Did the earth move? Did your coffee cup shake and your corn flakes fly across the room? "Blair misled MPs on Iraq, says Goldsmith", screamed the headline. "PM shut me out of crucial discussions, says Goldsmith". Great heavens, the Chilcot inquiry is back from the realm of the undead, singing its ghostly chorus through Westminster. On Friday Tony Blair returns like some ageing tenor, to reprise his no-regrets aria in a staging long past its sell-by date. Welcome to a new round of Britain's unique contribution to world government, politics ex-post-facto, or democracy just too late.
In most countries the government inquires, deliberates, does something. Britain does something, deliberates, then inquires. We are getting worse at it. In the case of Derry's Bloody Sunday of 1972, government shot first and spent 38 years and £400m trying to decide whether it was the right thing to do. After the Charge of the Light Brigade, it took Tennyson eight weeks and one poem to draw the same conclusion: "Someone had blundered."
The 2005 London bombings were followed by five years of inquiries by the police, parliament and security services. All decided that bombs had gone off and people had died. It was sad but nothing much could have been done about it, matter closed. Now we have yet another drawn-out investigation because the inquest system has not been allowed its say. It is filling newspapers with attenuated personal grief, without concern for brevity, economy or dignity. Lawyers and consultants are again seen lugging their taxpayer loot across London.
As for Chilcot, no one can remember why it was set up, except that it had something to do with Gordon Brown's fratricidal spat with Blair. We knew someone had blundered. We knew the light brigade had again gone charging up the wrong valley. But that was long ago under a government now booted from office.
The inquiry was set up by Brown in June 2009 to draw lessons from Iraq, "to help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations". The implication was that the Iraq fiasco was about the "equipping" of government, not about the judgement or venality of individuals. David Cameron was then a stripling Opposition leader, and he called it "an establishment stitch-up". Time has moved on, Cameron has moved up and Chilcot has settled comfortably into the Westminster scenery.
The inquiry held sessions from November 2009 to January 2010, when an unseasonally tanned Blair graced it with his presence. Further sessions were held in March, at which the inquiry was excited to fault Brown for confusing real-terms with money-terms expenditure. By then it had tucked in to £2.27m and was still going strong. It sat again in June and July, after which torpor set in. Even doctoral students in Iraq studies deserted the gallery. A report originally suggested for late 2010 did not appear.
We are now being fed what can only be termed stale meat. The fact that Lord Goldsmith was "uncomfortable" with the advice he was said to have given Blair is hardly new. That Blair "shut him out" of crucial meetings must have been upsetting for him personally, but is hardly a matter for public commiseration. He was clearly no good at playing poodle. We are told that legal decisions were "problematic" and that the foreign secretary and most belligerent warmonger, Jack Straw, was in reality "very reluctant" and could even have stopped the war. All sorts of people are heading for the hills.
The truth is that this was a wretched episode in British history and only the late foreign secretary, Robin Cook, acquitted himself with the remotest credit. Apart from some legal small fry, none of these witnesses resigned when it might have made a difference. Ministers sat on their hands while the normal defences of democracy were breached with attempted curbs on civil liberty, habeas corpus and free speech, and with gross distortion of government process. Thousands died as a direct result.
Politicians, soldiers and officials want history to exonerate them of blame by being able to write it themselves before Chilcot. They beat their breasts and declare their everlasting doubt, when privately they acquiesced. Will Chilcot name, blame and condemn them, so as to encourage others in future? I bet he will not. He will confine himself to procedures, lessons and recommendations, as inquiries always do. That way no establishment blood is spilled.
Iraq saw a collapse in parliament's ability to hold the executive to account. Commons and Lords rarely strayed beyond party posturing, terrified to seem "unpatriotic" when fobbed off with the language of the war on terror. Select committees were an impotent disgrace. The BBC, because it spends millions broadcasting them, always refers to them as "powerful" and "influential". They are neither.
A public inquiry is a surrogate court of law. It should be crisp, swift and certain in its justice, allocating praise and blame for some catastrophe, as a punishment and a deterrent. Instead British inquiries, such as those often held into welfare tragedies, have become substitutes for proper, ongoing democratic accountability. They are a dilatory mechanism for postponing judgment and diffusing blame on to underlings.
The Chilcot inquiry has become like the history murals in the Palace of Westminster, a fanciful pageant in which the great of the past are depicted in pastel shades, jostling each other at some historical college reunion. The rage of their victims is deadened by protocol and decorum. The cost of it all is paid by someone else.
This week the government is reforming the NHS. It is embarrassingly clear that nobody, least of all the cabinet, has a clue whether it is doing the right thing. The same applied to all previous reforms of the NHS. With words such as gamble, risk, radical and revolutionary being bandied about, it might be sensible to have a committee of inquiry up and running in continuous session, feeding such wisdom as it can summon into the process in "real time".
Instead everyone is doing what they are told. In about 10 years time I imagine there will be an inquiry into the NHS, to tell us all what went wrong back in 2011. They will all be summoned, David Cameron, Andrew Lansley, George Osborne, Oliver Letwin, the BMA, the consultants, the nurses and lawyers for the bereaved. They will slap each other on the back and ask after each other's sciatica. They will gaze back over time and wonder, who on earth was to blame, as it cannot possibly have been them?
