This doesn’t appear to have hit the press yet, but Iain Dale is reporting, this morning, that Eric Forth, Conservative MP for Bromley and Chislehurst passed away last night.

I should preface this post with a rare - and brief - autobiographical note.

Although I work in community development, and have done now for more than ten years, I actually trained as a psychologist (organisational/human factors, not the ’sit down on the couch and tell me your problems’ variety). And like many people who trained in one profession only to move on and take up another, I still keep my hand in, from time to time, by skimming the professional/academic journals for items of interest, a couple of which form the basis for this article.

Ask most people to list the things that routinely driven them into a state of screaming frustration and somewhere near the top of the list you’re sure to find the word ‘incompetence’, more often than not this will be cited in the context of ‘bureaucratic incompetence’ and encounters with the kafkaesque world of officialdom where anything and everything seem purposely designed to prevent the individual obtaining a reasonable solution, answer of response to even the most basic of problems.

Over the years, much has been written, said, filmed and blogged on the subject of bureacratic incompetence..

It has influenced our common language - the term ‘jobsworth’ entered the English language sometime during the late 1960s/early 1970s, rapidly becoming the standard methods of describing one of least endearing denizons of the bureauicratic environment,  the minor functionary for whom ‘the rules’ are everything such that any deviation from them is ‘more than their job’s worth’.

It has spawned a language all of its own, one rich in euphemisms, disingenuity and dissembling: bureaucrats don’t have skills, they have core competencies, they never lie, although they may be economical with the truth, and, of course, no one is ever fired, sacked or made redundant, they are merely downsized or redeployed outside the company. And this, in turn, has spawned a game, which is called either buzzword bingo or bullshit bingo depending on your personal prefence, and given rise to the cultural phenomenon that is Dilbert, which manages to both take the piss unmercifully and yet still prompt people to put forward their own stories of real-world bureacratic incompetence and stupidity that are every bit as bizarre as anything that Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, can concoct for his cartoon strips or books.

Yet, for the most part, what captures the attention of most people are the bureaucratic systems that support and sustain the kind of incompetence on regularly encounters in bureaucratic organisations. It seems almost to be taken as read that in dealing with bureaucracies you will encounter people who are incompetent, stupid, venal and occasionally bordering on corrupt, and yet when we complain about such things we invariably blame the system for housing these people and for failing to hold them to account rather than the individuals themselves.

One can readily see how ‘the system’ works to avoid accountability and personal responsibility from this BBC report of Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell’s response to questions from Parliament’s Public Administration Select Committee about the recent foreign prisioners fiasco:

The UK’s top civil servant [O’Donnell] was questioned about the controversy by the Commons public administration committee.

He said it was sometimes difficult to divide policy, which was the responsibility of ministers, from "delivery".

"If you ask Charles Clarke, he was clear he takes responsibility for the department and all it does. Certainly from the civil servants’ side mistakes were made and we need to learn from that," he said.

Asked if civil servants should have resigned over the controversy, Sir Gus replied: "I’m not clear that there was sufficient direct accountability for that to be appropriate.

"This would have been assessed by line managers along the way and people will be looking at what lessons to learn and what staff changes are necessary."

A "wide range of officials" were responsible for "a number of jobs", he added.

Look carefully enough and you can sense the mental subtext behind O’Donnell’s comments:

Good god, man. If we had to get rid of everyone who screwed up we’d end up sacking half the damn department!

While it is certainly true that bureaucracies have, over time, evolved any number of subtle and sophisticated methods of avoiding responsibility for getting this wrong - amongst my personal favourites are collective decision-making, which ensures that no one is ever blamed for getting things wrong as no one person can be identified as having taken the decision that caused the problem, and process management* under which projects are judged successful if they follow the right kind of process, even if they fail entirely to deliver anything of consequence - this does not remove the personal dimension from consideration. Bureaucracies are staffed by people, and its the people that make the actual mistakes - the system only serves to cover-up these mistakes, allowing the incompetent to avoid any responsibility for fouling things up.

*Process management is, of course, the basis of the majority of ‘quality systems’, many of which aren’t actually worth the paper they’re written on. To give a perfect example, the Community Legal Service Quality Mark, which was set up by the government as a quality standard for providers of information, advice and legal services, assesses applicants on their processes and how well these are documented/implemented - the one thing it doesn’t assess, however, is whether the information/advice given is actually any good.

All of which brings me to what I really wanted to discuss here, the personal dimensions of incompetence and to two research studies: -

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf) by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University, first published in 1999 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and

‘Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence’ (pdf) by Dunning, Kerri Johnson & Joyce Ehrlinger (Cornell University) and Kruger (now University of Illinois),which was published in 2003 in Current Directions in Pshycological Science.

Of the two, the second ‘Why People Fail…" is a little more accessible being more of a review paper than ‘Unskilled and Unaware…", which is more strictly reseach orientated, and yet both make for fascinating reading.

Both deal with what might colloquially be referred to as ‘David Brent Syndrome’, where one encounters an individual with seeminging unshakable belief in their own ability despite it being patently obvious to the outside observser that they are manifestly incompetent and what both show is incompetence packs a double whammy in these people: not only do they consistantly over-estimate their own ability, skills and job performance, but they also consistant under-estimate the ability, skills and performance of competent people around them. They are, quite literally, blind to their own failings being neither capable of recognising their own incompetence or recognising competence in others, from which they could otherwise identify benchmarks against which to the assess their own ability, as the Kruger and Dunning study notes:

In essence, we argue that the skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain—one’s own or anyone else’s. Because of this, incompetent individuals lack what cognitive psychologists variously term metacognition (Everson & Tobias,1998), metamemory (Klin, Guizman, & Levine, 1997), metacomprehension (Maki, Jonas, & Kallod, 1994), or self-monitoring skills (Chi, Glaser, & Rees, 1982). These terms refer to the ability to know how well one is performing, when one is likely to be accurate in judgment, and when one is likely to be in error. For example, consider the ability to write grammatical English. The skills that enable one to construct a grammatical sentence are the same skills necessary to recognize a grammatical sentence, and thus are the same skills necessary to determine if a grammatical mistake has been made. In short, the same knowledge that underlies the ability to produce correct judgment is also the knowledge that underlies the ability to recognize correct judgment. To lack the former is to be deficient in the latter.

Factor in a ‘business culture’ that insulates such individuals from criticism and personal accountability for mistakes and you have a perfect recipe not only for failure, but for repeated failures.

Consider, for a moment, the abysmal record of the public sector and particularly central government when it comes to large-scale information technology projects - a field in which, over the last few years, words like ‘on-time’ and ‘on-budget’ are almost unknown. In report after report by external auditors, the Audit Commission and the Public Accounts Committee, government departments have been castigated again and again for making the same basic mistakes in commissioning IT project to the point where government and the civil service are near legendary for their inability to adequately commission and project-manage technology-based projects.

I’m not going to go down the road of quoting large chunks of some of these reports in failed and failing projects but you can trust me that if you do track down and read a few of them you’ll find the same failings and same criticisms repeated over and over again, and yet nothing seems to change.

Why?

In part the system is to blame insofar as it protects individuals from the full consequences of failure - in the public sector, in particular, screw-ups that would result in an absolute blood-bath of sackings in a private company will often get written-off as ‘learning experiences’ while those responsible are either left in place, redeployed to other departments, taking their failings with them, or sometime even promoted on the basis of little more than having achieved the requisite ’seniority’ to merit a move up the ladder.

But equally it would not be true to suggest that such reports are simply ignored and not acted upon - they are. Departments are reorganised, recommendations are considered and implemented, systems are put in place, policies are written, action plans are drawn up and staff are redeployed and given training - and all to little or no appreciable effect.

Why? Because all the system, procedures, training and action plans in the world will not overcome the basic problem of incompetence, because non of these things actually teach people the one key skill they lack, the ability to distinguish between good and bad judgement, between accuracy and error.

One could ask, I suppose, why these people aren’t weeded out earlier their careers; why their incompetence is not  noticed sooner. Well that’s where the ‘Peter Principle’ comes into play, which holds that:

successful members of a hierarchical organization are eventually promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to a level at which they are not competent.

Or more simply that:

In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.

However, this is not simply a function of promotion placing individuals into a more difficult or complex job, which they then fail to cope with, rather promotions may take an individual into a role which requires different skills to their previous job(s); skills that they don’t possess - the classic example of the Peter Principle is the worker whose excellence in their jobs gets them promoted from the factory floor into management, only for it become apparent that they are completely unsuited to such a role.

In short, incompetence only becomes apparent once an individual is placed in a situation where their failings are exposed and not before - they may even have been in a particular job for several years when that happens having either had their deficiencies masked by the work of colleagues/subordinates or simply never having faced a particular situation in which the skills they lack are some obviously essential.

There is much of interest to be gleaned from these two studies - just consider these passages for a moment:

However, we have found that people’s estimates of their performance arise, at least in part, from a top-down approach. People start with their preconceived beliefs about their skill (e.g., “I am good at logical reasoning”) and use those beliefs to estimate how well they are doing on any specific test. This strategy at first seems to be a good one—people who believe they have logical reasoning skill should have some basis for that claim—except for one fly in the ointment. People’s impressions of their intellectual and social skills often correlate only modestly, and sometimes not at all, with measures of their actual performance (Falchikov & Boud, 1989). Indeed, and perhaps more important, people just tend to hold overinflated views of theirskills that cannot be justified by their objective performance (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989; Weinstein, 1980). Therefore, preconceived notions of skill can lead people to err in their performance estimates.

And…

The top-down nature of performance estimates can have important behavioral consequences. Women, for example, tend to disproportionately leave science careers along every step of the educational and professional ladder (Seymour, 1992). We began to wonder if topdown influences on performance estimates might contribute to this pattern. Starting in adolescence, women tend to rate themselves as less scientifically talented than men rate themselves (Eccles, 1987). Because of this, women might start to think they are doing less well on specific scientific tasks than men tend to think, even when there is no gender difference in performance. Thinking they are doing less well, women might become less enthusiastic about participating in scientific activities.

