Simon Jenkins

If I were Tony Blair I would report Sir Christopher Meyer to the Press Complaints Commission. Meyer's revelations in this week's Guardian must embrace invasion of privacy, breach of confidence and breaking a professional contract. He might even be vulnerable to a charge of profiting from the proceeds of a war crime. But Blair would be wasting his time. Meyer is not just the ex-ambassador to Washington. He is chairman of the Press Complaints Commission. The man has serious protection. Amazing country, Britain. Call me old-fashioned, but I still find something queasy in public officials ratting on their bosses while the latter are still in office. How should a prime minister regard an official's advice when he knows that it may appear as a Guardian scoop if he fails to heed it? Mandarins are getting too big for their boots. They want it all: private-sector pay, gongs, bonuses, inflation-proof pensions at 60, Oxbridge headships and no-censorship clauses for their memoirs. Sooner or later someone will stop it. Meanwhile, we can at least revel in the product. Meyer's Washington reminiscences are sensational. He portrays the prime minister as a star-struck wimp and his cabinet as "pygmies". I love John Prescott trying to inform senators with his views on "the Balklands" and "Kovosa". But of Meyer's central thesis I am sceptical, that Blair could have stopped the Iraq war or made it less of a fiasco if only he had spent his negotiating capital wisely. Instead Meyer has him dazzled, schmoozed and conned into deceiving parliament. When George Bush, clearly Meyer's hero, said that Blair had "cojones", what he meant was the opposite. The prime minister went along with each twist and turn in neocon policy. To America he was a celebrity, but to the White House he was a walkover. Little of this comes as a surprise to scholars of advanced Blair studies. In the face of serious power, Blair collapses. He did so over fuel tax, civil-service pensions, rating revaluation and, this week, the police heavy mob. If he "hangs tough", as he does occasionally with the parliamentary Labour party, it is because some higher power has got the better of him. Meyer's account of Blair's Washington antics is toe-curling. The prime minister's eyes are permanently out on stalks as he meets showbiz stars, is flown here and there by helicopter, and purrs round town in a Rolls-Royce. Even before 9/11 he had the demeanour of an eager presidential candidate, grinning, pumping flesh, making speeches of breathtaking platitude. Blair gulped down adulation and offered unconditional support in return: "However tough, we fight with [America], no grandstanding, no offering implausible and impractical advice from the touchline." British policy towards America was simply a blank cheque. This explains why Blair was never going to be anywhere but at Bush's side as the war unfolded. Contrary to what he told parliament, "Blair had already taken the decision to support regime change" at the Crawford meeting with Bush in April 2002. But this does not prove Meyer's hypothesis that as a result Blair had the capacity to influence the course of events. Meyer admits that "by the first few months of 2002, it was clear that Bush was determined to implement the official American policy of regime change". All else was modality. Blair did try to make his support conditional in two respects. He pleaded with Bush for help with parliament. He asked that military action against Saddam Hussein be taken only when the UN route was "exhausted", and that coincidental pressure be applied on Israel for a Middle East peace deal. Both conditions ran into the sand. Meyer appears to have believed that "Bush might blink" after the failure of the second UN resolution, and that what Britain decided to do "could be the decisive factor in the White House". Yet neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld cared a damn about British conditions, and they were who mattered. If Colin Powell could get nowhere against the White House, what hope had Blair? Rumsfeld even told him that if he disliked the war, he could leave his army in Kuwait. It was not needed. The key to understanding the conquest of Iraq is that from conception to catastrophe it was not the work of "America" or "Washington", but of a small cabal who won the president's ear. A groaning shelf of reportage and memoir testifies to this, from Bob Woodward, Richard Clark, Paul O'Neill, John Dean, Joseph Wilson and others. Rumsfeld regarded his enemies, as Woodward records, as being not just Saddam, but Colin Powell, the state department, the chiefs of staff, even the US army. All opposed him. The essence of this war was to be "lite" in every sense. It was Washington lite, invasion lite, occupation lite, diplomacy lite, legality lite, morality lite. Everything