A gentleman’s agreement. A meeting of civilised minds:

Foreign Office: UK SIGNS MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING WITH LIBYA
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office announced that the UK Government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Government of Libya, on 18 October, to facilitate deportation of persons suspected of activities associated with terrorism.

That’s Libya ticked and we “signed a similar MOU with the Kingdom of Jordan on 10 August”. Gives you a rosey glow doesn’t it? Hang on though, don’t break the bunting out just yet.

Only six months ago, we documented unfair trials, physical abuse in detention and restrictions on free expression and association.

That’s Human Rights Watch quibbling - as always - over Libya’s internal repression.

Just what is it with this government and torture?

ePolitix: UK wins European backing to challenge torture ruling
The British government has persuaded four other European countries to help challenge a ruling from the European court of human rights that prevents sending foreign terrorist suspects back to countries where they could face torture.

What does it say about the personalities of the people willing to entertain this? Somebody, somewhere is literally sitting at a desk and thinking:

“Well this guy could go back to his home country and be beaten, raped, electrocuted or tortured in a hundred different ways that my threadbare managerial imagination cannot grasp. And I do not care.”

or

“Well this information came from a man who has been be beaten, raped, electrocuted or tortured in a hundred different ways that my threadbare managerial imagination cannot grasp. And I do not care.”

They do not care because if they did they would say “no”, or resign or try to change the system. In a recent article for the Independent, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray details what went on in the jails of our Uzbek allies in The War Against Terror:

I will tell you what torture means.

It means the woman who was raped with a broken bottle in both vagina and anus, and who died after ten days of agony. It means the old man suspended by wrist shackles from the ceiling while his children were beaten to a pulp before his eyes. It means the man whose fingernails were pulled before his face was beaten and he was immersed to his armpits in boiling liquid.

If you think there are circumstances where torture is warranted then this argument is probably not for you and now is the time to head for websites that cater for your predilection before the Government bans them.

A commenter in reply to this ill-placed polemic I wrote for The Sharpener said:

How can you expect to have a reasonable and worthwhile take on anything the government does when you have developed such an unreasoning hatred for its leader?

Unreasoning? I got my reasons.

I was struck by this short piece (via Tim Worstall) by Paul Krugman in which he says:

What we really need is political journalism based less on perceptions of personalities and more on actual facts.

It seemed an odd thing to say, particularly when there are many facts in the public domain that I would say allow us to draw indisputable conclusions (not perceptions) about the personalities of some public figures. By drawing on these facts, the unreasoning hatred becomes a reasoning one. We need not rely on Krugman’s “perceptions of personalities” but can say this is true about this person’s personality. It’s what each of us then does with those facts which leads to the conflict, friction, disagreement, name calling or whatever.

Take Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State during the Clinton Administation. In 1996, before accepting the role, when asked if she thought the deaths of half a million Iraqi children under the sanction regime imposed to “contain” Saddam Hussein was a price worth paying, she replied:

“I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

There’s your fact in black and white. Albright has a personality that allows her to countenance those deaths as acceptable. It’s not a perception - it came out of her own mouth. It is then down to each of us to decide how we process and deal with that fact. Imagine the (perfectly rational and to be expected) outcry if Saddam Hussein were to stand in the witness box and say, “300,000? The price was worth it.”

On the subject of Saddam and for the sake of balance, let’s look at again at George Galloway’s notorious salute to Saddam Hussein:

Your excellency, Mr President, I greet you in the name of the many thousands of people in Britain who stood against the tide and opposed the war and aggression against Iraq and continue to oppose the war by economic means, which is aimed to strangle the life out of the great people of Iraq … I greet you too in the name of the Palestinian people … I thought the president would appreciate to know that even today, three years after the war, I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam. Sir, I salute your courage, your strength your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem.

It looks very much as if Galloway will defend that quote with his dying breath as a salute to the people of Iraq. Again though, the facts are not in dispute - Galloway is a man who bends his knee before tyrants - but it’s up to you how you process the information to form your opinion. Some people are willing to let it pass and the rest of us aren’t. (If only George had swallowed his pride and said to his critics: “Look, I was standing in front of one of the world’s most bloodthirsty tyrants, surrounded by bodyguards armed to the teeth. I was shitting bricks. What would you have said?” It might have been disingenuous but it would have garnered considerably more public sympathy.)

Just why Albright receives deference and Galloway sneers is for the likes of Jeremy Paxman to explain. No TV or radio presenter asked to interview Albright today is likely to object and risk their job. Journalists allow their careerism to win out every time.

This was particularly true during the time Alastair Campbell ruled the parliamentary lobby with both an iron fist and a velvet glove. Those journalists who did and wrote as they were told got the better access to The Greater Good. Those who didn’t, didn’t.

