The Real Scandals

I loathe the arms trade. I would happily ban all sale of arms abroad, provided that the Government had put in the groundwork to ensure continuing employment elsewhere for the often highly skilled workers involved. And I would dearly love to see BAe returned to public ownership as the monopoly supplier to the British Armed Forces.

But how the Lib Dems get away with selling themselves as a party of the Left is, like how they get away with selling themselves as the Nice Party, one of the great mysteries of British politics.

For the BAe "scandal" was in fact one of the very few authentically Labour things that the Blair Government ever did. It reasserted the priority of high-wage, high-skill, high-status jobs, as well as of the national interest generally (regrettable though it is that this is defined as cuddling up to the Saudis), and of Parliament and the Government drawn from and accountable to Parliament, over the Liberal notion, scandalously given judicial effect today in a sort of coup, of an American-style "separation of powers" involving in practice (as in the US) the supremacy of an unelected judiciary, and that still drawn (unlike the Bar generally these days) from a very narrow social, socio-economic and educational base indeed.

And it is, in any case, as nothing compared to John Major's appointment of Jonathan Aitken (whom I freely accept is now a changed man these days) as Minister of Defence Procurement on the direct orders of the Saudi Royal Family. Remember that? Some of us do.