heavy was discarded as an impediment. The post-invasion "mistakes", now used apologetically by neocon columnists, were built into the operation. The dismantling of the Iraqi economy and state apparat was meant. Iraq was a crazy, anarchic, rightwing adventure, but it was of a piece. The idea that Blair could somehow have nudged this war on to a wholly different course is a folly of diplomatic grandeur. As Vanity Fair wrote in its excellent Iraq investigative issue in April last year, Blair was helpless in the face of neocons. When he set conditions, they ridiculed them. Had Britain backed out after the failure of the second UN resolution, the White House would have lost no sleep. Blair could never have instituted the state department's sensible Plan for a Future Iraq, which Rumsfeld had already torn up (along with another from his own army). Blair could not even get Britons released from Guantánamo or stop the resumed bombardment of Sunni towns in November 2003, catastrophic to the coalition cause as it was bound to be. Blair had no leverage on Iraq. What he did have was a choice. He could have done what Wilson did over Vietnam, and the Americans over Suez and the Falklands. He could have declared no dog in the fight. But from the moment Blair offered unconditional support to the White House in the spring of 2002, he was chained to every horror that Iraq was to bring in its train. I do not see him as a belligerent warmonger, bomb-happy and careless of human life or rights. He is, as Meyer portrays him, a simple man carrying on his back the burden of an awful mistake. He will carry it for ever. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Colum...1637206,00.html

What did the Labour party imagine when it chose Tony Blair as its leader? The man is so Tory as to be out of sight. This week's reversal of two decades of Labour policy on secondary education is breathtaking. Apart from a peep of protest from John Prescott it appears to have passed the cabinet nem con. These days Blair could invade the Sudetenland and Poland without Labour objecting. The education white paper offers a vision of a "parent-led" state secondary-school system. Its key institution is the "self-governing school free to parents", a copy of the Tories' grant-maintained school that Labour once derided. Parents will be able to control a school's "ethos and individualism". As one parent briskly put it to me, "We can keep out the blacks." Whether British schools are so broke as to need this surgery must be moot. But it shows how far the political ecology has shifted under Blair. The 11-plus failed in the 1960s because it excluded from the best secondary schools some two-thirds of children. By 1965 this had become politically untenable. Both parties accepted the advent of non-selective schooling after 11, albeit in some areas postponed to 14 or 16. The reform has broadly held. When Margaret Thatcher was education secretary in 1970 she dared not reverse it. Only in the big cities were comprehensives seriously unpopular with some parents, largely because of the preponderance of ethnic minorities. Criticism also tended to be of their size and the quality of their teaching, failings that could be met without blasting the system apart. As Peter Hyman said on these pages on Monday, what bad schools need is better teaching and resources, not bureaucracy and ritual humiliation. The politics of the white paper holds that if a critical mass of each age group can be detached from the lumpen comprehensive mass, then middle-class parents will stay in the state sector. This is achieved, says Blair, by offering them "a range of good schools from which to choose". This is fantasy. Most parents cannot and do not want to roam the country in search of the "school of their choice", even if the transport system could stand the strain. They want the school closest to where they live to be an excellent one, period. In most countries, even in Blair's beloved Sweden, this is achieved through community ownership and leadership, not a cooperative of transient parents. A child's schooling is not a hospital operation. It is a seven-year decision laden with social connotations. That is why, as Blair well knows, the only choice in education (other than to go private) is of parents by schools. Put parents in charge of schools and they will choose parents like themselves. The 11-plus was at least an objective test of aptitude. The white paper evokes prewar social selection. It is worth asking why the Tories' identical reform failed. Blair's amanuensis, Lord Adonis, must have copied the white paper almost verbatim from the Baker 1988 act and the Patten 1993 one. They too were motivated by antagonism towards local government. They too tried to induce parents to remove their schools from council to central