Brian Barder's website

This is another collection of thoughts about a few of the events and controversies of the last few weeks, seen from the perspective of a committed supporter of the Labour Party who is also an unhappy critic of some of the things our governments have done since the glad confident morning of 2 May, 1997, as well as one who is proud to acknowledge their many successes.

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It seems out of character for the prime minister to have tripped up so badly when he told the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry that under his Chancellorship defence spending had risen in real terms every year.  His subsequent admission that this was a mistake (in four years of the period the defence budget had fallen in real terms) has naturally been seized on by the Tories and the generals, admirals, etc. as further evidence for the accusation that as Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown had starved our forces of the funds necessary for the equipment, vehicles and helicopters required to protect our servicemen as they have fought the various wars to which they have been committed.  Two things need to be said about that:

(1)  The “year on year” mistake has obscured the more relevant truth that over the period in question there was indeed a substantial 12% real terms increase in defence spending, in contrast with the equivalent period under the Tories, and even leaving aside the extra cost of Blair’s various wars;   and –

(2)  The defence budget overall is quite big enough for the purchase of almost unlimited quantities of body armour, helicopters, heavily armoured transport vehicles, night vision equipment and anything else needed for fighting wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.  But the spending priorities of all three services are decided primarily by the generals, admirals and air marshals, not by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.  If they choose to allocate so much of their budgets to fearsomely expensive toys such as Trident and the nuclear deterrent generally, to Euro-fighters and aircraft carriers and new generations of battle tanks designed to fight the Russians on the plains of central Europe, so that almost nothing is left for the unglamorous equipment needed for street fighting in Basra or Helmand, whose fault is that?  The British commanders in the field must also take some responsibility for the shortcomings:  if British troops lack the helicopters or other equipment needed to undertake specific operations with a reasonable degree of protection, their commanders shouldn’t undertake those operations.[1]

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I fear that the BA strike has a wider significance than questions such as the right staffing levels of aircraft cabins and how much BA cabin stewards and stewardesses (if that female form is still permissible?) ought to be paid.  At its heart is the proposition, apparently accepted unquestioningly by all three major parties, that most of the horrendous costs of recovery from the current economic and financial slump should be borne by ordinary middle and working class people through cuts in their wages and salaries (dressed up as wage ‘freezes’, part-time working, etc.), increases in taxes on even the lowest paid, such as VAT, and sharp cuts in public services on which the most vulnerable people in society depend most heavily.  Meanwhile the investment bankers and hedge fund managers whose greed and perfidy got us into this mess are back in business with their huge bonuses and indecent salaries, largely at our expense.  If the few working people who are still members of trade unions perceive this distribution of burden as unfair and unacceptable, and if their bosses, supported by Labour and the Tories alike, obstinately insist on exploiting the recession to impose it on them anyway, we may be in for many more strikes.  Most of the media seem surprised and outraged by the spectacle of organised labour trying to protect itself with the only weapon it has got against a ferocious and unwarranted assault on their standard of living.  Things can only get worse.

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I’ve been surprised by the number of my friends who have fervently agreed with a Times article of 9 March 2010 by David Aaronovitch denouncing the continued search for the truth about the Iraq disaster in the Chilcot Inquiry on the grounds that it’s all old hat, and that “it’s time to move on”.  Well, Mr Aaronovitch would say that, wouldn’t he?  He got the whole thing badly wrong back in 2003 and later, supporting the war and continuing to argue that it has all been worth-while, despite the mountain of evidence being expertly marshalled by the Chilcot Inquiry to the contrary.  Those responsible for this act of criminal folly are still trying to persuade us, e.g. in their evidence to Chilcot, that they were right to abandon the UN diplomatic effort to resolve the crisis peacefully when they did because the French had made it clear that whatever happened in the future they would always veto any UN resolution authorising the use of force.  In fact, in the famous TV interview on which this assertion depends, President Chirac had said exactly the opposite, as the transcript shows (and as demonstrated by the documentary evidence available for example in the comments on an earlier blog post of mine) — and as the French government made clear at the time in urgent messages to No. 10 and the FCO saying that their position was being misinterpreted.  Did Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown, and the rest of their Cabinet colleagues, knowingly misinterpret the French position, as they continue to do?  If not, why didn’t they or their officials read the interview transcript and the messages from Paris, and stop using the misinterpretation as the main justification for going to war prematurely and without UN authority?  Perhaps Sir J Chilcot and his colleagues will discover and publish the answers to these rather fundamental questions, even if David Aaronovitch and others now find the whole thing boring.

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Fortunately it’s unnecessary to say anything here about the crisis in the Roman Catholic Church over child abuse by priests, since everything that needs to be said about it has been said in an admirable article in the Independent by Johann Hari.  It’s available on the Independent’s website, here, and is well worth reading if you haven’t read it already.

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According to the Guardian, the sainted Vincent Cable of the LibDems has assured the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury of his willingness to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer if there’s a hung parliament after the forthcoming election.   This seems to make rather a lot of assumptions.  I wonder what Nick Clegg, Cable’s less well known leader, thinks of it.   It’s always rash to attempt predictions, especially of election results, but I still persist in my expectation that there won’t be a hung parliament, whatever the current polls might say, and that the Tories will have an adequate overall majority in the house of commons to enable them to govern on their own.  That expectation is strengthened by the latest public humiliation of Messrs Byers and Hoon and Ms Hewitt — and by the timely (but undoubtedly fortuitous) pregnancy of the new media favourite, Mrs ‘SamCam’ Cameron.  I also persist in predicting that a Tory overall majority will be a disaster for Britain, to be prevented if possible at almost any cost.

