The Right Move

Remember, we must remain in NATO in order to defend us from Russia. Even though, as Daniel Larison writes:

The Swedish government is ruling out making a bid to join NATO:

Sweden will not make a formal bid to join NATO for fear of escalating further the already tense situation that exists between the West and Russia over the annexation of Crimea and the continued crisis in Ukraine, the country’s defence minister said on 17 May.

That’s the right move for Sweden to make, and it does remove a potential cause of friction between Russia and NATO.

Pursuing membership in the alliance would have caused the Swedish government nothing but headaches in exchange for a guarantee that it doesn’t need and wouldn’t receive for many years.

Formal neutrality has worked very well for Sweden over the last century, and it would be strange for them to abandon that tradition after all this time.

The Finnish government recently endorsed much the same position:

My personal attitude toward NATO membership is negative,” noted [Finnish Prime Minister] Sipilä. 

“It is precisely the zone of unincorporated countries made up by Finland and Sweden which supports the stability of the Baltic Sea region.” 

And so Finland will not be moving any closer to joining the alliance anytime soon, despite the report published in Finland on the possible effects of NATO membership, which, without outright suggesting it, considered membership likely. 

One obstacle is public opinion, and Finns who would be supportive of possible Finnish membership remain very much the minority.

And Sipilä, at least, intends to take public opinion into account.

Expanding the alliance into more of northern Europe doesn’t make sense for these countries, and their governments are smart to recognize that.

The good news for the alliance in this is that this closes the door on one path to further expansion that the alliance doesn’t need and shouldn’t be seeking.

Athwart

Having got drunk with Tom Slater, with Owen Jones, and with choirboys, I am firmly of the view that they ought all to get drunk together:

William F Buckley Jr wrote: ‘A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.’ 

Swap ‘conservative’ for ‘media lefty’ and you’ve basically got the pathetic spectacle we’ve been confronted with over the past few weeks of the EU referendum campaign. 

As 23 June approaches and the polls are increasingly too close to call, the strangest thing has happened. The last few prominent Eurosceptics on the left have started to peel away [because the media ignore the rest of them, since they are not as entertaining as Boris Johnson, who in any case does not believe a word of it]. 

They’ve been confronted with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to smash power, to strike out for democracy and to put the future of European politics firmly in the hands of the people, rather than a faceless, byzantine bureaucracy.

And they’ve bottled it.

First there’s Yanis Varoufakis, the flash stepdad of European leftism and the former finance minister of ailing Greece.

This is a man who has experienced the tyranny of the Brussels set firsthand.

His modest proposals for rescuing debt-laden Greece from EU-enforced austerity were ignored. ‘Elections’, he was told by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, ‘change nothing’. 

He quit government in protest as his Syriza comrade Alexis Tsipras signed an agreement that would once again shackle Greece to Troika diktat. 

What is the self-styled ‘erratic Marxist’ up to now? 

He’s touring the UK, telling Brits to say ‘Oxi’ to Brexit so that we can ‘reform the EU from within’. 

Then there’s Owen Jones, the Corbyn choir boy who has followed the Labour leader’s transformation from Bennite Eurosceptic to apologetic Remainer. 

Last summer Jones called for the left to campaign for Brexit. 

After the horrors of Greece, he wrote, it’s time to ‘reclaim the Eurosceptic cause’. 

Now, just 10 months on, he’s joining Varoufakis on the campaign trail. 

His flirtation with principle over, he wants to ‘unite with people across the continent to build a democratic, workers’ Europe’. 

How propping up a democracy-thwarting institution puts you in line with the little guy is beyond me. 

Not least when said institution has effectively abolished workers’ rights in austerity-battered countries like Greece.

But perhaps the most glaring retreat of them all has come from Paul Mason.

The former Channel 4 economics editor and ‘radical social democrat’ actually had the brass to pen an article titled ‘The left-wing case for Brexit (one day)’. 

One day. Those two, trembly words sum up the sentiment of these fair-weather Eurosceptics.

Yes, yes, democracy – one day. Not now. 

Especially when, as Mason sees it, a Brexit would allow Michael Gove and Boris Johnson to ‘turn Britain into a neoliberal fantasy island’. 

He’s in favour of democracy, you see, just not when the pesky demos elects a government he doesn’t like. 

This is hypocrisy dressed up as strategic nous. In fact, it’s worse than that.

It’s often said that the shift in left-wing attitudes towards the EU over the past few decades has been the result of pure political contingency.

When, in the 1970s and 80s, the EU was seen as an avowedly capitalist project, Labourites and trade unionists took arms against it.

Now that it’s been given a social-democratic lick of paint, replete with talk of workers’ rights and free movement, it gets the nod.

But there’s something even more sickening going on here.

