So, in an attempt to restore the smashed trust in our political system and our politicians, to give us the ‘different type of politics, a more open and honest dialogue‘ he promised upon becoming prime minister, Gordon Brown has said the inquiry into the Iraq war will be held in private and will not report back until Summer 2010 (that is, after the general election).

In parliament today he was unable to say whether the inquiry will have the power to compel witnesses to appear before it or whether they will have to give evidence under oath. Brown did his best to blame the Tories for the way the inquiry will be conducted. ‘The opposition wanted a Franks style inquiry [the inquiry into the Falklands war] and that’s what we’re having,’ he said making it sound like a generous concession to Tory lobbying. You’re all in this one together, lads.

One of the members of the inquiry’s committee is Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of War Studies at King’s College, London. Writing in the Independent in 2003 at the outbreak of the war, he had this to say…

Even if it takes time to dislodge Saddam’s regime, the US – and also Britain – will emerge from this conflict hardened in their power and ready to exercise far greater influence over not only the development of Iraq but also the wider Middle East.

Let’s hope Sir Lawrence is better at recording history than he is at predicting it.

Update: Jamie: ‘Let the assistant gravedigger bury the dead‘. There aren’t any words, really. Not longer than one syllable at any rate.

Update updated: A good point from Bob:

But at the end of the day I suspect few will change their opinions because of the inquiry, in public or private. And I’m one of those. To me, Blair either lied on WMD or was conned by the US. Fool or Knave, it makes no difference, both were things for which he should have been made to resign, and if he had some evidence which would persuade me otherwise I’m damn sure he would have put it in the public domain by now.

Updated update updated: Here’s inquiry committee member Martin Gilbert comparing Bush and Blair to Roosevelt and Churchill.

So here we have the edifying spectacle of Hazel Blears with an onion in her hankie and her hand on her heart of stone. After a week of reflection she’s admitted to being ’stupid’. Glad we’re now all on the same page about that, Hazel, if nothing else.

The thing is, one has to wonder if Hazel’s resignation had led to Gordon Brown getting the heave-ho, whether she’d now be turning on the waterworks in public, expressing regret about poncing around the place wearing that look-at-me-aren’t-I-the-clever-one badge, and telling us she’d been ‘thoughtless and quite cruel‘ towards the former Prime Minister.

As things stand, we’re left to wonder just what it was that prompted this crisis of confidence in the usually bullish and never-wrong Ms Blears…

Hazel Blears will face a motion of no confidence next week at a meeting of her constituency Labour Party.

Yes. That would do it.

They Work For You now have every parliamentary speech going back to 1979. Here’s a promising young man giving his maiden speech in July 1983…

I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.

Tony, if you’ll forgive me asking, what the fuck happened?

When brutality and terror and abuse are government tools, used against people whose only crime is to want to come to this country for a better life, it’s a vital time to fight for the rights of refugees.

It’s Refugee Week from June 15 – 21. There’s loads happening. Perhaps a simple act is in order.

Pass it on.

This isn’t repellent because it’s a supposedly left wing PM that’s the target – fuck Gordon Brown. His crime in my eyes is getting involved with this shower of deceitful turds in the first place, and he’s been up to his nuts in every scam and scandal of the New Labour years. He wanted the premiership so badly he was prepared to do anything to get it, and now he is getting it, good and hard.

But let’s not dance around what we’ve seen with last week’s press circle jerk and shows like tonight’s Dispatches. It’s a naked attempt by a massive chunk of the nation’s ruling class to pin all the faults of the country they created – the fucked financial system, the sleaze-ridden politics, the empty PR machine that is New Labour – on Brown, leaving the rest of them to get on with business as usual.

Read the rest

Yet more people are talking about Alan Johnson’s perfect upbringing. This time, The Scotsman:

Johnson’s back story is as good as it gets. His father, a painter and part-time pub pianist walked out of the family home when he was eight. His mother died when he was 12, and he was then brought up by his teenage older sister in a council house in Battersea.

