Underblog.co.uk

Jack Straw is a lying bastard. However, for some time he has at least been offering reassurance to those concerned about the possibility of us plunging into another doomed war in the middle east:

“I don’t see any circumstances in which military action would be justified against Iran, full stop.” — Straw, November 2004

He repeatedly said that that a military attack on Iran would be “inconceivable”, something which Blair will not endorse with quite the same emphasis. So what will Margaret Beckett’s position be on Iran? It seems unlikely that the new foreign secretary will be quite as categorical as Straw. David Frum, the neo-con and former Bush speechwriter credited as the originator of the term “axis of evil”, gloats:

Straw was a prominent figure in the Labour party; Beckett owes her rise entirely to Tony Blair. The prime minister is replacing a foreign secretary whose weak words impeded successfully coercive negotiations with Iran with one much more beholden to him.

Incidentally, Frum is even more delighted about the demise of Clarke who, apparently, “tried to keep social peace with an alarming series of concessions to sharia and British Islamism”.

Of course, if Blair goes soon, there will be another shuffle of the ministerial deck by the new leader. It would be rather nice, wouldn’t it, if Brown’s cabinet were to wipe the smile from Frum’s face.

Hi, first post for months, but I intend to revive this blog over the next few weeks.

Latest news is that Charles Clarke has been replaced at the home office by John Reid. This may therefore be the last excuse for me to post these two remarkably similar pictures. Can you tell which is which?

I don’t want to fall into the trap that Backing Blair outlined earlier this morning of being distracted by a reshuffle when the real story is of Labour’s disasterous local election results. But here’s just one prediction: after a couple of months of John Reid, we’ll be clamouring for Pob Charles Clarke’s return. Reid will be even more contemptuous of civil liberties (except for the freedom from getting blown up, of course) than Clarke.

No time to write a background to this, but I’ve been doing a online little research on all this memo stuff. To be honest I’m a little confused.

We learned on Thursday that a former civil servant, David Keogh, and Leo O’Connor, who worked as a researcher for the ex-MP Tony Clarke, have been charged under the Official Secrets Act for their involvement in the leak of a confidential government memo. The BBC said that the contents of the memo were reported in the Sunday Times in May 2004. You can find the full memo here on the Times’ website, with a bit of searching. It is a Foreign Office document relating to the situation in Iraq which expresses concerns about the US assault on Falluja:

Heavy handed US military tactics in Falluja and Najaf some weeks ago have fuelled both Sunni and Shi’ite opposition to the coalition, and lost us much public support inside Iraq. It has spread fighting to MND(SE)’s area. The US have learnt lessons from this and are generally proceeding more cautiously.

Whilst this obviously has renewed relevence, what with the recent white phosphorous revelations, it is not the transcript of a conversation between Bush and Blair, which the Mirror reported on Wednesday, and does not mention the bombing of al-Jazeera. Yet elsewhere it has been reported that that the men were charged with the leaking of the memo reported in the Mirror. So which memo do the charges relate to?

Further confusion arises because the other damaging section in the recent memo received by the Mirror, which the media has been gagged from telling us about, also relates to British concerns about the Falluja onslaught and the danger to which it was exposing British troops. How do I know this? Because the Guardian (almost) told us so yesterday:

The meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair took place at a time when Whitehall officials, intelligence officers, and British military commanders were expressing outrage at the scale of the US assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja… The criticism came not only from anti-war MPs, but from Mr Blair’s most senior military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers. When Mr Blair met Mr Bush in Washington, military advisers were urging the prime minister to send extra forces only on British terms.

(The Guardian has form for telling stuff they aren’t really meant to. Recall the nonsense allegations that Prince Charles had sex with his valet Michael Fawcett which they didn’t quite tell us?)

That guardian article also refers to “separately leaked Foreign Office memo” referring to “heavy-handed” US tactics.

So why did the BBC report on the 17th of this month that the charges against O’Connor and Keogh related to the leaking of the memo published in the Sunday Times ages ago, when it appears they actually concerned a new memo that was to be published in the Mirror the following Tuesday? Was somebody trying to throw them off the scent to prevent them getting their hands on the new memo?

As for the full text of the Mirror memo, I’m still unsure as to whether to add my name to the growing list of bloggers who promise to publish it if they are sent it.

For this election, poll cards were delivered to me at both my home and university address. As I understand it, people with two adresses are allowed to vote in both places in local elections but only once in the general election.

I went to the polls in the morning at university, and then went home to vote in the county council elections there as well. When I went to the polling station at home, I pointed out that I should not be given a ballot for the parliamentary election, because I’d already voted in it. An official warned me very sternly, “You will be breaking the law if you exercise your right to vote in this constituency”. I thought this a slightly strange thing to say; it can’t be my “right to vote” if do so would be breaking the law! Anyway, if had I been intending to break the law I could have done so quite easily without bringing it to their attention. I asked if I was able to vote in the county council election, and at first the guy seemed slightly uncertain, but eventually said to the woman handing out ballots “He can have a yellow one”, as if giving me the benefit of the doubt over a point that was debatable.