government control. They were even given a 15% budgetary bribe to do so. In 1990, Thatcher ordered a policy paper on "unbundling" local education authorities, as has Blair. Like him, she could not imagine a school wanting to stay stifled by a "hard-left" council. Special institutions, city technology colleges, were set up with private money. They cost four times as much as locally commissioned schools. Labour's equivalent, city academies, cost five times as much. One thing Whitehall does not do is economy. Despite a frantic ministerial sales campaign, the innovation failed. Just 4% of schools opted to become "grant-maintained", almost all small ones threatened with closure. Parents seemed content with local councils and reluctant to burden themselves with school politics. In addition, the nationalised industry formed to run this new state sector, the Funding Agency for Schools, instantly smothered them in barrow-loads of bumf. Autonomy under the state is always a contradiction in terms. More lethal was the Treasury. It has long wanted a National School Service to parallel the NHS. Falling rolls - London is said to have 50 schools too many - require capacity planning. Any drift towards institutional freedom would vitiate that. Having brought school budgets under central control in the 1980s, the Treasury now wanted to control the spending. In spite of pledges in 1988 that popular schools would be allowed to expand at will, the Treasury banned it. It ordered Whitehall to vet school plans to ensure efficient use of capacity. Blair said on Monday that there would be no such dirigisme, yet he added that the Treasury would retain a "strategic role" and that school investment would be "agreed by local heads and governors". What does that mean? There is no sign that the Treasury has surrendered control of school building, teachers' pay or common funding. It is trust/foundation hospitals all over again. Letting popular schools expand is the one (revived) innovation in Blair's plan. But the last thing a good school will want to do is admit less-able pupils through parent choice, pupils who will depress its league-table ranking. Nor, unless it is wholly privatised, will it want the bother of running an adjacent failing school as proposed. The incentive is to take independence at face value and restrict numbers to good pupils, this being the essence of its popularity. Unless, as I believe will happen, the Treasury again calls a halt to all this, then push will come to shove over sixth forms. Under Blair's chaotic pseudo-market, sixth forms will concentrate in ever fewer exclusive schools, leaving local comprehensives unable to sustain theirs. All the reform will have done is reduce the number of rejected 11-year-olds from two-thirds of the age group presumably to a minority, a minority that will define itself as underachieving and poor. The despised "bog-standard comprehensive" will revert to being the bog-standard secondary modern, closing at age 16. That is the logical outcome of this reform. We will then start again by reinventing the comprehensive school. This is the what, in a blizzard of spin, the dear old Labour party has just bought. Amazing. http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/st...1600743,00.html

Lance Price, Blair's former aide, has just published his book, The Spin Doctor's Diary. His latest raspberry at Downing Street sets a new standard in political kiss-and-tell. Whitehall tried, halfheartedly, to get it suppressed. The cabinet secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull, declared the whole book "completely unacceptable" and made a series of juicy cuts. Price was thus able to use them as an 18-certificate trailer in the Daily Mail, flagged the "Allegations They Tried to Ban". I suspect that Turnbull, no friend of Blair's "democracy", knew exactly what he was doing. Price claims his revelations reflect his "passionate belief that unnecessary secrecy about how our government works is bad, not just for the people in whose name it operates but for government itself". This presumably refers to aides copulating on Blair's sofa, Blair abusing "the xxxxing Welsh" and his "relishing" sending troops into action. The book is a savage money-spinner at Blair's expense. It is a diary of events in the last three years of the 1997 parliament, offering a first-person account of spinners at work. The portrait of the Blair-Campbell duumvirate is so breathtakingly cynical as to be near implausible. Every day is an exercise in trying to write the following morning's front pages. It convinces me that Campbell's talent lay not in using the power of Downing Street to corrupt the press (an easy task) but in using the power of the press to corrupt Downing Street. At this he was astonishingly successful. Campbell is the diaries' evil