We put these notions to a test by giving male and female college students a pop quiz on scientific reasoning. Before the quiz, the students were asked to rate themselves on their scientific skills, and the women rated themselves more negatively than the men did. The students’ estimates of their performance on the quiz showed the same pattern, with the women thinking that they had done less well than the men thought, even though there was no gender difference in actual performance. Later, when asked if they would like to participate in a science competition for fun and prizes, the women were more likely than the men to decline the invitation. This reluctance correlated significantly with their perceptions of performance on the quiz, but not at all with actual performance (Ehrlinger & Dunning, 2003, Study 4). Perception of performance, not reality, influenced decisions about future activities.

This line of argument is one that has clear implications for the ongoing debate about the ‘gender pay-gap’ on which both Tim Worstall and Chris Dillow have made a number of interesting and rather sceptical observations about what often passes as the ‘accepted wisdom’ in this area - a selection of Tim’s commentaries can be accessed via this link while Chris’s take on matters can be accessed here - both links take you to Google search results, which is the quickest way of tracking down these articles - not least as it suggests that the observed differential, in women, between perceived and actual performance may well act as form of internalised ‘glass ceiling’ that influences women’s educational/career choices to the detriment of their real economic potential.

Intruiging as such lines of inquiry are, they are one’s that I much prefer to leave to those, like Tim and Chris, whose knowledge and understanding of economics far outstrips my own - if nothing else I can recognise the boundaries of my own competence in such matters. What I find more interesting is how these studies and question of individual and systematic incompetence may relate to certain facets of our currrent political and governmental culture and how they shape that culture in terms of what seems increasingly to be a prime objective of all those working in government - the avoidance of responsibility and accountability.

By tradition, when screw-ups happen in government, the buck stops at the relevant Minister, as Gus O’Donnell stresses here:

If you ask Charles Clarke, he was clear he takes responsibility for the department and all it does. Certainly from the civil servants’ side mistakes were made and we need to learn from that

This is an all-too typical response in such situations - civil servants must ‘learn from their mistakes’ but the Minister is the one who bears the actual responsibility for the foul-up.

Sometimes this is undoubtedly true - Politicians make policy and when it all goes pear-shaped, its found that policy if the cause of the problems. However it is still more often the case that when government screws thing up badly, the real fault lies in the incompetence of civil servants than in the failing of Ministers. By and large, the British political system remains relatively free of wholesale pre-meditated corruption/deception - few of the more notorious/egregious examples of governmental cover-ups over the last 30-40 years began with political decisions and/or politically driven conspiracies before the fact - the one fully documented case of such a conspiracy we have is that of the Chagos Islanders. Most such cover-ups develop after the fact and are devised to conceal cock-ups and errors of judgement committed by public servants - one thinks of the business of ‘arms to Iraq’ and the Scott Inquiry, Chinook ZD576 and ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ or even the furore over the sinking of the Belgrano*, where a simple failure to appraise Parliament of the true circumstances of its sinking at the first reasonable opportunity led to an entirely unnecessary cover-up and subsequent scandal out of all proportion to the actual event itself.

*The Belgrano has to be one tof he most unnecessary scandals in British Parliamentary history.

Everything that followed, including the unsuccessful prosecution of civil service whistleblower, Clive Ponting, could have been avoided had the government simply told Parliament what had actually happened and explained that they could not give them the full story earlier as this would have compromised the safety of the British Task-Force.

The problem here is that the doctrine of Ministerial accountability often mitigates against holding civil servants to account for their own acts of incompetence.

Why?

Because Ministers rely on their civil servants for information and answers to questions about departmental performance and service delivery - in answering a probing question tabled a backbench MP, the answer given by a Minister has almost always been supplied to them by a civil servant whose interests, when it comes to matters of incompetence, are likely to be anything but that of giving a full, open and transparent response to the original question.

To be a government Minister is, to some extent, to become a hostage to fortune - civil servants never knowingly lie to ministers but they do omit information which might prove ‘inconvenient’ or open up lines of questioning that they would prefer to avoid. Ordinarily, one might suppose that such practices are fine so far as they go, until it become apparent to the Minister that a particular account they’ve been given is somewhat less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, at which point the Minister in question would start asking a few awkward questions of their own.

But that’s not generally how thing turn out, usually because by the time it becomes apparent to a Minister that the official line they were given by civil servants is some distance from being the full truth, the official line has long since been conveyed to Parliament and entered into the official record to the extent that backtracking becomes near impossible without damaging the credibility of either the Minister, the department or both.

The most spectacular example of this in recent years has to be the case of Chinook ZD576, the history of which is covered here. What makes this case particularly interesting is that it spans a change of government such that the absurdities it demonstrates cannot be attributed to a single political party.

To understand the situation as it still stands today, allow me to quote from a letter written by Sir Malcolm Rifkind and published in the Sunday Herald in February 2002:

Last week a high-powered House of Lords select committee published its report into the 1994 Chinook air disaster that caused the deaths of the cream of British military intelligence. . .The select committee was chaired by the formidable Lord Jauncey, a former Lord of Appeal and a judge whom I know from my own experience to be a person of the highest ability and integrity. He was assisted by four colleagues, two of whom are distinguished QCs. They had no axe to grind and they approached their task with great professionalism.

They concluded, unanimously, that it would be wrong for the Ministry of Defence to maintain the finding of gross negligence against the deceased pilots of the Chinook made eight years ago by two senior RAF air-marshals. . .The immediate reaction of the government was made by armed forces minister Adam Ingram within hours of the publication of the report. He could hardly have had time to read it, but he appeared to dismiss it as containing nothing new. The implication was that the government would not budge.

That in itself would not run counter to any of the previous behaviour of the Ministry of Defence. There has already been a fatal accident inquiry, under a Scottish sheriff, which concluded that the finding of gross negligence was unsafe and should not be maintained. The government ignored that.

The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons, its most important select committee, has accused the Ministry of Defence of arrogance and called for the verdict to be put aside. They have been ignored for their pains. There have been various studies of the accident by aeronautics and com puter experts, all of whom have concluded that technical problems may have caused the accident. Their views have been dismissed.

To make matters worse, the RAF has changed its procedures so that never again will air-marshals be asked to allocate blame for air accidents. They will try to identify the technical causes of air accidents but leave questions of blame to the civilian courts. The Chinook case, therefore, remains a hangover from a discredited procedure, but the Ministry of Defence clings to the air-marshals’ decision with all the tenacity of a rottweiler.

I confess I have a personal interest in this case. I was the secretary of state for defence at the time the air- marshals reached their decision. I endorsed it and reported its conclusion to parliament. . .I recall being sad that the pilots were being blamed, but at that time I had no reason to question the conclusion of the RAF that gross negligence was the cause of the accident. These are highly complex and technical matters. A defence secretary has no more specialist knowledge of why an aircraft might have crashed than a health secretary would have on why a heart transplant had gone wrong. One must, to a considerable extent, trust the judgement of one’s senior advisers.

That’s the nub of this case - two air-marshals overruled the findings of the RAF’s own inquiry into the crash and inserted an unsustainable verdict of gross negligence (which amounts to manslaughter) against the flight crew who were killed in this crash and yet, despite a series of independent inquiries, including a House of Lords Select Committee, all which found against this verdict, the MOD has steadfastly refused to reconsider the verdict of the air marshals - a line which Ministers have consistantly followed in the House to the extent that one MP, James Arbuthnot, is still pursuing the matter to this day.

How does one get from this sorry situation to the two reseatch papers on the psychology of incompetence, well perhaps these extracts from the report of the House of Lords Select Committee may clarify matters:

135.  During the course of his evidence Sir John [Day] on more than one occasion emphasised that his conclusions were based on fact and not on hypotheses. It is therefore appropriate to look at some of the matters which he treated as fact. (Page references are to HL Paper 25(i).)

      (a)  "We know that about 20 seconds before impact with the ground the crew made a way point change" (Q 280, p 118 col 1). This figure which derives from the Racal report on the SuperTANS is based on a power down speed of 150 knots and a straight course from the WP change to impact at that speed. It is therefore at best an estimate and not a fact since the only factual evidence of speed at or after the change is the indication from the ground speed and drift indicator of 147 knots at initial impact (AAIB report, paragraph 7).

      (b)  "We know for a fact … that some four seconds before impact the crew started to flare the aircraft" (Q 280, p 117 col 1; Q 1088). Not so. The Boeing simulation, using assumptions now shown to be incompatible, produced this result. On no view could it be described as fact and there is no evidence either way as to what caused the aircraft to impact the ground in the position described in the AAIB report.

      (c)  "They had chosen to fly straight over the Mull of Kintyre, and we know that because they had set up this 1000 feet a minute ROC" (Q 301). There is no evidence that they had chosen to overfly the Mull, and indeed the making of the way point change suggests the contrary. Furthermore the 1000 feet a minute ROC derives entirely from the Boeing simulation with all its deficiencies referred to above.

      (d)  "What is for sure is that they were in a 1000 a minute cruise climb in that last 20 seconds before the final four seconds of flare" (Q 304). This is far from being sure given the deficiencies in the simulation already referred to.

      (e)  "We know they did not pull emergency power" (Q 311). Sir John later agreed that the impact could have destroyed any evidence of emergency power being pulled (Q 1097).

136.  An example of Sir John’s reliance on facts appears in the evidence given on his first appearance before us: "The judgment I have made about gross negligence is not based on what I think may have happened, it is based on what I know happened from the facts I have described to you" (Q 321). The majority of these "facts" were the matters referred to in the preceding paragraph.

However, the select committee had this to say about these facts in its conclusions:

148.  We consider that Sir John’s conclusions on this matter must be weakened by his reliance on matters which he treated as facts but which have been demonstrated to our satisfaction to be not facts but merely hypotheses or assumptions.

The actions of Air Marshals in this case fit the pattern of incompetence identified Dunning et al - he has grossly overestimated his own understanding of the evidence in this case and reached a judgment predicted primarily on his belief that his own experience vastly outweighed the judgment of the RAF’s own investigators - indeed when challenged as to why the Air-Marshals overruled the findings of RAF crash investigators and inserted their own judgement in its place, their reponse was to dismiss the finding of the investigators on the grounds that they lacked experience in such matters.

Chinook ZD576 may be an extreme example of government and the civil service go about the task of protecting the incompetent, but it is far from being unique - indeed one has to wonder just how routine an occurance it actual is?

The other aspect of incompetence I want to raise is directed more specifically at politicians and wider political culture in general, or to be more specific one aspect of that culture which has come to dominate the political scene over the last 30 years or so, and that’s the ‘cult of strong leadership’.