These turncoat Remainers, these radicals for the status quo, don’t just bristle at the turn of public opinion, on economics or migration – they’re scared of it.

Their Brexit-phobia is really a fear of the demos itself. You see this is in their panic-stricken talk of the furies Brexit might unleash. 

‘We don’t know… how the plebeian end of the Leave campaign will react if they lose. My instinct says: badly’, writes Mason. 

Varoufakis, meanwhile, is even more pessimistic. Only fascists and racists, he says, will profit from the demise of the EU. 

A Brexit now would mean ‘anti-migrant racism, pandered to by the political establishment for decades’, writes a commentator in the New Statesman.

There is constant talk of chaos. Democracy is seen not only as disagreeable, but as dangerous. 

The left, once intent on stirring the passions of the people, now wants to keep a lid on them at all costs. 

This is why you shouldn’t take the left appeals to ‘reforming the EU from within’ seriously. 

Not only because Cameron’s paltry renegotiation revealed an EU incapable of making even minor concessions. 

Not only because the only salient proposal Varoufakis’s Democracy In Europe Movement has managed to come up with is livestreaming council meetings. 

But because the cowardice of the left in the face of Brexit is bred of the very same fear of an unshackled demos that forged the European Union in the first place. 

Whether it was the fear of the German public following reunification or the loathing of indignant Eastern European states today, the EU has always legitimised itself using the spectre of what an unleashed demos might do – or who it might elect – given half the chance. 

That same fear grips the left today. 

From freedom of speech to economic growth, the left has already jettisoned many of its founding principles [again, you are paying attention to the wrong people, especially now].

But the Brexit retreat is, in many ways, a more stark betrayal.

The modern left’s detachment from the masses, its sneering distaste for our habits and desires, has fostered a profound fear of change itself. 

Their paranoia about where unleashed public passions might flow has led them to cling to the status quo for dear life. 

These are progressives terrified of change – and terrified of us. 

Faced with the opportunity to demolish an anti-democratic order, they are standing athwart, yelling Stop.

History will not be kind to them.

Legalised Larceny

Aditya Chakrabortty writes:

Almost everyone who gives the matter serious thought agrees that George Osborne and David Cameron want to reshape Britain.

The spending cuts, the upending of the NHS, even this month’s near-miss over the BBC: signs lie everywhere of how this will be a decade, maybe more, of massive change. 

Yet even now it is little understood just how far Britain might shift – and in which direction. 

Take austerity, the word that will define this government. Even its most astute critics commit two basic errors. 

The first is to assume that it boils down to spending cuts and tax rises. The second is to believe that all this is meant to reduce how much the country is borrowing. 

What such commonplaces do is reduce austerity to a technical, reversible project. 

Were it really so simple all we would need to do is turn the spending taps back on and wash away all traces of Osbornomics. 

Austerity is far bigger than that: it is a project irreversibly to transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest. 

It’s doing the job very nicely: while the typical British worker is still earning less after inflation than he or she was before the banking crash, the number of UK-based billionaires has nearly quadrupled since 2009. 

Even while he slashes benefits, Osborne is deep into a programme to hand over much of what is still owned by the British public to the wealthiest.

Privatisation is the multibillion-pound centrepiece of Osborne’s austerity – yet it rarely gets a mention from either politicians or press.

The Queen mentioned it in her speech last week, but the headline writers ignored it.

And if you don’t know that this Thursday is the closing date for consultation on the sale of the Land Registry, our public record of who owns what property, that’s hardly your fault – I haven’t spotted it in the papers, either.

But without getting rid of prize assets, Osborne’s austerity programme falls apart.

At a time when tax revenues are more weak stream than healthy flood, those sales bring much-needed cash into the Treasury and make his sums add up. 

The independent Office for Budget Responsibility has ruled that the only reason the chancellor met his debts target last year was because he flogged off our public assets. 

And what a fire sale that was, with everything from our last remaining stake in the Royal Mail to shares in Eurostar shoved out the door in the biggest wave of privatisations of any year in British history.

And more, much more, is to come.

The all new and mostly grotesque housing bill will force local authorities to sell “high-value” council houses once a family moves out – which will basically hand over whatever remains of social housing in central London to investors. 

Osborne also wants local authorities “to dispose of potentially surplus assets”, of which he calculates they have £60bn “in property not used for schools or housing”. 

That would be property such as our public libraries and swimming pools – but to a government hellbent on asset-stripping such communal necessities are merely unsold inventory. 

At Whitehall, ministers plan to sell a big chunk of Channel 4, and the public stake in the national air traffic control.

And that’s just the start, because here’s something else you probably won’t have read about: Osborne has bundled up all of our public holdings – in every company from the collapsed banks to the Royal Mint – and put them under the control of a government organisation called UK Government Investments. 

