Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Ken Livingstone will be among the key speakers at TUC Congress House on Saturday, where Sinn Féin is organising a conference on Irish unity.

Both Adams and Livingstone have alluded to the roots of the event in the dialogue which began back in 1982, shortly after Sinn Féin won its first seats in that year’s Assembly elections.

As GLC leader, Livingstone invited the party’s leaders to London only for them to be banned by Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

That invitation has played a central role in the right’s charge sheet against Livingstone ever since, but it is often forgotten that on his subsequent visit to Belfast in February 1983, he told republicans that “every time a bomb goes off in London or innocent civilians are killed in Northern Ireland it visibly puts back the cause of a united Ireland.”

The contacts established then went on to play a significant role in the peace process, with Livingstone acting as a key intermediary between Sinn Fein and Mo Mowlam in the mid-1990s.

The debates about Ireland in the 1980s raised issues that have resonated in more recent conflicts.
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There now seems little doubt that Mossad took out Hamas commander Mahmoud al Mabhouh, either with or without the complicity of other Palestinian elements. Yet astonishingly enough, the debate on the assassination somehow centres on alleged duplicitous use of British passports on the part of the Isrealis.

Effectively, the Israeli ambassador to London has been summoned to the Foreign Office for a bollocking, at which David Miliband will tell him: ‘Look, no problems with you lot bumping off that dodgy Pally bloke. But it’s just not on for your country’s hit squads to travel on fake UK papers, old chap. Don’t let us catch you doing it again.’

What is being missed here is the question of whether premeditated extrajudicial murder of specific individuals at the behest of a state can ever be morally legitimate, and whether or not it was morally legitimate in this instance.

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Radical politics, like romance, inevitably disappoints. It has become a cliché that liberal infighting gets in the way of liberal action, but this week has been a flashpoint for the British left, struggling to organise itself in the face of an upcoming election which may well bring greater gains for its enemies on the right and the far-right than the country has seen for a generation.

Fifty core members of provocative far-left group The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) resigned their membership yesterday in a dramatic public walkout that has sent shockwaves through the British far-left.

The catalyst for the walkout was the resignation of party stalwart and recent Mayoral candidate Lindsey German after members attempted to block her appearance at a local Stop The War meeting, amid ferocious internal debates.
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“It’s official: DC has changed the party!!!!!!!!”

So tweets Tory prospective parliamentary candidate Joanne Cash, who resigned on a Monday and un-resigned on Tuesday from the Westminster North candidacy, explaining that:

I did resign. Assoc did not accept. CCHQ has resolved specific issue so I am not leaving. It’s official DC has changed the party!!!!!!!!

Paul Waugh has a very full account of “the farcical scenes at the plush Commander gastropub” in a little local difficulty in which party chairman Eric Pickles, the hereditary deputy leader of the Tory peers Lord Strathclyde, David Cameron himself, Michael Gove and several other party luminaries were heavily involved.

The upshot appears to be that Cash’s one-day resignation has succeeded in removing her enemy in the local party – who was constituency chair and, ever so fleetingly, elected constituency president by the members.

Which raises the question: does the episode show how “DC has changed the party!!!!!!!!”?
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Tony Blair’s appearance at the Chilcot inquiry reminded us of the guy’s exceptionally slippery eel-like qualities.

Also, like Andrew Rawnsley remarked in Sunday’s Observer, the former PM’s job was made a lot easier by the “feeble” nature of the panel:

“Time and again, they approached an interesting subject area, stumbled around like people in the dark trying to find the light switch and then abandoned the quest without leaving themselves or anyone watching much the wiser about the most divisive war in the last century of our history”.

I don’t normally agree with Peter Hitchens, but he nailed it right on the head when he wrote:

“Mr Blair, questioned in a feeble and disorganised way, talked himself out of trouble by answering questions he hadn’t been asked and not answering the ones he was asked. His interrogators mostly didn’t notice this simple trick, which dishonest people instinctively use”.

All we learnt is that, after years of reasons for going to war mutating faster than the Sars virus (in succession, WMDs, violation of UN resolutions, Al Quaeda, human rights and ‘regime change’), we are now told that 9/11 was what really did it.

The former PM said: “The crucial thing after 9/11 is that the calculus of risk changed… After September 11, if you were a regime engaged in WMD (weapons of mass destruction), you had to stop.”

Yet, even if you agreed with this line of thought, it would only make sense if they’d held accountable each and every regime that was suspected of engaging in WMDs. You do it only with one and it’s like trying to contain a bursting dam with a brolly.