genius. He clearly regards Blair as a fool - the word is more obscene - loathing the public sector and obsessed by his future income. Campbell dominates every decision, holding most ministers in contempt and using them as initiative factories to get Blair out of some new scrape, be it on drugs, asylum seekers, binge drinkers or whatever. Blair emerges "effing and blinding", vacillating, charming, opportunist, chaotic, above all thick. Price is not the first so to describe Blair and his entourage. We can read similar material from Rentoul, Rawnsley, Naughtie, Seldon, Kampfner, Scott, Riddell, Oborne and others. But most rely on such devices as "an insider said" and can be taken with pinches of salt. The new book is closer to Washington memoirs in flaunting oratio recta. The intimacy of Price's revelations is what gives them force. They intrude into the innermost sanctum of sofa government, the off-message exchanges of those present. No indiscretion is sacred - or so we must assume. Blair is said to be upset by Price's disloyalty. But it was Blair who wanted to staff his office with media hangers-on, not civil servants. The latter may have shortcomings but are bound by oaths of secrecy and job security. A crony's loyalty is only to his boss. When that wanes, he has nothing to sell but his secrets. Since their price is in direct proportion to their sensationalism, the temptation to dish the dirt must be overwhelming. http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1581336,00.html

Blair's party conference thugs did a heavy job on an 82-year-old man for shouting "nonsense" at the foreign secretary on Thursday. Walter Wolfgang was mildly heckling Jack Straw for justifying unprovoked military aggression. As luck would have it, Wolfgang was a refugee from Nazi Germany. When he felt the hand of "security" on his collar, I wonder if his mind flashed back to his youth. The incident recalls a New Yorker cartoon of a Nuremburg rally. It has the Führer beginning his speech: "I think I may say without fear of contradiction?" What was outrageous was not the ejection as such - insecure politicians have always feared hecklers - but the use of anti-terrorism powers. It now seems instinctive to the police to assume that an elderly heckler has terrorist intent. It is exactly the syndrome that killed Jean Charles de Menezes in the London tube. Next year's "shoot-to-kill" anti-free-speech law will enable the police to throw people such as Wolfgang into prison for giving "unintentional encouragement" to any political violence. Lord Falconer said on Sunday that the powers will be enforced "reasonably". Like in Brighton on Wednesday? Does that mean Falconer will arrest only regius professors of history? Ian McCartney, the Labour party chairman, should not have bothered to apologise to Wolfgang. He should have summoned Blair, Straw, Charles Clarke and Falconer and told them to get their tanks off Labour's lawn. They had already turned his conference into little short of a police rally. The whole thing was near Mosleyite. Blair and co should abandon their totalitarian laws or he, McCartney, will suspend their party membership forthwith.

Blair's party conference thugs did a heavy job on an 82-year-old man for shouting "nonsense" at the foreign secretary on Thursday. Walter Wolfgang was mildly heckling Jack Straw for justifying unprovoked military aggression. As luck would have it, Wolfgang was a refugee from Nazi Germany. When he felt the hand of "security" on his collar, I wonder if his mind flashed back to his youth. The incident recalls a New Yorker cartoon of a Nuremburg rally. It has the Führer beginning his speech: "I think I may say without fear of contradiction?" What was outrageous was not the ejection as such - insecure politicians have always feared hecklers - but the use of anti-terrorism powers. It now seems instinctive to the police to assume that an elderly heckler has terrorist intent. It is exactly the syndrome that killed Jean Charles de Menezes in the London tube. Next year's "shoot-to-kill" anti-free-speech law will enable the police to throw people such as Wolfgang into prison for giving "unintentional encouragement" to any political violence. Lord Falconer said on Sunday that the powers will be enforced "reasonably". Like in Brighton on Wednesday? Does that mean Falconer will arrest only regius professors of history? Ian McCartney, the Labour party chairman, should not have bothered to apologise to Wolfgang. He should have summoned Blair, Straw, Charles Clarke and Falconer and told them to get their tanks off Labour's lawn. They had already turned his conference into little short of a police rally. The whole thing was near Mosleyite. Blair and co should abandon their totalitarian laws or he, McCartney, will suspend their party membership forthwith.