As good as it gets. The lucky, lucky bastard.

Meanwhile, back in 1968…

Within two weeks, Enoch Powell was to make his notorious “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham. But by then the Labour government had already done more to catalyse racial prejudice than Powell’s rhetoric ever could. In fact, as Callaghan’s biographer, Kenneth Morgan, points out: “From Callaghan’s point of view, Powell’s antics were a valuable distraction. They enabled the government to appear, by contrast, sane and balanced…”

And it was ever thus. While we’re watching two BNP thugs getting elected to the European Parliament (they enable the government to appear, by contrast, sane and balanced), the not-at-all-fascist New Labour are quietly getting on with stuff.

Remember Fatou Felicite Gaye and her son Arou, who has ‘post-traumatic stress disorder caused by previous interaction with the Border Agency’, who were picked up by the Home Office in dawn raid, and who were sent to the Dungavel detention centre? They were deported but refused entry to the Ivory Coast because ‘Ms Gaye has no paperwork to prove her identity, and Arouna was born in the UK’. They are now stateless, back in the UK and in the Yarl’s ‘without adequate health services‘ Wood detention centre.

British National Party? Watch and learn, lads. Watch and learn.

To describe New Labour policies as ‘back of a fag packet’ has, up until now, been a metaphor for their seemingly dashed-off-in-minutes nature, their paucity of ideas and passion. (Plus they make you feel dizzy and nauseous. And give you cancer)

Who knew that when it came to the party’s European and local election campaign strategy, it could actually, literally be written on the back of a fag packet. Here’s John Prescott whining about New Labour’s pisspoor campaigning…

I kept asking the party what was the strategy, what was our message, what was the campaign? I became so concerned I actually wrote to Harriet [Harman]. Her reply was less than satisfactory. These apparently were the ‘messages.’

For the many v for the few
Grow your way out v cut your way out
On your side v on your own
Substantial leadership v insubstantial salesmanship

And that was it.

And that was it. To think they had the guts to use the word ’substantial’.

So Work and pensions secretary James Purnell has gone to spend more time with his sideburns. Good. All right-thinking people will have danced a little jig at the news this morning.

I imagine it’ll be just the Tories upset at his departure, him having been a sleeper agent for them – ‘I say old boy, any chance you could be a bit more beastly to the great unwashed?’ ‘I. Obey. Master.’

Now he’s gone rogue they must be hoping Brown can dig up another total and utter bastard to further their agenda. The chilling thought is that Purnell’s flounce moves the terrifying Phil Woolas closer to a big job.

How much damage has this done for Brown? I bet most people outside of political geekery and adrenalin junkie political journalists went ‘James who?’ on hearing the news. Even a breathless John Humphrys on the Today programme on Radio 4 is struggling to make this sound seismic.

After all, Purnell’s a one-dimensional figure even to those of us who have followed his revolting career. Unless they’re on the receiving end of his misanthropic policies I doubt he’s made much impact on people’s awareness other than as a bugger-gripped, Jolie-lipped New Labour drone who looks like he was grown in a laboratory they see burbling away on the news on a slow day.

Here’s a fun little story from the government’s News Distribution Service…

Plot to keep Iran’s ‘Top Gun’ jets flying … …with parts from eBay!

I like the exclamation mark. Hahaha Iran hahaha with its hahaha crappy airforce hahaha needing part from hahaha eBay!

Three men were jailed for a total of ten years for their part in a plot to supply military equipment to keep Iranian F-14 ‘Tomcat’ fighter jets airborne and combat ready in contravention of an embargo on military exports to Iran.

The thing is, I’m not sure if the British government should be crowing about this, to be honest. Not with our soldiers being killed because we’re too incompetent (or, in the case of former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, too evil) to make sure they got body army. Not with our Snatch Land Rovers which in Iraq and Afghanistan are called ‘mobile coffins‘. Not when US troops in Iraq called our lot the ‘borrowers’. Not with our welcoming of a greater deployment of US troops into Helmand in Afghanistan because it finally means our troops might get some decent helicopter support.

