides the question of how much harm cannabis use is liable to cause relative to other drugs in categories B and C, the issue on which the Advisory Council has provided its evidence. The other factors, ministers argue, should include a judgement on the “message” that leaving cannabis in a low-risk category sends to the public, and especially to vulnerable young people open to the temptation to use illegal drugs. Johnson argues either that the message which the downgrading of cannabis sends out is not a matter on which the Council is any better equipped to express a view than politiciaans, or alternatively that it’s outside the Council’s competence; and in either case, that the Council has failed to take this factor into account. But this is a self-defeating argument. It’s generally known that the main criterion for placing a drug in a particular category is how harmful its use is likely to be; if the bulk of the scientific evidence is that cannabis should be in the category of least harmful drugs, then that’s where it should be. Of course that will be interpreted as “sending a message” that cannabis is less harmful than most other drugs. But it’s the fact that cannabis is less harmful that sends the message, not placing it in category C. It seems that Johnson (and Gordon Brown) don’t believe that we, the citizens, can be trusted with the truth about cannabis, and that for our own safety, so that we shall not be led into temptation, they try to deceive us into thinking that cannabis is more dangerous than in fact it is. This is plainly indefensible.

5. Underlying all this is the uncomfortable truth that the overall policy on drugs, Prohibition, is a disastrous failure. The attempt to stamp out the supply, possession and use of cannabis, cocaine and heroin has been almost wholly counter-productive. There has been a relentless rise in supply, possession and use. Convictions for cannabis possession in 1982 numbered 14,856; in 1998, 40,119; nearly 70,000 in 1999; and the rise has continued since then. The position is no better in the US: In the year 2000, 626,042 Americans were arrested for simple possession of cannabis; 872,721 in 2007. Hundreds of thousands of people in both countries are criminalised by their occasional use of recreational drugs, and some of those people’s lives are ruined forever by a criminal conviction and imprisonment;  yet the great majority are unharmed by occasional use of soft drugs, certainly compared with the risk of harm from alcohol and tobacco. Because cannabis is illegal, its users mostly get it from criminal drug peddlars who also supply hard drugs, those whose use is much more risky; so criminalisation much increases the likelihood that some cannabis users will move on to harder drugs at some stage. Prohibition drives up the price of even relatively harmless drugs, thereby also increasing the incidence of drug-related assaults and muggings. Prohibition has much the same ill effects as the ill-fated prohibition of alcohol had in the United States from 1919 to 1933. It does far more harm than good. But any admission that drug prohibition is a failure is strictly taboo for a government which is more frightened of being labelled ’soft on drugs’ than of continuing an obviously flawed policy of prohibition. It is ultimately this untenable anomaly that has led the current Home Secretary, amiable fellow though he seems to be (except when angrily denouncing Professor Nutt on Sky News, purple in the face with barely rational rage), into the hopeless mess that he now finds himself in.

Those of us who are or have been public servants responsible for formulating policy and giving policy advice to ministers are familiar with the occasional problems that arise over recommendations, factual material and policy advice received from experts. Some is invaluable; some extraordinarily blinkered. Experts are contemptuous of amateurs — officials, politicians — who reject their advice, and who apparently think they know better than the experts in the field. Sometimes you disregard the expert advice because it fails to take account of factors outside the experts’ field, or is obviously politically or otherwise slanted. Sometimes you know that you disregard it at your peril. The Home Secretary and those who advise him should have recognised immediately that the Advisory Council’s advice on the relative harmlessness of cannabis was in the latter category.

Alan Johnson has been a front runner in the undeclared race to succeed Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party. Seeing him on television aggressively attacking the dissident Professor, having acted so impetuously to get rid of him, apparently without proper consideration or consultation, obviously having lost his rag, deploying a simplistic defence in a complex controversy, makes one wonder whether this hitherto genial figure is leadership material after all.

Update (5 November 2009): It’s good to see Sir Simon Jenkins, former Editor of The Times, training his formidable guns on this issue in both the London Evening Standard and the Guardian.  Both articles are worth reading in full.  But I was especially struck by this, from Simon Jenkins’s Evening Standard article:

After serving with David Nutt on the 2000 Police Foundation report on the drug laws, I concluded that he knew more about the harm drugs do to the body than everyone in Westminster or Whitehall put together.
I also realised that the public was not silly. It would accept a reform of the law (according to opinion polls) if politicians would give a lead. They would not, not even the wretched Liberal Democrats who flirted with reform in the Nineties.

