xD.

In terms of logistics, I would make three suggestions. Given the layout, it’s important that each table isn’t talking amongst itself thereby making so much noise that you can’t hear the speaker. Secondly, there are two breakout rooms. I would like to see the two used for an hour each for anyone to stand up a present an idea for five minutes. Thirdly, I’d like to see it recorded and ideally live streamed. Certainly, the plenary sessions could be on uStream or BlogTV.

—fold—

I start with some of the themes Sunny suggests, and add in some more. This is by no means exhaustive; just some things that interest me.

London

Firstly, I don’t think anyone who can’t beat Ken for the Labour nomination will be able to beat Boris. However, I’m not convinced that Boris will run again; it’s certainly not a foregone conclusion and it seems the main reason he would stay on is that there is no obvious heir apparent from the Conservative ranks, certainly not with with any significant profile. If the competition is between Ken and Oona, I would favour the former on the basis that he stands a better chance of building a broad coalition that goes beyond the Labour party. We will need to develop a narrative on the Conservative administration of City Hall, and I would suggest that it should focus on a lack of big ideas and not making the case for London in Whitehall and Westminster. Boris has also had a few bizarre flights of fancy – Boris Island Airport and the Boris Bus (especially its cost) – while scrapping ideas like Cross-River Tram that would have been beneficial to London.

When it comes to the Mayoralty, I have no idea who the LibDem candidate will be (although Susan Kramer is available). The choice of LibDem candidate may well indicate how London LibDems feel about the ménage à deux and whether they feel the Orange Book tendency has moved their party in a way with which they feel uncomfortable. We will have to determine whether attacking the LibDems for their coalition with the Tories is sensible, responsible and effective, and that may well depend on who the candidate is.

I am plotting an idea to set up a London political podcast. I will do a separate post on that as and when I have settled my ideas, but some of the ideas that have come out on that are important. We will need to look to the growth in Labour councillors and councils to be the starting point of a fightback against the Tories in the capital.

Wales and Scotland

We must avoid making this project too London-centric. Yes, it is being hosted in the capital and London has many millions, but we should look at the other devolved areas in Britain: Wales and Scotland. All three could learn from each other, but they may be particularly useful in working out a tack to take with regard to the LibDems. We also have to work out how we strengthen the progressive position at Holyrood and the Senedd, given that the former has extensive powers and it seems likely that the latter will be gaining similar powers. Alternate centres of power in Wales, Scotland and London may well be able to slow at least some of the damage I fear the current administration will bring.

The West Lothian Question

I think that progressives need to seriously consider the idea of English regions.

There is a lot of talk about devolution, giving power to the people and so on. We need to work out what that actually means. If we regionalised, we would see alternate centres of power. To give them meaning, they need powers substantial powers and we should consider the inclusion of policing, transport, housing, spatial planning and, potentially, health. I feel that counties are too small and too easily controlled by the centre to be able to effectively devise and implement policy.

Regions would mean the main parties would have to have some sort of meaningful regional structure. Much as I hope the regions would be able to stand up to Whitehall, I hope that meaningful regional structures within political parties would weaken the wearisome control from the centre to which so many people object.

I would hope that this would lead to the economic weight of the country shifting away from London and away from financial services and giving parts of England outside of London the opportunity to be something more than vassals.

We have spoken much about the sad state of local media. I merely raise the question as to whether regions would cause a re-alignment of newspapers, radio and television so that there could be meaningful coverage and scrutiny of politics and competition between outlets.

I reject the idea of and English Parliament as an answer to the West Lothian question out of hand (a Parliament for forty-eight million people isn’t much less unitary than one for sixty-one million).

We should emphasise that this would not create an extra layer of bureaucracy. There are already Government Offices for all the English regions along with Regional Development Agencies and Local Authorities Leaders’ Boards. This is about democratising those structures.

Ultimately, I think we have seen a flourishing of the London, Welsh and Scottish blogospheres that is indicative of better relations between citizen and state in those three areas and I want the same for the rest of England. This will mean addressing some of the mistakes and lack of ambition from the failed north-east referendum.

