19 Jan 15 | Iraq, News and features, United Kingdom
Despite his repeated assertions that it is nothing to do with him, it is now clear that British Prime Minister David Cameron not only has the power to hold back the long-awaited Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the Iraq war until after the election – but may actually do so. The prime minister who championed free speech but wants to duck out of TV election debates seems prepared to suppress the report of the Iraq inquiry on an equally flimsy pretext. If he does he will again find himself on the wrong side of the argument, perhaps with only opposition leader Ed Miliband for company.
The inquiry has been in the headlines a lot lately, with politicians calling for the report to be published before the election and speculative stories about whether this is or isn’t possible. Having significantly compromised to extricate itself from a long-running dispute over which documents it can disclose in support of its findings, the inquiry, launched in 2009, is now undertaking the “Maxwellisation” process of notifying people that it intends to criticise and inviting their responses.
But publication before the election in May will depend not only on when Sir John Chilcot delivers the report to Cameron but what cut-off date is applied. Two weeks ago Cabinet Office minister Lord Wallace re-iterated that the government will hold back the report if it is not completed by the end of February. This is a month before parliament is dissolved on 30 March and pre-election “purdah” officially begins. Wallace justified this early deadline on the grounds that:
part of the previous Government’s commitment was that there would be time allowed for substantial consultation on and debate of this enormous report when it is published.
There was, in fact, no promise of “substantial consultation” from the previous government. It appears to have been invented to lengthen the process and justify interfering with an inquiry whose independence Cameron has repeatedly emphasized. Last month he said: “I am not in control of when this report is published. It is an independent report, it is very important in our system that these sort of reports are not controlled or timed by the government.”
A day after Wallace’s statement, Cameron repeated the error at Prime Minister’s Questions: “…it is up to Sir John Chilcot when he publishes his report. He will make the decision, not me.
A further day later Number 10 issued a “clarification”. According to the Telegraph, the prime minister’s deputy official spokesman said that in fact Cameron would have the final say on the timing the publication once has received the report. She said: “The point the Prime Minister has made is the timing of the report and its completion is a matter for the inquiry. “In terms of publication, the government would seek to publish it as swiftly as possible while ensuring parliament had the right time and opportunity to debate and look at it.”
This looks very much as if Cameron is prepared to suppress the report on the same grounds as Wallace gave – that MPs need a lot of time to study it. But Downing Street clearly knows that if Cameron expressly signed up to the February deadline he would completely contradict his own promise not to control the timing of the report. When I asked one of Cameron’s spokespeople whether he agrees with the deadline, he returned to the pre-clarification position of denial: “as the PM has said in the House of Commons, it is up to the Inquiry, not him”.
Meanwhile Labour leader Ed Miliband has kept very quiet on the issue and, having spoken to Labour’s media people, it is clear that they don’t want to talk about it either.But neither leader can fudge the issue much longer as a cross-party coalition of MPs, including Plaid Cymru, pushes for publication and challenges the government’s deadline. They have now secured a half day parliamentary debate on 29 January. The Lib Dems have challenged the government to publish the report within a week of receiving it, even during the election campaign. Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon called for politicians to unite on the issue, prompting Scottish Labour’s leader Jim Murphy to demand “the earliest possible publication”. Whether that is a rejection of the February deadline is unclear.
Looking further ahead, it seems unlikely that Cameron would really have the nerve to sit on the report, for as long as two months before the election. Even if you accept the official position that it needs to be put before parliament and cannot therefore be published during the election campaign, could he realistically refuse to publish it while parliament is sitting? With MPs treading water during March, to claim that there is not time to debate it would be entirely untenable.
We should never expect too much from an establishment inquiry, particularly without the key evidence. But the government’s argument for stalling the report is effectively that the desire of the political class for the perfect time and space to discuss it trumps voters’ right to be informed. After the massive loss in public trust that the Iraq war caused, surely Cameron wouldn’t dare.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
This article was posted on January 19, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org.
24 Jan 11 | Uncategorized
New concerns have arisen about the openness of the Iraq inquiry after it emerged that its top official played a key role in co-ordinating the government’s Iraq policy during the period covered by the inquiry.
The secretary to the inquiry, Margaret Aldred, is on secondment from her role as deputy head of the Cabinet Office Foreign and Defence Policy Secretariat, formerly Defence and Overseas Secretariat (DOS), where she has worked since 2004.