Its CEO (what else?) is a former doyen of the City called Mark Russell. 

In a rare interview in 2013, Russell declared:

“We don’t believe government makes for a particularly good shareholder. Our belief is that unless there is a good policy reason for government to have a shareholding then really we should be seeking to divest those shareholdings.” 

Everything must go is no longer the cry of distressed shopkeepers – it is now public policy.

As an employee of the taxpayer, Russell earns up to £159,999, which is far more than the prime minister’s salary. 

Yet the one thing he has done that you will have heard of was an unmitigated disaster. 

He was among those in charge of selling 70% of Royal Mail three years ago – a sale that, even the government now admits, brought in less money than it should. 

We let a 500-year-old public service go at a £1bn discount, a select committee of MPs calculated in 2014.

And that takes us to the heart of the problem with such sales. At best, privatisation is a short-term gain for a long-term loss.

The public sells one of its prize assets in order to enable the chancellor to bank some cash immediately. 

In a report published on Monday, the campaign group We Own It calculates that if Osborne sells the Land Registry, National Air Traffic Services, Channel 4 and the Ordnance Survey the public will kiss goodbye to control over £7.7bn in dividends and profits in the next 50 years. 

Sure, we pocket a couple of billion now – but we lose far more in the long run. 

These are services that have taken many decades, even centuries, of public investment and management to build up. 

The Land Registry dates back to Victorian times; the Ordnance Survey’s aerial photographs of enemy territory helped Britain win the first world war. 

All that accumulated effort and ingenuity will be handed over to a small group of investors – and for what? Better management? 

A recent study of the evidence by the University of Greenwich concludes there is “no significant difference in efficiency between public and privately owned companies in public services”.

For more investment? Ministers selling off everything from railways to water have promised privatisation will bring greater investment. 

It comes – but it’s always the public that ends up paying for it. 

Thatcher claimed that selling off BT, British Gas and the rest would turn Britain into a shareholder democracy. 

Official figures show that Britons now own less than half as much of the UK stock market as they did before Thatcher’s first privatisation. 

Osborne’s privatisation, like the rest of his austerity programme, will enable him to transfer wealth from the public to a far smaller group of private investors. 

The employees can look forward to cuts in jobs, pay and conditions – as we have seen across the privatised utilities. 

The rest of us, the customers, will endure higher bills and paying for hidden subsidies.

And the chancellor? He will have brought in enough cash to enable him to make some pre-election tax cuts – to literally buy himself votes.

Osborne calls this privatisation. I treat it as part and parcel of austerity.

But there is another term you and I might use.

Because this making off with our public property is nothing more than legalised larceny.

The Blairite Delusion

Remember, Corbyn voted for the good Blair stuff (the stuff that John Smith would also have done), while the Conservatives voted for the bad Blair stuff (the stuff that Corbyn voted against). Chelley Ryan writes: 

According to several news sources, Jeremy Corbyn is planning a post-referendum reshuffle and is trying to persuade Ed Miliband to accept a role in the shadow cabinet.

Seems like a good idea, is the general consensus of most Corbyn backers, and that’s because Miliband still commands a lot of respect. 

Yes, he was leader when Labour lost the election, but it was a tough election to win, particularly after the seismic political shift in Scotland. 

If Corbyn backers blame Miliband for anything, it was his willingness to appease the Blairites; or to borrow a phrase coined by MP Jon Cruddas, “the cold dead hand” of the party. 

Predictably, the Blairites are already bleating about a Miliband revival. 

According to one Labour MP, “Ed shouldn’t be in the shadow cabinet. He should be in jail for what he did to the Labour Party.” 

This excessively harsh statement was in reference to the changes Miliband introduced to democratise the leadership election system — changes the Blairites lauded at the time, but which they now wrongly “blame” for Corbyn’s leadership win. 

Of course the MP’s identity was protected by the paper that reported the quote, but I have been on the wrong side of the Blairites for long enough now to not accept its validity. 

The Blairites are a narcissistic bunch.

They strut around news studios and on Twitter like a bunch of preening peacocks, bestowing their “wisdom” on us mortals. 

If they appeared on Mastermind, their specialist subject would be “winning elections,” because they speak about little else. 

They try to patronise “non-believers” into their way of thinking. The word “deluded” is the favoured insult of Blairite Twitter trolls. 

 When the Labour leadership campaign started to throw up shock polls that gave Corbyn a resounding lead, Blairites beat their chests in anguish over our “naivety.” 

We were told to end the madness, get heart transplants and accept our urges to vote Corbyn were nothing more than “emotional spasms,” caused by Labour’s election defeat. 

But how well placed is this arrogance?