And, in any case, hadn’t the slippery christian said in the infamous Fern Britton interview that he’d have gone to war anyway regardless of WMDs?

Not to mention that no-one raised the simple straightforward objection that Iraq had jack to do with 9/11. If anything, a number of countries were far higher in the list of potential involvement. The hijiackers, for instance, were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. No evidence whatsoever existed of any link between Iraq and Al Quaeda.

The panel also failed when Blair was asked why he had insisted on a second UN resolution if he now thinks that the first one was enough to legally justify the war. They allowed him to slip out of that contradiction without further prodding.

Fair enough suspicion. Fair enough emotions running high. Fair enough the desire to appear tough before so-called rogue states. But can you raise raze an entire country to the ground purely on that basis – in the 21st century? Can you be so geo-politically inept and blind to the extra oil you’re going to pour on the flames? Can you play with so many people’s lives just like that, when the motivations are so hit and miss?

It has been years now that Tony Blair has been getting away with lame justifications such as “God will be my judge on Iraq“, “I did what I thought was right for the country“, or ” I believed in it. I believed in it then, I believe in it now“.

But you ask any prime minister, president, führer or member of a junta and they’d probably say, through history, that they too believed in what they thought was right. And that is just shit.

There’s a worrying tendency emerging in some sections of the left to cite China as a positive example for the UK.

At the Progressive London” conference, Ken Livingstone gave a speech in which he declared that the proof that government investment ends recessions lies in China’s staggering rates of state spending, and enormous correlate levels of growth.

Later, John Ross of Socialist Economic Bulletin (and Ken’s former economic adviser) took some time out from claiming that Britain’s national debt didn’t need to be repaid, that the triple-A rating is meaningless, and that all spending cuts are completely a choice and not imposed by brute economic circumstances, to cite China as proof-positive that government-led investment ends recessions. He waxed lyrical about China’s 9% growth in the last quarter, and how the Chinese government simply told banks to lend and – hey presto – they lent.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for keeping government spending as high as possible to protect the tentative recovery. But citing China as a model for UK growth is idiotic, and deeply troubling.
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I haven’t been paying too much attention to the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry, largely because I’m cynically assuming it’s going to return a verdict of Whoops, 100% Accidental Bloodbath, Tut-Tut.

I am, however, loving the reactions it’s bringing out around the internet.

Twittering anti-war lefty types seem to veer from cold suspicion to outbursts of wild optimism every time generic civil servant (x) makes a vague admission that yes, the case for war may possibly have been full of bullshit.

Why this should be, I have no idea. Obviously the case for war was crammed to bursting with bullshit, bulging and groaning at the seams. Hilariously though, this inquiry marks at least the third time that the British state has told the anti-war left that the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary, and the third instance of enthusiastic, puppy-eyed lefties saying Really? Surely not, rushing off to check the OED.

I imagine that Chilcot will cast Tony Blair as a shifty, pompous, dishonest twerp who sent the armed forces into a boiling disaster, much as an inquiry into Myra Hindley’s behaviour would probably raise doubts over her suitability for childminding duties. Sadly, the chances of it finding criminal culpability in the former PM’s aggressive warmaking are somewhere between jack and shit, and Jack just nipped into Ladbrokes to put a whopping great bet on a whitewash.

I guess this is my point – the question of the war’s legality is an enticing carrot for anti-war types to chase in perpetuity. I’m working on the assumption that for some, a fiery official condemnation would prove them right once and for all and force the nation to face reality, as if the last seven years weren’t quite real enough.

Whether Chilcot nails Blair’s balls to the floor or not, the war’s defenders are not about to throw up their hands in horror and join in the massive bout of Bodysnatchers-style finger-pointing and howling. There will be no Thank you protestors for being right about this epic clusterfuck after-show party.

A sizeable number of the war’s cheerleaders have cheerfully blown off its horrific consequences, from the Iraqi insurgents’ bloodbaths, through the sectarian death squads and the ensuing civil war and micro-partitioning of the country, by waving their hands and chanting the magical exculpatory incantation, Al-Qaeda terrorists ate our homework!

These people would rather cram their scrotums down their own throats than give an inch to Chilcot, and the odds of say, the Times, running a Sorry we fed you all lies editorial are woeful.

Further, regardless of the outcome, the former PM isn’t going to be clapped in irons, chained to a heavy radiator and thrown into the Thames. He’s going to continue shambling around the world jamming great fistfuls of dollars into his pockets in the full glare of the public eye.