The LibDems

We should pursue a strategy of splitting the Social Democrats from the Liberals/Orange Book in the Lib Dems with a view to one side joining the Tories and the other Labour. We should make it clear that you cannot go into coalition with the Tories and call yourself progressive.

I think we should advocate that the cuts are being implemented too soon; that if they are going to do a zero-budget process, it has to be zero-budget across everything¹; that these cuts are also the political desire of the Orange Book and Tories; ensure efficiency where they are made; oppose the most egregiously unfair cuts; maintain support for industry.

That having been said, we need to work out how we can use social democratically-minded LibDems to control the excesses of the coalition.

Others

• Low pay. We must continue to support the living wage, consider the benefits of a citizen’s wage and ensure that the minimum wage is increased appropriately.
• Europe. As people will know, I am pretty pro-European. However, we should explicitly say that there should be no further integration for a couple of Parliaments to give the Lisbon changes and expansion time to bed down. We could expand to the relatively small countries of the Balkans when the time is right, but we will need to be in an economically strong position to welcome Turkey to the EU when the time is right. It should be made clear that member state of the EU have the right to nationalise, municipalise and deprivatise and that the principles of the free market should not prevent this (although I would retain the state aid prohibitions as they are).
• Co-ops. It strikes me that this is a movement to which we should reach out; surprisingly large, but often very local and potentially powerful for community organising.
• The BNP. We need to consider what’s going to happen next with the BNP and their fellow-travellers. I welcome their thorough trouncing at the recent election and I look forward to Richard Barnbrook being invited to pursue interests of his own choosing by the good people of Barking and Dagenham. However, I have three concerns. One is that we will become complacent about the BNP et al. and that they will be able to regroup. We must keep the pressure on them. A second is that the BNP’s problems may lead to more support for the EDL; while they are clearly not going to get anywhere electorally, they are violent. Thirdly, we need to explicitly oppose and combat the rising populist nationalism that we see in UKIP, sections of the Conservative party, sections of the media and, frankly, amongst people who should know better.
• Women’s rights. We must defend the right to abortion. I feel the likelihood of an attempt at restricting it in this Parliament is high and I feel there is a good chance it could be successful. I feel that we should also be looking at Norwegian-style rules for gender-balance in the boardroom. We should discuss the sex industry and the objectification of women.
• Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t want to belabour these subjects. For the moment, I want to set aside whether they were a good idea or not, and just look at the conduct of the campaigns. It is clear that there were mistakes and shortcomings. We should look at what they were, how they happened and how we stop them happening again. In order to do it properly, we must be able to do it without always going back to the morality of the conflicts. I’m not saying we shouldn’t consider the morality of the conflicts; I’m saying it’s not the only issue.

I’ll probably do something on electoral reform in the coming days.

xD.

1 – Including the NHS and Trident. I am prepared to at least consider that (for instance) industrial promotion is currently more important than (for instance) fertility treatment. I am not saying that is the case, but that we should be prepared to consider it.

How’d I do?

I should add thanks to Aaron & Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy for passing on Al J’s request.

xD.

Were the problems with the Iraq war just the basis on which we went to war, or inappropriate equipment necessitating lots of UORs ?

Do we just want to know that the whole enterprise was a bad idea, or do we want to see where and why things were done badly or well?

The loudest opposition to the nature of the inquiry has largely come from the grouping around the Stop the War Coalition (a trading name of the Socialist Workers’ Party ¹ ). It is worth remembering that this grouping was not only opposed to the war ² , not only opposed to the Labour government, but opposed to the entire system of government and nature of the state. That suggests that they would be opposed to the inquiry on some basis no matter what as, in their view, the government is necessarily corrupt and serving of capitalist interests.

The more reasoned problems come under three heads; timing, secrecy and outputs.

Timing

The ‘why now’ question is easily answered; British troops there have largely withdrawn. Conducting an honest inquiry would have been impossible if witnesses thought they were kicking the stool from underneath troops in the field.