Well in truth, the Blairites, and their 1980s forebears, should have their portraits in the rogues’ gallery or the hall of shame, rather than have a statue made in their honour. 

Take the Gang of Four. Prior to their sulky departure from the Labour Party in 1981, Labour had a healthy lead in the polls. 

The Gang of Four didn’t walk out because they thought a more left-wing Labour Party wasn’t electable. They walked out because they were terrified it was.  Certainly all the polls were pointing that way. 

The Gang of Four’s departure, and subsequent alliance with the Liberals, tore the left vote in two. 

But even after this split, Labour either kept a small lead, or was neck and neck with the Tories, until the Falklands war catapulted the Tories into an unassailable lead. 

By the time Labour’s election manifesto was launched, the Tories had a lead of approximately 14 per cent. 

Even a manifesto sent down by the gods would have struggled to flip a lead that large in such a short time. 

That fact didn’t stop embryonic Blairite Gerald Kaufman from successfully spinning the blame for the election defeat at the manifesto’s door, when he branded it “the longest suicide note in history.” 

Oh, the irony.

Not only did the rightwingers in the party massively boost the Tories’ electoral chances with their decision to break away in 1981, they cemented a false blame narrative in the minds of the masses, using their friends in the media.

I urge anyone interested in Labour’s 1983 manifesto, to read Neil Clark’s excellent article “Not so suicidal after all.” 

Clark peels away the propaganda to expose a simple but heartbreaking truth. 

The 1983 manifesto was not a suicide note. It was a prescription for the vaccine this country needed to stop it getting sick. 

OK, so we can rest some of the blame for Labour’s 1983 election defeat at the rightwingers’ door, but surely we should still give Tony Blair credit for three consecutive election wins, right?

Wrong. The only credit Blair deserves is for being in the right place at the right time. Labour was on track to win the 1997 election long before Blair became leader. 

In the months prior to the tragic early death of Labour leader John Smith, Labour was enjoying 14 and 15-point poll leads. 

If Smith hadn’t died, he would have almost certainly led the party to victory in 1997. Smith was not a leftwinger, but neither was he on the right.

It is of course impossible to say with any certainty how Smith’s leadership would have differed from Blair’s, but, according to Smith’s biographer Andy McSmith, some key differences would have been a higher minimum wage, less reliance on spin, a higher top rate of tax, and the icing on the cake — no military intervention in Iraq. 

 If McSmith is correct in these assumptions, Smith would have avoided some of the lethal political errors made by Blair. 

The four million core voters who abandoned Labour under Blair’s divisive leadership might have stayed loyal to the party. 

Not that Blairites accept the fact that millions of voters abandoned Labour under Blair. According to several Blairites I have run into on Twitter, the core vote died.

No, I am not kidding.

Maybe they all caught a new strain of flu which only affects people with an aversion to spin, illegal wars, private finance deals, an absence of housing investment and light-touch banking regulation?

The simple truth is this — a stuffed chimp wearing a red rosette would have won the election in ’97.

After 18 years in opposition, and up against a deeply divided government mired in sleaze and scandal, Labour’s time had come.

It was just a terrible shame that time came when Blair was leader.

Before the Blairites’ jump down my throat to list all of New Labour’s achievements, I want to say of course I accept good things happened under Blair. 

I just happen to believe most of those things happened in spite of him, not because of him. 

They would still have happened under Smith, but in a better, bolder way. Who knows, if Smith hadn’t died, maybe Labour might still be in power now.

So there you have it. The Labour rightwingers are not deserving of our awe or our respect.

They spilt the party once to make it unelectable when it was led by a leader they did not approve of, and now they are trying to do it again, but this time from within.

And even when they do get their way, and the party falls to them, they drive away voters en masse by turning Labour into a party that’s indistinguishable from the Tories.

We must never let the Blairites get into the driving seat again.

They are too much like drunk drivers with a misplaced sense of their own skill.

Duties and Constraints

This letter from Tony Benn to his constituents was written in 1975 and published in The Spectator:

In 1975 you will each have the responsibility of deciding by vote whether the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Common Market: or whether we should withdraw completely, and remain an independent self-governing nation. 

That decision, once taken, will almost certainly be irreversible. 

In both the 1974 General Elections, I fully supported our manifesto commitment on the handling of the Common Market question. 

The present Government is now engaged in renegotiating the terms of entry along the lines set out in those Manifestos and is solemnly pledged, whatever the Outcome of those negotiations, to see to it that the final decision will be taken by the British people. 

But we must recognise that the European Community has now set itself the objectives of developing a common foreign policy, a form of common nationality expressed through a common passport, a directly elected assembly, and an economic and monetary union, which, taken together, would in effect make the United Kingdom into one province of a Western European state. 