And it still holds true today. Take this from Andrew Marr about the recent guff surrounding David Cameron and the did-he-or-didn’t-he-snort guff:

The devil’s dandruff is on every second lapel in Soho; it’s sprinkled on washstands in Blackpool; it is piled high in theatre dressing rooms.

That was on October 12. Ten days before, the Evening Standard had revealed how its reporters had found traces of cocaine at six parties held during the Labour Party conference in Brighton. The story completely failed to catch fire across the rest of the media who were too busy giving Kate Moss a kicking. I wonder, however, if Marr’s fingers paused over his keyboard before typing “Blackpool”. As far as I’m able to ascertain, there were no stories of cocaine being used at the Conservative conference in Blackpool (Marr filed his piece in the week after the Tory Party Conference)- the cocaine was sprinkled on conference washstands in Brighton, not Blackpool.

As it turned out, Marr’s article passed without comment from the Tories although you would think they had grounds for complaint. The fallout, however, might have been heavier had Marr transposed the Northern seaside town for the Southern one in his article, particularly with him being a prominent media personality having to float a newly launched television show and the BBC still supine post-Hutton and wary of causing further offence to New Labour.

Which brings me back to Tony Blair and my “unreasoning” hatred for him. The flaws in the Prime Minister’s personality are there for all to see, as matters of public record, as cold fact. It’s just that some are able to ignore them more easily than others.

There’s his stories about watching Jackie Milburn play football at Newcastle and, when a teenager, stowing away on a plane to the Bahamas. What about his favourite food? Is it fish and chips as he told the Labour Party magazine or is it “fresh fettuccine garnished with an exotic sauce of olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes and capers” as he told the Islington Cookbook? Trivial issues, to be sure, but demonstrative of a dysfunctional relationship with the truth.

The list is, for all intent and purposes, endless. Why could Blair find the time to write to Ozzy Osbourne when the latter came a cropper on his quad bike or visit Rob Lowe when the actor was performing in London but can’t find an hour to pay a hospital visit to servicemen wounded in Iraq?

Next question. For ten marks, reconcile this:

If military action proves necessary, it will be to uphold the authority of the UN and to ensure Saddam is disarmed of his weapons of mass destruction, not to overthrow him. It is why, detestable as I find his regime, he could stay in power if he disarms peacefully.

With this:

A majority of decent and well-meaning people said there was no need to confront Hitler and that those who did were war-mongers. When people decided not to confront fascism, they were doing the popular thing, they were doing it for good reasons, and they were good people … but they made the wrong decision.

An appeaser teasing the appeasers.

Flying from Shanghai to Hong Kong on the day David Kelly’s body was discovered, when asked if he’d had anything to do with Kelly’s name entering the public domain Blair said: “Emphatically not. I did not authorize the leaking of the name of David Kelly.” However, under questioning during the Hutton Inquiry, Sir Kevin Tebbit, Permanent Undersecretary at the Ministry of Defence, had this to say about the strategy to get Kelly’s name into the open:

Tebbit: [A] policy decision on the handling of this matter had not been taken until the Prime Minister’s meeting on the Tuesday. And it was only after that that any of the press people had an authoritative basis on which to proceed.

Jeremy Gompertz QC, counsel for the Kelly family: So are you saying this: that the decisions which led, in fact, to the naming of Dr Kelly were taken at No. 10 Downing Street and not by the Ministry of Defence?

Tebbit: I was not trying to make that point. I was trying to contrast to you the difference between a formal decision on bringing forward the information into the public arena and the stage before any such decision had been taken.

Gompertz: Whether you were making that point or not, what is the position? That the decision was taken at No. 10 and not by the Ministry of Defence, or by the Ministry of Defence?

Tebbit: The decision was taken at a meeting in No. 10 with which the Ministry of Defence concurred.

How to reconcile “Emphatically not. I did not authorize the leaking of the name of David Kelly” with “[A] policy decision on the handling of this matter had not been taken until the Prime Minister’s meeting on the Tuesday”? This was Blair’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” moment but with weasel words worthy of Clinton’s “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”, he scrambled free: “I stand by the totality of what I said at that time”. Whatever the totality means.

This isn’t all about a mate who never gets his round in or cheats on his wife. It’s about the man responsible for the welfare of every man, woman and child in Britain. A man who has taken Britain to war more times in the shortest space of time than any other Prime Minister and may yet find the time to squeeze in another ruck or two before retiring. A man, wanting for nothing behind bomb-proof and bullet-proof glass, complacent about death and torture and truth.