The ‘how long’ question can only be answered in reference to other inquiries.

The Fingerprint Inquiry; announced 14 March 2008. Yet to report.
The Fraser Inquiry into the Holyrood building; announced July 8th 2003. Report published 15 September 2004.
The Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly; opened 1 August 2003. Report published 28 January 2004
The Cullen Inquiry into the Dunblane massacre; announced 21 March 1996. Report published 30 September 1996
The Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié; announced 20 April 2001. Report published 28 January 2003.
The Cullen Inquiry into the Ladbroke Grove rail disaster; announced 8 October 1999. Report published 17 April 2001
The Davies Inquiry into the Aberfan disaster; announced 26 October 1966. Report published 3 August 1967
The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday; announced 29 January 1998. Yet to report.
The Butler Review into WMD in Iraq; announced 3 February 2004. Report published 14 July 2004.
The Redfern Report into the Alder Hey organs scandal; announced 3 December 1999. Report published 7 November 2000
The Scott Report into the Matrix Churchill affair; announced November 1992. Published 27 April 2004.

This will of necessity be a painstaking process. Setting an artificial limit of twelve months will not help anyone. I would reply to anyone who says it is being put back till after the election for political reasons that desiring it to report early, half-cock, so that it can be used to hit the Labour party is also a political reason.

Secrecy

Much of the criticism has been on the issue of secrecy.

For one thing, I understand and agree with the logic of certain things being secret. Beyond the obvious issues of national security, I would make two points.

Firstly, we did not cover ourselves in glory. I’m guessing that there are plenty of people who will want to tell their part of the story but will not, for various reasons, want to do it in public. Their own conduct or that of ‘brother officers’ might have been wanting, or they might be concerned about leaving interpreters and other locally employed civilians in the lurch again.

Equally, an honest investigation will have to take information from people who we cannot compel to appear – from the USA, for instance – and who are unlikely to appear if they feel they would compromise confidences. Similarly, would (say) a representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government be likely to appear to discuss oil if their words were ferried direct to Washington and Baghdad?

Outputs

The inquiry has many issues to consider. Off the top of my head, they could include the lead up to the war, WMD, intelligence qua intelligence, use of intelligence, lack of embassy, use of intelligence from allies, the march on Baghdad, de-baathification, troop numbers, mission objectives in Basra, relations with civilians, the Awakening, civil-military co-operation, troop equipment and so on and so forth.

Quite beyond the simple questions of ‘were there WMD’ and ‘was the dodgy dossier sexed up’, there are questions about everything that happened in Iraq. There is a general understanding that we didn’t cover ourselves with glory, but after any operation of the size of Iraq, there is a need for a ‘lessons learned’ exercise. There are going to be two outputs, one public, one secret. As with the Dunblane inquiry, parts of the secret version may be declassified before the time limit to aid that process.

The ouput is not ‘Tony Blair was wrong’ but a whole range of comments, recommendations and criticisms. Those looking for an answer along the lines of ‘Tony Blair was wrong’ are missing the point and, ultimately, will make it harder for us to see where we went wrong, what lessons we can learn and how that affects and constrains future military conduct.

Ultimately, going to war in Iraq was a political decision. While an inquiry may do much, it cannot decide whether a policy was right or wrong. That is reserved for the electorate.

For the record, I opposed the Iraq war.

xD.

This post also appeared at Common Endeavour and in a shortened version at Liberal Conspiracy.