Since the late 1970s politics, and particularly success in elections, has increasingly come to rest on public perceptions of leadership, both here and in the US - all the beginning of this in the US can more properly be traced back to at least Kennedy’s victory over Nixon in 1960. This leads to a rather intriguing observation about winning elections, or more precisely about winning successive elections, which is simply that over the last 30 years, in both Britain and the US, the politicians who have succeeded in winning successive elections have, almost uniformly, been those who most conveyed an image of having almost absolute self-belief in their ability - Reagan, Clinton and George W Bush in the US and, of course, Thatcher and Blair in the UK. Conversely on the two occasions where an incumbent failed to secure reelection , George H W Bush and John Major, both were markedly more self-effacing in character than their opponents, Clinton and Blair.

But, as the research into incompetence seems to demonstrate, this quality of absolute self-belief in one’s own ability is often a sign of incompetence and, in particular of its ‘double curse’ in which one not only fails to see one’s own failing but also cannot recognise the competence of others.

When one thinks about how such a character trait might manifest itself in someone who attains high office, such as becoming President or Prime Minister, one has to think that one of its more striking effects would be to condition the individual to take an extremely hands-on approach to their role, Being far more inclined to trust their own judgement than that of others whose competence cannot be assured, such an individual would inevitably tend to centralise the authority of government on themselves. In fact the more their administration ran in to problems the more they would respond by taking on even more responsibilty for and control of decision-making processes in government - after all, if, for example, the Home Office cannot manage to deport foreign prisioners on release, thereby proving itself incompetent, does that not also prove that the judgement of the Home Secretary responsible for that department cannot also be trusted - and if one cannot trust the Home Secretary’s judgement, well who else’s can you trust but your own.

The US system to some extent mitigates against such scenarios by limiting Presidents to two four year terms of office - even if the American peiople do succeed in electing an incompetent President, they’re rarely around long enough for the full extent of their incompetence to become fully apparent. That coupled with mid-term congressional elections which often leave the opposition in control of the Senate and/or House of Representatives for the last two years of the Presidential term, effectively preventing the President for doing anything that might really stuff things up, tend to the limit the potential damage that an incompetent President might do were they to go the full eight years with their full powers and support intact.

Britain has no such check and balances - a successful Prime Minister can go until either the electorate - or their own party - get sick of them and decide its time for a change…

…which when you look at the circumstances of Thatcher’s fall from grace and Blair’s increasingly difficult situation prompts an interesting question.

To what extent can Thatcher’s downfall and Blair’s current problems be attributed to each of them reaching the point of their own incompetence?

Of course, the clincher in Thatcher’s case was the Poll Tax, but in terms of finding something which both reflects the overall character of the Thatcher government during its final years and which could be construed to support an ‘incompetence’ hypothesis, perhaps this closing section of Geoffrey’s Howe’s resignation speech from November 1990 might prove illuminating:

There is talk, of course, of a single currency for Europe. I agree that there are many difficulties about the concept–both economic and political. Of course, as I said in my letter of resignation, none of us wants the imposition of a single currency. But that is not the real risk. The 11 others cannot impose their solution on the 12th country against its will, but they can go ahead without us. The risk is not imposition but isolation. The real threat is that of leaving ourselves with no say in the monetary arrangements that the rest of Europe chooses for itself, with Britain once again scrambling to join the club later, after the rules have been set and after the power has been distributed by others to our disadvantage. That would be the worst possible outcome.

It is to avoid just that outcome and to find a compromise both acceptable in the Government and sellable in Europe that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has put forward his hard ecu proposal. This lays careful emphasis on the possibility that the hard ecu as a common currency could, given time, evolve into a single currency. I have of course supported the hard ecu plan. But after Rome, and after the comments of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister two weeks ago, there is grave danger that the hard ecu proposal is becoming untenable, because two things have happened.

The first is that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has appeared to rule out from the start any compromise at any stage on any of the basic components that all the 11 other countries believe to be a part of EMU–a single currency or a permanently fixed exchange rate, a central bank or common monetary policy. Asked whether we would veto any arrangement that jeopardised the pound sterling, my right hon. Friend replied simply, "Yes." That statement means not that we can block EMU but that they can go ahead without us. Is that a position that is likely to ensure, as I put it in my resignation letter, that

"we hold, and retain, a position of influence in this vital debate"?

I fear not. Rather, to do so, we must, as I said, take care not to rule in or rule out any one solution absolutely. We must be seen to be part of the same negotiation.

The second thing that happened was, I fear, even more disturbing. Reporting to this House, my right hon. Friend almost casually remarked that she did not think that many people would want to use the hard ecu anyway–even as a common currency, let alone as a single one. It was remarkable–indeed, it was tragic–to hear my right hon. Friend dismissing, with such personalised incredulity, the very idea that the hard ecu proposal might find growing favour amoung the peoples of Europe, just as it was extraordinary to hear her assert that the whole idea of EMU might be open for consideration only by future generations. Those future generations are with us today. How on earth are the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England, commending the hard ecu as they strive to, to be taken as serious participants in the debate against that kind of background noise? I believe that both the Chancellor and the Governor are cricketing enthusiasts, so I hope that there is no monopoly of cricketing metaphors. It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.

The point was perhaps more sharply put by a British business man, trading in Brussels and elsewhere, who wrote to me last week, stating :

"People throughout Europe see our Prime Minister’s finger-wagging and hear her passionate, No, No, No’, much more clearly than the content of the carefully worded formal texts."

He went on :

"It is too easy for them to believe that we all share her attitudes ; for why else has she been our Prime Minister for so long?"

My correspondent concluded :

"This is a desperately serious situation for our country." And sadly, I have to agree.

The tragedy is–and it is for me personally, for my party, for our whole people and for my right hon. Friend herself, a very real tragedy–that the Prime Minister’s perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation. It risks minimising our influence and maximising our chances of being once again shut out. We have paid heavily in the past for late starts and squandered opportunities in Europe. We dare not let that happen again. If we detach ourselves completely, as a party or a nation, from the middle ground of Europe, the effects will be incalculable and very hard ever to correct.

In my letter of resignation, which I tendered with the utmost sadness and dismay, I said :

"Cabinet Government is all about trying to persuade one another from within".

That was my commitment to Government by persuasion–persuading colleagues and the nation. I have tried to do that as Foreign Secretary and since, but I realise now that the task has become futile : trying to stretch the meaning of words beyond what was credible, and trying to pretend that there was a common policy when every step forward risked being subverted by some casual comment or impulsive answer.

The conflict of loyalty, of loyalty to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister–and, after all, in two decades together that instinct of loyalty is still very real–and of loyalty to what I perceive to be the true interests of the nation, has become all too great. I no longer believe it possible to resolve that conflict from within this Government. That is why I have resigned. In doing so, I have done what I believe to be right for my party and my country. The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.

What makes this interesting is not the policy issues - one can easily dispute Howe’s assertions about monetary union and the ERM being right for Britain - but the overall picture it paints of conditions within the Thatcher government of the time, particularly here:

The first is that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has appeared to rule out from the start any compromise at any stage on any of the basic components that all the 11 other countries believe to be a part of EMU–a single currency or a permanently fixed exchange rate, a central bank or common monetary policy. Asked whether we would veto any arrangement that jeopardised the pound sterling, my right hon. Friend replied simply, "Yes."

Where she appears to have unilaterally taken a policy stance on the matter that not only do senior members of her cabinet disagree with, but about which they appear to have had no knowledge whatsoever until she made the statement to which Howe refers.

Over the last year, since winning the general election, one can see much the same characteristic emerging from the Blair government. Although no one has, as yet, done a ‘Geoffrey Howe’ on Blair it seems clear that more and more policy is being driven entirely from the Prime Minister’s office with the expectation that even senior ministers will fall meekly into line and simply do as they are told by the PM, whether they agree with him or not - there have certainly been persistant rumours that both Charles Clarke and Ruth Kelly, while Home Secretary and Education Secretary respectively, were extremely unhappy with elements of the policy hand being dealt to them by Blair but had their objections more or less summarily dismissed, meanwhile, as the recent reshuffle made apparent, Blair has chosen to surround himself with as many loyal supporters as humanly possible in a government where there is a heir-apparent waiting in the wings - it may be a little harsh to characterise some of these people simply as ‘yes men’ but it does seem to be the case that Blair has substantially stripped away from the core of government those whose judgment fails to coincide precisely with his own or who are likely to put forward alternatives to his preferred policy position on key issues.

The question has to be asked, therefore - has Blair exceeded his own competence as Prime Minister?

While he obviously retains all his presentational skills of old and remains a formidable performer on the floor of the House, in terms of policy his agenda for his final term in office is much less conservative and much more demanding than anything put forward in the bulk of his two previous terms and this may well be the tipping point beyond which he falls prey to the double curse of incompetence being neither able to correctly assess the validity of his own judgements nor recognise competence in the judgments of others.

The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities - Salman Rushdie.

Faith must trample underfoot all sense, reason and understanding - Martin Luther.

There is no worse screen to block out the Spirit than confidence in our own intelligence - John Calvin.

Before anyone asks, the juxtaposition of the three quotations given above is entirely deliberate and illustrative of what I consider to be an important point - that the underlying concept of an ‘Islamic Reformation’ may well be something of a misnomer and not, as Salman Rushdie, Sir Iqbal Sacranie and others seem to think, the key to bringing Islam ‘into the 21st Century’.

I may well be overstating matters somewhat, but at the very least I think the use of the term ‘reformation’ is rather ill-advised, as is the use of Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century as a reference point or analogy for what some progressive Muslims are seeking.

I must stress, before moving on, that the issue here is not with the concept of developing a modern, progressive, liberal interpretation of Islam - far from it, I think most people would see that as very positive move. The difficult I have is one of simple historical fact - if that really is your objective, then the Protestant Reformation is, with few notable exceptions like the Quakers, an pretty lousy role-model to choose.

Yes, at the heart of the Reformation lay a clear and unequivocal challenge the old, calcified order of the Roman Catholic Church, which is where I expect this analogy comes from, but this should not distract attention from the fact that the Reformation was primarily an exercise in religious fundamentalism, one which stressed a highly literal interpretation of the Bible and rigid adherence to its precepts as written. A reformation it may have been, but certainly not a liberal or rational one, as the quotes from both Luther and Calvin ably demonstrate.

