Following on from Dave's post:
The government's partial climbdown over whether to hold the Iraq war inquiry in public adds an impression of muddle and incompetence to the appearance of political cynicism that surrounded the original decision. This new move reinforces the sense that the decision was rushed through for no other reason than to appease unruly backbenchers and dampen down the 'Gordon must go' campaign. At a time when the reputation of politicians is at an all-time low, how can making important national decisions for blatantly self-serving reasons, rather than basing them on principle, do anything but make matters worse? (Mind you, the Tories are no better: for the party that, when last in power, burdened teachers and pupils with a raft of testing and inspection to declare its belated opposition to SATS was an act of pure political hypocrisy and cynical vote-chasing).
As for the Iraq inquiry itself, although I'm not opposed in principle, I wonder exactly what purpose it will serve. Those who have been most vociferous in calling for it appear to be an uneasy alliance of two groups. On the one hand are the trenchant 'stoppers' of the Lose The War Coalition who won't be happy with anything less than a full-scale condemnation of the decision to topple Saddam. The other group is made up of those who have lost relatives in the conflict and demand to know why their loved ones died. But public enquiries don't exist to provide vindication for the opponents of government policy, or (hard though it may be to accept it) therapeutic closure for the bereaved. I suspect neither group will be satisfied, whatever the outcome.
This post originally appeared at Martin in the Margins
"The Iraq war was a disaster" is a familiar refrain. Unfortunately, that doesn't tell us very much. Do we mean the concept, the planning, the implementation, the strategy, the tactics, what? Or do we want an official stick with which to beat the government?
Were the problems with the Iraq war just the basis on which we went to war, or inappropriate equipment necessitating lots of UORs ?
Do we just want to know that the whole enterprise was a bad idea, or do we want to see where and why things were done badly or well? Read More »
The government of Spain has decided to honour surviving British and Irish veterans of the International Brigade by granting them Spanish citizenship. Questioned on the Today programme this morning about why he left his home in the East End of London to fight for a country of which he knew little, 94 year old Sam Lesser recalled the fear of fascism spreading through Europe at the time. But, he added, we didn't have to leave home to find out about fascism: we had experienced it here, on our own streets.
Seventy years later, fascism is once again stalking the streets of Britain, not to mention its town halls and the corridors of the European Parliament. According to the Guardian report, Sam Lesser is 'still angry that the British government did nothing to help the Spaniards'. Not only that, he's 'furious...that the fascist, xenophobic propaganda he had to endure as a young man is again being preached by "Sir Oswald Mosley's heirs and successors"'.
Let's hope that the current generation is as courageous in confronting the menace of the BNP as Lesser and his generation were in standing up to Franco, Hitler and Mussolini.
One thread that keeps popping up in the context of Labour's trashing last night is the disappointment a lot of Labour's voters feel with the party.
There is no question that Labour MPs - while not being alone in the petty (and sometimes, not-so-petty) chiselling that has gone on, are taking a disproportionately high share of the blame from the public.
The subtext is that people expect the Tories to be a shower of shysters.
People believe that Labour's natural role is to be a haven of honesty. Oddly, as members of The Labour Party, this should be a matter of some pride to us. It should also be a matter of some concern to us, as this 'flipping' and fiddling not only threatens Labour at the next election. It also threatens to toxify our brand - for a generation.
All the more reason for Labour activists - where their MP has let the party down - to take matters into their own hands. It's also time for the party to appeal to the thousands of people who haven't bothered to join the party that they naturally support because they don't see the point of membership.
It's time for a purge. What about your MP? Why not have another look at www.reselect.org?
If the Expenses crap has taught us anything, it is that the public take a simple and correct view, Duty comes before Personal Gain. Clearly it has taught some people nothing.
The political world is full of personality and that is by no means always a bad thing. But when it spills over as it has this week, it is the worst thing of all. With politics at it's lowest reputational ebb, with the far right Nazi party pushing for a breakthrough and with so much hope developing over the economic recovery signs, now just wasn't the time. Read More »
I've long harboured the belief that the third way was a dangerous ideological course. Like many very sensible ideas, it is, in practice, flawed.
The current state of politics seems to bear that out.
Some time ago, for reasons that were misguided, campaigning became a science.
We all became obsessed with 'turning out our vote', profiling the electors, working to the 'marked register' of voters etc. I think that has damaged democracy. Read More »
It'll take you about ten minutes to get your head around this one - well worth a try:
Picking up the optimistic theme of the previous post here by Dave Cole, I think that there is...
- a cross-party consensus in support of political decentralisation;
- an opportunity to challenge and largely replace the political caste that have stood by and allowed the power of Parliament to wither;
- a widespread view that politics needs to be renewed, that parties need to reverse their decline, that they need to funded by lots of small donations rather than a few large ones;
- a cross-party view that new communications technologies can alter the way that people are involved in policymaking;
- a loss of the legitimacy of Parliament---as it is currently constituted---for it to use parliamentary privilege to defend the privileges and monopolies enjoyed by parliamentarians.
Now is good time to unpack the term 'Parliamentary Privilege.' We all know what it should mean, and we've seen what a lot of MPs have decided to understand it to mean. But now, formerly 'immovable' obstacles could be brushed aside in the light of recent revelations.
Read More »
