'Official Secrets' and getting the perspective right on Blair

“I think we were lied into an illegal war,” says Katharine Gun, excellently played by Keira Knightley in a film well worth watching, Official Secrets.

Back in 2003, Gun was working at Britain’s communications spying centre, GCHQ, when she was included in the distribution of an email from the States, asking for blackmail material against a number of UN Security Council delegates, to push them into backing a resolution authorising war on Iraq.

Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun about to take a life-altering step
Sadly, it didn’t stop the war

Gun, appalled that the resources of GCHQ were being used merely to provide cover for the UK and US governments, leaked the email. To keep the spoiler small, let me just say that the film includes a particularly telling exchange about her role.

“You work for the British government,” she’s told.

“No, not really,” she replies.

“No?”

“Governments change,” she explains. “I work for the British people. I gather intelligence so that the government can protect the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people.”

The film was an excellent way of spending a lockdown hour or two. It also brought back memories. Not particularly cheerful memories, accompanied as they were by a sense of disappointment and even betrayal.

Huge demos against the invasion, in London and around the world
Also couldn’t stop the war

Huge numbers, up to a million, had demonstrated in London against the war. Dubya Bush, US President, and Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, had flopped from one unconvincing source of authority for war to another. They claimed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but weapons inspectors on the ground had found none. Blair went for a United Nations resolution because British legal opinion said he needed one. When he couldn’t get that authorisation, he asked his Attorney General to provide a different opinion, which he duly did.

Dubya had clearly decided to go to war in Iraq however weak the justification, and Tony Blair had decided to go along with him, with or without authority.

They went in, toppled a deeply unsavoury dictator, but at huge cost: as well as six-figure casualties in the fighting, the war spurred the emergence of ISIS, leading in time to its blood-chilling dictatorship and many more years of war to break it.

No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ever found. And, when the legal advice offered to the government was finally published, it confirmed all our suspicions: the Attorney General had warned that invasion would be illegal and potentially lay Ministers open to prosecution as war criminals, unless a covering resolution was obtained from the UN. He only changed that view when it became clear the resolution had failed.

Nothing people could say or do would change anything. Not the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Not Katharine Gun laying her job and liberty on the line. Not even the law would restrict its behaviour: it was going to war even if the action was illegal.

It was all deeply depressing.

That’s why I find it ironic now to be labelled a ‘Blairite’, as I have been by many on the far Left of the Labour Party. Far from an enthusiast for Blair, I felt betrayed by his behaviour over Iraq. And there were other issues on which I felt his government behaved reprehensibly. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has left public sector bodies, in particular hospitals, still struggling today. Blair even repudiated one of his best initiatives, the Freedom of Information Act, when he realised it could be used to force him to reveal information he would rather hide.

No, I was never a Blairite. And today, the committed supporters of Blair are few indeed. But the difference, in assessing Blair, between those of us who refuse the label ‘Blairite’ but don’t belong to the hard Left, is that we’re not prepared to write off his governments’ achievements as though they never happened.

Among others, they include the major assault on child poverty. The minimum wage. The Human Rights Act. Devolution of powers to the nations of the UK. Freedom of Information. The Good Friday Agreement. Huge investment in the health service.

The latter is particularly topical, given that the health service is today struggling so pitifully to cope with Coronavirus. Had the investment started by Blair continued, instead of being reversed in the name of austerity, how much better-placed would the NHS have been to cope with the present pandemic?

Lives have been lost due to austerity. Thousands of lives. That’s worth bearing in mind when we assess the Blair legacy.

Without being a Blairite, I’m in no doubt that the governments he led were infinitely to be preferred to the one we have now. And, in arguing for a return to a Labour government, that’s something we need to proclaim loudly. Things would have been better without the last ten years of Tory government.

What’s more, he achieved far more than those who followed him as leader, and who lost power to the Tories or failed to win it back. He achieved far more than Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn. Whether their policies were good or bad, they were unable to enact any of them.

You can only do any good at all if you get into power. Which Blair powerfully demonstrated. And you don’t have to be a Blairite to understand that. 

I reject that label. But I also refuse to belittle the good he did among the harm.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking for a good way to spend a lockdown evening, you could do a lot worse than watch Official Secrets.

3-D Corbyn: fiddling with anti-Semitism while Labour burns

The wonderful thing about faith is that it can never be wrong. If the world doesn’t end on the day the true believers announced, it’s only because they misinterpreted the Lord’s words or because they were unworthy of having their beliefs so spectacularly confirmed.