Brian

One of the LabourList discussion commenters asks why, if the post of President of the Council of Europe has such limited powers, British Labour ministers are pushing Tony Blair’s candidature for it so hard.  In reply to this interesting enquiry, I have suggested in my own comment several possible reasons, two of them tolerably reputable.  Together with some other contributors, and in the knowledge that I’ll be excoriated as arrogant for my pains, I have also tried to answer several other questions in LabourList comments, as well as seeking politely — or otherwise — to correct some of the more obscurantist misconceptions.  You can read all these comments at this location.   Do go across and join in the debate.  There’s still plenty of scope for fresh illumination.

As a wry postscript, I respectfully commend a most useful commentary on the whole question by the veteran Quentin Peel in this weekend’s Financial Times (31 Oct/1 Nov).  This describes entertainingly and informatively how the creation of the post of semi-permanent President of the Council of Ministers was imposed on an unpersuaded Europe by its autocratic and aristocratic inventor, former French

Giscard d'Estaing

Président Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, “suspected of secretly coveting the job himself”.  Well, why not?  He’s the principal author of the ill-fated EU constitution from which much of the Lisbon treaty has been derived;  he has just written a novel in which he implies that he once had an affair with the late Diana, Princess of Wales;  and there can’t be many other former French Presidents who were born in Germany.  And he’s only 83.

How unfortunate it is that the French for ‘Chairman’ is ‘Président’!

Brian

Mandelson said Griffin, who was pilloried during the programme when he struggled to explain his denials of the Holocaust, would suffer in the end. “When the content and the meaning of what he said sinks in for people, most of them will recoil from what they heard,” Mandelson said. “In the short term, he may have done himself a favour. But in the long term he has done himself no good at all.”)

There have been other contradictory verdicts.  The panel and the audience exposed Nick Griffin’s ugly ideology and repeatedly hit him for six.  No, the whole programme was a farce, amounting to a public lynching that could only evoke reluctant sympathy for the beleaguered victim.  Question Time was right to depart from its usual format and concentrate almost the whole of its allotted hour to denunciation and exposure of the BNP.  No, the paucity and ugliness of BNP policies would have been much more effectively exposed if we had been allowed to hear Griffin and his fellow-panellists answering questions on, for example, the postal strike, Afghanistan, the recession and the banking crisis, unemployment, and the Pope’s bid to poach reactionary parsons from the Church of England — all topics that would undoubtedly have been debated in a routine Question Time programme. And so the argument has continued across the media and the blogosphere.

No less a person than the Editor of the admirable blog, LabourList, is in no doubt where he stands:

Nick Griffin’s smug, sneering performance on Question Time was met with near unanimous mockery in the BBC studio, from the other panellists and now from the media and political blogosphere.
The BNP leader sweated, ticked and fumbled his way through the show from the start and was clearly out of his comfort zone and out of his depth. He also betrayed his true bigotry in a flurry of ill-considered outbursts…
(Alex Smith,  http://www.labourlist.org/griffin-on-question-time-the-verdict)

But he quotes Matthew Parris in the Times:

Nobody dared try what, if it could have been done, would have been the most devastating tactic of all, and perhaps the only tactic that would have done Mr Griffin any real harm: to brush him aside as a small man, enlarged by the anger of his enemies.

Can all these commentators have been watching the same programme?

Not usually one to shirk sticking my neck out, I venture to disagree with most of the above.  The following propositions seem to me virtually self-evident, anyway to any democrat who watched the programme:

1.  The BBC was right to invite the BNP to take part in Question Time.  The BNP won around 6% of the votes at the latest European Parliamentary elections and gained two seats.  It is winning seats in local government elections.  It’s not for the managers of the BBC to decide which electorally significant political parties should be permitted a chance to explain their policies and principles in a programme which has acquired an institutional status as a kind of political hustings open to every legal party which commands perceptible public support.  If the BNP is to be excluded by the BBC as politically objectionable, which other party will be next?

2. The BBC was however wrong to represent the inclusion of a BNP representative in the programme as some kind of colossal media and political earthquake, trailing it for many days in advance and afterwards as a broadcasting landmark, instead of what it should have been:  another routine current affairs programme in which another small minority party would be taking part, just as the Greens and UKIP occasionally do.  In its greed for ratings, the BBC dug a deep hole and promptly fell into it.

