And another thing…

I GAVE an interview to Radio Scotland this morning on the only subject the media are interested in today: Iraq.

I spent so much time in 2003 defending the government and the Prime Minister from criticism of the war and it’s been an awful long time since I had to revisit those arguments. But my! How they all came flooding back!

Amusingly, one of the BBC journalists who interviewed me more than once at the time was Iain Macwhirter, whose anti-war views he failed to conceal even then. Today, as a freelance no longer employed by the BBC, he feels no need to offer even a pretence of objectivity. He was interviewed after me and immediately dismissed my comparison of Kosovo in 1999 with Iraq in 2003. He either couldn’t understand the point I was making or, more likely, deliberately chose to misinterpret it. The two events were, as Macwhirter correctly pointed out, entirely different. Unlike in Kosovo, there was no immediate humanitarian emergency in Iraq four years later which demanded an international response. But the point I was making was on international law. There was no specific UN mandate for military action by Nato against the Serbs in 1999. None of the nations taking part was acting in self-defence. Very few people at the time even raised the subject. But in 2003, it was all about international law, wasn’t it?

Well, no. It wasn’t. It was all about politics. It was about polticians making political decisions and about those who disagreed with those decisions using whatever arguments that came to hand to oppose them. You never hear the Guardian-reading classes demanding that Tony Blair (note the correct spelling) be tried for war crimes committed in Kosovo, where there were civilian casualties resulting from the Nato bombing. Why? Because those same Guardian-readers agreed with that particular policy, irrespective of its legality.

The greatest ever political failure of the international community was in deciding to do nothing to try to prevent or mitigate the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. I’m quite sure that had we sent troops in to prevent the massacres, we would have been breaking international law. And I’m sure there are plenty of people who would have cared about that, though I’m not one of them. Refusing to get involved in Rwanda while hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were brutally slain was entirely immoral and cowardly. But it was legal in international terms, so maybe that’s alright then.

So we can talk all we want about the legality or otherwise of the Iraq invasion and war, and no doubt we will. But if you think that’s what the controversy is all about, you’re dead wrong. It’s about the politics. It’s always been about the politics.

I’VE ALWAYS hated “Gestapo” comparisons. You know the kind thing I mean: “That officer gave me a funny look – Honestly! It;s like Hitler’s Getapo!”

“Police state” is another one: “I was only doing 140, and they send me a court summons! It’s like Pinochet all over again…”

Not only are most of these comparisons plain silly, they’re incredibly offensive to those who actually lived through Nazi Germany or whose family were actually killed and tortured by Pinochet’s regime. It’s not just that the British police are being compared to the Gestapo: the suggestion is that the Gestapo were no worse than the Met. Or that people living in Britain have it as bad as Chileans in the 70s.

And so we return to the old “Is Tony Blair a war criminal?” nonsense, repeated today by Oliver Miles in the Independent on Sunday. As John Rentoul so sensibly points out, it’s number 180 in his series of “Questions to which the answer is ‘no’.”

If, by “war criminal”, we mean someone who led his country into a war that was unpopular with some people, then, yes, Tony Blair is undoubtedly a war criminal. But generally speaking, war criminals are people who deliberately ordered the targeting of civilians during a military engagement, or who either ordered, or did nothing to prevent, the execution or torture of their opponents. In other words, someone who “committed war crimes”.

No-one except the feeble-minded are seriously suggesting that Tony Blair is guilty of this second definition. And, as with “police state” and “Gestapo”, such accusations devalue the force of such accusations. The Gestapo? “Well, arguably some of their officers overstepped the mark, but most of them were quite helpful if you needed directions to the Reichstag.” Police state? “Not so bad, really, so long as you don’t mind being stopped and searched at railway stations once in a blue moon.”

War criminal? “Tony Blair’s as bad as Hitler, innit? I mean, taking Britain to war in Iraq after two votes in Parliament, then imposing democracy then withdrawing troops… I mean, two peas in a pod, eh?”

I SIMPLY cannot understand why, as David Miliband says, the Tories are “playing the man, not the ball” with regards to Tony Blair and the European presidency.

Despite my profound doubts about David Cameron’s suitability for office, I’ve always accepted that he’s a clever politician. Objecting to the former Prime Minister becoming the new president seems peculiarly petty and short-sighted for someone who needs the votes of former Labour voters in order to become PM himself.