No, instead of jailing Mohsen Akhavan Nik and his son, along with Nithish Jaitha, for breaching the embargo, we should be making them heads of equipment procurement for the Ministry of Defence.

The days when pretentious gits like me invoked tragedy in a Gordonian context have long since passed. Tragic heroism relies upon a certain largeness of spirit, or at the very least a sudden moment of self-knowledge so acute that it induces intolerable psychic anguish. Ajax slaughtered his sheep when made aware of his fatal flaw, Oedipus put out his eyes when faced with his. Despite his ocular head start in that direction, Gordon is as nugatory a figure as Nero, fiddling with ritualistic lines at yesterday’s PMQs while his government self-immolates.

It’s the smallness of the man, the lack of grandeur in his dreams, the pathetic dressing-up of rank self-interest in the translucent cloak of dutifulness, that makes guilt-free schaudenfraude less a temptation than a moral obligation. For this has become a morality play – specifically, the first morality high farce in politico-theatrical history – about a system so deranged in its complacency that it gifts such power to one whose personal ambition is surpassed only by his lack of talent, without any mechanism to remove him once that power has drained away.

Read the rest

And lo, so much did the Communities Secretary love the Labour Party that she resigned from her cabinet post for ‘personal reasons’ the day before elections that look set to smash the party that has sheltered her mediocre talents. Nice to see her getting her priorities straight.

Still, wa-ha-hay!

Memories, like the corners of my mind. Misty water-coloured memories, of the way we were. Scattered pictures, of the smiles we left behind, smiles we gave to one another for the way we were. Can it be that it was all so simple then? Or has time re-written every line? If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we? Could we?

Let’s be honest, if Jacqui Smith had quietly slipped out the back door of the Home Office (instead of somebody starting a rumour that’s she’s jumping before she’s pushed) would anybody have been any the wiser?

It’s been four years since Alex Harrowell suggested abolishing the Home Office and it’s an idea that’s lost none of its appeal. What does the Home Office actually do anyway? The department could be closed, all it’s vestigial functions outsourced, and none of us would notice.

The police more or less do what they like so cutting them loose from Home Office ‘control’ is unlikely to see much difference on the ground. Home Office pronunciations on drugs seems to have little effect so some kind of computer programme that automatically generates a press release on the issue every 18 months could easily fill that role.

Does the Home Office ‘protect the public from terrorism‘ as it claims? The police and MI5 do the heavy lifting on that front with Home Office ministers merely taking the credit on the rare occasion an actual terrorist plot is actually uncovered or keeping schtum when it’s a more common false alarm. Again, the subsidiary Home Office role of stoking public fears about terrorism and foreigners could be given to some kind of automated fear generator that emails tabloid newspapers’ news desks.

You could sack the UK Border Agency and simply give its job to a rebadged British National Party. Who better to kick brown people’s doors in at dawn before violently dragging them to stinking, nightmarish hellholes, traumatising their children and deporting them to violence or death? Hell, I bet Nick Griffin’s lot would do it for free, slashing millions off the Government’s budget. Who’d notice the difference? Certainly not the people being kicked, punched, dragged, incarcerated and shot.

Simple as that. The Home Office can follow Jacqui Smith into well-deserved oblivion.

First it was the Independent’s John Rentoul who said Health Secretary Alan Johnson’s dead parents gave him a biography ‘to die for’. Polly Toynbee joined the Johnson death cult by saying Johnson being made an orphan as a child contributed to ‘his perfect backstory‘.

Now it’s George Galloway, of all people, who is dragging the skeletons from Johnson’s formative cupboard:

One of the things I like about the next Labour leader (though God knows what there will be left to lead), Alan Johnson, is his background story.