Blair's party conference thugs did a heavy job on an 82-year-old man for shouting "nonsense" at the foreign secretary on Thursday. Walter Wolfgang was mildly heckling Jack Straw for justifying unprovoked military aggression. As luck would have it, Wolfgang was a refugee from Nazi Germany. When he felt the hand of "security" on his collar, I wonder if his mind flashed back to his youth. The incident recalls a New Yorker cartoon of a Nuremburg rally. It has the Führer beginning his speech: "I think I may say without fear of contradiction?" What was outrageous was not the ejection as such - insecure politicians have always feared hecklers - but the use of anti-terrorism powers. It now seems instinctive to the police to assume that an elderly heckler has terrorist intent. It is exactly the syndrome that killed Jean Charles de Menezes in the London tube. Next year's "shoot-to-kill" anti-free-speech law will enable the police to throw people such as Wolfgang into prison for giving "unintentional encouragement" to any political violence. Lord Falconer said on Sunday that the powers will be enforced "reasonably". Like in Brighton on Wednesday? Does that mean Falconer will arrest only regius professors of history? Ian McCartney, the Labour party chairman, should not have bothered to apologise to Wolfgang. He should have summoned Blair, Straw, Charles Clarke and Falconer and told them to get their tanks off Labour's lawn. They had already turned his conference into little short of a police rally. The whole thing was near Mosleyite. Blair and co should abandon their totalitarian laws or he, McCartney, will suspend their party membership forthwith.

Blair's party conference thugs did a heavy job on an 82-year-old man for shouting "nonsense" at the foreign secretary on Thursday. Walter Wolfgang was mildly heckling Jack Straw for justifying unprovoked military aggression. As luck would have it, Wolfgang was a refugee from Nazi Germany. When he felt the hand of "security" on his collar, I wonder if his mind flashed back to his youth. The incident recalls a New Yorker cartoon of a Nuremburg rally. It has the Führer beginning his speech: "I think I may say without fear of contradiction?" What was outrageous was not the ejection as such - insecure politicians have always feared hecklers - but the use of anti-terrorism powers. It now seems instinctive to the police to assume that an elderly heckler has terrorist intent. It is exactly the syndrome that killed Jean Charles de Menezes in the London tube. Next year's "shoot-to-kill" anti-free-speech law will enable the police to throw people such as Wolfgang into prison for giving "unintentional encouragement" to any political violence. Lord Falconer said on Sunday that the powers will be enforced "reasonably". Like in Brighton on Wednesday? Does that mean Falconer will arrest only regius professors of history? Ian McCartney, the Labour party chairman, should not have bothered to apologise to Wolfgang. He should have summoned Blair, Straw, Charles Clarke and Falconer and told them to get their tanks off Labour's lawn. They had already turned his conference into little short of a police rally. The whole thing was near Mosleyite. Blair and co should abandon their totalitarian laws or he, McCartney, will suspend their party membership forthwith.

