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.

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?

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.

More importantly on the eve of an election, it is inexcusable. For all her faults (and they aren't as many as some people seem to think) I always believed Hazel Blears would put Labour first no matter what. I feel disappointed, I feel angry and I feel let down. The fact that, no matter what the personal dispute between her and the PM, she wouldn't 'suck it up' for 48 hours disappoints me utterly.

By Friday she could have done this and been supported for it, but by doing it during an election campaign she has kicked the hard-working party activists in the teeth as they pound the streets for Labour.

Though she is Blairite, from the wrong side of the Pennines and a whole foot and half shorter than me, I always quite liked her. Though often disagreed with her on policy. She always seemed like a solid Party comrade who believed in the collective membership and supported the activists. She blew that away today.

If that is the depth that the senior Labour figures have descended to then it is time the membership took back the control that we have released to the leadership over the last 15 years. It's time for the ship to leave the sinking rats.

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.

We complain about voter turnout falling and then spend most (in some cases all) of our time just talking to the people who voted last time. We largely ignore the non-voters and then wonder why they don't start voting. We don't do that here, because I believe that if what you say is right the majority will support you, we have courage enough to let the public decide without trying to manipulate them by 'focussed' campaigning on only those we know support us already.

That's partly why membership has dropped so badly too. A limited pool of supporters just dwindles, where is the new intake coming from?

And so it is with the obsessive pursuit of the 'middle' ground of voters. People are turned off by it. By 'scientifically' searching for the most popular line to capture the vote, I think we are cheating the people and being cowardly. Give them a choice, trust them to make it. Put real clear space between Labour and Conservative.

The notion of the Third way as a political solution has brought us to the point where people no longer trust politicians and no longer respect politicians. Because politicians no longer tell us what they passionately believe in and ask for our votes, they tell us what we want to hear and try to 'capture' our vote.

This is why people say 'they are all the same', we argue with them about that, maybe they're right.

This is why people say 'they can't be trusted', because we don't let ideology guide us and show that we believe what we say.
This is why people say 'we don't believe in them', because we, in return aren't believing enough in the them. We aren't setting out our stall and having faith enough to let them decide.

This is why, people are turning to extremists. Not because they buy into everything they say, but because they want to exercise a choice. They need a choice to have.

The nationalist lunatic elected to the mayoralty of Doncaster is the best example. He campaigned to everyone, he set out his policies warts and all and he was the only one in Doncaster to do that. And despite his awful rhetoric and extremist lunacy the people voted for him. It was our failure, as it will be if the BNP win Euro seat, that did this. We cannot hide from that any longer.

If we are to put the interests of the country first, before party, we have to look long and hard at what this means. It is in none of our interests to deliver the country into the hands of the far right Nazis. WE have to have the courage to face that, whatever it may mean for the Labour party in the short term. It's our duty to protect people, not from making their own mistakes, but by being there when they have and rebuilding the country with them afterwards.

• 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.

Personally, I've always hated the idea of MPs being 'recalled' and brought to account by their constituency parties because it has usually (in the past) been used as a means of mandating them to adopt unworkable (or electorally impossible) policies. But, today, everything is different.

The idea of MPs being forced to fight for their right to represent their party based upon their character is a fantastic opportunity for Labour, (and, as it happens, for the other parties).

Also, the possibilities for crowdsourcing opinion and evidence, as well as the ease with which trusted open deliberative communities can be formed, means that the kind of consensus-building needed for constitutional change can be done in weeks rather than years. As long as the current danger-point for Gordon Brown passes (and I'd not bet the farm that it will), Labour have a year. They could...

• Ask some trusted public figures to spend two weeks crowdsourcing existing evidence to come up with a model of the issues surrounding constitutional reform and decentralisation.
• Identify the obstacles to decentralisation and seek a consensus on what needs to be done to overcome them (some of them involve restraint in the way that the main parties campaign).
• Open every CLP's selection process up so that every candidate has to prove that their character is acceptable to people who will campaign for them.

Also, the party could establish a panel of people from outside the party (those smartarses that are talking about standing as 'white-suit' candidates would be perfect) and ask them to give every Labour candidate a clean bill-of-health on the question of probity

Labour could go to the country in the spring as the party with a clear road-map to transform politics forever subject to a consensus that isn't necessarily that politically contentious while being able to sidestep the intractable question of electoral reform. It would also go to the country as the one party that has NO candidates that haven't proved their personal probity.

There is no reason why any of these possibilities couldn't work today. They are all do-able before the next election. Even the Tories would agree with a lot of them.

In fact, the main reason that the Tories may not play ball here is that this approach could give our Gordon a fighting chance of winning the next election. Or---better still---it could give whoever Gordon steps aside for at the last minute a fighting chance of winning the next election...

(There's a longer and even more boring version of this over at NTaH)