Britain’s continuing membership of the Community would mean the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation, and the end of our democratically elected Parliament as the supreme law-making body in the United Kingdom. 

I am writing, not to argue a case, but to explain — as best I can — what effect British membership of the Common Market has had upon the constitutional relationship between a Member of Parliament and his constituents. 

The Parliamentary democracy we have developed and established in Britain is based, not upon the sovereignty of Parliament, but upon the sovereignty of the People, who, by exercising their vote lend their sovereign powers to Members of Parliament, to use on their behalf, for the duration of a single Parliament only.

Powers that must be returned intact to the electorate to whom they belong, to lend again to the Members of Parliament they elect in each subsequent General Election. 

Five basic democratic rights derive from this relationship, and each of them is fundamentally altered by Britain’s membership of the European Community.

First: Parliamentary Democracy means that every man and woman over eighteen is entitled to vote to elect his or her Member of Parliament to serve in the House of Commons; and the consent of the House of Commons is necessary before Parliament can pass any act laying down new laws or imposing new taxation on the people.

British Membership of the Community subjects us all to laws and taxes which your Members of Parliament do not enact, such laws and taxes being enacted by authorities you do not directly elect, and cannot dismiss through the ballot box.

Second: Parliamentary Democracy means that Members of Parliament, who derive their power directly from the British people, can change any law and any tax by majority vote.

British Membership of the Community means that Community laws and taxes cannot be changed or repealed by the British Parliament, but only by Community authorities not directly elected by the British People.

Third: Parliamentary Democracy means that British courts and Jjudges must uphold all laws passed by Parliament; and if Parliament changes any law the courts must enforce the new law because it has been passed by Parliament, which has been directly elected by the people.

British membership of the Community requires the British courts to uphold and enforce Community laws that have not been passed by Parliament, and that Parliament cannot change or amend, even when such laws conflict with laws passed by Parliament, since Community law overrides British Law.

Fourth: Parliamentary Democracy means that all British Governments, Ministers, and the civil servants under their control, can only act within the laws of Britain and are accountable to Parliament for everything they do, and hence, through Parliament, to the electors as a whole.

British membership of the Community imposes duties and constraints upon British Governments not deriving from the British Parliament; and thus, in discharging those duties, Ministers are not accountable to Parliament or to the British people who elect them.

Fifth: Parliamentary Democracy, because it entrenches the rights of the people to elect and dismiss Members of Parliament, also secures the continuing accountability of Members of Parliament to the electorate, obliging Members of Parliament to listen to the expression of the British people’s views at all times, between, as well as during, General Elections, and thus offers a continuing possibility of peaceful change through Parliament to meet the people’s needs. 

British membership of the Community, by permanently transferring sovereign legislative and financial powers to Community authorities, who are not directly elected by the British people, also permanently insulates those authorities from direct control by the British electors who cannot dismiss them and whose views, therefore, need carry no weight with them, and whose grievances they cannot be compelled to remedy.

In short, the power of the electors of Britain, through their direct representatives in Parliament to make laws, levy taxes, change laws which the courts must uphold, and control the conduct of public affairs has been substantially ceded to the European Community, whose Council of Ministers and Commission are neither collectively elected, nor collectively dismissed by the British people nor even by the peoples of all the Community countries put together.

These five rights have protected us in Britain from the worst abuse of power by government; safeguarded us against the excesses of bureaucracy; defended our basic liberties; offered us the prospect of peaceful change; reduced the risk of civil strife; and bound us together by creating a national framework of consent for all the laws under which we were governed. 

We have promised a ballot box decision because all these rights are important, and none should be abandoned without the explicit consent of the people.

I am, of course, not here addressing myself to the general political or economic arguments for or against entry, nor commenting on the view that the advantages of membership might outweigh the loss of democratic rights that I have described.

But no one who votes in the ballot box should be in any doubt as to the effect British membership has had, and will increasingly continue to have, in removing the power the British people once enjoyed to govern themselves.

Having campaigned so long to win for you the right to have a referendum I am proud to serve in a government that has promised that the final decision will be made by all the electors through the ballot box. 

The whole nation, and all political parties, are divided on the Common Market question.

We must respect the sincerity of those who take a different view from our own.

We should all accept the verdict of the British people whatever it is, and I shall certainly do so.

But from now, until that decision is taken, we all have a responsibility to discuss the issues openly, calmly and seriously, and it is in this spirit that I am writing to you as your Member of Parliament over the last twenty-four years.

The Blair Impeachment Project

Neil Clark writes:

With just over six weeks to go before the long-awaited release of the Chilcot report into the Iraq War the calls for former Prime Minister Tony Blair to be properly held to account for the lies he told us in the lead up to the illegal invasion are increasing by the day.