Is there any point to the Labour party? It meets this week in Brighton a shadow of its once-mighty self. Delegates used to be greeted with trumpets and drums, with the cries of orators and the braying of demonstrators. Union barons strutted the hall with their entourages. Executive elections were cliff-hanging tests of party power. When conferences passed resolutions they stayed passed. The earth moved. Labour conferences now resemble the last chapter of Animal Farm. Old Boxer has gone to the knacker’s. No one dares speak. Some animals are more equal than others. Napoleon is reading Tit-Bits and dressing his sow in watered silk. The ruling pigs are drinking with the old enemy, the humans. In truth they are indistinguishable. I cannot think of a political institution so transformed as Labour in my lifetime. Its party conference once reeked of power. It was an exhilarating cauldron of beer, argument and conspiracy. There was standing room only at Tribune meetings as Arthur Scargill, Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone heaped hilarious scorn on all and sundry. Conference was a glittering tourney, a grand coalition constantly renegotiating itself. It was unpredictable and it mattered. The force is spent. The heroes of the left have taken to pipes and slippers. Knights, bishops, rooks are gone and pawns move only on message. A Labour government no longer approaches the autumn season in a state of frenzied anticipation. Ministers no longer wrestle their policies from “Composite Resolution 22 as amended by the Amalgamated Union of Carthorses”. Those days are over. Conference has all the vitality of a Commonwealth heads of government meeting. The reason is Tony Blair. Those nostalgic for old Labour should remember how they ridiculed it at the time. The taming of Labour was Blair’s doing. It was he and the modernisers who, through the early 1990s, goaded the leadership into reform if Labour were ever to attain government and be taken seriously. Blair was then a bright-eyed revolutionary with a project. He systematically undermined the union link. In 1982 he had jeered at the Social Democratic party as “unelectable because they isolated themselves from organised labour”. Ten years later he did just that. He campaigned for Labour to accept Thatcher’s union reforms, including ending the closed shop. He fought to end the block vote in party elections. He declared in public the unions should expect “no special or privileged place” within the party. After he became leader in 1994 he killed the nationalising clause 4 of the constitution and seized control of the shadow cabinet and the party manifesto. So timid is Blair in office that it is hard to recollect the radical in shining armour of opposition. It was he, not Gordon Brown, who risked his career for reform, waving the flag amid the gloom and defeatism. Blair knew that old Labour was the enemy. He yearned to change its name. He took a giant hypodermic and rammed the party full of Novocaine, removing its teeth and wiring its mouth shut. His adoption of Philip Gould’s “unitary command structure” was total. Labour could no longer risk being a movement or a coalition. It was an obedient army. Today the result is astonishing. The Labour party will this week cheer a government that in its name is privatising the National Health Service, public housing and, if it can, secondary education. It will cheer the fiscal regression of last week’s cringing U-turn on council tax revaluation. It will cheer parenting orders, internment without trial and curbs on free speech. Its MPs have for 2½, years acceded to an illegal foreign war in alliance with a right-wing American president. Ten or 15 years ago a Labour conference would have gone berserk at this neo-Thatcherism. There would have been uproar, with such names as Brown, Blair, Blunkett and Straw doubtless in the van. Today any protest is dismissed as the ranting of jobless backbenchers. History will find this unbelievable. Did a Labour conference in 2005 really agree to continue a war in Iraq? Did it really set aside the goal of social justice in favour of an authoritarian “respect agenda”? Traditional British values such as local democracy, free speech and protecting minorities no longer concern institutional Labour. The public must look for their defence to specialist lobbies, the media, Liberal Democrats and, of all people, the House of Lords. Any parliamentary challenge to Charles Clarke’s anti-terrorism bill now depends on the lords. The only question that matters is which clause will the lords reject? How will the lords humiliate the government? What can the law lords do? No one expects the Commons to defend liberty from the executive. It is a wonder the Speaker bothers to take his seat. Read the rest of this article here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,...1796269,00.html