3.  The BBC made another disastrous mistake in choosing to abandon the programme’s normal format, deliberately turning it into a public trial of Griffin — indeed, more a lynching than a trial, for some degree of fairness is required in a trial, including the right of the accused to defend himself without bullying interruptions.  Not only were all the other panellists and apparently the large audience hand-picked to give Griffin a hard time:  David Dimbleby, as chairman, abandoned all pretence of impartiality and instead appointed himself Grand Inquisitor-in-Chief.  Griffin’s attempts, however ham-fisted and objectionable, to explain his and the BNP’s beliefs and policies and to defend himself against the unremitting assault were constantly interrupted by shouting and hectoring from Dimbleby, Jack Straw and Chris Huhne, and by the audience lynch mob.  Only the women panellists, the Conservative shadow communities minister Baroness Warsi,  and playwright and critic Bonnie Greer, spoke coolly, rationally and even reasonably courteously, thereby inflicting much more damage on Griffin than the over-excited bawling of the males.

In the programme that followed Question Time, ‘This Week‘, Andrew Neil observed that:

The danger tonight was that the British people, famous for their fair-mindedness, saw one man being beaten up by five other people on the panel, including the presenter, and by an audience that was overwhelmingly hostile to him.

That seems exactly right.  When a programme is so arranged that decent people begin to feel a hint of sympathy for a horrible, mendacious, dangerous fascist like Nick Griffin, someone somewhere has badly blundered.

4.  The principal benefit of BNP participation in the programme should have been to give us all an insight into the reasons for the BNP’s qualified success in attracting around a million votes at the last EP and local government elections:  to help us identify what it is about BNP utterances that attracts so many people, and what needs to be done to counter that attraction so as to return its adherents to support for the democratic parties.  Regrettably, this BBC-organised shouting match provided little if any such benefit.  Griffin gave a number of clues between the interruptions to what it is that has started to attract more support for his party , but sadly few of them were followed up by the panel or the audience:

• It’s always been clear that unease over immigration, especially among Britain’s white working class, has driven substantial numbers of voters, few of them convinced fascists or even in most cases bigots, to support the BNP, feeling that none of the mainstream parties either acknowledges the resentments they feel and problems they face, or proposes any concrete action to address them.  Some of the things Griffin said about immigration were potentially interesting.  A black member of the audience spoke movingly about Britain being his home, and the country he loved, asking the highly pertinent question:  Where would you want me to go?  Griffin replied, strikingly, that the questioner would be able to stay:  those whom the BNP wanted to send home were those who were in the country illegally.  This seemed to contradict his other remarks about giving the country back to its “indigenous” inhabitants, but this remarkable contradiction was never followed up, the panellists and most of the audience preferring to compete with each other in establishing their anti-fascist credentials.  So we never got to the bottom of BNP policy on the repatriation of immigrants.  Jack Straw, whose whole performance I thought lamentable, even seemed to be denying that the government’s policies and actions on immigration were a source of anger and resentment that benefited the BNP.  Baroness Warsi, by contrast, was commendably frank on this neuralgic issue[1].
• Griffin’s concise list of Islamic beliefs and practices which he described as incompatible with traditional British values will have struck a chord with many viewers.  A reasonably impartial chair would have invited a rebuttal, perhaps from one of the Muslims in the audience.  Instead, Griffin’s charge went unanswered.  Another couple of thousand votes for the BNP next time as a result, perhaps?
• Jack Straw opened the programme with an interminable, if well-intentioned, lecture about the part played in the second world war by Asian and African soldiers fighting and in many cases dying in the battle against racist fascism of the kind represented by the BNP.  Griffin replied denying that he was now or had ever been a Nazi, adding that his father had fought in the RAF during the war while Jack Straw’s father had been in prison “for refusing to fight Adolf Hitler” — irrelevant, of course, to Straw’s actual accusation, but effectively deflating Straw, with the result that Griffin appeared to have won this first round.   (The colourful descriptions by some commentators of Griffin as looking scared, sweating and shaking, anxiously licking his lips and failing to measure up to the challenge, seem to me unduly coloured by wishful thinking.  Griffin’s unattractive and inappropriate half-smile no doubt revealed his nervousness:  but the fox can be forgiven a degree of nervousness as the huntsmen and the hounds encircle him, baying enthusiastically for his blood.  In general, given the grossly uneven nature of the contest, he actually acquitted himself pretty well.  Straw seemed to me much more nervous, or perhaps more excited than nervous:  and he was plainly there as Master of the Hunt, with precious little to be either nervous or excited about.)
• Griffin said he felt there was something ‘creepy’ about public displays of affection between gay men.  That’s clearly a reflection of unacceptable homophobia, to be unreservedly condemned.  But we kid ourselves if we fail to recognise that to numerous viewers his remark would have sounded like a rare and welcome defiance of ‘political correctness’, articulating what many otherwise perfectly decent people feel but are afraid to say.
• Griffin’s robust demand for the abandonment of the pointless war in Afghanistan and his indictment of Jack Straw for his part in initiating the disastrous war in Iraq ticked many boxes.  There are certainly other politicians belonging to more reputable parties who take the same line, but neither of the major parties condemns both wars outright or demands the immediate withdrawal of our soldiers from Afghanistan.  Several Brownie points to Griffin here: the unspeakable saying the unsayable.
• Griffin was notably shifty on several matters, most of all about the holocaust.  Dimbleby tried to press him on this, but all he would say was that he had never been convicted of holocaust denial.  Neither the panel nor the audience managed to get a conviction on this, either;  so some viewers would have concluded that the charge was ‘not proven’ — which, at any rate under English law, means an acquittal, however undeserved.

