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

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?

The loudest opposition to the nature of the inquiry has largely come from the grouping around the Stop the War Coalition (a trading name of the Socialist Workers' Party ¹ ). It is worth remembering that this grouping was not only opposed to the war ² , not only opposed to the Labour government, but opposed to the entire system of government and nature of the state. That suggests that they would be opposed to the inquiry on some basis no matter what as, in their view, the government is necessarily corrupt and serving of capitalist interests.

The more reasoned problems come under three heads; timing, secrecy and outputs.

Timing

The 'why now' question is easily answered; British troops there have largely withdrawn. Conducting an honest inquiry would have been impossible if witnesses thought they were kicking the stool from underneath troops in the field.

The 'how long' question can only be answered in reference to other inquiries.

The Fingerprint Inquiry; announced 14 March 2008. Yet to report.
The Fraser Inquiry into the Holyrood building; announced July 8th 2003. Report published 15 September 2004.
The Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly; opened 1 August 2003. Report published 28 January 2004
The Cullen Inquiry into the Dunblane massacre; announced 21 March 1996. Report published 30 September 1996
The Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié; announced 20 April 2001. Report published 28 January 2003.
The Cullen Inquiry into the Ladbroke Grove rail disaster; announced 8 October 1999. Report published 17 April 2001
The Davies Inquiry into the Aberfan disaster; announced 26 October 1966. Report published 3 August 1967
The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday; announced 29 January 1998. Yet to report.
The Butler Review into WMD in Iraq; announced 3 February 2004. Report published 14 July 2004.
The Redfern Report into the Alder Hey organs scandal; announced 3 December 1999. Report published 7 November 2000
The Scott Report into the Matrix Churchill affair; announced November 1992. Published 27 April 2004.

This will of necessity be a painstaking process. Setting an artificial limit of twelve months will not help anyone. I would reply to anyone who says it is being put back till after the election for political reasons that desiring it to report early, half-cock, so that it can be used to hit the Labour party is also a political reason.

Secrecy

Much of the criticism has been on the issue of secrecy.

For one thing, I understand and agree with the logic of certain things being secret. Beyond the obvious issues of national security, I would make two points.

Firstly, we did not cover ourselves in glory. I'm guessing that there are plenty of people who will want to tell their part of the story but will not, for various reasons, want to do it in public. Their own conduct or that of 'brother officers' might have been wanting, or they might be concerned about leaving interpreters and other locally employed civilians in the lurch again.

Equally, an honest investigation will have to take information from people who we cannot compel to appear - from the USA, for instance - and who are unlikely to appear if they feel they would compromise confidences. Similarly, would (say) a representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government be likely to appear to discuss oil if their words were ferried direct to Washington and Baghdad?

Outputs

The inquiry has many issues to consider. Off the top of my head, they could include the lead up to the war, WMD, intelligence qua intelligence, use of intelligence, lack of embassy, use of intelligence from allies, the march on Baghdad, de-baathification, troop numbers, mission objectives in Basra, relations with civilians, the Awakening, civil-military co-operation, troop equipment and so on and so forth.

Quite beyond the simple questions of 'were there WMD' and 'was the dodgy dossier sexed up', there are questions about everything that happened in Iraq. There is a general understanding that we didn't cover ourselves with glory, but after any operation of the size of Iraq, there is a need for a 'lessons learned' exercise. There are going to be two outputs, one public, one secret. As with the Dunblane inquiry, parts of the secret version may be declassified before the time limit to aid that process.

The ouput is not 'Tony Blair was wrong' but a whole range of comments, recommendations and criticisms. Those looking for an answer along the lines of 'Tony Blair was wrong' are missing the point and, ultimately, will make it harder for us to see where we went wrong, what lessons we can learn and how that affects and constrains future military conduct.

Ultimately, going to war in Iraq was a political decision. While an inquiry may do much, it cannot decide whether a policy was right or wrong. That is reserved for the electorate.

For the record, I opposed the Iraq war.

xD.

1 - they're not socialists, they're not workers and they don't know how to party
2 - even though it had no problems with declaring "we are all Hezbollah now"

This post originally appeared at davecole.org

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.