Obviously Tony Blair is eminently qualified for the job and would do it well. You’d have to be pretty stupid to dispute that. So what are Cameron’s objections? Primarily among them, we have to assume, is that Blair is guilty of the heinous crime of smashing Cameron’s party at three general elections in a  row.

All the more reason to appoint him, I would have thought.

CHERIE Blair’s comments in the Independent on Sunday today ring true: that in 2003, Tony was probably 51-49 per cent in favour of committing British troops to Iraq.

When discussing the subject with non-politicians, they’re always surprised to hear that such important decisions can – and sometimes have to – be taken on a balance of argument, rather than on an overwhelming moral conviction one way or the other. Most opponents of the war I’ve spoken to tend to fall into that category; they are utterly convinced that the war was totally unjustified in any respect.

If only life – and politics – were that simple.

A few months ago, I wrote:

Within the question there is often an assumption that those of us who voted for war had the same single-minded conviction as those who opposed it. And it’s true that many who voted for the war did in fact have an absence of doubt that was shared by their opponents. I envied them, for I did not, and I still don’t.

I simply couldn’t comprehend how any MP could walk into either division lobby on such a controversial and complex issue without a glimmer of doubt in his mind, whichever lobby he was walking into. For my part, I wrestled long and hard with the various arguments, changing my mind about a dozen times about how I intended to vote. Those who marched against the war, who now hate everything about Labour and Tony Blair because their protests had no effect, will not understand such agonising. After all, war is either good or bad, right or wrong, yes?

No.

So on the night of the first vote, in February 2003, I supported the government, then went home with a very heavy heart, fretting in case I had made the wrong decision. A few weeks later, I had made up my mind and was probably two-to-one (in my head) in favour of invasion. It was then that I decided the time for equivocation had ended. If you’re going to make a decision, stick to it, defend it, and live with the consequences.

Amusingly, John Rentoul reckons Cherie’s comments represent just about all there needs to be said, so the Chilcott enquiry can pack up and go home.

One thing I trust that critics of Blair’s (and my) decision will bear in mind is that the UK never voted for an invasion and occupation of Iraq – that was going to happen anyway. The question before us was whether we should commit British troops to the US effort. But had the Commons voted “no” more than six years ago, it would have made precious little difference to Iraq’s fate.

THE LATEST project by writer Peter Morgan will spell a return to the role of Tony Blair by Michael Sheen, who played the part in both Morgan’s previous political pieces, The Deal and The Queen.

The Special Relationship will also star Dennis Quaid as Bill Clinton.

Is it the personality of Blair and the controversy that surrounds him that makes him such an attractive character for film makers to depict? After all, apart from Sheen, the former PM has also been played by Robert Lindsay (The Trial of Tony Blair) and Ioan Gruffud (W). Apart from Churchill (and possibly Thatcher — at least on the small screen), it’s difficult to think of another British Prime Minister so frequently dramatised, especially given how recent was his tenure at Number 10.

Or is it simply that in an era when we need to turn everything into a film script, where political dramas are so immediate and fresh, that Blair’s story was inevitably going to be dramatised?

Sheen’s first two portrayals of Blair were brilliant. He resisted the undoubted temptation to play the role as satire and instead played it with a straight bat: Blair’s humanity and sincerity were allowed to show in both The Deal and The Queen, which was surprising and refreshing, given the media’s determination to portray every political leader as good/bad, or hero/villain with no trace of nuance.

So I’m looking forward to what I guess can be called the third part of "The Blair Trilogy". But not half as much as I’m looking forward, on this one occasion, to deleting any comment that describes Tony as either a liar or a war criminal. 

Because he is neither.

Tony Blair

RECENT media references to Charlie Whelan has reminded me of the debt he owes me and many other Scottish Labour MPs.

During the 2005 general election he had a regular column in the Daily Record newspaper in which he suggested that the party leader and Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was not the vote-winner that he had once been and cast doubt on the willingness of any Labour candidate to use a photograph of him in their election literature. Unwisely, he offered a bottle of malt whisky to any candidate who proved him wrong.

I duly sent him a copy of my main election address, featuring the above pic. Many other candidates with pictures of themselves with Tony did the same. As far as I know, none of us has received the promised prize.

TWENTY-FIVE years ago this week, I finally decided to join the Labour Party.