I conclude that most of those who saw Griffin as discredited and demolished by the programme are people who would never in a million years be tempted to vote for or support the BNP:  people who were already well aware of Griffin’s disgraceful record of extremist and undemocratic utterances, of a degree of racism that unquestionably amounts to fascism.  But these are not the people whose responses to the programme are important or interesting.  What was the response of those who are by no means fascists or racists but who feel increasingly neglected by all the mainstream political parties — especially perhaps by the Labour Party, which under New Labour has seemed less and less like the champion of or spokesman for the working class, the poor and vulnerable, those at or near the bottom of the heap?  Perhaps the answer to that disturbing question lies in the evidence of the first opinion poll and other worrying statistics: a YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph says that 22% of the people questioned would “seriously consider” voting BNP, more than 240 complainants to the BBC felt the show was biased against the BNP (while only around 100 complaints were about Mr Griffin being allowed to appear on Question Time), and the BNP claims that 3,000 people registered to join the party during and after the broadcast — no doubt a wild exaggeration, but….

So there’s a strong likelihood that the BNP was a net beneficiary of the evening’s antics.  Does this mean that the BBC was wrong to have Griffin on the programme?  No, but it was wrong to allow him to appear as the victim of a manifestly unfair contest;  wrong to adopt a format which prevented viewers from seeing and hearing about BNP attitudes to a range of current issues and which made it impossible for anyone to follow up Griffin’s remarks in a calm, forensic way in the course of a sensible and well regulated discussion;  wrong to have built up the programme, before and after it, as a great national event comparable with the FA cup final (or whatever that’s called now) or the Grand National.  The BNP has won, probably, some sympathy and support; while the rest of us have been denied any fresh insights into the reasons for the party’s growing support or any clues to how it can best be reversed.  As a result of a series of bad miscalculations by the BBC, we have got the worst of both worlds.

[1] “David Dimbleby: (To Jack Straw) The rise of the BNP, and the reason that Mr Griffin is on this panel tonight, is because of their success in the European Parliament, because as you well know, they got two seats in Europe. Is that because of failings by your government over the last 12 years to reassure people about the scale of immigration?

“Jack Straw: I don’t believe it is… If you want to know why the BNP won in the North West and in Yorkshire in June, it was a lot to do with discontent with all the political parties, particularly over the issue of expenses.

“Baroness Warsi: I think, Jack, there’s certain things that mainstream political parties have to be honest about. And I think that answer is not an honest answer… There are real issues around poverty, around deprivation, around lack of social mobility and immigration. It is an issue. There are many people who feel that the pace of change in their communities has been too fast.”

Lady Warsi, you’re in the wrong party.

Brian

My blog post of last August is at http://www.barder.com/696
and Mary’s original comment on it, about her petition to 10 Downing Street, is at
http://www.barder.com/696#comment-88026.
(Please also glance through the other 35 comments).

Mary has now posted a further comment:

Thanks to S. Corker and any others who have signed. Only 8 days to go – can anyone else sign please?
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Indeterminate/
It’s really easy – just click on the web site, open the email they send you and click where indicated.
Thanks.

Do please sign this absolutely uncontroversial humanitarian petition while there’s still time. As Mary says, it’s at
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Indeterminate/.

The petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to release all prisoners sentenced to an indeterminate public protection (IPP) order with a tariff of less than 2 years, and who would not since June 2008 have received one.

Submitted by Ms. Mary May – Deadline to sign up by: 29 October 2009 – Signatures: 225

More details from petition creator:

The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 introduced a minimum tariff of two years for prisoners serving indeterminate public protection sentences. The government made an error with the interpretation of the law regarding IPPs and approx. 970 prisoners were given tariffs of less than 2 years. To demonstrate justice these people should be released if they have served their tariff which generally was the same length of time they would have served with a determinate sentence. The judges passing the IPP sentences did not consider the offenders to be so dangerous that they should be kept in prison for lengthy periods or they would have given tariffs of more than 2 years. This results in more than 970 prisoners being kept in prison after the end of their tariff with little hope of release.