At last history hits pay dirt. For years it was pap for television. The nation's rulers needed scientists for guns, linguists for trade and economists for mistakes. History was for nuts and numismatists. Now up pops Charles Clarke jingling bags of gold. The home secretary has promised the prime minister that he will lock away for five years anyone who "glorifies, exalts or celebrates" a terrorist act committed in the past 20 years. He does not care if glorification was not meant. If someone, somewhere takes anything that I say or write as encouraging to terror, even if they do not act on it, I have committed a criminal act. Nor is this all. Lest any crackpot thinks he can dance up and down any old high street praising Hitler, Mao or Uncle Joe as outside the 20-year limit, Clarke is preparing a list of earlier terrorist acts that also render their celebrants criminals. After "listed" historic buildings we have "listed" historic terrorisms. To the glorious chronicles of our island race, Clarke is to append an open-ended catalogue of listed events. They may include any acts of violence against people, property or, bizarrely, electronic systems anywhere in the world if intended to advance a political, religious or ideological cause or to influence a government. I am told that this astonishing bill was cobbled together not by Clarke or the lord chancellor, Charles Falconer, who were both away at the time. The author was a No 10 wonk who was trying to think up "12 points" to put in Blair's holiday press conference pack on August 5. The wording recalls the remit of the old House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington. It is born of Joe McCarthy out of 1066 and All That, with a dash of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. A sure sign of a leader losing his grip on reality is when he starts meddling with history. New Labour was born denying its past. As George Eliot said of women, happy is the one who has no history. Blair's party was not-Labour, not-Liberal, not-Tory, just "we". Hence the significance of Clarke's partial cut-off date in the mid-80s. That was the time when Blairism first oozed like ectoplasm from the guts of Orgreave and Wapping. Terrorism as defined in law more or less covers the story of the human race. Half of Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples must qualify as a listed event. The Crown Prosecution Service must be staffed with experts in William the Conqueror, the Black Prince, the New Model Army, the Gordon rioters, the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Spin doctors must cut their teeth on Alexander the Great, Vlad the Impaler, Innocent III and the Counter-Reformation in Latin America. They must burn midnight oil over the Albigensian crusade. Blair will be heard screaming in his attic: "Beware the Da Vinci Code." This is government by trivia and whim. Already we are told that Clarke's listed events will not include anything Irish. Why? King William's campaign is life and breath to loyalist militants, as is the 1916 Easter Rising to Blair's pet insurrectionists, the IRA. Why should these groups be excused the law? Soon anyone who visits terror on the British people will negotiate a "listed events exclusion clause" as part of their final settlement. Even without the cliche that one man's listed event is another's act of heroism, this is a can of worms. Bomber Harris's flattening of German cities in the second world war was specifically described by Churchill as "simply for the sake of increasing terror". The bombing of Hiroshima was, to put it mildly, a politically motivated assault on people and property. Last month it was not glorified, but it was certainly celebrated. Are Hiroshima or Dresden to be listed events? If not, how can the no less terrorist blitz be listed? Conrad was in this sense right: "The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket." I have no faith in Clarke's Stalinist historians. If Whitehall bureaucrats are so otherworldly as to find village ponds, conker trees and rare steaks awash in human hazard, there is no telling what they will find in the bloodstained pages of history. They need only to find a dodgy event and someone to praise it and they will pounce. The issue is not mens rea or intention to glorify. To convict, there need only be someone who confesses to being "encouraged" by the glorification. It is a stooge's charter. This extension of censorship renders any apologist for any liberation struggle vulnerable to prosecution. I find it astounding that people such as Falconer, Clarke and the rest of the cabinet can sit round a cabinet table and pass a measure worthy of Joseph Goebbels. Read the rest of the article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...1576613,00.html