The decision was made after a lot of introspection. I knew I wanted to get involved in politics; in the early 1980s it was difficult not to be affected by political events all around us: the inner city riots of 1981, the Falklands War, the splits in the Labour Party and Benn’s challenge for Labour’s deputy leadership, mass unemployment (particularly in north Ayrshire, where I grew up), Thatcher’s 1983 landslide and the year-long miners’ strike.

Both my parents had voted Labour throughout their lives, as had their parents. My maternal grandfather had been a great fan of Tony Benn in the 1960s (and was therefore a natural recruit for the SDP when it was formed in 1981). And, on the occasion of my first vote — the 1982 regional council elections — I dutifully turned up at the polling station to support the Labour candidate, Jimmy Jennings.

But a year later, the first time I had the chance to vote in a general election, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for a party led by Michael Foot, even though I was living in a marginal seat at the time. Along with two friends who were also voting in a general election for the first time, I put my cross against the SDP candidate’s name (as described in a post I wrote last year). As happened in numerous seats across the country, the third party managed to split the Labour vote, allowing the Tory candidate to win.

Fast forward another year, and despite my brief and accidental membership of the Conservative Party, I knew that that was the one party I just couldn’t consider joining (actually, there were two parties I wouldn’t have considered joining, but the SNP didn’t even qualify as a candidate to be rejected). Neil Kinnock’s election as Labour’s leader had grabbed my attention: here was somebody who was serious about opposing the Tories and, at last, serious about turning Labour into a government-in-waiting, rather than an umbrella pressure group pandering to every minority interest under the sun. I still had my reservations about policy: I didn’t support unilateral nuclear disarmament and thought Labour’s previous policy of disengagement with Europe was bonkers. But they would be ditched in time, I figured. So when, at the end of a party political broadcast, an address was given for membership enquiries, I bit the bullet and sent off a letter.

Funny how a seemingly casual decision at the time could have such a massive effect on the course of someone’s life. But the truth is I never considered it to be a casual decision. I took it extremely seriously at the time, and in the years that followed, my commitment to the Labour tribe defined my career and even my personal relationships. Personal and political highlights became indistinguishable: when Kinnock made his anti-Militant speech to Labour conference in Bournemouth in 1985, I was house-sitting for a friend in Sale, whooping and air-punching in a room occupied by a total of one person. On a related note, 1988 will always resonate in my memory as the year I was served with an interim interdict (injunction) due to my involvement in a local constituency inquiry into the activities of Militant members in Cathcart.

The low points have regularly outnumbered the high points: defeat in the 1987 and 1992 general elections (the consequences of the latter being the loss of my job when I had just bought a house and started a family), the loss of the Scottish* by-election in 1988, John Smith’s death in 1994, my rejection as a Labour candidate for the local elections in 1990, the attempted coup against Tony Blair in 2006.

But the highlights made everything seem worth it: the morning of 2 May 1997, my selection as Cathcart’s parliamentary candidate in September 2000 and subsequent election as an MP in June 2001, my appointment as Scottish Labour’s press officer in September 1990, my first speech to national conference in September 1989, my appointment as a minister in September 2006 (September seems to be an important month for me, I’ve just realised).

Something of a roller coaster ride, you might conclude. As I’ve often told Carolyn: I’ve never understood those who claim politics is dull. It’s more entertaining than the best soap opera, with more interesting and better-written characters. 

And in the last quarter of a century, I’ve never regretted for an instant my decision to pick up a pen and notepad as that party political broadcast came to an end and jot down the address, “150 Walworth Road, London”.

* In the same way actors refer to Macbeth as “the Scottish play”, that’s how I tend to refer to Jim Sillars’ former seat.

REMEMBER the days when politicians and journalists would trade arguments?

Ah, happy days! Nowadays, it’s difficult to open a newspaper (and impossible to browse the blogscape) without reading about the latest threat to imprison political opponents. Simon Heffer is the latest to indulge in this tosh. In today’s Telegraph he writes:

It would be a brave person who sought to argue that what Mr Brown has done, and what he is now pressuring Mr Darling to do, is not a wholesale act of criminal negligence. Simply losing the next general election is, frankly, not enough of a punishment for a man who has inflicted such damage on our country that people won’t even buy government bonds any more. An example needs to be made of him. I want him behind bars.

I’m sure Heffer’s sentiments will find an echo among many of my own readers (though not, thankfully, among most of my voters). There’s a distinctly unpleasant edge to much debate today which has more resonance in the political culture of certain South American countries than here in the UK. “You disagree with me? I’ll put you in prison!”