No, the only service the inquiry can perform is to utterly expose the lunacy at the heart of our decision to join the Americans in their deranged Iraq enterprise, and to make sure the lesson is drummed into the public one more time, hard enough to prevent even partial repeats. Here’s a brief recap of exactly how we wound up taking part…

Let’s recall that the Americans invaded Iraq to fend off Iraqi aggression.

I’ll write that again, for clarity. The United States – the world’s only remaining superpower, with a defence budget of five hundred billion dollars per annum – invaded the castrated, two-soldiers-in-a-Fiat-Panda dictatorship of Iraq in self-defence.

Now, I can already hear the objections about Tony Blair’s humanitarian agenda, but none of that matters at all. Tony wasn’t in charge – the US was deploying the most terrifying military machine in history, and made it clear they could squash the Iraqi military like an asthmatic beetle without our help.

This was the Bush White House’s war, and they wouldn’t start babbling about painting schools and helping those poor women vote until the collapse of Iraq had turned the country into the Hammer House of Horror. Their justifications were the terrifying, anthrax-filled model planes that Saddam might use to genocide Dogdick, Alabama and those awful mushroom clouds that would be shaped like smoking guns, or whatever.

And the plan? The plan went like this – Invade Iraq = Freedom!

You know when you’ve got a suitcase that’s so full you can’t shut it, and you wedge everything down and shove a fork through the zipper and pull to no avail, and eventually two of your mates have to sit on the damn thing until you eventually get the bulging, straining case shut?

That is just how full of bullshit the case for war was.

The Americans were standing, pumped-up and raring to dive into the new Vietnam they’ve been looking for ever since they fled the original with their tails between their legs, loudly bellowing that they would totally have kicked those skinny pyjama guys asses, if their buddies hadn’t stopped them…

…And the former Prime Minister looked at this situation and thought, This looks like the kind of ultraviolent dipshit escapade I could really get my teeth into!

So there’s your one and only question for the PM on Friday – What the hell were you thinking, numbnuts?

Of course, we know the answer to that one, but I don’t think it’ll do the country any harm to hear Tony Blair spell out his reasoning, one more time.

“Any fight you’re going to have eventually, have it now… We should pick the time, not them”

…and a belated happy new year to Christopher Hitchens, who I’m starting to suspect is neither misguided nor a deluded optimist, but rather a brutal psychopath and a raving homicidal maniac.

The subject matter is, of course, the hated Iranian regime: aggressions and provocations by, and the tonnage of bombs we will have to drop on the Iranian populace in order to bring them the joy of freedom.

The tipple is Johnnie Walker Black Label, and the crimes of the mullahs – or the Revolutionary Guard, as Hitch now terms the Iranian regime – they go into countries where they’re not wanted, arm violent insurgent groups and militias, shoot protestors in the streets, send death squads to the other side of the planet, seek nuclear weapons and they torture, rape and disappear prisoners.

“The existence of such regimes is incompatible with us,” Hitchens says, with a straight face.
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Nick Cohen has not written anything on international issues for a while, but he was back on form in the Observer this week. “Opponents of the Iraq war are deluded if they think Chiclott will find the allied intervention was illegal” he thundered, The “central allegation that the second Iraq war was ‘illegal’ is unsustainable,” he concludes.

Uh huh.

An inquiry into the Netherlands’ support for the invasion of Iraq says it was not justified by UN resolutions. The Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said UN Security Council resolutions did not “constitute a mandate for… intervention in 2003″.

The inquiry was launched after foreign ministry memos were leaked that cast doubt on the legal basis for the war.

But what would they know, eh Nick.

Meanwhile the Economist has some reasonable questions for the inquiry to put to Tony Blair:

When they question Mr Blair about WMD, Sir John and his colleagues should concentrate on nuclear weapons—and in particular on the government’s assertion that Saddam might develop one “in between one and two years”. These nuclear allegations, which helped Mr Blair call the threat from Iraq “serious and current”, need further probing.

A second focus should be on how raw intelligence was changed. Mr Blair described as “extensive, detailed and authoritative” intelligence that was, in fact, patchy and old; he described conclusions that were speculative as “beyond doubt”. At the inquiry, Mr Campbell drew a distinction between shifting lines and paragraphs in dossiers and actually fabricating intelligence. . . . .