I’m now not sure that I should have voted twice, because both my addresses are in the same county (but in different divisions). So does anyone know if I broke the law after all, and if so what I should do about it? (more…)

For those who don’t know, Guardian columnist and New Labour apologist Polly Toynbee has been offering to send out nose-pegs to people who have been taken in by the “Tories will get in by the back-door” rubbish that she and everyone else is spouting. The idea behind the pointless gesture being that you wear it when voting for war-mongering Blair, to protest in a symbolic way whilst condoning a war criminal with your vote. This nonsense was beginning to get my goat, so I done this:

Dear Ms Toynbee,

I wonder if you could send me a nose peg. I intend to use it when I vote Conservative in my Con/Lab marginal.

Obviously I cannot vote for my current Labour MP (who voted for the war) as it could only be seen as an endorsement of the probable war-criminal, Blair, and a party that has failed to dump him. The foul stench of such an action would permeate my senses even if I emptied a whole can of Febreeze up either nostril and then sealed them up with cement.

My alternative is to vote in a way that favours the largest anti-war party, the Liberal Democrats. In my constituency this can only be done by voting tory, in the slim hope of a hung parliament (and in the knowledge that the risk of a conservative victory is negligible). Obviously, this poses problems, due to extremely distasteful nature of the tory campaign which no liberal would want to encourage. That’s where the nose-peg comes in. With one of your pegs, I hope to make clear that my vote for the Conservatives is tactical, and should not be interpreted as an endorsement of their disgusting campaign or potentially damaging policies.

A symbolic gesture of the kind you propose would be insultingly meaningless to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have lost friends and relatives as a result of Bush and Blair’s unnecessary war. It might, however, be just the thing for the Lib Dem supporter who wants to vote against Labour without condoning the tories.

Therefore I ask that the peg be sent to the address below.

Yours Sincerely,
Underblog
Underblog’s house,
Underblog’s street,
Underblog’s marginal constituency
UK

Life is all about choices. So is democracy. Democracy is choice. At this general election, we are told that we have a choice between going forward with Labour or “back to a failed past” with the Conservatives. Either we endorse Bliar, or we get a dispicable Tory government that panders to racism, will dismantle our public services and ruin our economy. And anyway, the tories would have attacked Iraq too.

Presenting the situation as a choice of this nature is a clever strategy. It’s designed to make you feel that you have to vote for Labour, because otherwise you’ll get something even worse. But of course, this isn’t actually a choice at all. It’s the politics of No Alternative.

Never mind that the chance of the Tories forming a government is infinitessimal. Never mind that on a uniform swing from Labour to the Lib Dems, the Tories cannot win. Never mind that a protest vote could topple Blair, but keep Labour in power. The media does nothing to dispel the myth or check the facts, so by repeating the “it’s us or the Tories” mantra, Labour can frame voters’ decisions in a way that is favourable to them.

This false choice strategy (often used to obscure the likelihood of one option or to reframe an argument on the user’s terms — Wikipedia) is clearly one of Alistair Campbell’s favourites. Here it is being used by Blair in a different context, in his recent interview with Paxman:

I tried desperately hard to get a second UN resolution. I couldn’t get one. Now I had a decision to make as to whether to leave Saddam there, in breach of UN resolutions, and end up in a situation with the international community humiliated and him emboldened, or to remove him. I decided to remove him. …in the end a decision had to be taken; there was no middle way, there was no fence to sit on.

We are told that there was a choice between acting immediately or doing nothing. There were no other options, says Blair. This simply isn’t true. Hans Blix’s inspections were working. Had Blix’s efforts been seriously frustrated by Saddam, the UN security council could then have passed a resolution authorising war. Had the inspections continued to be tolerated, Blix would finally have concluded that Saddam posed no threat, and war could have been avoided altogether. There was no immediate need to act illegally.

This is particularly relevent now as more information leaks out about the concerns expressed by Lord Goldsmith in his 13 page legal advice, given to the prime minister on the 7th of March. The version of the Attorney General’s opinion, shown to MPs on the 17th of March, stated that:

It is plain that Iraq has failed so to comply and therefore Iraq was at the time of resolution 1441 and continues to be in material breach.
Thus, the authority to use force under resolution 678 has revived and so continues today.

Yet on the 7th of March, the Prime Minister was warned by the Attorney General that:

It could be difficult to revive the authority for military action in UN resolution 678 in 1990, given that 678 authorised action to remove Iraq from Kuwait and did not explicitly authorise an invasion of Iraq

After this, should we really accept that we have no choice but to vote for Blair? Does the pope shit in the woods?