Alistair Campbell and the Iraq War inquiry
It’s difficult not to feel the sensation of deja vu when you see Alastair Campbell once again holding forth, defiantly as ever, before a cringing committee of the great and good tasked with supposedly wringing the truth out of him.
That they’d have more chance of draining red viscous fluid from a hard inanimate object is ever the unspoken reality.
It is also touching though, almost heart-warming to see just how loyal Blair’s ever faithful spin doctor remains to his former boss. Blair after all feels no such compunction to keep up the pretence that Iraq was all about the weapons of mass destruction and not the re-ordering of things while the pieces were still in flux, admitting as he did to that noted Rottweiler Fern Britton that he would have invaded even if he had known that there were no WMDs.
Christopher Meyer, the ambassador to Washington at the time, made clear in his evidence that he felt the government never resisted the march to war once it was clear that the US was going to take action regardless of anything or anyone else.
At various points, Campbell’s evidence made you wonder whether his stubbornness to admit almost any mistake is not in fact borne of his continuing loyalty to Blair, but in fact that he has to keep telling both himself and the world how he got everything right while everyone else has repeatedly got it wrong in order to convince himself that he is still on the side of the angels.
Hence he’ll defend “every single word” of the dossier and almost anything which contradicts his evidence is a conspiracy theory, like the Guardian report of yesterday which suggested that he changed a part of the dossier to bring it into line with a claim made by Dick Cheney.
It is though perhaps instructive to compare how we conduct inquiries with the Dutch. Previously the government of the Netherlands resigned after a damning report into the Dutch military’s failures at Srebrenica.
By coincidence, their own inquiry today into their role in the Iraq war has concluded that it was illegal, as UN resolution 1441 could not be used as a mandate for armed conflict.
Back here, we’re still regarding Alastair Campbell as though he’s a reliable witness. One suspects that the Chilcott inquiry’s conclusions won’t be anywhere near as incisive.
BBC admits not being tough enough on BNP
The BBC has admitted Radio 1 was not tough enough when it interviewed two senior British National Party members who said footballer Ashley Cole was “not ethnically British”.
The BBC’s editorial complaints unit has ruled that the programme should not have allowed the pair to appear anonymously, and should have more strongly challenged their concept of British ethnicity.
The interview, broadcast on the station’s Newsbeat programme last year, introduced the men as “two young guys who are members of the BNP”, when in fact they were Mark Collett, the party’s publicity director, and Joseph Barber, in charge of the BNP record label, Great White Records.
During the two-minute interview, conducted by Newsbeat reporter Debbie Randle, Collett and Barber said that Cole, married to singer and The X Factor judge Cheryl Cole, was not “ethnically British”, and spoke of him “coming to this country”, even though he was born in London.
Boris fights with Osborne over bankers’ bonuses
Boris Johnson picked a fight with Shadow Chancellor George Osborne yesterday in signalling to the Conservatives that he wanted the tax on bankers bonuses scrapped if they got into power.
The tax is only meant to last for a year but according to the Daily Mail it could be worth up to £5 billion to Britain’s treasury.
Bankers pay packages are also under assault with the new 50% income tax rate on earnings over £150,000. Boris opposes the 50% tax too.
He claims the tax will encourage bankers to leave London but there is no actual evidence of large-scale movement.
A comment on the Daily Mail website summed it up:
I wish Boris would fight as hard for the rest of us as he does for the bankers.
None of the top-rated comments on the Daily Mail website were sympathetic to the bankers.
Campaigners – get your hands off our lunchboxes
The process of producing a good lunchbox is one of trial and error; claim & counter-claim; constant negotiation between producer and customer. My brother and I weren’t easy customers to please.
For a few years we were quite happy with Dairylea in our sandwiches, until we discovered that Dairylea was cheese, and ‘Mum, we don’t like cheese!‘ We went our separate ways after that: Jon took a shine to ham & tomato ketchup; I developed a thing for Bernard Matthews turkey slices, which she sprinkled with salt and sprayed with barbeque sauce.
But it was always the deserts which caused the most angst. Did we want Wagon Wheels or Chocolate Rolls? Jam Tarts or Fondant Fancies? Yoghurt or fromage frais? How do you keep yoghurt cool without resorting to an ice pack which’ll make your sandwich soggy?
Were it not for love, my mother wouldn’t have bothered. Each tacky little Tupperware box we carried to school was an expression of devotion, and that she constantly evolved the menu to serve our fickle tastes was a sign that she wanted to send us to school with something from her to us.
continue reading… »
Climate activists fined for targetting lobbyists
Two London residents have been fined £400 by Westminster Magistrates Court for protesting against the International Chamber of Commerce in London last month.