There is also a string of outstanding questions about the conduct and aftermath of the war. For instance, why did some British troops seem not to have been fully equipped for the task? . . . . Another concern is the increasingly vexed issue of when, precisely, Mr Blair committed British forces to the invasion—and whether he simultaneously said different things to George Bush and the British public. And why did he enter the war without much assurance that the Americans had a plan for post-war reconstruction?

As political leaders there is much more Barack Obama and Gordon Brown could be doing to help Haiti. Above all they must make sure that the disaster is not compiled by the cynical exploitation of the current crisis.

In an article for The Nation Richard Kim details how Haiti has been crippled by its indebtedness to Western powers.

Following Haiti’s liberation from the French in 1804 it was forced by 1825, under threat of embargo from France and other Western powers, to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners. It turned primarily to Germany and the US for help.

However, it has never escaped from this spiral of debt and also has been subjected to the imposition of ’structural adjustment policies’ by the World Bank and IMF.

All of which have contributed to Haiti being not just the poorest but also one of the most unequal societies in the Western hemisphere.
According to a report;

It is second only to Namibia in income inequality (Jadotte 2006) , and has the most millionaires per capita in the region. Margarethe Thenusla, a 34-year old factory worker and mother of two said, “When they ask for aid for the needy, you hear that they release thousands of dollars for aid in Haiti. But when it comes you can’t see anything that they did with the food aid. You see it in the market, they’re selling it. Us poor people don’t see it”.

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Edward McMillan-Scott MEP may take legal action against the Conservative Party after an internal appeal panel upheld his expulsion from the party.

He says his treatment went beyond that of any Conservative MP involved in the Westminster expenses scandal, and that the five year ban contrasts with the two year expulsion of Den Dover, the former Tory MEP who was expelled for two years in 2008 when he refused to pay back “unduly” claimed expenses payments worth over £538,000.

This is not about me: it is about the values of the next British government … In the context of the Westminster expenses scandal, for which no Conservative was expelled, this will be seen by many as a serious case of double standards. The party seeks to prevent my candidacy in the next European election merely for taking a stand on matters of personal conscience. This raises very serious ethical, legal and political issues. [Telegraph]

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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.

Possibly the worst news to come out of the failed H&H coup, for Labourites, is that Gordon Brown has been forced to expand his team of ‘election campaign chiefs’. Sure, Brown is in a weak position, but any political team should never let a range of people decide election strategy or messaging.

At this point New Labour needs one strategy and one clear message. Then it needs ministers to repeat that message endlessly in the context of their policy announcements. The political anoraks can find the policy detail if they want; for the 10-second attention span of BBC News @ 6 viewers – the message has to be coherent and repetitive (so it be internalised). That’s the way it is.

The problem with these extra chiefs is that not only will they send out mixed messages, but it gives the media an opportunity to run the narrative that senior ministers are in-fighting over the election message. They’ve been doing this for a while anyway.

I’ve said this repeatedly and I’ll say it again – there’s only one viable election strategy and that is the class war strategy. Labour should ignore the right-wing press and the Guardianistas, the polls bear me out.

The most worrying finding for the Tories is that Mr Cameron is seen to be on the side of the rich over ordinary people, by 50 to 42 per cent. By contrast, Mr Brown is seen as 64 per cent for ordinary people and 26 per cent for the rich.

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This morning’s Times cartoon puts it quite starkly

And the media narrative also seems to have turned against him.

Financial Times: Slow response weakens Miliband
Daily Mail (John Kampfner): David Miliband – the pretender who is a serial bottler
Daily Mail: (comment): The real loser of this pathetic plot
Independent (Steve Richards): Miliband needs a lesson in political warfare
Independent (Andrew Grice): Inquest held — but no dead body
Economist (Bagehot): After the snowstorm

Steve Richards is right in saying there are only two options for Cabinet ministers in a coup: wholehearted declarations of support or insurrection. Miliband took so long, and the statement was so convoluted, that the charge of being a ‘ditherer’ like Brown is starting to stick.

I’m not that fussed.
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Some thoughts on yesterday’s knifing attempt by Hoon and Patricia Hewitt.

First. I’ve long said that Gordon Brown is a terrible communicator and the party should have replaced him when they realised this to salvage their chances. I made the call just before the last party conference too. Initially, I did think the H&H coup came too late. But I’ll have to break with convention and agree with John Rentoul that now is probably the right time. As I said earlier, a new leader would have to quickly declare an election anyway. So the timing probably isn’t that off.