A few days ago, the foreign affairs spokesperson for the Scottish National Party (SNP) Alex Salmond MP, told RT’s Going Underground program that he would like to see Blair impeached by the British Parliament and also stand trial at the International Criminal Court, if the families of those killed and the wider public agreed.

Other MPs have also expressed their support for Salmond’s initiative.

“If it’s proved that Tony Blair misled everyone, I personally am determined to see justice prevail and to see him impeached,” said Conservative Sir David Amess.

Meanwhile, it’s been reported that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will not be backing down from his earlier calls for Blair to be investigated for war crimes depending on what Chilcot’s conclusions are.

Last year Corbyn said: “I think it was an illegal war, I'm confident about that, indeed [former UN Secretary- General] Kofi Annan confirmed it was an illegal war, and therefore he has to explain that.”

Tony Blair is clearly in deep trouble. But what are the practical chances of a trial of some sorts taking place

In Where R those WMDs?, a new anti-war satirical play written and performed by myself and my fellow RT contributor Dan Glazebrook, Blair is flying to South Africa when his plane has to make an emergency landing in Zimbabwe. 

He’s arrested and put on trial for war crimes.

The great ‘progressive’ shows his true colonialist colors when he says that African countries have no right to pass judgment on what he did and that only Africans, Serbs and other 'official enemies’ of Western elites should be subject to international law.

Well, the chances of an airplane carrying Tony Blair having to make an emergency landing in Zimbabwe are remote, but thankfully there are other more plausible scenarios for seeing the war criminal getting his just deserts.

The ICC is one route, and certainly has jurisdiction as the UK signed up to the founding Rome statute.

A problem though is that the court – most conveniently for Blair - has still to decide on a definition of ‘war of aggression’.

Let’s remind ourselves what was said at the post World War Two Nuremberg trial of leading Nazis regarding the launching of a war of aggression.

“War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.

“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Bush and Blair clearly initiated a war of aggression against Iraq in 2003 and therefore committed ‘the supreme international crime’.

Although we may have to wait a while for Blair to be tried under this count at the ICC, he could still be tried there on other charges relating to the war, such as failing to prosecute the war in a ‘disproportionate manner’ and the deaths of civilians in bombing raids.

Then there’s the impeachment route.

According to law, any British citizen, former Prime Minister or not, can be prosecuted or tried by Parliament.

But we’ve got to go back to 1806 to find the last time Parliament impeached anybody (a certain Lord Melville) and to 1848 for the last attempted impeachment of Lord Palmerston.

“The procedure has never been abolished but is obsolete”, noted Downing Professor of Law at Cambridge University S. A. de Smith in his 1970s work Constitutional and Administrative Law.

However, a 1977 Select Committee on Privileges report held impeachment to be ‘of continuing validity’.

The Iraq war has brought the issue of impeachment back to life.

In 2004, there were moves to impeach Blair for High Crimes and Misdemeanors over Iraq, and a motion was tabled in the House of Commons by Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price.

“The evidence for Blair's duplicity is overwhelming,” Price said.

His move was backed by over 20 MPs from across the political spectrum.

“The time has come to look again at whether impeachment should form part of the constitutional process…That the Prime Minister has misled the Commons is not in doubt in most people’s mind,” anti-war Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle told The Guardian.

The bigwigs of the ‘Big Three’ parties were horrified at the prospect of impeachment proceedings of the British Prime Minister, so worked together to kill the initiative.

Peter Hain, the Leader of the House, who voted for the Iraq war, cited a 1999 committee which held impeachment to be ‘obsolete’.

“I bitterly regret not supporting the impeachment of Tony Blair,” the Labour MP Alice Mahon later wrote.

I’m sure she wasn’t the only one.

Now though, with Chilcot looming, things could be very different.

The mood towards Tony Blair is much more hostile than in 2004 and it’s worth mentioning that one of the MPs who supported Adam Price twelve years ago, Boris Johnson, could well be the next Tory leader, if Cameron loses the EU referendum or only just scrapes home.

It’s not just that Blair lied to Parliament and the country about Iraq having WMDs which could be used within 45 minutes, he also told whopping great ‘porkies’ about Saddam having the power to avert war by disarming.

On 25th February 2002, for instance the Prime Minister told Parliament, “I detest his [Saddam's] regime. But even now he [Saddam] can save it by complying with the UN's demand.

“Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully. I do not want war... But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam's active co-operation.”

Yet, in 2009, Blair told a television interviewer that he would have supported war with Iraq to get rid of Saddam regardless of the WMDs issue.

Chilcot is expected to confirm that Blair made the decision to go to war after meeting with George W. Bush at the President’s ranch in Texas in April 2002.