1 – they’re not socialists, they’re not workers and they don’t know how to party
2 – even though it had no problems with declaring “we are all Hezbollah now”

Firstly, it is in our strategic interest for two reasons. I will look at the morality and legality later, but it is enough to say that many states and people, friendly, neutral and hostile, regard both Guantánamo as immoral and the UK as very close to the United States. By acting to expedite the closing of Guantánamo, we are acting to right a perceived wrong. It also improves our standing within the EU and NATO if we can demonstrate an ability to act as an effective link or broker between the western and eastern sides of the Atlantic. I would add that there might well be (although I do not know this for a fact) people who would be repatriated to, say, Bosnia-Herzegovina. While I do not wish to impugn Bosnia-Herzegovina and am using it just as an example, I do not believe that it, or many other states, have the state-capacity to effectively monitor these people. If we look slightly more widely around the Balkans, the apparent ease with which people evaded the ICTY, I believe the point is proven. In the long-term, taking in detainees here is more secure than leaving them in limbo or Ruritania.

Secondly, it is expeditious. Whether Mr Dale likes it or not, President-Elect Obama has made it clear that Guantanamo is to be closed. As I mentioned, we are seen as close to the US in foreign policy terms. One of the big problems with Guantánamo was the lack of clarity as to what was going to happen to people held there. We now have a resolution; however, we will have to accept people who do not have an immediate connection to the US for a few reasons. One is that some states will not accept people who have a prior or stronger connection to them. We can exert more moral pressure on them to accept people from Guantánamo if we show how much we are doing; in any case, it will not work for everyone. There are some states that it would be wrong to ‘export’ these people to; they are those states that would torture them. They would go from a frying pan to a rather hotter fire and many of the problems we face because of Guantánamo would be reinforced.

Thirdly, it is morally right. Guantánamo was an abrogation of rights, poorly implemented and conceived, that took away some of our moral high ground and constitutes a serious threat to habeas corpus in the USA. Its closure rectifies at least some of those issues. Moreover, the USA is our friend and ally; if it seeks our support on this, given that the costs are minimal and the benefits great, I would have hoped it would have been a no-brainer.

If I may refer to the title of Iain’s post – “Guantánamo is a problem made in America” – I would contend that the problem may have been made there, but that does not relieve of us our obligations to justice and due process, or to our ally, or the effects its existence and the method of its closure may have on us.

In short, it is both morally right and in our strategic interest.

xD.

Inquests are unusual in English law in that they are the only inquisitorial proceeding, as opposed to the adversarial form that every other legal proceeding takes.

It is worth remembering that there are two main objections to the provision for forty-two days’ detention provided for in S42 (4) (b) (ii). The first is deontological; the period of time that any entity or person acting under the law (ultimately dependent on Weber’s definition of the state) should detain anyone else should be kept to the absolute minimum as the potential exists that, before trial, the person is innocent and so their detention is unjust. It is the same logic that insists justice should be speedy; detention before charge should be speedy¹.

The second is utilitarian. While I’m sure some people will disagree with me¹, I do not think that the current government is an evil monster that wants to abolish all our civil liberties. However, I do not think that the current government should hand a carte blanche to every single, future government. The risks and potential harms of the 42 days’ detention, and the deeply unsatisfactory safeguards – that people could be taken off the street if they threatened a future government (say, 41 days before an election) and held incommunicado – far outweight any potential benefit. Liberty make that point very well in this briefing document (PDF).

I feel the same applies to S64 and S65. Firstly, the idea that someone in the executive should be able to wander into a judicial proceeding and change things is opening the process up to abuse. It is different from making provisions for national security – things can be heard in camera – and, in any case, it should not be possible to change things in the middle of the proceeding, but only a priori. Secondly, the risks are significant as they would allow interference, as I have said, and set a worrying precedent for expansion.

If nothing else, connections will be made between a stroppy Oxfordshire coroner, a move to Gloucestershire for repatriating the bodies of people who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq, a stroppy Gloucestershire coroner and then this bill; it does look as if the Government is trying to cover its tracks.

xD.

1 – the definition, not the blogger.

‘Anti-Iraq war protestors’ are up there along with Tony Blair, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness, Ken Livingstone, Alex Salmond and the Countryside Alliance. Have a look on the Channel Four website. The fact that the award goes to a rather nebulous group of people rather than one of the organisations behind the protests is interesting. It suggests that the brand identification of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) is negligible and Channel Four have to copy Time Magazine‘s ‘person of the year 2006′¹ in going for a non-entity. This is rather surprising, given that the Stop the War Coalition’s logo is really rather good – easy to remember, easy to identify and easy to reproduce – and its message was supported on a grand scale.