A fish rots from the head down is an overused, cliched metaphor these days but I really can’t think of a better one. Here’s Matthew Norman in the Independent (behind the subscription wall) on the downfall of David Blunkett:

The only pag of pity I can find for this odious fluffball of self-righteous arrogance, as Nemesis pays her final house call, is in so far as he’s a weak-willed, semi-bonkers victim of a culture created and fostered by his dear friends the Blairs. Maybe he came to assume, without being aware of it, that if they could get away with all the nonsense (freebie hols, fraudsters brokering property deals, reversing state policy for £1m donations, doling out peerages and ministerial posts for cash, and the rest of that tired old litany), then it couldn’t be corruption at all. If all the greed and the grandeur, the lying and dissembling, are just part of the game, why shouldn’t he have a bit for himself?

If he concluded that the standards expected of political leaders have sunkso far as to be invisible, who can blame him? In an age when a Prime Minister’s wife merrily smuggles Chinese pearls into Britain without paying the VAT, is it any wonder to hear that same Prime Minister state, with every appearance of sincerity, that Mr Blunkett leaves without a stain on his character?

Like I said, it’s how you process these facts. To me and many others, they mark Blair as unfit to lead if not worthy of a cell in the Hague. To others, these character traits can be safely ignored or, if they’re frightened to rock the boat, pushed away out of sight for the time being. Could you really imagine a Paxman or a Marr asking:

Prime Minister, are you seriously suggesting that your wife took half a million pounds out of your blind trust to buy two flats in Bristol and you knew nothing about it?

Or

Why do you continue to lobby for the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, a country your own Foreign Office says it has “a number of concerns about human rights” about, including “the implementation of basic international human rights norms; aspects of the judicial system; corporal and capital punishment; torture; discrimination against women and non-Muslims; and restrictions on freedom of movement, expression, assembly and worship”?

Or

Prime Minister, you could put thousands of still anxious parents’ minds at ease by answering one simple question: Did your youngest son have the triple MMR vaccine?

Or

Prime Minister, why did you not sign the early day motions in 1988 condemning Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds at Halabja?

Or

Prime Minister, would you say these lies, evasions, sales of weapons, and all the rest, are the acts of a self-proclaimed Christian?

You could, of course, substitute Prime Minister for Foreign Secretary, Defence Secretary, Home Secretary…

When our Christian leader was told that to deport asylum seekers back to Egypt was to risk them being subjected to “serious human rights abuses” and that there was “little scope for pushing deportations any further”, his response was: “This is crazy. Why can’t we press on?” How to file away that fact?

To me it paints a picture of a man aloof and reckless with other people’s lives. That he doesn’t care that these people may be tortured. That he doesn’t care whether these people are innocent or guilty. If he did he’d order their trial. If he can order these people deported to countries where they may be tortured or held indefinitely without trial then he has no belief in the rule of law and has no claim to the values of humanitarianism, democracy or even common decency.

He is head of a government which is prepared to accept intelligence obtained under torture from some of the worst regimes on the planet. It colludes in the extraordinary rendition of suspects to countries where information can be extracted using methods it itself is too squeamish to use. It shakes the hands of savages. The next time Blair gives a speech in which he mentions human rights, remember he might as well be talking about particle physics: he knows little about the subject and cares even less.

Any and all of this extends from Labour’s years in the wilderness and Blair’s willingness to exploit them: the desperate lust for power followed by the inability to find any meaningful use for that power once it was gained. In the face of savagery, the only response that Blair and New Labour could find was to respond with savagery of their own. Finally came the twin realisations that power is the only reason left for staying in power and that life is cheap. Trivial matters like the truth and the needless death and pain of faceless human beings need not get in the way of that. Realpolitik or whatever other lofty euphemisms used to give a sham nobility to shameful actions are the magnets dragging the moral compass from its true direction.

This government has certainly reached its decadent phase much faster than the preceding Tory one. The word “sleaze” is now bandied about freely. It won’t be long before the Tories begin to throw it about with impunity safe in the knowledge that their own brand, with its sad little men with their envelopes full of banknotes and their trousers around their ankles, was much less sinister and entrenched than the New Labour flavour. The helter skelter of new legislation makes me wonder if Blair realises this as well. When Harold Wilson left office the one and only thing he could point to as his legacy was the Open University. It remains doubtful whether a decade of Blairism will have anything even as paltry to show for its time. An embracing of torture and misery may yet be a defining characteristic.

And yet. A cowed, compliant corporate media with egos and mortgages to maintain won’t ask too many searching questions on the issues that really matter. Nor will a few pathetic wogs who, innocent or guilty and sent back to abattoir states, will never be heard from again.

Posted on November 6th, 2005 at 10:30 am

See also • New Labour and human rights: words and deeds • Moral flexibility • The Guardian: UK accused of complicity in torture		• Permalink • Trackback • Subscribe • Print
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