In other words, whatever Saddam had done or pledged to do, he and his country were going to be hit with ‘Shock and Awe’. 

This was a ‘regime change’ war that already had been planned by hard-right US neocons who had been gunning for Saddam for years: WMDs were merely the pretext for the invasion. 

Blair, in addition to the other serious charges against him, is accused of secretly committing Britain to going to war against its own national interests at the behest of a foreign power.

Some might even go so far as to call that treason.

Almost ten and half years ago, General Sir Michael Rose, the British former commander of the UN protection force in Bosnia, wrote:

“A clear justification for the war in Iraq was never sufficiently made by Tony Blair. No one can undo the decision to go to war.

“But the impeachment of Mr. Blair is now something I believe must happen if we are to rekindle the democratic process.”

Rose was predictably attacked by the pro-war neocons for his intervention (‘Don’t Impeach Mr. Blair for Iraq, Commend him!’ was the response of the Henry Jackson Society), but of course Sir Michael was right.

All things considered, the impeachment of Tony Blair really can’t come soon enough.

Those who still defend/support the Iraq war will try and argue that it can’t take place as no one has been impeached since the 19th century.

But they need to be overruled.

Parliament’s ancient right to impeach has never been formally abolished, however much Blair’s defenders might wish it had been.

Alas, we can’t bring back the lives of more than one million people killed since the illegal invasion, but we can make sure that one of the most important players in the criminal enterprise is brought to book.

As the late and much missed Ken Coates, writing in The Spokesman, the journal of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, put it in 2007:

“Until accountability is reimposed, we cannot establish honest, political discourse. Evidently politicians have told lies before.

“But now we live with untruths that cannot be corrected, with falsehoods that have become official. Where the lie rules, logic gives way to unreason.”

To Do Justice

I do not always agree with Barbara Hewson, but this is very well worth reading:

The UK Department for Education last week published research into rates of reporting child abuse. 

Feminists claimed that the fact that a third of those interviewed said they would not report suspicions of abuse amounted to ‘victim-blaming’. 

But the Independent’s report last Friday mentioned an important finding, the significance of which has been lost on the survivor lobby. 

It said that the fear of having misread a situation, and of wrongly accusing someone, is the biggest factor that deters reporting. 

A ruling from the Court of Appeal on 19 May in a family case shows just how skewed the system has become when dealing with accusations of abuse. 

The case is called Re E (a child) and it makes depressing reading.

The court quashed sensational findings of abuse made by a judge in the county court last January, against a father (‘Mr E’) and his 15-year-old son, ‘A’. 

Mr E was said to have assaulted a young girl, ‘D’, on scrubland from the age of four. He was said to have forced A to engage in sexual activity with D. He also orchestrated sexual activity between two other children, ‘B’ and ‘C’. 

In addition, the judge concluded that both Mr E and A had attempted anal penetration of a dog (a pit bull, described by the police as ‘not a docile dog’). 

The judge adopted the ‘cycle of abuse’ theory, finding that A was first abused and went on to abuse others.

Two families were involved in this saga: the E family, whose son, A, was aged 15; and the ‘F’ family, who have two boys and a girl: B (15), C (10) and D (8).

In 2010, A had accused two uncles of abusing him, but his parents did not take any action after A said he did not want the police involved. 

In February 2015, A, who was out with the other children, was caught shoplifting. The police returned them to their parents only to find the parents all inebriated. 

So the children were taken into foster care. The youngest, D, then accused A and his father of abusing her. 

This led to a rash of disclosures by A, B and C, also alleging abuse. Inexplicably, the foster carer then took the three younger children on holiday.

The first problem arose with the police interviews of the children, conducted after they returned from holiday. 

Interviews of complainants in sex cases are called ‘achieving best evidence’ (ABE) interviews. 

The idea is that the interviewee sits in a comfy chair, and the interviewer establishes a ‘rapport’ with him/her by discussing neutral, non-relevant topics and by trying to understand if the interviewee understands the difference between truth and lies. 

These interviews are recorded. However, in this case, the introductory phase was not recorded. It was therefore unclear what the children were told about the ‘ground rules’. 

Next, the interview of D (the youngest) contained leading questions, such as introducing the names of alleged abusers into the narrative. 

D made no allegations. Then D left the room for an hour. Mysteriously, as soon as she came back, she started making allegations. 

It appears she spoke with her foster carer, who claimed that all she said to D was, ‘You need to say all the things while you are here’. 

The Court of Appeal commented that an ABE interview should not be used simply to get a child to repeat on tape what she may have said to someone else. 

A was so distressed by his interview that he was physically sick during it. Meanwhile, B made no allegations of abuse in his ABE interview. 