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On a more personal note, I wonder how many people know what a lovely place Wells in Somerset turns out to be, and what a superb cathedral it has?  The most dyed-in-the-wool and bigoted atheist (such as me) couldn’t fail to be moved by Choral Evensong in Wells Cathedral, sung gloriously every day of the year by its magnificent choir.  There’s a fuller account, with pictures, of the splendid week that J and I have just spent in Wells here –  but don’t all rush at the same time to the website of the Swan Hotel to book the Cathedral Suite there;  there’s plenty of time for everyone.  (Actually, not having converted such knowledge as I might have had of international affairs into cash when I retired, we couldn’t afford the Cathedral Suite, but our Standard Room was absolutely fine.)

[1] See Stephen Grey, Cracking on in Helmand, Prospect magazine, Issue 162, 27 August 2009:

In Whitehall, meanwhile, government officials seethed at what they regarded as General Dannatt’s opportunism in using recent casualties to spread the blame for three years of bloody stalemate. As seen from London or Washington, the story of Helmand was more often of commanders who pushed soldiers into harm’s way, sent back endlessly optimistic reports, and extended the conflict beyond the resources and political will available back home. Their complaint has merit. Politicians dispatched troops to Afghanistan, but Nato generals decided how to deploy them. Most of the crucial decisions—from sending troops to defend the platoon houses, to “mowing the lawn,” to Panther’s Claw—have been made by soldiers. If an operation was launched with insufficient troops (or helicopters) it should not have been launched at all.

Brian

The prime minister’s brave decision to give evidence at the Iraq Inquiry on 5 March provided the opportunity for the central question about the Iraq war to be put bluntly and persistently to the second most senior member of the Blair government that took us to war, enabling us all to judge the adequacy or lack of it of Mr Brown’s response.  The question, put (predictably) by Sir Roderic Lyne, went like a bullet to the heart of the matter:

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

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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?

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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

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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

A BBC programme broadcast today, and the advance publicity for it, give the impression that a huge proportion of the famine relief aid given by the international community to Ethiopia in the 1980s was diverted from starving people to buy arms and ammunition for use in the civil war then raging in the northern parts of the country.  This impression is false.  Nothing of the sort occurred.  But the erroneous impression given by the BBC risks doing great damage to future international disaster relief programmes by appearing to discredit the historic Ethiopian relief effort, to which thousands of people all over the world gave so generously.

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

With the opinion polls momentarily suggesting a narrow gap between the Conservatives and Labour, the chattering classes’ newspapers and current affairs programmes on television are full of pundits agonising about the dangerous implications of a hung parliament after the impending general election — i.e. a result in which no single party has an overall majority in the house of commons.

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

In the many questions about Gordon Brown’s merits and defects as prime minister, his alleged bullying of his staff and colleagues is peripheral (except of course for those whom he allegedly bullies).  Any bullying is a symptom of a more fundamental problem, not the problem itself.  Whether staff at No. 10 Downing Street have complained to the National Bullying Helpline and whether the Helpline was right to announce that it had received such complaints and whether it now says that none of the complaints mentioned Gordon Brown — all that may entrance and obsess the media, but it’s strictly on the periphery of the periphery of the central question:  are Gordon Brown’s working practices as prime minister conducive to the good government of Britain?

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

In a fit of absent-mindedness (aka sheer stupidity) I have just opened a seriously infected file (sent to me via Skype with a message purporting to come from a reliable Skype contact) which has played havoc with my computer, including disabling every known application that might have been able to clean it up.

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

Tony Blair’s six hours at the witness table of the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry yesterday gave us a bravura performance, allowing him to display all the old familiar dramatic and forensic skills that got him out of so many scrapes during his years at No. 10.  The media this morning all comment on how nervous he seemed initially (those in the room apparently saw his hand shaking when he poured himself a glass of water), although I would have said only that he was tense to start with — as who wouldn’t have been?  But it didn’t take him long to recover the old charm, fluency and unquestioning self-confidence.

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

The academic and historian Professor Geoffrey Warner has kindly authorised me to publish on this website a short but meticulously researched paper comparing the evidence given to three official inquiries — Butler, Hutton and now Chilcot — about the famous (or infamous) warning in one of the two Iraq dossiers that Saddam Hussein could have WMD ready for launch within 45 minutes of giving the order. The comparison identifies some notable and suggestive inconsistencies from which Professor Warner draws an equally interesting and irresistible conclusion.

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

This week the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry starts to hear evidence on, among other things, the legality or illegality of the Iraq war.  Among the key witnesses will be Sir Michael Wood, at the time the Foreign Secretary’s principal legal adviser:  Elizabeth Wilmshurst, then Wood’s deputy, who resigned because she could not accept the Attorney-General’s formal advice that the war would be legal, contrary to her own opinion that it would amount to “the crime of aggression”;  the then Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, who had expressed serious reservations about the legality of military action in his private advice to the prime minister on 7 March 2003 but then appeared to have dismissed those reservations when he declared that war would be legal in his published opinion of the 17th, just 10 days later;  Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary (and so the main recipient of the advice of Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst), who is to return to the Inquiry to discuss legality; and, of course, next Friday 29 January 2010, Tony Blair, in what may be the last of his starring roles.

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

In your heart you know he’s wrong….

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

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