He was an orphan boy brought up by his teenage sister…

If Johnson does end up Labour leader I for one hope he has the good grace to thank his parents for dying when he was so young. Our political narrative demands it.

You often see Gordon Brown doing this with his hands (he’s not the only one). If you know anybody who knows British Sign Language, ask them what that hand shape is the sign for.

When the Prime Minister has the sheer brass balls to go on national television and say…

Well I’ve got to tell you, I was brought up in a household where integrity and telling the truth and doing everything honestly was what really mattered.

…surely the only sane response is: so what the bloody hell happened then, Gordon? That whirring sound you can hear is Gordon Brown’s parents spinning in their boxes at speeds matched only by his whirligig moral compass. The weather being what it is right now, I’d quite like to be standing next the Prime Minister’s moral compass – the breeze coming off it as it blurs around its spindle must be cold enough to chill beer.

(more…)

A proud moment for us voters in Hove and Portslade as our MP, Celia Barlow, gets a story in the Telegraph all to herself…

Celia Barlow, a Labour MP, used her second home allowance to spend more than £28,000 on stamp duty, legal costs and renovations despite telling the fees office that the property would become her main home.

I imagine calls for her to step down at the next election will be lacklustre at best. Any such gesture from Celia herself would be almost wholly symbolic. With a majority of just 420, I think we can safely regard her as toast.

It’s the times we live in I suppose – ones where a war criminal can be a made a peace envoy or a dilettante millionaire who doesn’t know how many houses he owns can claim to feel the poor’s pain – when a professional liar and bully can be acclaimed Mind Champion of the Year. Does anybody else think this is a spectacularly bad idea?

How many of us are able to separate Campbell’s role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from his I-share-your-pain schtick, I wonder? I’d like to hear the reasoning behind such distinctions.

When Secretary of State for War John Profumo left office in disgrace in 1963 he went to Toynbee Hall and cleaned the toilets. There used to be a time when (some) politicians and their servants accepted punishment and justice. Now they get fat cheques, book deals, and soft interviews about their mental health that don’t mention Iraq even once or the narcissistic drive for vindication that led ultimately to the death of David Kelly. It’s to be noted that the interview is All About Alastair – just what Mind actually does doesn’t get much of a mention.

(more…)

It’s a time when every politician desperate to keep his or her job is banging on about giving more power to the people (strange it’s taken them until now, mind).

So, I was wondering if anyone could tell me whatever happened to Gordon Brown’s nearly two year-old promise to repeal sections s132-138 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) 2005, banning free protest within a kilometre of Parliament.

Update: Right. While the actual repeal is trapped in the paralysis of a dying government…

…with recession-fighting measures now central to the Government’s plans, there was no Bill to enact the constitutional “renewal” reforms…

…it seems…

…although SOCPA is still on the statute books – and can therefore still be enforced at any time – it seems like the CPS have been given orders not to proceed with any prosecutions over “demonstrations” within the 1 km radius, so the law is effectively dead.

Jack Straw’s just been on Five Live and used the term ‘endemic corruption’ in the same sentence as ‘proportional representation’*. I think it’s safe to say that the Justice Secretary is not a fan of electoral reform.

It’s interesting however to cross reference the list of countries who use proportional representation with the Economist Intelligence Unit Index of Democracy. Of the top 21 countries on the Index of Democracy, 18 use proportional representation. The three that don’t are Australia (at 10), United States (at 18) and the UK (at 21).

(Those three countries, by unhappy coincidence, were the only three to commit active troops to the invasion of Iraq.)

* I’ll dig out the exact quote when it’s online.

It’d be fantastic to finally see a system of proportional representation established for parliamentary elections in the UK. But if I were you, I wouldn’t be under any illusions about New Labour’s deathbed conversion to the cause.

So Gordon Brown, anti-sleaze crusader since 1983 2009, says Hazel Blears’ behaviour over her expenses is ‘totally unacceptable‘ although she ‘didn’t break any rule or the law’.