A striking feature was that some abuse allegations, which the foster carer reported the children as making, were never mentioned by them in their interviews. 

Also of concern was that the police interviewer subsequently conducted what were called ‘fast track’ interviews of the three younger children at home, without keeping a proper record of what questions were asked or how the children responded. 

The Court of Appeal called this ‘unorthodox’. 

The children’s accounts contained many inconsistencies. C had a history of making, and then retracting, false allegations against others in the past. 

D alleged that the children had been taken to hotels, where they were abused and filmed. But the police could find no evidence to substantiate her dramatic claims. 

She claimed that there was a hiding place in the wall at home: the police knocked a hole in the wall, but could find nothing. 

Eventually the police concluded that the ABE interviews could not be used in court, and that the children’s accounts would not stand up to scrutiny.

So no criminal charges were brought. However, there were parallel care proceedings in the family court. 

A was confined in a specialist residential unit for victims/perpetrators of sexual abuse.

At a pre-trial hearing, complaints were made about the ‘fast track’ interviews at the trial. But the family judge refused to allow the interviewing officer to be called to be questioned. 

Even more worryingly, the judge decided that none of the children should give evidence, either. 

Many people would find this bizarre: if a criminal trial had proceeded, the children would have had to give evidence, and be questioned (albeit via video link). 

Apparently, the practice in the family courts is that even mature teens should not give evidence.

This approach ignored a Supreme Court ruling from 2010, Re W, where the Supreme Court said that the question of whether a child should give evidence should be approached on a case-by-case basis.

A blanket prohibition on children giving evidence was incompatible with the right to a fair trial.

Baroness Hale stressed that focused questions, which put forward a different explanation for certain events, ‘may help the court to do justice between the parties’. 

That ruling went unheeded by the family courts. 

This is remarkable, suggesting that the family courts operate a separate system of legal rules unaffected by fundamental legal principles, such as the right to a fair trial and the supremacy of judgements of the Supreme Court (the doctrine of legal precedent). 

It is perhaps not surprising that many ordinary people view the family courts as inherently unfair.

The judge’s reason for not calling the children was that, ‘the one question you cannot put to the child witnesses, is “You’re lying aren’t you?”’. 

So, even if they had been called, they would not have been challenged on that basis. 

The judge also said that, if they were called, ‘I would not allow you to put the contradictions. You have got to bear in mind the age of the children.’

But at 8, 10 and 15, these children were not tender toddlers.

At this juncture, the judge had not even seen the videos of the ABE interviews, nor had she watched them by the time the trial began. So day one was spent watching them. 

The Court of Appeal was very critical of the judge’s reasons for making the findings of abuse that she did. 

It said that she failed to acknowledge, or deal with, the numerous deviations from good practice in the police interviews. 

She adopted a broad-brush and superficial approach, and failed to engage in the level of analysis that was required. 

She was wrong to treat each child’s account as corroborating the others’, and failed to grapple with the many inconsistencies in their interviews and earlier ‘disclosures’. 

For example, the fact that D made accusations, which differed from those of her brothers, and the fact that B made no allegations in his interview, could not be corroborative.

Then the Court of Appeal had to address the way that A was treated. 

A has a learning disability, which was described as ‘significant’. He had his own solicitor and a guardian. They visited him a couple of months before the trial, to go through the evidence with him. 

A, like any client, was entitled to legal professional privilege: the opportunity to receive legal advice in confidence. 

But when the judge learned that this meeting had taken place, she ordered the guardian to file a statement about it. 

At the meeting, A was accompanied by a key worker named ‘G’. 

A’s solicitor explained that they ‘needed a steer’ from A as to whether anything sexually inappropriate had happened to him or not. 

As the Court of Appeal noted, it was unclear what a person with a significant learning disability would understand. 

A did not respond. The guardian noted that A seemed tense and exhausted.

During a break, the guardian wrote the words ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ on a piece of paper. She left it with A and his key worker. 

The key worker decided that A was too tense to pick up the pen. So she took the pen and asked A which answer he wanted her to tick, A indicated ‘YES’. 

So G ticked ‘YES’. 

The Court of Appeal decided that A’s rights to a fair trial were breached to a significant degree by all of this. 

The judge’s order for an account of his meeting with his legal team was ‘highly unusual’.

The exercise whereby G ticked ‘YES’ was evidentially dubious, not least as A’s understanding of what he was being asked was wholly unclear.

The Court of Appeal said that the judge’s analysis of the evidence in relation to A was ‘both confused and inadequate’.

This case is a warning of how unfairly the system can operate when allegations of abuse surface.

It’s unsurprising that members of the public are hesitant about making abuse allegations.

Their confidence is unlikely to improve, unless police investigations and legal hearings become much more rigorous.