When the inquiry announced Aldred’s appointment in July 2009, it made no mention of her role in Iraq policy during the previous four and a half years. But parliamentary questions, freedom of information (FOI) disclosures and my investigations show that it was a significant one — and the main reason for her appointment.
The inquiry has stated that it has been given papers from the section where Aldred worked but has declined to state whether it has documents relating directly to her. It has not published any Cabinet Office documents from this period.
Last week, Tom McKane, one of Aldred’s predecessors at DOS was a witness at the inquiry. It appears that Aldred would herself have been called as a witness if she were not the inquiry’s secretary.
Elfyn Llwyd MP, parliamentary leader of Plaid Cymru, has secured a parliamentary debate on Tuesday (25 January) to discuss Aldred’s apparent conflict of interest. He has described her position as “untenable”.
Llwyd will also raise concerns over the Cabinet Office’s failure to disclose the process by which Aldred was appointed. The issue threatens further embarrassment — or worse — for Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell, who blocked inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot’s request to publish records of what Tony Blair promised George Bush in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.
Although the inquiry previously stated that Sir John Chilcot had complete freedom to choose the secretary, the Cabinet Office has admitted in response to an FOI request to that O’Donnell personally nominated Aldred.
The Cabinet Office has stated that it has no written records of this process because discussions “were conducted orally rather than in writing.”
In a written parliamentary answer, Cabinet Office minister Nick Hurd has declined to state whether other candidates were considered for the role but cited Aldred’s “previous involvement in Iraq issues” as the main reason for her selection.
The apparent lack of a formal process is a possible breach of the civil service code. The information commissioner recently criticised the Cabinet Office for its handling of the FOI request and raised the possibility that disclosable information may have been deleted.
Chilcot has said that he was aware of Aldred’s previous involvement on Iraq at the time of her appointment but did not see any potential conflict of interest that would affect the inquiry’s independence. But the Cabinet Office has acknowledged that it did see a potential conflict of interest.
It has also emerged that the inquiry secretariat, of which Aldred is head, negotiated the controversial protocol on sharing sensitive information with the Cabinet Office, before it was put before the inquiry committee. Aldred herself signed the protocol, which prevented the inquiry publishing the Blair/Bush exchanges.
Last January Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, now deputy prime minister, said the protocol was “being used to gag the inquiry.” The inquiry has suggested that it was the basis for assurances given to the US that measures had been put in place to protect its interests during the inquiry’s hearings. The assurances emerged from a US diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks.
The protocol has prevented the inquiry from publishing documents from before Aldred’s time at DOS, including leaked papers showing that in 2002 it drew up plans for “regime change “in Iraq.
Although the inquiry has not disclosed the details of Aldred’s own involvement in Iraq policy, it is clear that it was extensive.
Two witnesses have told the inquiry that Aldred usually chaired the Iraq Senior Officials Group, a committee of officials tasked with co-ordinating Iraq policy, although only one mentioned her by name.
The Cabinet Office’s annual report for 2004/5 — the year that Aldred took up her post — states that “Over the past year, DOS has coordinated policy development on Iraq.”
Another US embassy cable published by Wikileaks records that in October 2008 Aldred and her manager Simon McDonald met US officials and discussed the British government’s attempts to obtain a status of forces agreement (SOFA) before the expiry of a UN mandate authorizing the presence of British troops in Iraq. McDonald and other officials have been questioned about this issue at the inquiry. Another previously leaked document shows that Aldred was also involved in the issue of rendition and torture in connection with Iraq.
Llwyd said: “I cannot believe that it was in any way appropriate for a person who was involved in Iraq policy to be appointed as gatekeeper to this inquiry. This calls into question the independence of the inquiry and ultimately the credibility of its findings.”
He added: “Some commentators have said that the Chilcot inquiry have been utterly ineffectual in pursuing witnesses to obtain the truth. Given the major involvement of the inquiry secretary in formulation of UK policy towards Iraq since 2004, I conclude that the inquiry is flawed and that the position of the inquiry secretary is untenable.”
01 Oct 09 | Uncategorized
By Chris Ames
Today I am launching a new web-based project to monitor and comment on Sir John Chilcot’s Inquiry into the British government’s role in the Iraq war. The website is called Iraq Inquiry Digest.
The idea is to make sure that this time –– unlike in previous Iraq-related establishment inquiries –– nothing gets missed. Gordon Brown got off to a bad start when he tried to set up a secret inquiry. But he largely got the inquiry that he wanted, with members that were handpicked according to criteria unknown to the rest of us.