In historical terms, the reformation did little to directly advance the cause of liberal, progressive and rational values in European society - these developed primarily out of the Renaissance, the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment and through the development of science, humanistic and political philosophy, the nation state and the spread of values and ideas that were very much the antithesis of most of those espoused by Protestant reformers.

It’s most significant innovation arose out of a loose melding of Renaissance humanism with Augustinian theology and devotionalism, which challenged the traditional rigid hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church and the alliance of reason and faith laid down by Thomas Aquinas and, to some extent, promulgated a limited concept of equality, in the sense of individuals being equal before god regardless of their station in life, with redemption possible only through the grace of god and not by the performance of good works, as was the view of the Catholic Church. However equality was far from being a major concern in this doctrinal dispute; of more importance to both factions was a schism over the very concept of god, which the Catholic Church, after the manner of Aquinas, saw as a rational, guiding principle but the Protestants saw instead as an arbitrary, unknowable and limitless will. Protestantism meant more than simply equality before god, it also meant anti-rationalism, Biblical literalism and a rejection of Aristoelian logic, giving it a tenuous but useful alignment with Renaissance humanism, which emphasised personal growth and reform through eloquence rather than reason.

In philosophical terms, the overriding character of the Protestant reformation was more in tune with the later counter-enlightenment from which developed first, romanticism and irrationalism and eventually nationalism,  nihilism and fascism, which means its not the kind of distant relative you ‘d generally be too keen on inviting round for tea.

What the reformation did do successfully was open up cracks in the traditional authority of the church, challenge the belief that rigid hierarchical structures in society wre derived from a natural order sanctioned by god and deflect the attention of religious authorities away from the growth and development of ideas which would later come to provide a far more serious challenge to the authority of both religious factions than anything either could throw at the other… oh, and I mustn’t forget that Protestant demands for Bibles that could be read by all, and not just by the local priest, drove the development of printing in Europe during its earliest stages and, of course, printing would later play a pivotal role in the spread of ideas from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

And all for the price of a couple of hundred years of religious wars, persecution and conflict, the savagery of which we’d struggle to repeat until the 20th Century.

If one thing did emerge from the reformation that did, ultimately, come to support the development of progressive liberal values then that advance was primarily political rather than religious or philosophical.

In the middle of all this ruckus over the true nature of god, Henry VIII pulled what eventually turned out to be rather a masterstroke, not by embracing protestantism but by making himself head of the Church of England.  Henry may only have wanted a divorce but what he actually did was clearly establish the authority of the State over the the church, which over the next couple of hundred years, give or take Mary Tudor, the English Civil War and the Jacobite Rebellion, established foundations of secular State authority under which liberal/progressive ideas could flourish.

The point of  all this is simply that religious reform movements tend to be anything but liberal/progressive. The Protestant reformation may have, largely inadvertently, helped to create the social and political conditions in Europe that led to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, but if one looks for the direct descendants of those early reformers one find not bastions of liberal enlightenment and progressive rationalism but the hard core evangelical, fundamentalist, religious right - including the modern Lutheran and Calvinist churches.

Living in the UK, its all to easily to lapse into a false sense of security about this - after all by most standards the Church of England are a fairly liberal bunch, however the modern liberalism of the Anglican Church is, by and large, a product of its position in British society and, in particular, the subsidiary position it occupies in relation to the State. To a considerable extent one can argue that the most lasting legacy handed down to the UK by Henry VIII is not just an established Protestant church, but a tame church which recognises and accepts the secular authority of the State such that Britain has become more of a liberal society over the last couple of centuries, so its Church has followed fairly meekly in its wake.

All this brings me to a couple of observations which I’m putting forward very much the role of Devil’s Advocate.

First, if its an Islamic Reformation you’re looking for then, if history in any guide, you may a be a bit late - if anything a European-style reformation has been underway from quite some time, even if no one seems to have really noticed that its there despite is staring people squarely in the face. Europe’s protestant reformers weren’t liberals or progressives, they were religious fundamentalists and if Islam is to draw on the European experience in such matters then who is to say that history isn’t already repeating itself. Let’s be honest, by the standards of modern Islamic fundamentalism the Ottomans weren’t just liberal in outlook, they were positively louche.

Second, and this observation leads on from that above, if Islam is looking to the European model for ideas as to how it might develop a modern, liberal/progressive culture then its not really a reformation they should be looking for so much as an Islamic Enlightenment.

Quite how realistic and attainable such an idea might be is not one I feel qualified to comment on, but what I can be sure of is that if that’s what you’re looking for then the best advice I can give you is steer well clear of the Reformation and guys like Luther and Calvin because they really don’t have that much to offer…

Errm… Hello, my name is Tony and… and I’m an addict.

I think my problem began… well I guess it really began around ten years ago. I’d just changed job, it was a major promotion and meant long hours and a lot more responsibility. People were suddenly looking to me to be in charge of things, make important decisions.

I guess I was under a lot of pressure even then but it all seemed to come so easily in those days. I’d told people that things could only get better and they really believed in me. It gave me a real sense of achievement – no more than that… a sense of purpose. I really did believe I could change things for the better.

It’s difficult to say quite when things started to go wrong. During those first years there were a few hiccups along the way, one or two close colleagues got themselves in to difficulties and had to resign but the job seemed to be going really well. People liked me and the seemed to genuinely believe in me and what I was doing – so much so that when it came time to renew my contract I won the job hands down, near enough a landslide even if the other candidates weren’t very good.

Those were great times. I felt really good about myself and the way things were going. Even when our closest business partner had a change at the top I still managed to hit it off with the new guy, George, right from day one. Okay, so George was a bit different from his predecessor and one or two of his management team seemed… well, a bit shifty, but we quickly found we had enough in common to get along and make a real go of our working relationship. I really felt we could do business.

Thinking back, maybe it was not long after I met George that my problems really started. Although we got on really well, George had a bit of tough start in his new job – a lot of people thought the other guy, Al, should have got the job and that George hadn’t really got what it took to be the top man in the company. I hate to say it, but George did seem a bit, well… distracted. He’d get things wrongs from time to time, say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Occasionally things would come out a bit garbled and you got the feeling that a lot of people we laughing at him – not that it bothered me, of course, after working with John for a few years you get used to that kind of thing, but it did seem that George was having a problem earning the respect of a lot of his people.

Then there was the big crash. I think that may have been where it all really started to go wrong. Suddenly George was in a lot of trouble, at least that’s how it looked at first. Then, suddenly, his people got behind him and he could do no wrong – they really pulled out all the stops, anything he wanted he could have.

That’s when George started to get… well he became very demanding. He’d been planning a major takeover bid for quite a while – all very hush-hush you understand, but it turned out to be some sort of major oil deal. Did I mention that he and his number two both used to be in oil before they took on their current jobs?

Anyway, George was determined to see this deal through, even though he has some unfinished business with another guy who just had to be put of business for everyone’s sake, which meant another takeover bid in the pipeline, only this one had to be done quickly. So the question was asked “could he count on my full support?” –and well, what else could I say but ‘of course’. Look, when a guy like George wants something badly enough you really can’t say no to the guy – well you could and I suppose George might be okay with that… but some of the others…

Put it this way, there’s more than bit of the Soprano’s about some of George’s friends and I’m not talking opera here either.

The thing is, a lot of my people were a lot less sure about George than I am… errm… I mean was… no, sorry, am… They really weren’t keen on us working quite so closely together, especially when they found out that this guy who’d caused George so much grief had decided to turn on us as well because we were working so closely with him. Even then, it wasn’t quite so bad – we were convinced that we were doing the right thing on that first deal and pretty much everyone seemed to agree with us. The guy was obviously asking for it and everyone still believed that me and George, well we were the good guys and just doing the right thing.

Trouble is that first deal didn’t go quite as well as we’d hoped – we got through the main business just fine to start with but the guys at the top, the one’s everyone wanted to see brought down, well kind of got away and George, well started to lose interest in that deal. His eyes were firmly on the big prize, the deal he’s really been wanting all along, and he wasn’t in much of mood to take no for an answer.

Of course, it was easier for George, his people were more or less completely behind him and most of them would accept pretty much anything they were told – it didn’t really matter how shaky the business case that he put forward was, they were going to go for it anyway. I found things much more difficult. People were asking questions and demanding answers and well… I’m afraid some the guys in middle management were tending to gloss over things a bit. Alistair, in particular, seemed to think we could iron out these wrinkles if only we got the presentation just so and then got into a terrible fight with one of our outside contractors afterwards, after one of their staff suggested he’d been a bit too economical with the truth – all a bit of frightful mess I’m afraid.

Suddenly people just didn’t seem to trust me anymore. We started to get a lot of bad press and well… I guess I panicked. I had to do something, I couldn’t just let things slide and it was the only real option open to me. That was when it really started to become a problem, when it all started to take over and become a compulsion.

I thought I had it under control at first, after all it wasn’t anything I hadn’t done before lots of times, and always in moderation, but now things started to spiral out of control. I’d have a bad day at the office and it was all I could think about afterwards. I couldn’t leave it alone. I just had to do it – there was no other way I could satisfy the cravings.

I guess it was then that I became addicted to legislating.

It’s only over the last year, maybe two, that things have gotten really bad. It all started out reasonably enough, just a little anti-terrorism legislation to begin with – little was I to know how addictive it would all become. It all seem so innocuous to begin with but then that’s always the way isn’t it – one minute you think you’re fine but before you know it you’re mainlining on summary justice, introducing ASBOs, curbing immigration and introducing identity cards. It’s a vicious circle, the more you have, the more you need – you can never get enough… and even when you think you’ve had enough there are always people there to offer you more; The Sun, The Daily Mail, the Daily Express – the dealers who’re always on hand to offer you your next fix…

What makes things worse is that the more addicted you become the less people seem to like you. I had to negotiate a new contract last year, which I did get, but it was much more closely run thing than last time even if the other applicants were no better than the ones I faced before. I started to feel that time was running out for me – I’d had to promise Gordon, who’s been wanting me to step aside and give him a shot at the top job for ages, that I’d step down before my contract was next up for renewal, and that was before I’d even signed on the dotted line for the current one.

Pressure, pressure, pressure – that’s all I get from everyone these days. When am I quitting? Will Gordon get the chance to get his feet under the table before this current contract is up? Why am I not listening more to the staff? Who’d be the boss when you’re faced with that day in, day out?