Why, then, has the StWC declined from public view?

Part of the answer is in a previous post of mine:

If the Stop the War Coalition was going to continue as a meaningful force, it needed to attract and retain the soggy left of the ‘Various People Against Nasty Things’ variety. Providing placards that said ‘Victory to the Resistance’ was, at risk of being controversial, not the best way of building a broad coalition. It was a very good way of alienating the people who don’t consider the Socialist Worker newspaper to be some of Fleet Street’s finest editing and putting the few remainders a short step from carrying SWP banners.

although now I would add ‘We are all Hizbullah’ to ‘Victory to the Resistance’. In short, the aim was not to build a mass movement, but to increase the number of members of the SWP, StWC and RESPECT. If the hitrate for long term, useful members was (say) one in a thousand, that would still have yielded two thousand members from the Day X march alone. It made sense to the SWP; given that they believe we are in a permanent arms economy anyway, the war going ahead or not would have been largely immaterial.
Equally, the StWC didn’t represent all of the anti-war movement; it was one of three organisations, the others being CND and MAB, that called the protest. A lot of the people who opposed the war and marched under the StWC’s roundel never felt any particular attachment to it as the representations made by Lindsay German et al. never really resonated with the Chelsea tractor drivers. The messages were about imperialism, when what people felt was either that Britain was a client state or that it was just a wrong decision, badly taken. Imperialism – the desire to cow the Iraqi people – didn’t enter into most people’s opposition because they didn’t believe it to be so.

I am not sure of this point, so forgive me if sounds a bit strangled, but the StWC also sought to forge links with the Muslim communities in the UK. The questions there are which Muslim communities? and who’s linking to them?. Had the StWC really been about preventing a racist backlash in response to the Iraq war, it would have done a lot more to bring groups together. It didn’t, the evidence being the quite common anti-Muslim sentiment we see expressed in the press. I’m not blaming StWC for racism, but I am saying that they failed to do as much as they could have done because they were more interested in building a political movement that wasn’t there to be built.

There was never single set of ideas behind the brand; in essence, there never was a brand. The StWC had an organisational role that it could have used to advance political knowledge in the UK. It squandered the opportunity so that, a few years later, all people remember is that a lot of people were quite annoyed about …something.

There is, at the time of writing, no mention of the award nomination on the Stop the War Coalition website.

xD.

1 – I’m thinking of including ‘Time person of the year 2006′ on my CV.

Look. I’m sorry, but I read the Guardian. I take after the time-honoured strain of pinko thought that opposes any and every war on the sole condition that it finished at least ten years ago. I think it’s absolutely essential that people have the right to demonstrate because they look so cute on Parliament Square. In the rain. Listening to Lindsay German. I can remark loudly to tourists how wonderful it is to live in a free country as I go past on the bus, thankyouKenLivingstonedontchajustlove’im?

I wasn’t very keen on Saddam (Sir, I bloody well do not salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability) but I didn’t really like the idea of the Americans blowing bits of Iraq up. Afghanistan was probably OK and gave me great potential for agonised, liberal hand-wringing, but Iraq was such a bad idea that, horror of horrors, I would actually take a position on it.

The Stop the War Coalition, by anyone’s measure, achieved phenomenal growth. It went from nowhere to organising not on a town-by-town basis but on a suburb-by-suburb basis. The Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) deserve a lot of credit for this, as do CND and MAB, as they did provide a lot of the administrative support that allowed the organisation to function at all. It was, though, a grass-roots movement based on a very real feeling that the war on Iraq was wrong. The Stop the War Coalition provided agency for that movement but did not create and did not grow that feeling. It did call the 2,000,000 march on February 15 2003, but I suspect that a drover’s dog could have achieved a similar number, such was the feeling against the war.

