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 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-skilled, 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 any American-style "separation of powers" involving in practice the supremacy of an unelected judiciary, and that still drawn 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 a changed man these days) as Minister for Defence Procurement on the direct orders of the Saudi Royal Family. Remember that? Some of us do.