And that’s without the problems of dealing with the customers – these days I’m always too tough on this or not tough on that, this is wrong, that’s wrong… I just don’t seem able to get anything right anymore, especially since that unfortunate business on the Tube last year – oh God was that a rough weekend, especially as I got George, Jacques and all the others over for a working dinner. Terrible business…

The thing is it then that the compulsion gets to be even worse – often it’s completely unbearable. The slightest thing goes wrong, the smallest hint of criticism, especially from those vultures in the tabloid press, and I can’t help myself – I have to reach for the statute book and start legislating. It’s getting to the point where I can no longer control it – I even had to fire several members of the management team a couple of weeks ago in the hope that that would help me stave off the cravings… but no, not even that made people happy. Sometimes you just can’t do right, for doing wrong and always you end up craving the next fix, the next new law, the one that will make everything better.

The thing is, I know deep down that all this won’t last forever – the job I mean. I had hoped to be around long enough to get all this out of my system, but that bastard Gordon and his friends keep pushing and I coming realise that I may not have enough time to work all this out before I have to stand down, which is why I’m hear today as I really need to help to bring all this under control while there’s still time.
So that’s me I guess. My name is Tony and I’m an…

Oh, hello Charles, fancy bumping into you here? Me? Oh, fine, fine, just a few things I need to work through…

And you? Good, good… glad to see you’re feeling much better…

Drink problem? No, no… nothing like that at all…

Errm… Alcoholics Anonymous, you say? Fuck!

Look, err… Charles, must dash… we’ll get together soon, lunch perhaps?

No, no… it’s not important, just something I need get done right away… you know, busy man, time always pressing…

…

Errr, Hello… Yes, its the Prime Minister…

Look, never mind the pleasantries just put me on the Cabinet Secretary straight away…

Is it important that I speak to him now? He’s in a meeting?

Of course it’s fucking important- I’m the fucking Prime Minister… Okay, I’ll hold…

Ah, yes hello… yes, yes I know… important business of state and all that - look never mind all that, I’ll be back in the office in ten, no make it fifteen minutes and you can tell that fat bastard Prescott to make himself fucking scarce when I get back, because if I see him I’m going to fucking twat him down the fucking stairs…

I tell you, that’s the fucking last time I take his recommendation when it comes to appointing a new fucking diary secretary!

I get paid to go to meetings…

At the end of a week in which the Human Rights Act has come under an unprecedented assault, both in the press and from senior politicians, including the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, it has taken the Telegraph to provide the neatest and most succinct example, to date, of everything that is fundamentally wrong about this whole debate:

The Afghans who hijacked a civilian airliner are rewarded with a judgment that they are entitled to stay in Britain at the taxpayer’s expense.

Foreign terrorists who reportedly plot the murder of hundreds of British civilians cannot be deported back to their countries of origin, nor may they be detained here. Murderers and rapists are entitled to have any decision to keep them in prison reviewed by a judicial hearing, at which they must be represented by a lawyer - and as a result, an intimidated Probation Service frees killers who go on to murder fresh victims.

I’ve already dealt with the matter of the ‘Stansted Nine’ here, but would also like to point readers to the thoughts of Brian Barder and Tony Hatfield, both of who bring the wisdom of years and an incisive legal mind to bear on this matter and on the matter of the Human Rights Act in general.

However, I would like to add one simple observation here - as far as I can see, not only are there no legitimate grounds on which to deport the Stansted Nine at the present time but the sole reason I can see for the government pursuing the deportation with such vigour derives from the fact that, at the time of the actual hi-jacking, which is now getting on for six years ago, the Home Secretary of the day, Jack Straw, made a great show of ‘promising’ that these men would be deported - this was long before their case had even been properly investigated let alone brought before a jury.

It does seem to me the, in this matter, the government are motivated exclusively by political considerations and not by the considerations of justice or the proper application of the law, which is about as shameful as it gets. One of the key rationales for separating the powers of the executive, legislature and judiciary is to prevent politicians playing god with people’s lives in the interests of political gain and their own public image, and yet it seems to me that an attempt at ‘playing god’ is exactly what is going on here.

As regards the ‘foreign terrorists’ who cannot be deported or detained here, these are, of course, the alleged foreign terrorist suspects who were formerly detained in Belmarsh Prison and who are now held effectively under house arrest using control orders, which were introduced to replace the system of arbitrary detention without charge after this was ruled unlawful by the High Court.

These men cannot currently be deported to the countries of origin because each has an extreme poor human rights record which includes the routine/semi-routine use of torture. While the prohibition on deportation in these circumstances is enforced in the UK courts under the Human Rights Act, it actually derives not from the Act itself but from the case of Chahal -v- The United Kingdom, which was heard by the European Court of Human Rights and the decision, in this case, in binding on the UK courts with or without the Human Rights Act to back it up.

The government’s response to this has been to work towards trying to bypass the ruling in Chahal by obtaining a memorandum of agreement from these states; which include Algeria, Egypt, Libya and Jordan, amongst others, in which the state gives an undertaking not to torture these people if they are sent back to those nations - except that the considered opinion of most of those who do concern themselves with Human Rights law is that such memoranda will not be worth the paper they’re written on, a fact underlined by the government’s efforts to place the responsibility for monitoring Libya’s compliance with the agreement it has already signed into the hands of a ‘human rights charity’ run by the son of Colonel Qaddafi.

Both these cases are rooted in article three of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides for an absolute prohibition on the use of torture from which there is no room for derogation. As the Telegraph points out, correctly, to override the decision of the courts in these matters would require not only the repeal of the Human Rights Act but Britain’s withdrawal from the European Convention, which it signed in 1953. What the Telegraph neglects to mention however, is that we would also have to withdraw from the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which we signed in 1985 and ratified in 1998, at the same time - this would put into a select little band of nations that are outside this convention, which includes North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Syria - nice company we’d be keeping, eh?

On this matter, the Telegraph has this to say:

The only way to remedy judicial decisions that "defy common sense" (to use the Prime Minister’s apt phrase) is to opt out of the European Convention altogether: there would be few if any harmful effects. There may be claims that it would set "a bad example" - but Britain is not responsible for the legal systems of other countries.

I find it difficult to understand quite how the Telegraph can take the view that isolating the UK not only from Europe but from, in effect, the rest of the civilised world would have ‘few if any harmful effects’, not least as  it is highly likely that such a withdrawal from ECHR would also require Britain’s wholesale withdrawal from the European Union, a move which would most certainly have considerable harmful effects, at least in the short-term, on the UK economy, amongst other things…

…well, actually, it’s not so difficult as this can readily be explained in one of three ways:

1. The Telegraph simply haven’t thought through, in full, the implication of such a move,

2. The Telegraph has thought it through and decided this would be a hand backdoor route to forcing the UK to leave the EU, or

3. The author of this editorial is a complete and utter half-wit.

As things stand, any of the three seem equally plausible.

Before leaving this matter, we should also consider the one question that the government seem studiously keen to avoid - if these men have been plotting ‘the murder of hundreds of British civilians’ then why have they not been brought to trial? Conspiracy is by no means the easiest case to prove but it is a criminal offence and could be taken before a court.

The answer, so far as we have been able to glean one, seems to have to with the absence, in these cases, of any credible evidence that might reasonably be admissible in a British court, some of which, it has been suggested, may have been obtained by torture - ironically in the very countries with which the government intends to have memoranda promising that torture if we deport these people.

So who is really to blame for this situation? The Human Rights Act? Or the government and security services who, by cutting corners, lowering standards and interning people on the basis of ‘evidence’ which is not admissible in a British court, now find themselves stuck with a group of people they can legally do almost nothing with?

As a final note on this issue, the one thing that seemingly has been forgotten in the all sound-bites and fury this week is that article 3 of ECHR not only prevents Britain from deporting foreign nationals to countries which practice torture, it also prevents Britain extraditing its own citizens to such countries, and to those that still make use of the death penalty, where there is no express undertaking that such a penalty will not be applied (and, of course, where such an undertaking can reasonably be relied upon).

The second part of the Telegraph’s opening gambit relates, of course, to the case of Anthony Rice.

Now unlike, I suspect, most of the tabloid hacks who’ve been screaming about this case for the last few days and, in particular, blaming the Human Rights Act for the failings of the parole and probation systems, I’ve actually read the report of the Chief Inspector of Probation, Andrew Bridges, in full - and it really is worth reading in full as the picture that emerges is very different to that painted by the press and by senior politicians, not one of the ‘rights of criminals’ being put ahead of public safety but rather one in which those charged with such considerations on our behalf were, and maybe still are, lacking in the basic competencies required to fulfill their duties successfully.

One can, perhaps, understand how this false picture has emerged when one considers that the report contained around 15-20 references of similar character to this one::

This whole process is additionally complicated by the human rights considerations in each case which have grown in importance following a series of Court judgments. Prisoners are now legally represented at Parole Board hearings, often by counsel, who also have recourse to judicial review. It is a challenging task for people who are charged with managing offenders effectively to ensure that public protection considerations are not undermined by the human rights considerations.

Of course, however, the key line in this paragraph is this:

It is a challenging task for people who are charged with managing offenders effectively to ensure that public protection considerations are not undermined by the human rights considerations.

Which, translated into English from bureaucratic bullshit, actually means that there have been systemic failings in the workings of the Parole Board and Probation service, failings that are the direct result of a wholesale’ lack of competence in the area of Human Rights law compounded by a desire, at seeming all costs, to avoid cases being brought to judicial review, where they can be dealt with appropriately by a competent authority.

The key to sifting the real problems in this case from the semi-exculpatory smoke-screen being thrown up by the report having so heavily cited the Human Rights Act, lies in this section covering the circumstances of Rice’s release on licence:

Principal Finding 3: Management of release on Licence

1.3.1 Based on the reports received about the progress that he had made during his sentence and his proposed resettlement plan, the Parole Board made a final decision in 2004 that Anthony Rice, who was five years past his ‘tariff date’, was safe to release. We consider that in doing so they gave insufficient weight to the underlying nature of his Risk of Harm to others, and we think this happened for a combination of reasons:

They did not have full knowledge of his past offending behaviour, in particular that he had been an offender against children.

They received cautiously encouraging but ultimately over-optimistic reports of Anthony Rice’s progress under treatment.