In the States, the Republicans’ knee-jerk reactions to losing elections is to impeach Democrat presidents. Like many fashions, it has crossed the pond. The term “impeachment” has never been widely used here, but it carries overtones of the much more glamorous American system and so some politicians from the minor parties started using it when they attacked Tony Blair over Iraq (however, one of those minority party politicians, Alex Salmond, once got into difficulty when debating Iraq with me on the radio: he claimed that Richard Nixon had been impeached and that Bill Clinton had not. I pointed out that it was the other way round. Alex was assuming, like many people, that “impeachment” is the same as “conviction”. It’s not).

So, from the Guardian/Independent-reading middle class wet dream/fantasy of trying Tony Blair with ward crimes on the basis that they didn’t agree with his foreign policy, we now have the right wing, in the shape of Heffer, demanding not that Labour are thrown out of office and into opposition, but that the prime minister should be imprisoned because they disagree with his economic policy.

Is this what it’s come to? That political debate isn’t enough to engage the public any more, so we have to up the ante and start threatening the individual liberty of political opponents? You can see where this is headed, can’t you? After all, death threats are perfectly acceptable if you think the local government settlement this year isn’t going to allow council spending to keep pace with inflation…

Alternatively, how about this: we have a political debate about the issues between now and the general election, then we vote, and whichever party wins, forms the next government. Radical, yes? 

Meanwhile, let’s lock up Simon Heffer (only joking, of course…).

TONY Blair’s assumption of Labour’s leadership in 1994 genuinely changed our party.

Of course there was the welcome ditching of Clause IV,which was certainly the highest profile internal reform he achieved. But there was also the unapologetic embracing of privatisation, the challenging of the culture that made excuses for every form of criminal or anti-social behaviour and, at long last, a recognition that what matters far more than policies are the outcomes they produce.

The resurgence of the Conservative Party under David Cameron has been based on an assumption that he, like Blair, has changed his party, reshaped it in his mould. But the evidence for this is far more elusive. On the economy, I admit, the Conservatives are now the party of regulation and centrist diktat. Fair enough.

But what about every other area of policy? How has Cameron “reinvented” his party? On Europe, they’ve adopted a more extreme approach than under any previous leader, including Thatcher. But what has actually changed? What are the big differences between Cameron’s Conservatives and Thatcher’s, Major’s, Hague’s or Howard’s Conservatives? Are they really different at all? If so, how?

Or is the Conservatives’ poll lead more to do with disaffection with Labour than enthusiasm for Cameron and his party. Neither analysis is good news for my party, but it’s not enough any more to wait for governments to lose elections. Oppositions have to win them, or at least win a higher level of enthusiasm from the electorate than Cameron has so far managed to elicit. 

Tony Blair’s reforms to the Labour Party were significant, profound and lasting. So far it’s been difficult to see what Cameron has changed about his party, other than the logo.

GIVEN the anti-politics culture prevailing at the moment, many readers of this blog will undoubtedly rub their hands in glee at Trevor Phillips’ suggestion that MPs should be forced to retire from the Commons after four terms.

He plans to present the idea to the Speaker’s Conference where, I trust, it will receive the serious consideration it deserves and be binned. 

Term limits are fundamentally anti-democratic and the satisfaction that some would have at seeing the forced departure of this or that politician they dislike would be tempered, I hope, with the realisation that such decisions should be left to the electorate and the electorate alone.

The only reason that US presidents are limited to two terms is that Franklin D. Roosevelt went and got himself elected four times by the American public, the cheeky scamp! His detractors believed that allowing the public a say in who should lead their country was undemocratic, so while Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, was in office, they passed the 22nd amendment to the US constitution to make sure the electorate would never again have the chance to vote for a president on more than two consecutive occasions.

I know Phillips’ motives are decent, and I have no suggestion for alternative ways to clear the way for more black and ethnic minorities to enter the Commons. But limiting the number of times an MP could stand would be just silly.

Just think: if we’d had a four-term limit since the end of the Second World War, we would have been deprived of the premierships of Attlee, Churchill (second time round), Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Heath, Calaghan, Thatcher, and Brown.

We would, however, still have had Alec Douglas-Home, John Major and Tony Blair (although he would have been forced to retire from the Commons at the 2001 election).

Silly idea, Trev. Sorry.