Firstly, the beautiful sound of the words 'social contract' being applied to something a bit more multilateral than the old chestnuts about 'rights and responsibilities.' Secondly, there appears to be the first sight of a long-overdue move to kick-start a 'public service movement'.

It means NHS managers, head teachers and business leaders are freed from unnecessary bureaucracy but not from accountability to patients, parents and consumers in their communities of which they are a part.

This can only be read as an appeal to professionalism rather than managerial micromanagement - item one on any post-mortem if-and-when Labour eventually leaves office.

If Labour - the party born of the trade union movement - has one opportunity at the moment, it is to articulate a new social contract - particularly in the field of public service. It's hard to find anywhere for a Labour minister to turn at the moment where they aren't urged to embrace greater transparency, higher standards in public life, a more energetic promotion of participation in policymaking. But none of these suggestions address the key questions that a Labour government has to answer:

Why - in a decade in which we have increased public spending to levels that even leftish critics wouldn't have dared to advocate - do we have a public sector that is enervated, insecure and resentful? Public sector professionals - many of whom had voted Conservative in the past - should be Labour's equivalent of Mrs Thatchers' grateful council-house buyers. A shift back towards professionalism and away from box ticking could save billions, energise what should be Labour's natural constituency, and improve the quality of public service.

A social contract that public sector professionals were invited to shape would be entirely commensurate with Labour's traditional relationship to these workers. They are due an apology, and it's not one that needs to stick in the throats of any Labour minister.

the UK public gather to say prayers of thanks for being able to elect the Mother of all Parliaments

This post, in which Steve Goodrich asks 'why do we hate politics' over on the Compass website is a bit of a classic of its kind.

It starts off identifying a fairly well-fleshed out thesis---that the consumerisation of politics has resulted in an increasing disillusionment and disengagement.

It then offers a thin denunciation of this line---but one that doesn't address any of the reasons why the problem---as he's sketched it out---exists, apart from asserting that politicans haven't done everything that Steve wishes they would do:

"The problem lies not within our demand for politics per se but in the failure of politics, or to be more specific politicians, to supply us with reasons to give them our support.

This is not surprising considering the government's current performance. Their attempt to stabilize the banking system has provided mixed results, yet more fundamentally it has done nothing to reassure us that they are working in our interest. Promises made for job creation look fanciful and far-off, whilst staggeringly high amounts of money are pumped into the black hole of our decrepit financial system. Workers are laid off in their thousands whilst at best their plight is met with unconvincing, rehearsed showings of empathy and understanding by ministers and opposition alike.

To top it all off the common line throughout the past six months has been that matters are out of their hands. ‘The economic crisis is a world crisis' does not instil trust in their ability to tackle the problems at hand. What makes it worse is that there is little substantive difference between the parties as to how this can all be resolved with minimal harm to us, the victims."

It all sounds very consumerist to me. THEY haven't managed to come up with the right product for US. And for a post that is so fixed on identifying the problem with politicians (THEY haven't adopted Steve Goodrich's particular prescriptions, it seems), there seems to be no defence of politics, no outline of how it can be done properly, and no questioning of how far the quality of democracy can provide a cause for these problems.

David Aaronovich doesn't make the same mistake in this excellent article in The Times:

"...if you don't have a liberal democracy, everything else goes to hell. And it does strike me that, right now, we are in a nasty phase of attacking democratic politics and its inevitable representatives, the politicians, for their deficiencies and taking refuge either in populism, legalism or magical thinking.

Any of these are dangerous, but doubly so in a time of potential depression. The populism is expressed in the casual, jokey bracketing of politicians with fraudsters, the influence of potty-mouthed right-wing bloggers on some political journalism and an impatience with foreign workers and other minorities. The legalism is evident in the suggestion that politicians should hive off their responsibilities to technocratic bodies, such as an “independent” NHS. The magical thinking comes in imagining wheezes that would somehow save us from the messy business of having, joining, organising, funding or voting for political parties.

It always amazes me---and it shouldn't---how clever adults seem to believe, against the evidence of their own experience, that the governing classes in our democracy inevitably mess everything up." 

Aaronovich concludes:

"So how depressing it is that there are Grand Conventions in defence of liberty and none in defence of politics; that we count cameras but won't join parties; that we obsess about biometrics and databases and refuse our support to the democratic politics that is the real safeguard against authoritarianism or chaos."