Their own earlier decision in 2001 to transfer him to open prison conditions in our view set in motion a momentum towards release. As we see it that Parole Board decision created in this case a set of expectations that release had now become a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’. (We believe it has a similar effect in other ‘Lifer’ cases.)

It was also from 2001 that in our view the people managing this case started to allow its public protection considerations to be undermined by its human rights considerations, as these required increasing attention from all involved, especially as the prisoner was legally represented.

1.3.2 A crucial dimension to our finding is that the 2001 decision was in a sense the key decision that made the eventual release decision more likely, because the momentum towards release started from that point. Accordingly in this report we treat the entire period of open prison conditions as being part of the ‘release decision’ phase rather than the ‘period in custody’ phase of the case.

1.3.3 Hence we find a problematic ambiguity in the role of the open prison conditions phase for a life-sentenced prisoner that we believe needs to be addressed. In theory the idea is that a spell in open prison conditions provides an opportunity for the prisoner to be tested both on what he has learned from his treatment and on how he consequently behaves – leading to a final decision about his release. We understand and certainly support this principle. But we consider that in practice the expectation by the prisoner is often significantly different from this: You are now in the last phase before release, and unless you blow it completely you will be out before long.

What this tells us is not the Human Rights Act was at fault in this matter, but that it was a largely peripheral issue that, at worst, caused the Parole Board to momentarily take their eye off a ball that had already been dropped. of much greater concern in this matter should be the manifest failings of the parole system, itself, which meant that those considering whether Rice continued to present a risk to public safety were not adequately appraised of his past offending behaviour and were provided with ‘encouraging but ultimately over-optimistic reports of Anthony Rice’s progress under treatment’, matters which would have cast any human rights considerations in his case into an altogether different light.

This seems to me the central issue in this whole case - why was Rice released in the first place - and it is certainly the one in which the public has the greatest interest as everything that followed proceeded from this one decision.

What needs to be noted here is that:

a) The Parole Board that met and approved Rice’s release under licence would have consisted of a chairman, who is always a judge, a psychiatrist and an independent lay member, and

b) The test that a Parole Board is required to apply in considering an application, such as that submitted by Rice is:

"whether the Lifer’s level of risk to the life and limb of others is considered to be more than minimal”.

All things being equal, it would seem to me that human rights considerations should only come into play after the Parole Board as reached a conclusion on whether a prisoner satisfies this test - in this case, hindsight tells us that Rice did not but that, crucially, the Parole Board reached its decision based on incomplete and inaccurate information, which has nothing whatsoever to do with consideration of Rice’s human rights at all.

This being the case, there is no need for a change in law to address this issue, as this a simply matter of ensuring that Parole Boards apply the correct procedure in the right order and are provided with the right information and any talk, by politicians, of the need to revise the Human Rights Act arising out of this case would be no more than the usual political grandstanding to the tabloid press.

While this report is by no means a whitewash, the key issues it raises - those relating to the systemic failures in the parole system that led to his being released in the first place - have been almost entirely lost in the media-generated furore surrounding the supposedly malign influence of the Human Rights Act in this case, which politicians have, of course, seized upon for either the own political gain (Cameron) or to deflect attention from incompetence and maladministration for which they are ultimately responsible (Blair). It would be easy to be cynical about the dual-pronged assault on the Human Rights Act that has been made by the right-wing press and senior Labour/Tory politicians, to respond simply by observing that ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they’ were it not for the fact that this report lays open a growing and disturbing trend amongst those working in the criminal justice system in which public servants are as much inclined to blame the Human Rights Act for their failings as their political masters.

Reading Bridge’s report one cannot fail to be struck by the extent to which it offers a rather political commentary on the circumstances of the release of Anthony Rice, most strikingly in this passage in the final section section of the report:

If our analysis of how Anthony Rice came to be released is accepted, some people will ask: “Does this happen in other cases too?” The answer is possibly yes. We know that over the last 15 years there has been a series of test cases and judgments that have eroded the Home Secretary’s powers to determine release decisions for lifers by executive action. We observe that life-sentenced prisoners now have the right to be heard and to be represented at Parole Board panel hearings. We note that they are regularly represented by counsel, while the interests of the public, victims, and Home Secretary are represented by a Prison Service official. In this context we are not alone in identifying the increasing challenge for all involved in managing offenders to ensure that public protection considerations are not undermined by the human rights considerations of each case.

Yes, the Home Secretary’s executive powers in relation to release decisions for individuals serving discretionary life sentences have diminished over the last fifteen years as a consequence of judicial rulings, the main body of which either pre-date the introduction of the Human Rights Act or, as with the present legal constraints on deportation of foreign nationals, derive from rulings made in the European Court of Human Rights and not by a UK Court acting on the provisions of the Human Rights Act - and with good reason. In handing down these rulings, what the courts have correctly recognised is that the practice of assigning responsibility for judicial decisions on the release of prisoners from custody to a politician is entirely inappropriate and inconsistent with the demands of a fair and equitable criminal justice in which individual cases are treated entirely on merit. It should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that the practice of assigning responsibility in such matters to a politician introduces an unacceptable conflict of interest into the consideration of exactly how long a prisoner should be detained, having been given a discretionary life sentence, and when they should be considered eligible for release - in short it is all too easy for a politician to be swayed in their judgment by the question of how a decision to release a particular individual might play in the press and whether it might leave them open to a charge of being ’soft on crime’ from political opponents, rather than treat such a case sole on its merits, a risk that increases substantially in cases where a prisoner has attracted particular public notoriety.

Bridge’s reference to the powers of the Home Secretary having been ‘eroded’ is, to say the least, unfortunate and gives a wholly biased view of the actual situation; one in which the authority of the system in dealing with the release of prisoners from discretionary life sentence has not been eroded at all, merely transferred from a politician (the Home Secretary) to an independent body (the Parole Board) - in fact his central complaint throughout seems to be that the buck has been passed to a system that is currently ill-equipped to cope with such complex and difficult decisions and that it is, therefore, somehow unfair to expect the Parole Board and Probation Service to ‘carry the can’ for its failings this case. To be fair, this may not be quite what Bridges intended - one cannot entirely tell - but it is certainly what has been made of his report over the last few days and, as such, he has to be bear some responsibility for what is, at best, a lack of care in his choice of how to present certain matters; for example the passage cited above could be readily interpreted as a call for the restoration of the Home Secretary’s executive powers in relation to the release of prisoners serving life sentences despite the fact that what is actually required to address many, if not most, of the ‘legal’ issues raised in the report is merely that the system ensure that such decisions are dealt with by a competent authority.

In actual fact, the obvious and, to my mind, most effective response to that Bridges raises here would be simply to ensure that the interests of the ‘the public, victims, and Home Secretary’ are also represented by legal counsel, ensuring a level playing field for both sides, although whether this would have assisted in this particular case is another matter entirely, given the main problem here was the failure to adequately assess the risk that Rice continued to pose, even after 15-16 years in prison.

Bridges’ report seems, to me at least, to consistently overplay the significance of the Human Rights Act in relation to this case and as a result one cannot quite shake the feeling that there is more to this than meets the eye. There is a growing culture both within and outside the criminal justice system which seems to hold that ‘it’s because of the Human Rights Act’ is an acceptable response to any and ever criticism of the system’s failure to live up to public expectations ranging from release of prisoners who constitute a risk to the public to the failure of community police to stop kids playing football in the street - yes, I have actually been a community meeting where a police officer has cited the Human Rights Act in response to just such a question from one householder.

Only today the Sun leads with the usual screaming headline ‘Raped by the Law’ as a result of a case in which a now convicted rapist carried out one of the attacks for which he has been sentence to life imprisonment after being freed on bail while awaiting for two other attacks, and while the Sun’s report makes no direct reference to the Human Rights Act - it’s not as if such cases didn’t happen before the Act was introduced, there have been bad calls on bail applications for as long as the system has existed - the Sun still manages to implicitly link this case by running the following two ‘Sun Says’ editorials one after the other:

Crime Chaos

AS CRIME statistics go, they are truly terrifying.

Each month, 7,846 criminals on probation are committing an average 10,206 new offences.

Worse still, the true figures are likely to be even HIGHER as these numbers refer only to crimes that have been solved.

What is the point of releasing prisoners supposedly under the watchful eye of the probation service if they carry on murdering, raping and robbing?

The Home Office has forgotten it is supposed to protect the public from violent criminals.

If our prisons are too full, there’s a simple solution: Build more.

Former probation officer David Fraser, who has written a book on the crisis, warns: “The service is supervising offenders who are engaged in a constant orgy of re-offending. Why does the Government allow this to continue?”

It’s a good question.

One which new Home Secretary John Reid needs to answer.

Before he sorts out this sorry mess.

And…

Time to Act

AT LAST Tony Blair admits he needs to do something about the ludicrous Human Rights Act.

He wants the Government to have the power to overturn judges’ barmy rulings where a criminal’s so-called rights come ahead of their victim’s.

The PM says this is one of his “most urgent policy tasks”.

He’s not kidding.

While this is certainly a step in the right direction, we’ll wait to see if these pledges turn to action.

And rest assured, The Sun will continue to fight for the scrapping of this disgraceful piece of legislation.

Obviously the full significance of permitting politicians to overrule a decision taken by a court - political interference in judicial matters being one of the hallmarks of a totalitarian state - is completely beyond the understanding of Rebekah Wade et al.

It is categorically not the ‘Human Rights culture’ that British citizen’s should be concerned about but the growing anti-Human Rights culture that is being spread by the media, politicians and public servants, a culture that is based on the lie that our fundamental rights and liberties can be neatly packaged and parceled up into contending ‘rights for foreigners/criminals, etc’ and the rights of everyone else - the two are one and the same as people will inevitably find out the hard way if we permit things to continues down the road that politicians and the press seem, currently, to be set upon.

At times like this we would all do well to remember the words of Pastor Martin Niemoller*

When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church — and there was nobody left to be concerned.

* This version of Niemoller’s oft-quoted speech appears in the Congressional Record, 14, October 1968, page 31636, which appears to be the only contemporaneous record of his having made this statement. However even the accuracy of this version has been disputed by an employee of the US House of Representatives who claims that "stuff is just put into it [the Congressional Record] by Members of Congress and is not checked for accuracy, or even truth.".

It seems likely that Niemoller gave this speech on several occasions - why waste a good line - giving rise to these variations on his central theme.