So it is with all cults. They can never be in error, and above all their guru is infallible. Consequently, if they begin to fail, there can only be one of two explanations: nefarious behaviour by traitors within, or vicious plots by conspirators from outside.

It’s happening inside the British Labour Party. It’s losing members, losing money and above all losing electoral support. Up against a hopelessly divided and discredited government, Labour is at least six points behind in the polls where normally the Opposition would be several points ahead.

That can’t be down to the leader. He is faultless, a man of unimpeachable integrity, remarkable courage and unsurpassed wisdom. So if the movement is failing under his enlightened hand, it can only be because it is being undermined by unconscionable elements doing the devil’s work.

Saint Jezza - incapable of only one thing: error

The internal traitors are numerous. They are red Tories or Blairites – frankly, the terms are interchangeable – and they have nothing better to do with their time than undermine the Labour Party and its revered leader. They are working for the return of a Tory government even if, as is the case of many of them, they have spent half a lifetime campaigning for Labour governments.

There is no contradiction here: those weren’t true Labour governments, merely Tory administrations in disguise. All these renegades were in fact sabotaging true Labour, infiltrating the party to poison the wells of untainted faith now running true thanks to the great leader.

But Labour isn’t only beset by internal enemies. There are powerful outside foes too. Chief amongst them is the government of Israel.

Were you so naïve as to think that Israel might be principally preoccupied with such nations as the United States or Russia? Or perhaps those, on its doorstep, which have threatened its very existence in the past, such as Syria or Egypt?

You are so wrong. What keeps Netanyahu awake at night is the prospect of a Labour government in Britain led by the sainted Jeremy Corbyn. His diplomatic service and intelligence agencies have bent their scheming minds to the most urgent of their tasks: preventing Corbyn ever entering No 10 as Prime Minister.

Some voices in senior government circles in Israel might be tempted to say “Stop Corbyn? Why bother? He’s sinking himself quite fast enough on his own”. They don’t last long. They too are the internal enemies, in this case of Israel, blind to the true threat posed by a minor nation on the edge of Europe, from which it is currently struggling to isolate itself still further.

Fortunately, Israel has friends it can count on in Britain. I, of course, am one of them, as is every British Jew. We do Israel’s bidding, even those of us who speak out against that state and denounce its behaviour as shameful. That’s just a smokescreen to disguise our true and devious aims.

Let’s be clear, by the way. These Corbynists who denounce what is, in fact, an international Jewish conspiracy against their man, are not anti-Semites. It’s true that the trope of international Jewish conspiracies has, in the past, been a hallmark of anti-Semitism, but it isn’t in this case. Because the international Jewish conspiracy denounced previously was a fraud, made up by anti-Semites; the one denounced by Corbynists today is real, and they have TV programmes from Al Jazeera to prove it.

What this all means is that everything Corbyn’s doing is precisely right, and exactly what is required to take Labour back to power. Only these vicious conspiracies stand in his way. Fortunately, he continues, imperturbable, to pursue what I have come to think of as his 3-D strategy.

By that I don’t mean that Corbyn is particularly 3-dimensional, except in the most trivially physical sense. There are times he strikes me as not even two-dimensional but one-dimensional, a man following a straight line leading nowhere – or, at least, nowhere useful. In fact, given his tendency to vanish whenever the going gets tough, it might even be sensible to think of him as a single point, vanishing over time.

No, when I say 3-D I’m referring to his preferred approach to any crisis, based on three Ds:

• Denial: he starts by claiming that there isn’t a problem
• Dithering: he takes as long as he’s can to avoid reaching a decision
• Delay: if finally forced to take a decision, he makes every effort to delay its implementation

It has, indeed, been the case of his approach to anti-Semitism. He started by pretending there was no problem (and many of his followers still do); he then spent months taking no decision about what to do about it; when finally he set up an organisation to take some action, he let time slip by ensuring that the gentlest measures possible were adopted as slowly as could be managed.

It’s the approach he prefers. His attitude was identical when it came to Brexit: he sat on the fence as long as he could until forced off it by the membership. Now he’s following along behind those he’s supposed to be leading, in the hope that the whole thing might blow over without his every being obliged to do anything meaningful.

However, please don’t imagine that this might have anything to do with Labour’s dire standing in the polls. Oh, no. The leader’s got it right.

It’s the traitors who are stabbing him in the back. They and they alone are responsible for the failure of the project. Especially thanks to the backing they have from a major international conspiracy.

Based, of course, in Jerusalem.