Unacceptable but within the rules. How does that even make sense? Where else in life does such a moral contortion work? Is it like competing in a chess tournament wearing only a jockstrap, for example? Starting an Ian Huntley tribute website?

Needless to say, it’s this kind of thinking that leads to horrors like hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. Sure, bombing civilians is unacceptable, they said, but it’s done in the spirit, and to the letter, of the rules.

Remember the notorious threats to public order, four year-old Arouna Gaye and his mother, Fatou Felicite Gaye, who were interned in Dungavel detention centre after a dawn raid in Glasgow?

Glasgow SNP MP John Mason raised their case in the House of Commons yesterday:

This four-year-old has already been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder caused by previous interaction with the Border Agency.

Post-traumatic stress disorder in a four-year old boy. That phrase ‘previous interaction’ is doing a lot of work there. I imagine it involves shouting and pushing and screaming and crying.

In who is that supposed to instil confidence about how our asylum system works other than voters for the British National Party? True or false: we have a humane asylum process in this country.

The revolting immigration minister Phil Woolas, in that sociopathic tic required of all government minister that allows them to view human life as an abstract concept (unless they’re grovelling for a discount in Tesco), said he ‘could not discuss the case in detail’. He did manage to call the situation ‘regrettable’. He didn’t say who’d be doing the regretting.

Look, this MPs’ expenses cataclysm is a side show. While we’re hurling rotten fruit at the government they’re carrying on doing their job and rounding up the real bastards. All I can say is thank Christ these public menaces had their doors kicked in at dawn and were dragged to a detention centre:

A woman from the Ivory Coast and her four-year-old son are being held at the Dungavel detention centre following an early morning raid in Glasgow.

It comes days after details of measures to improve the treatment of failed asylum seekers were announced.

And look at these scumbags…

Ismail Cherbal and Safia Aouf, nationals of Algeria, and their British-born children Sonia aged four and son Aya aged 15 months have been detained in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre for the past 32 days.

Fifteen months old? Well, you can’t be too careful. You might think that New Labour are a bunch of grasping venal bastards but under all the brouhaha with expenses, the true heart of our government still beats.

What sort of country sends a dozen uniformed officers to haul innocent sleeping children out of their beds; gives them just a few minutes to pack what belongings they can grab; pushes them into stinking caged vans; drives them for hours while refusing them the chance to go to the lavatory so that they wet themselves and locks them up sometimes for weeks or months without the prospect of release and without adequate health services?

Our country, apparently.

(See also the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns)

Anybody else enjoying the sight of Hazel Blears doing her ‘ee, am from Salford, me‘ prolier-than-thou salt-of-the-earth schtick while waving around a cheque for 13 grand like a little white flag of undignified desperation?

If she’s done nothing wrong then why write the thing? Would she have written it if the story hadn’t come out? Would she have written it if her claims hadn’t been leaked and instead released by Parliament with her addresses redacted thus hiding the practice of ‘flipping‘?

How does this go across with the great unwashed of Salford, do you reckon? I’m thinking mainly of those who fiddle their benefits to get by and are regarded as moral lepers by the likes of Hazel (’In a recession, there’s no space for freeloaders,’ she said at the beginning of the year). Can’t she wave her magic chequebook around to get those people out of trouble? You know, for the good of the people of Salford?

Update: Craig Murray:

But the sight of a “Public servant” who can at the drop of a hat dash off a current account cheque for over £13,000 is deeply unedifying. For more than half her constituents, that cheque was for more than a year’s income after tax and national insurance. It was nearly three years of the state pension.

Hazel Blears:

That’s why I’ve taken this personal decision to send this cheque which is the amount that would have been paid had it been liable. Which it wasn’t. But so what? You can comply with the rules but the public are really, really angry…

But so what? Thirteen grand is a so what. Hazel, there are a lot of us that are really, really angry about much of what you’ve done while a cabinet minister. Can we all have cheques as well?