Several readers of this blog have signed the petition, for which she and I are grateful. But inexplicably, most haven’t, yet.  It only takes a couple of minutes, if that.

The whole system of indeterminate sentences, a mealy-mouthed euphemism for preventive detention, is a black blot on our system of justice. But even if you aren’t convinced of that, you surely can’t justify keeping in prison the narrow category of people to whom the petition refers. Please sign up while there’s still time!

Brian

It’s understandable, I suppose, that all this confusion between judges and lords should find an echo with our American cousins, especially the bankers and financiers, in their house organ, the Wall Street Journal, now owned by that patriotic American from Down Under, Rupert Murdoch:

A U.K. Court Without the Wigs
New Supreme Bench, Patterned on America’s, Stirs Debate

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court long have been Anglophiles, routinely turning to antique English cases to help decide issues from gun rights to terrorism….

Now, the Mother Country is following the lead of its offspring. This month, the U.K. replaced its Law Lords — a committee of noblemen that served as the highest tribunal for much of Britain — with the new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. [Emphasis added]

The WSJ’s second headline, describing the new UK Supreme Court as “Patterned on America’s”, is about as wrong as it could be.  The UK’s Supreme Court doesn’t interpret or enforce our written federal constitution, as its US namesake does, for we have no such thing.  Our Supreme Court has no power to strike down any law passed by the Westminster parliament as unconstitutional and therefore invalid, as the US Court can do and does.  It is not the highest court of a federation each of whose constituent units has its own supreme court, because we don’t (yet) have a federation, although Scotland has its own legal system and its own courts. The decisions of our Supreme Court don’t automatically prevail over those of the government or the parliament, as those of the US Supreme Court do.  They are different animals, inhabiting different zoos.

But never mind that.  A ‘committee of noblemen‘ as Britain’s highest court!  What a price we pay for calling all these curious people Lords — life peers, Justices of the Supreme Court, even (heaven help us) bishops! Mr Jack Straw, MP, still prevented from casting off his weird and now functionless title of ‘Lord’ Chancellor, and yet not even a member of the House of that name!  More bizarrely still, even that powerful commoner Mr Gordon Brown MP, who bears the majestic title of First ‘Lord’ of the Treasury, despite not being a Lord and no longer the minister responsible for the Treasury!  And finally, spare a thought for The Rt Hon Harriet Harman QC MP, “Leader of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal and Minister for Women and Equality”, who — as the old joke has it — is neither a Lord, nor a privy, nor a seal. No wonder Mr Murdoch and his financiers’ newspaper find it all a little difficult to follow, when on their reckoning Harriet Harman must evidently be a nobleman.

Let’s just hope that when the remaining hereditary peers are at last removed from our second chamber and, in accordance with the expressed wishes of the House of Commons, all (or most) of the members of the reformed second chamber are commoners directly elected to it,  we may at last be allowed to stop calling it the House of Lords, and to stop calling its members Lords.  I don’t much care what it’s then to be called instead;  but when the glad day comes that the United Kingdom accepts the logic of its current half-baked constitution and becomes a proper federation of its four constituent nations, the obvious name for its federal second chamber will be the Senate (with equal numbers of Senators elected from each of the nations, regardless of population size)[2];  and the august judges of the Supreme Court will be Justices, and no longer also Lords.  Then perhaps Mr Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal will get the message, and the ageing noblemen of our decayed aristocracy, committees and all, can retire gracefully to the shires whence they came.

[1] http://www.parliament.uk/about_lords/the_law_lords.cfm

[2] My reference in another blog to the ‘Senate‘ as the obvious name for the federal second chamber of a UK Federation prompted an angry outburst in one comment, to the effect that the term was an Americanism and thus objectionable (!).  Quite apart from it also being the name of the federal second chambers of Australia and Canada, it’s worth bearing in mind that the classical Romans, as so often, actually got there first.  But unlike the present UK, where sovereignty supposedly rests with ‘The Queen in Parliament’, in republican ancient Rome ‘Senatus Populusque Romanus‘ or SPQR (‘the Senate and People of Rome’) were jointly sovereign;  indeed,

The two legal entities mentioned, Senatus and the Populus Romanus are sovereign when combined. However, where populus is sovereign alone, Senatus is not”  [http://j.mp/3QcOqL].

The change to federal status for the UK will provide the welcome opportunity to establish that the peoples of the four federated nations are sovereign, not any of the five parliaments to which they will voluntarily delegate certain defined and strictly limited powers.

Brian

Brian