The activists from climate camp – Alex Wood and Emma Hughes – dressed as robbers and attempted to peacefully blockade the head offices of the International Chamber of Commerse, holding a banner reading ‘ICC: Internatinal Climate Criminals’.
They said that the organisation, which represents the world’s biggest businesses, had tried to stop any succesful deal at the Copenhagen Climate Conference last month.
Charity worker Emma Hughes said, after the case:
Although the court charged us, today the International Chamber of Commerse are the real criminals. It was big business who undermined the deal at Copenhagen, and, in doing so, our future
From a press release
Watch: Alistair Campbell at Iraq Inquiry
Police anti-terror ‘stop and search’ overruled
Police powers to use terror laws to stop and search people without grounds for suspicion are illegal, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled. The Strasbourg court has been hearing a case involving two people stopped near an arms fair in London in 2003.
It said that Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinton’s right to respect for a private and family life was violated. Home Office Minister David Hanson MP said he was “disappointed” and would considering whether to appeal.
…
Speaking to BBC Radio 4′s The World At One, Ms Quinton said she hoped the ruling would lead to the government drawing up a “fairer body of legislation to protect us”.
“It’s not about saying that there’s no need for stop and search. What we’re really saying is people have a right to privacy and there needs to be a balance between police powers to ensure our safety but also our rights to a private life.”
Amnesty International today issued a press release stating:
The UK government must scrap abusive, discriminatory and unlawful powers that allow the police to stop and search without reasonable suspicion, Amnesty International said today after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that their use was illegal.
The European court has been hearing a case involving two protesters, Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinton, who were stopped near a protest against an arms fair in London in 2003 by police acting under the 2000 Terrorism Act, which allows senior officers to authorise stop and search procedures without reasonable suspicion.
The Court ruled that their right to respect for a private and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated.
Daily Mail hypocrisy in slamming Swine Flu ‘scare machine’
Six months ago Britain’s tabloids were tolling the bell of a looming Armageddon.
The Daily Mail headlines ranged from IS SWINE FLU ALREADY HERE?; and SWINE FLU: IT’S GETTING SERIOUS, to SWINE FLU NOW THE BATTLE TO CONTAIN IT, and KILLER FLU IS HERE.
And that’s without counting the paper’s first page warnings that “65,000 could die [and] one in three could get infected”, printed in the 7 July 2009 edition.
So you will excuse us if we laughed out loud this morning when the same paper published what is already on course as the most ridiculous article of 2010, a faux-outraged piece by Christopher Booker that states: After this awful fiasco over swine flu, we should never believe the State scare machine again!
continue reading… »
It’s not class war, Dave, it’s just character building…
Does it really matter that that David Cameron is an Eton-educated scion of the aristocracy whose entirely life history has been one of relative privilege and ease?
According to some people, especially Tories, such a characterisation of David Cameron is not only unfair but entirely unjustified and tantamount to engaging in crude class warfare. To refer critically to his privileged background, upbringing and education is to label him a toff and expose your own deep-seated class prejudice.
Personally, I think that’s a complete load of old rot.
Cameron’s privileged background does matter but not because he’s a toff; the flaws and limitations he’s starting to exhibit are by no means the sole preserve of the aristocracy and its offspring. Rather its because, like Tony Blair, who’s own road to high office followed a trajectory that was, in many important respects, similar to that which Cameron is now traversing; Cameron is showing worrying signs of being a dilettante, of being the just the kind of Oxbridge-educated ex-public schoolboy for whom the veneer imparted by his upbringing and education masks a deep-seated lack of intellectual rigour.
It matters because life, for David Cameron, has been, for the most part, far too easy and far too short on genuine adversity and the kinds of difficult personal experiences that, once upon a time, would have been universally referred to as ‘character building’. continue reading… »
Watch: Why can’t our media ask these Qs?
A presenter on American news channel MSNBC criticises US Treasury secretary Tim Geithner for letting big US banks off the hook for “taking taxpayers for a ride” by evading closer scrutiny and paying executive hundreds of millions in compensation.
The British media has, in contrast, completely failed to reflect popular anger over bankers bonuses and the continuing collusion between the political class and the financial sector.
Watch:
Belatedly reflecting some of that popular anger, President Obama today announced he would, “try to recoup for taxpayers as much as $120 billion of the money spent to bail out the financial system, most likely through a tax on large banks.
The report adds:
A bipartisan commission charged with reporting on the causes of the financial crisis will begin a two-day hearing on Wednesday with testimony from the heads of four big banks: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. Meanwhile, industry opposition continues to stymie the president’s initiative in Congress to tighten regulations.
Here, Boris Johnson has emerged as the biggest cheerleader of bankers and the financial sector.
via Huffington Post
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