The first part of Tim’s weekly dose of bloggy goodness (Britblog Review #65) is available for perusal, from which I find my attention drawn to Suzblog’s comments on the decision of the Appeal Court to rule in favour of the government’s attempts to remove Brian Haw from Parliament Square:

The issue is not his protest but the location and the condition of the area after all these years. He often uses a loud-hailer to shout views at MPs and passers-by. With his placard-strewn campsite, the place is an eyesore and in the hot weather quite pongy. At times the noise is quite deafening. Have to admit, I always walk on the opposite side of the road when going past the area. I feel so embarrassed by the image this ugly looking protest portrays to foreign visitors in front of the British Parliament.

So, while everyone else has been concerned over the civil liberties aspects of this case and the dramatic and unwarranted curbs that SOCAP 2005 has placed on the rights of British citizens to mount peaceful protests in Parliament Square, Susanne is far more concerned that Brian’s protest lacks a can of fucking Oust and a set of chintz fucking curtains.

Hilariously, Susanne’s previous post bewails the Lib Dems loss of control of Islington Council during the recent local authority elections with the time honoured cry of "Where did it go wrong?" - work with me on this Susanne but I rather suspect it might have just a little something to do with morons like you who think the opinions of bunch of lard-assed American tourists more important than our own civil liberties.

I see it business as usual…

Reid: Bombers never blamed Iraq

Home Secretary John Reid has rejected suggestions London bomber Sidique Khan blamed his actions on the Iraq war.

Mr Reid was asked if ministers wished to avoid a public inquiry because they feared it would fuel a debate about Iraq being a motive of the bombers.

He said Iraq had not been mentioned in the bombers’ wills or testaments.

In his testament Khan said: "Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetrate atrocities against my people all over the world."

Mr Reid told the BBC: "If there had been any mention of Iraq from any of the bombers any where in the last will and testament of Khan in the Al Jazeera video which he made - that wouldn’t have been hidden, couldn’t have been hidden.

"The truth is it wasn’t mentioned."

Oh for fuck’s sake John - do you really honestly think that we’re all such a bunch of half-wit knuckle-dragging Sun-reading cunts that we’re incapable of recognising, by simple and obvious inference, that the statement that:

"Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetrate atrocities against my people all over the world."

Is an implied reference to us having invaded Iraq, in addition to having ousted the Taleban from power in Afgahnistan and sitting idly by - in his opinion- and doing nothing about the situation in Palestine.

Just what fucking ‘atrocities’ do think he’s talking about here, if not those? Putting fucking gherkins on the McDonalds Halal Burger with Cheese?

UPDATE - Gah! Having posted this I realised immediately that I could have given this a much better title given the McDonald’s gag and the obvious blind spot that the Government have when it comes to the role of the Iraq war as a recruiting seargeant for extremists - should have gone the Nelson route and called this ‘I see no chips’.

I am deeply endebted to Leo McKinistry, as author of the Thunderer column in today’s Times, for providing the following example of complete and utter illiberal crap, which I present today for your general edification - with annotatations, naturally

MR JUSTICE SULLIVAN is lucky he is not facing a prosecution for perverting the course of justice after his extraordinary decision to give a bunch of Afghan hijackers the right to settle in Britain. The High Court judge’s ludicrous ruling makes a mockery of the law, treats the public with contempt and sends out the message that our country is a haven for gun-toting hostage-takers.

Actually it does nothing of the sort; Mr Justice Sullivan’s ruling concerns the correct application of UK immigration law in line with Britain’s duties in International, European and UK law in respect of refugees/asylum seekers, but we’ll let that pass for the moment and see what else Leo has to say…

Any normal, morally self-confident system would hold that a gangster who smuggles guns and explosives on to a plane and then threatens to kill all the passengers had abnegated any claim to have his human rights treated seriously. But our bewigged, complacent judges seem to inhabit an alternative moral universe, a place of legalistic quibbling and abstract theorising, where all common sense has been abandoned and the rights of foreign criminals are given priority over the interests and security of the public.

Leo has clearly forgotten the circumstances in which this hijacking took place. The nine Afghan nationals to which this ruling relates, hijacked an internal flight in February 2000, which was eventually flown to the UK, via Moscow, landing at Stansted Airport where, after four days of negotiations all passengers and crew on the plane were released unharmed.

The actual hijackers were arrested, tried and, subsequently, convicted for the hijacking, receiving sentences of between 5 years and 27 months, which may seem rather lenient, however in handing down sentence Judge Sir Edwin Jowatt had this to say about the case:

The judge conceded the initial hijacking "was brought about by fear of death at the hand of a tyrannical, unreasoning and merciless regime".

He said: "This was a case which was different to other hijacking cases.

"I accept you were fleeing Afghanistan in fear for your own lives."

He added: "But for that the sentences for all of you would be much longer."

BBC News Online - 18 Jan 2002

Any morally self-confident society would consider the circumstances leading up to the hijack to provide considerable mitigation for their actions - it does not excuse but it does explain and in terms with which any reasonable person could, and should empathise - it should be noted that of the 150 Afghan passengers taken hostage during the hijack, 60 claimed asylum on release.

The nine hijackers susbsequently appealed against their convictions, which were quashed in July 2004, when the Appeal Court ruled that the original trial judge had misdirected the jury in the application of the principle of ‘duress’ - a technicality, yes, but an important one. However due to time it took to hear the appeal, all but two of nine had served out their sentences without - as far as I can ascertain - without incident and equally I can find no suggestion anywhere that any of these men have been involved in any further criminal conduct since the hijacking itself.

These men are not gangsters, and while one cannot condone their actions in hijacking the plane, one can legitimate ask the question of what you would have done had you have been in their situation - would you hijack a plane if you were in fear for your life and it was the only way you could see to escape from a brutal and murderous regime like the Taleban.

This is, as the judges who have dealt with this case throughout have stressed, an exceptional case dealing with exceptional events - and not a matter of simple criminality.

Indeed, it is sometimes hard to know whose side the civic authorities are on. Citizens are constantly bullied and threatened with imprisonment for driving too fast, failing to pay a TV licence, falling behind with the council tax, dropping a crisp packet or holding unfashionable views about cultural diversity and homosexuality.

What a wonderful euphemism we have at the end of this sentence - ‘holding unfasionable views about cultural diversity and homosexuality’ - or to put it more simply - ‘being a racist, homophobic twat’.

Yet a gang of Afghan Muslims, without any connection to Britain, can hijack a plane and threaten mass murder, only to find themselves rewarded not only with the right to live here, but also with a string of welfare benefits. It is estimated that the British taxpayer has been forking out at least £150,000 a year to feed and house the hijackers while their legal cases were processed. In total, more than £10 million, including the usual exorbitant legal fees, has been spent on this wretched gang.

There are several points to pick up from this paragraph.

First, having a prior connection to a particular country is not a pre-requisite for seeking asylum in that country and never has been - or perhaps Leo believes we should only accept asylum-seekers from Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

To be granted asylum is not a ‘reward’ for their having carried out a hijacking - the two are entirely separate matters. Nor is their entitlement to welfare benefits a reward either - they have had no choice but to claim benefits due to the government’s decision to hold them on what amounts to an indeterminate residency status, which denies them the right to work - this is a classic ‘you can’t have it both ways’ situation, if you are going to deny asylum-seekers the right to work and earn a living for themselves then you can’t complain about them receiving benefits. The same argument applies in respect of the legal costs incurred in this case - if you deny people the right to work then you really have no ground for complaint when they claim legal aid, unless you believe that foreigners should not be accorded the basic right to adequate legal representation and are happy to undermine one of the core principles of the British justice system.

This grim saga encapsulates so much that has gone wrong with the governance of Britain: pathetically short sentences for criminals; lawyers earning a fortune by parading their synthetic compassion; epic welfare profligacy; and thugs laughing at our craven surrender to their brutality.

Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

Tony Blair is now ranting against the judiciary, but his Government is largely to blame for making such a fetish of human rights, symbolised by the Human Rights Act 1998 that acted as the catalyst for this judicial revolution. Only a fortnight ago, Mr Blair promised to “hassle, harry and hound” foreign criminals out of the country. How laughably hollow those words now look.

And, as usual the Human Rights Act gets the blame - except that all HRA 1998 actually does in encapsulate in the UK law, the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is binding on the UK anyway.

The net effect of the Human Right Act, which Leo clearly fails to, or refuses to, understand is merely to speed up access to justice and reduce the costs incurred in human rights cases by enabling the vast majority of them to heard within the UK system, rather than have them go to the European Court of Human Right, where proceeding take considerable longer and costs are substantially greater.

In this case the Government is to blame, not for making a fetish of human right but for failing to deal with these nine men fairly, equitably and within the law. Instead they chose to concoct an ad-hoc system which appears to have been pretty much pulled out of the collective arses of the Home Office, in irder to deal with these men - a system which has rightly been ruled unlawful.

Ultimately, this is not a matter of human rights but a simple matter of justice - these men were arrested, tried, convicted and served time in prison for having hijacked a plane to get to the UK - in all but two case, the time spent on remand and in prison following their initial conviction more than adequately covered the sentences they were given, long before those convictions were overturned on appeal.

These men have already been punished, in accordance with the law, for their part in the hijacking in 2000, so how is justice to be served by punishing them a second time by repatriating them to a country who President has authority only in so far as the boundaries of its capital city, where corruption is rife, where the rule of law has but a tenuous hold and where the very people that these men were fleeing from, the Taleban, continue to murder and maim seemingly at will across large sections of the country.

If one is to blame the government for anything, it is for being too ready and too inclined to give credence to the illiberal, venomous and xenophobic media rantings of reactionary twats, like Leo McKinisitry, rather than stand up for civilised values and plain, old fashioned justice.

Time and again in recent times, the judiciary have weathered the storm of such rantings and done what is right, proper and in the best interests of British justice, while the real hijackers of British justice - the Home Office, The Mail, Sun and Express - go largely unpunished.

*Actually the article is 391 words in length, but 400 sounds better as a title.

I’ve pondered for some time on putting forward a more considered and comprehensive response to the publication of the Euston Manifesto, which, as you might expect, I won’t be signing, but its taken this piece from Rob Newman to finally stir me of the general sense of torpor that accompanied its publication.