Oh, and please don’t tell me that the Stop the War Coalition brought together lots of intellectuals and gave them a position on the news. I refuse to believe that Jeremy Corbyn et al. would not have been interviewed by the various media outlets had the Stop the War Coalition not been around.

Why, then, has the Stop the War Coalition gone from having a thirtieth of the population of this island marching through London to damp protests on Parliament Square?

If the Stop the War Coalition was going to continue as a meaningful force, it needed to attract and retain the soggy left of the ‘Various People Against Nasty Things’ variety. Providing placards that said ‘Victory to the Resistance’ was, at risk of being controversial, not the best way of building a broad coalition. It was a very good way of alienating the people who don’t consider the Socialist Worker newspaper to be some of Fleet Street’s finest editing and putting the few remainders a short step from carrying SWP banners.

The people in, allied to or close to the SWP were probably, I should fancy, already against the war. There was absolutely no need to appeal to them – most people on the left, including the SWP, are in favour of a co-operative system rather than the confrontational nature of capitalism and so one presumes they would be prepared to coalesce around a common goal – unless the SWP was running the Stop the War Coalition for its own ends. I hesitate to say that the SWP went into the Stop the War Coalition as part of a recruitment drive, particularly as I think that the other main groups that went along with the anti-war movement, CND and MAB, would have words to say about it. Nevertheless, I think it is possible that the mindset was so much one of being a small party become little more than a protest group that people just didn’t know what to do.

The protest virgins who came out for a jolly on that February 15th were not going to make it a regular occurrence. They’re too lazy, too busy and too far away. Endless demonstrations in Parliament Square addressed by the same group of speakers – no doubt, talented orators with a valid point to make – just makes the Stop the War Coalition look like another pointless, hard left group with initials (StWC, to join AWL, WSWS, ICFI, CFE, SWP, SWSS, CPE(M-L), LSESU, NUS) rather than ideas.

How would the Stop the War Coalition have succeeded?

By stopping the war. Sadly, it didn’t. It was not, though, time at that point to pack up and go home or become increasingly radical and distasteful to the Chelsea tractor drivers who we adored on February 15. If we are serious about having – and I use this phrase with more than a little trepidation – an ethical foreign policy, we need to show not merely that, in that time-honoured phrase, ‘bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity’ but that there is an alternative. Moreover, that alternative has to be acceptable to people; a socialist world might well be more desirable for some, but that doesn’t achieve the aim of stopping the war or, at least, limiting or eliminating British involvement in said war.

Don’t get me wrong: the Stop the War Coalition, all the people who worked in the office in Brick Lane and then at King’s Cross, all the people who attended and organised meetings did a great deal of work and, I think, an amount of good. The Stop the War Coalition will go down in history. It will not, though, go down as the moment at which everything changed but as an interesting aberration from the norm of apathy and disengagement. It could have kept people on board – not turning out to protests every week but by maintaining a sentiment that the war on Iraq was wrong, the occupation of Iraq is still wrong and the Government’s actions over terror are wrong.

The Stop the War Coalition started, I believe, around the time of the conflict in Afghanistan, the war in question being (as CNN put it) The War Against Terror (TWAT). If that is so, and given that Liberal Democrat and, horror of horror, some Conservative sentiment is riled by, for instance, the new powers for house arrest that the Government has arrogated itself, a protest about civil liberties might have attracted more people, made the Stop the War Coalition look like more than alphabet soup leftie groups and educated the masses a bit about why they need to be concerned about public freedoms.

I suspect that before overly long, we will be again on the eve of war in the Middle East. Whether that war is stopped or not, we cannot at this juncture say, but there will be calls for more restrictions on civil liberties, more secrecy and more alienation of people from politicians.

At that time, we will have the opportunity to plant a seed – an opportunity we missed in Iraq – that says that this sort of military adventuring is wrong and perhaps stop it happening again.

Now, can I have some guacamole, please? No, the organic one. Thanks, Tony.