Don't be fooled a second time. They told you Britain must invade Iraq because of its weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong. Now they say British troops must stay in Iraq because otherwise it will collapse into chaos. This second lie is infecting everyone. It is spouted by Labour and Tory opponents of the war and even by the Liberal Democrat spokesman, Sir Menzies Campbell. Its axiom is that western soldiers are so competent that, wherever they go, only good can result. It is their duty not to leave Iraq until order is established, infrastructure rebuilt and democracy entrenched. Note the word "until". It hides a bloodstained half century of western self-delusion and arrogance. The white man's burden is still alive and well in the skies over Baghdad (the streets are now too dangerous). Soldiers and civilians may die by the hundred. Money may be squandered by the million. But Tony Blair tells us that only western values enforced by the barrel of a gun can save the hapless Mussulman from his own worst enemy, himself. The first lie at least had tactical logic. The Rumsfeld doctrine was to travel light, hit hard and get out. Neoconservatives might fantasise over Iraq as a democratic Garden of Eden, a land re-engineered to stability and prosperity. Harder noses were content to dump the place in Ahmad Chalabi's lap and let it go to hell. Had that happened, I suspect there would have been a bloody settling of scores but by now a tripartite republic hauling itself back to peace and reconstruction. Iraq is, after all, one of the richest nations on earth. Instead the invasion came with tanks of glue. Decisions were taken, with British compliance, to make Iraq an experiment in "ground zero" nation-building. All sensible advice was ignored on the assumption that whatever America and Britain did would seem better than Saddam, and better than our doing nothing. Kipling's demons danced through Downing Street. Britain did not want to colonise Iraq. Yet somehow Blair's "fighting not for territory but for values" needed territory after all, as if to prove itself more than a soundbite. The scenes broadcast yesterday from Basra show how far authority in southern Iraq has collapsed. This is tragic. When I was there two years ago the south was, in its own terms, a success. While the Americans were unleashing mayhem to the north, the British were methodically applying Lugard-style colonialism in Basra. They formed alliances with sheikhs, bribed warlords and won hearts and minds by going unarmoured. There was optimism in the air. British policy demanded one thing, momentum towards local sovereignty and early withdrawal. There was no such momentum. An ever more confident insurrection was allowed first to impede and then dictate the timetable of withdrawal. Sunni terrorists now hold American and British policy in their grip. The result has been an inevitable civil collapse. We do not even know on which side are the Basra police. The British government - and opposition - is in total denial. Ministerial boasts can't conceal the gloom of private briefings. Blair has done what no prime minister should do. He has put his soldiers at a foreign power's mercy. First that power was America. Now, according to the defence secretary, John Reid, it is a band of brave but desperate Iraqis entombed in Baghdad's Green Zone. He says he will stay until they request him to go, when local troops are trained and loyal and infrastructure is restored. That means doomsday. Everyone knows it. Iraqis of my acquaintance are numb at the violence unleashed by the west's failure to impose order on their country. They are baffled at the ineptitude, the counter-productive cruelty of the arrests, bombings and suppressions. They are past caring whether it was better or worse under Saddam. They know only that more people a month are being killed than at any time since the massacres of the early 1990s. If death and destruction are any guide, Britain's pre-invasion policy of containment was far more successful than occupation. Infrastructure is not being restored. Baghdad's water, electricity and sewers are in worse shape than a decade ago. Huge sums - such as the alleged $1bn for military supplies - are being stolen and stashed in Jordanian banks. The new constitution is a dead letter except the clauses that are blatantly sharia. These are already being enforced de facto in Shia areas. For the rest of the article read: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...1574478,00.html

Simon Jenkins is a British newspaper columnist who currently writes a regular column for The Guardian and the Sunday Times. He was born in 1943 and educated at Mill Hill School and St John's College, Oxford. He began on Country Life magazine, worked for The Times Educational Supplement and the Evening Standard and edited the Insight page of the Sunday Times. He was political editor of the Economist from 1979 to 1986 and subsequently went on to found and edit the Sunday Times Books section, where he also wrote a weekly column. In 1988 he was voted Journalist of the Year, and in 1993 Columnist of the Year. He has won the Edgar Wallace and David Watt awards. In the course of his career he has edited both the Evening Standard and The Times, and has written books on politics and on the history and architecture of London. He has been deputy chairman of English Heritage (1985-90) and is currently a member of the Millennium Commission. He chairs the Buildings Books Trust, sponsors of the Pevsner guides. Simon Jenkins lives in London and is married to the actress Gayle Hunnicutt.