By Simon Jenkins guardian.co.uk
In most countries the government inquires, deliberates, does something. Britain does something, deliberates, then inquires. We are getting worse at it. In the case of Derry's Bloody Sunday of 1972, government shot first and spent 38 years and £400m trying to decide whether it was the right thing to do. After the Charge of the Light Brigade, it took Tennyson eight weeks and one poem to draw the same conclusion: "Someone had blundered."
The 2005 London bombings were followed by five years of inquiries by the police, parliament and security services. All decided that bombs had gone off and people had died. It was sad but nothing much could have been done about it, matter closed. Now we have yet another drawn-out investigation because the inquest system has not been allowed its say. It is filling newspapers with attenuated personal grief, without concern for brevity, economy or dignity. Lawyers and consultants are again seen lugging their taxpayer loot across London.
As for Chilcot, no one can remember why it was set up, except that it had something to do with Gordon Brown's fratricidal spat with Blair. We knew someone had blundered. We knew the light brigade had again gone charging up the wrong valley. But that was long ago under a government now booted from office.
The inquiry was set up by Brown in June 2009 to draw lessons from Iraq, "to help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations". The implication was that the Iraq fiasco was about the "equipping" of government, not about the judgement or venality of individuals. David Cameron was then a stripling Opposition leader, and he called it "an establishment stitch-up". Time has moved on, Cameron has moved up and Chilcot has settled comfortably into the Westminster scenery.
The inquiry held sessions from November 2009 to January 2010, when an unseasonally tanned Blair graced it with his presence. Further sessions were held in March, at which the inquiry was excited to fault Brown for confusing real-terms with money-terms expenditure. By then it had tucked in to £2.27m and was still going strong. It sat again in June and July, after which torpor set in. Even doctoral students in Iraq studies deserted the gallery. A report originally suggested for late 2010 did not appear.
We are now being fed what can only be termed stale meat. The fact that Lord Goldsmith was "uncomfortable" with the advice he was said to have given Blair is hardly new. That Blair "shut him out" of crucial meetings must have been upsetting for him personally, but is hardly a matter for public commiseration. He was clearly no good at playing poodle. We are told that legal decisions were "problematic" and that the foreign secretary and most belligerent warmonger, Jack Straw, was in reality "very reluctant" and could even have stopped the war. All sorts of people are heading for the hills.
The truth is that this was a wretched episode in British history and only the late foreign secretary, Robin Cook, acquitted himself with the remotest credit. Apart from some legal small fry, none of these witnesses resigned when it might have made a difference. Ministers sat on their hands while the normal defences of democracy were breached with attempted curbs on civil liberty, habeas corpus and free speech, and with gross distortion of government process. Thousands died as a direct result.
Politicians, soldiers and officials want history to exonerate them of blame by being able to write it themselves before Chilcot. They beat their breasts and declare their everlasting doubt, when privately they acquiesced. Will Chilcot name, blame and condemn them, so as to encourage others in future? I bet he will not. He will confine himself to procedures, lessons and recommendations, as inquiries always do. That way no establishment blood is spilled.
Iraq saw a collapse in parliament's ability to hold the executive to account. Commons and Lords rarely strayed beyond party posturing, terrified to seem "unpatriotic" when fobbed off with the language of the war on terror. Select committees were an impotent disgrace. The BBC, because it spends millions broadcasting them, always refers to them as "powerful" and "influential". They are neither.
A public inquiry is a surrogate court of law. It should be crisp, swift and certain in its justice, allocating praise and blame for some catastrophe, as a punishment and a deterrent. Instead British inquiries, such as those often held into welfare tragedies, have become substitutes for proper, ongoing democratic accountability. They are a dilatory mechanism for postponing judgment and diffusing blame on to underlings.
The Chilcot inquiry has become like the history murals in the Palace of Westminster, a fanciful pageant in which the great of the past are depicted in pastel shades, jostling each other at some historical college reunion. The rage of their victims is deadened by protocol and decorum. The cost of it all is paid by someone else.
This week the government is reforming the NHS. It is embarrassingly clear that nobody, least of all the cabinet, has a clue whether it is doing the right thing. The same applied to all previous reforms of the NHS. With words such as gamble, risk, radical and revolutionary being bandied about, it might be sensible to have a committee of inquiry up and running in continuous session, feeding such wisdom as it can summon into the process in "real time".
Instead everyone is doing what they are told. In about 10 years time I imagine there will be an inquiry into the NHS, to tell us all what went wrong back in 2011. They will all be summoned, David Cameron, Andrew Lansley, George Osborne, Oliver Letwin, the BMA, the consultants, the nurses and lawyers for the bereaved. They will slap each other on the back and ask after each other's sciatica. They will gaze back over time and wonder, who on earth was to blame, as it cannot possibly have been them?
By Simon Jenkins guardian.co.uk
0 Comments