Tempting as it is to barrel heading into an exercise in picking holes in the manifesto itself, which I found to be rather bromidic exercise in intellectual prolixity, I think it much more interesting to look at some of the commentary put forward by its supporters, since publication, as much of this serve to crystalise my reasons for steering clear of the manifesto and some of those who profess to be its most enthuiastic supporters.

Perhaps it’s best to start by tackling on of the central and most misleading contentions put forward by some of the ‘Eustonites’, most notably here by John Lloyd:

The war in Iraq dramatised, but did not of itself cause, a split in the left - one which is becoming more pronounced with every passing day. Much of the left took the view that the American-British invasion of Iraq was wrong; a significant part of that saw the reason for the war as stemming from, or containing, one or more of the following elements: A rampant American imperialism; a move to control Middle East oil supplies; a strategy dictated by US support for Israel - or dictated by the "Jewish lobby" and/or by Israel itself; Islamophobia; and (on the part of the UK) a poodle-like dependence on the US.

Opposition to some or all of these has increasingly defined much of the left, especially the further left. In the centre-left and in political, intellectual and media opinion generally, a diluted version of that view is popular, one that implicitly or explicitly sees the Iraqi events as at best a series of blinders.

This is perhaps the single greatest fallacy promulgated by some of the manifesto’s supporter, the idea that ‘the left’ can be neatly divided up and packaged into two contending ideological camps - ‘the decents’ and ‘the stoppers’ - with all other divergent left-wing opinions being either, at best,  irrelevant or, at worst, a shallow reflection of the position adopted by the stoppers.

Such a markedly oversimplistic view of left-wing atttitudes to the invasion of Iraq is simply breathtaking in its intellectual conceit - it seems that to be considered part of the left these days, one must absolutely have an adjective or one is entirely unworthy of consideration.

In reality, the real situation is very different to that suggested by some of the core Eustonites - both they, the self-styled ‘decents’ and their mortal enemies, the Respect/SWP-led ’stoppers’, are mere vocal minorities within a broad canon of left-wing thought in which the mainstream is increasingly turnign away from blind adherence to ideology and adopting a rationalist worldview under which events, such as the invasion of Iraq, are considered and evaluated in terms of the actuality of the situation at hand and not merely on matters of abstract principle.

The Iraq war has not dramatised the ideological schism between the ‘decents’ and the ’stoppers’ - that schism, in various guises, happened long ago, certainly as far back as the 1930s and 40s - hence the rather quaint if all-too-often trritating over-depedence on the rhetoric of that era exhibited by some of the more prominant ‘decents’ when mounting a typically polemical attack on their mortal intellectual enemies.

Someone has to say this, so I guess it might as well be me - Stalin’s been dead for near 50 years, Mao Zedong’s been pushing up daisies for 30 and outside of the realms of the ‘decents’ and the ’stoppers’ most people simply swtich off at the point that each camp starts berating the other for being ‘apologists’ of some variety or other, except, maybe, for those few hardy souls who are sufficient well-versed in Orwell’s political essays - particularly ‘Notes on Nationalism’ - to observe that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Both the ‘decents’ and the ’stoppers’ display all the core characteristics that Orwell identified in his essay as belonging to ‘Nationalism’ - using, of course, Orwell’s extended defintition of the term. Indeed, if read (or perhaps re-reads) this essay and takes particular note of Orwell commentary on the Trotskyists of his day, one is hard pressed not to arrive at the conclusion that there is some curious quantum theory of left-wing politics at work in the relationship between the decents and the stoppers, so closely does each provide a mirror image of the other - for ’stoppers’ and ‘decents’, read ‘Trots’ and ‘Anti-Trots’, which turns out to be a rather unsurprising inversion of the Communist/Trotkyist schism of the 1930s when one notes that amongst the leading lights of the ‘decent’ camp one finds a fair old number of ex-Communists and recanting Marxists.

That being said, it may well be the case that a schism does emerge from the aftermath of the Iraq war, not between the ‘decents’ and the ’stoppers’ but between an overtly ideological/utopian minority, which encompasses both, and a mainstream ‘rational’ left which, quite frankly, is getting sick and tired of being lectured about principles it well understands and labelled as lackies and ‘useful idiots’ by the ideologues for simply daring to think things through for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions on the many rights and wrongs of a complex situation like Iraq.

As I mentioned at the start of this piece, it was a number of comments made by Rob Newman that finally shook me out of my previously torpid state on this subject, not least of which the comment given below:

I find that the manifesto is about a reaction to two things: hypocrisy, and betrayal. Those are both strong terms, but I think they are justified. The hypocrisy is that practiced by those who, for instance, supported the first Gulf War to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait — in identical language to that latterly used by Tony Blair to justify the 2003 invasion — but switched position to condemn the second Gulf conflict, and to call Blair a liar. This is tied in with the general feeling of anti-Americanism that has infected a great deal of the liberal Left. Diane Abbott was at the meeting last night and rejected the notion that opposition to the war equated to anti-Americanism; but the commentary which has been bandied around about the war and about Euston gives the lie to that. (For instance, consider the familiar argument: "We should go to war in Iraq." "No we shouldn’t — and Donald Rumsfeld met Saddam Hussein twice! The US supported Saddam against Iran!" etc.)

Rob’s comments here are fairly typical of the kind of gross oversimplifications and distortions that have been, and still are, in all too common usage in ‘decent’ circles and which serve primarily to support their mischaracterisation of what is the mainstream oppositional view of the Iraq War.

Rob’s charge of hypocrisy stands up only is one presumes that overall situation in relation to Iraq remained largely static between the Gulf War of 1990 and the 2003 invasion - this is neither my view nor the view prevalent amongst the majority of those who opposed the latter war. The 1990 war was predicated on Iraq’s violation of one of the clearest principles in international law, the sovereignty of an independent nation state. This entirely justified both the action taken to expel Iraq forces from Kuwait and, under international law, would have also justified the prosecution of that war to its logical end, the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in order that he be brought before a war crimes tribunal - it seems to have been rather forgotten that the Nuremburg Tribunals, upon whose judgements are founded many of the core principles of modern international law, held, even in the face of dealing with the atrocities of the holocaust, that the single most heinous of all crimes against humanity was the unjustified and unlawful prosecution of war, itself.

Of course, the coalition of the day stopped short of removing Saddam from power, a decision primarily predicated on wider foreign policy considerations of which probably the most significant was the understanding that inevitable consequence removing the Ba’athist regime at that time - and maybe even now - would be an Iraq dominated by its Shi’a majority and directly aligned with Iran. This also explains why the US, in particular, deigned to support the Shi’a uprising in the south of Iraq that followed the first Gulf War, the irony of this being that the crimes for which Saddam is currently standing trial occurred during this very period and as direct consequence of his being permitted to put down the Shi’a revolt without intervention from the US-led coalition of the time.

I’m getting a little off the point here, so to pull things back it is enought to repeat that a charge of hypocrisy stands up only if one views the two wars as being fundamentally interconnected and predicated on a single sequence of events. If, on the contrary, one sees marked and very obvious difference between the situation as it existed in 1990 and that which existed in the run-in to the 2003 invasion, then one is no way hypocritical in having supported the Gulf War only then to oppose the more recent invasion as one see each as being very different events which took place for very different reasons. More than that, I would certainly contend that only if one subscribes to vastly oversimplified and static view of the strategic and political situation in the region during the period between 1990/91 and 2003 or if one disregards such things and places near eclusive emphasis on a single factor - as many ‘decents’ are wont to do in claiming that the 2003 invasion was justified solely on the need to remove Saddam to the exclusion of all other considerations - is it then possible to view both wars as part of single and uniform sequence of events.

What ideologues would consider hypocrisy, rationalists would consider to be merely a reflection of a complex and volatile situation that has changed markedly in the twelve years between the two wars.

Beyond this, Rob’s comments on ‘anti-Americanism’ are to say the least, glib, tendentious and an all too obvious straw-man, one that follows much the same pattern that has been all too evident in relation to Israel, where valid criticism of government policy and actions undertaken by the state have been deliberately conflated into what has then been presented as invalid and generic attack on the nation as a whole. Just as when one criticises the Israeli government for its actions one all too often runs the risk of being labelled ‘anti-Semitic’, so it seems one now faces the same risk if one criticises the present US adminsitration or even a single member of that administration - although, curiously enough, this same notion of ‘attack one, attack all’ which denies the possibility of making a clear distinction between America (or indeed, Israel) as a whole and incumbent administration at a particular moment in time seems not to apply on occasions where the ‘decents’ are talking about Islamic terrorism Islam, where it seems the distinction between Islam and Islamism is so clear-cut and obvious as to be immediately obvious to all.

Now that, I think, could more justifiably and accurately be considered hypocrisy, unless it is merely intellecual snobbery in which its a assumed that only those on the ‘decent’ left are capable of making, understanding and adequately expressing distinctions of this kind.

I have to say that I know of no one, certainly amongst 150-200 bloggers who’s work I regularly read, whose judgement of the rights and wrongs of the 2003 invasion is based on anything so crude and simplistic as Donald Rumsfeld having once shaken Saddam’s hand or the role adopted by the US in supporting Iraq’s war on Iran with arms sales. Such matters have certainly been cited as evidence of the US administrations hypocrisy in its stance towards Iraq, givng rise to understandable moral opprobrium, but not as conclusive grounds for opposing the war. Logically, if one opposed the war solely on the grounds that Iraq and the US once found common cause in their mutual opposition to Iran then one must take the view that the US should not have invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein because one believes that nothing has changed in the intervening years and that the US should still considered Iraq an ally - this is patently absurd and not a position I have seen expressed anywhere.

I’ll leave things there for now with the general observation that it is difficult, if not impossible, to ascribe any real credibility to the manifesto and, in particular its supporters, in circumstances in which the view they present of ‘the left’ amounts to a gross distortion of the truth about the real nature of the majority of left-wing opposition to the Iraq war, which for me, is one of the primary reasons why I cannot sign the manifesto - after all whether I agree with any of its its principles is immaterial as within the overall view of left-wing political thought being promoted by some of its supporters I don’t seem to have an adjective and therefore don’t exist.

I will return to the manifesto in due course, not least as someone, perhaps perversely, enjoys unravelling the complexities of foreign policy, in addition to having been well schooled in understand the principles of realpolitik, I want to look in more detail at the viability of the concept of humanitarian intervention and the Eustonites notion of a ‘new internationalism’, not least in the context of holding a commitment to the ‘historical truth’.