Second. The problem is actually that neither Hewitt nor Hoon are particularly popular with any part of the party, which meant little chance of popular support (though they could have snagged a cabinet minister anyway). The mood across blogs and Twitter among Labourites and lefties was overwhelmingly of derision. See Mehdi Hasan for a good left-wing summary of the argument.

Third. At this point Alan Johnson is the only viable candidate, given he knows he’ll be leading the party into elections with approx 25% chance of winning. He’s never shown lofty ambitions so it wouldn’t be a huge blow to someone generally seen as a safe pair of hands. The problem is that to avoid looking too disloyal, he can’t be the first big beast to jump. The Milibands, Ed Balls, Harriet Harman etc are also biding their time and don’t want the disloyal tag either. So they’re afraid to jump too. All this saps away confidence.
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(image via @HopiSen)

What Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon have done today strikes me as one of the most obvious putsch bids since the events in Moscow in August 1991. Ms Hewitt’s insistence on the World at One that ‘this is not an attempted coup’ carries about as much weight as a similar denial from Gennady Yanayev.

Frankly, I am only surprised that she did not seize control of the state broadcaster, in order to declare that Gordon Brown is standing down ‘on grounds of health’ and that Britain is henceforth under martial law. That seems to be the way these things usually go.

Obviously I do not count myself among Brown’s strongest political supporters. Even so, as a Labour Party member, I am dismayed at the endless succession of half-arsed efforts to topple the best prime minister Britain has got.
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contribution by Madam Miaow

This letter was written in response to Mark Lynas in the Guardian blaming China for Copenhagen

Dear Mark,

So the cold war is alive and well.

Western spin is really pulling out all the stops, perhaps because we are onto you as the various blogs and forums show.

If anything, China got strong-armed into signing a weak deal at Copenhagen when it should have held out as Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba and others have said.

The US and the rich nations use up almost all the carbon allowance in the atmosphere over the past 160 years, the US dithers over ten years of Bush, they refuse to ratify Kyoto, the Danish summit chair has to resign when she’s caught fast-tracking the rich nations’ deal, the West fail in their Kyoto pledges, Canada rips up its Kyoto deal and proceeds with exploiting its huge reserves of dirty oil, the US will only reduce emissions by 4% against the 1990 base year and not the 17% you describe as “serious cuts”, while China makes real strides in green technology, and so on.

But it is all China’s fault.
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On Christmas Eve, a time ostensibly meant for peace & goodwill, the New York Times ran an epic op-ed arguing for military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear technology. Should you have the stomach to endure Alan Kuperman’s belch of war-baiting, you can go here; it’s some real Deck The Halls shit.

Because I’m not particularly interested in the substance of Kuperman’s argument (there are already some excellent rebuttals by the likes of Marc Lynch & Matt Duss), I’m instead going to note Stephen Walt’s reaction. For Walt, this is but the opening salvo of a concerted campaign to pressure President Obama into taking military action. He warns that opponents of this action should start refining their arguments now because the march for war may soon become a deafening din.
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Iain Dale has the text of Cameron’s New Year speech up. Quite rightly the media will be paying particular attention to this short but important little snippet:

But let’s make sure the election is a proper argument about the future of the country, not some exercise in fake dividing lines.

Cameron recognises here what Tessa Jowell misses in her nonsense about ‘hideous’ ‘class war’. By playing the one nation card at this stage, he is effectively admitting the Tories are deeply rattled by the prospect of a Labour move towards a class-based electoral strategy.

He’s seen the opinion polls, he’s seen the financial context in which such a strategy might be implemented, and he’s afraid.
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Yesterday the Independent ran the “exclusive” that Gordon Brown had declared class war on fox hunting, which boiled down to a re-stating of long held Labour policy.

God forbid the environment secretary Hillary Benn launch a campaign to highlight that Tories are planning to repeal the hunting ban!

As pointed out over at Frank Owen’s Paintbrush, it is surely instructive the Tories and Countryside Alliance consider this issue more important than: “post office closures, house prices turning the countryside into the preserve of the rich, unemployment, pensioner isolation and poverty, and a host of other serious problems afflicting people in rural areas.”

But no. Pointing that out would mean ‘class war’ and today the Sunday Telegraph, which obviously has New Labour’s interests at heart, has an interview with Tessa Jowell where she apparently urges Brown to drop this “hideous” strategy and reveals that “she was pushing for reform of public services to be at the heart of the Labour manifesto“. Yup. Now that’s what you call an exciting and clearly defined electoral strategy.
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