(more…)
22 Jan 15 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, United Kingdom
Does The Sun’s Page 3 still exist? The paper’s pagination remains, humble but resolute: the very best in British pagination. As surely as curry follows beer on this sceptered isle, the nation’s favourite newspaper will have a third page, facing the second page, on the reverse of the fourth. And despite what those who would disparage our way of life would want, it will always be page three.
Briefly, this week though, it seemed the tradition (est 1970), of putting a picture of a topless young woman on page three — the “Page 3 girl” — had ended. And then it came back. What’s going on? Is there a Page 3 or isn’t there? Or are we witnessing Shroedinger’s glamour shot?
The Page 3 girl was a typical product of the British sexual revolution. What started, with the availability of contraception to women in the 1960s, as a liberation, quickly became another way to reduce them. Freed from the terror of unwanted pregnancy, women and girls were now expected to be in a permanent state of up-for-it-ness. The popular films of the late 60s and early 70s, the On The Buses, the Carry Ons, the Confessions…, portrayed British society as a parade of priapic middle-aged men, always attempting to escape their middle-aged, old-fashioned wives, in pursuit of seemingly countless, always available, young women.
It was fun, it was cheeky, it was vampiric — depending on how you wanted to look at it.
Page 3 was part of this culture; this idea that sweet-natured young women with absolutely no qualms about sex were out there, just needing a wink and a Sid James cackle to persuade them into a bit of slap and tickle. Slap and tickle, though, is not the same as sex, or at least not sex as we might hope to understand it. The slap and tickle of the British imagination owes more to the pre-pill “sort of bargaining” described by Philip Larkin. In spite of the poet’s hopes, sexual intercourse hadn’t really begun in 1963.
Page 3 models were (are? Who knows?) very rarely erotic creatures. They were “healthy” and “fun”, perhaps a little “naughty”; always girls and never women.
The phenomenon survived the attentions of feminist campaigns of varying strengths. Page 3 perhaps peaked in the 80s, when it was possible to move beyond the tabloids to become an actual star, even with clothes on (80s Page 3 icon Sam Fox is still, apparently, in demand as a singer in eastern Europe). This, ironically, coincided with an era of politically correct criticism of Page 3 led by senior Labour MP Clare Short.
In the 90s, new laddism, spearheaded by James Brown’s Loaded magazine, somewhat rehabilitated the Page 3 girl, or, more accurately, made looking at topless models seem respectable to men who would never buy the Sun (“men who should know better” as Loaded’s tagline went).
As the post-Loaded rush for young men’s money descended into boasting of nipple counts, the focus of feminist campaigning switched to the weekly Nuts and Zoo magazines. The Sun’s Page 3 carried on, outliving the rise and fall of Nuts (somehow, Zoo is still going), but is now taking a severe battering from the No More Page 3 campaign, led by young feminists. The very fact that there is uncertainty over the future of the feature is testament to that campaign’s success.
It would be easy to look for a free speech angle on this and come up with “killjoy feminists” versus, decent honest yeomen of England.
But it would be false. In truth, what we have here is an example of how free speech works. The No More Page 3 campaign, as it has pointed out, has a right to call for an end to something they don’t like. They make the argument, they are criticised, and that’s absolutely fine. No one gets hurt, no one goes to court, no one tries to pass a prohibitive law (yet).
Meanwhile, there are some half-hearted defences floating around, mostly attempting to claim that Page 3 is a PROUD BRITISH INSTITUTION, like ugly dogs or barely suppressed tears.
“Tradition!”, the defenders shout, like a legion of leery, thigh-rubbing Topols. The Daily Star, which runs pictures of topless women on its own Page 3, but has escaped the ire of campaigners for the fundamental reason that no one really cares what’s in the Daily Star, proclaimed: “Page 3 is as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pud, fish and chips and seaside postcards. The Daily Star is about fun and cheering people up. And that will definitely continue!”. But really, it all seems a bit half-hearted.
Fundamentally, this week’s wind-up aside, The Sun’s topless Page 3 will cease to exist because people don’t really want it to exist, and no one can really think of a good reason for it to exist.
It’s not censorship, or prudishness, that will eventually kill Page 3. We’ve moved on, regardless of what the editors of The Sun do or say. It’s not them; it’s us.
This article was posted on 22 January, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org.
