The end result of Tony Blair’s policies: plutonomy

If you’ve never heard of the concept of plutonomy, then hold your nose and go to Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to read this:

Plutonomics

Blair is so rich now that he can afford to give away the revenues of his memoirs (if you don’t believe me, have a look at this piece on Blair property no. 9, for his young daughter). In my opinion, all of the debate about whether Blair was being sincere or not about donating the revenues to the British Legion missed the real point: Blair wanted to get as many people as possible to read his memoirs. Doing so was crucial to his long term strategy to attempt to rehabilitate his ‘image’. People might not buy a book whose revenues would go into Blair’s bulging pockets. More importantly, the timing of the announcement that the profits were going to the British Legion would have been calculated to generate massive publicity for the launch—which of course it did. (By way of an aside: I often wonder if Blair, like the terrorists he’s ostensibly been so keen to combat, desperately needs the oxygen of publicity in his efforts to ‘acquit’ himself.)

So what does this have to do with plutonomics? Blair’s ideology, and his policies arguably fit like a glove with plutonomy. While many people may believe what Blair writes, and while even intelligent people will write adulatory reviews of his memoirs, Blair’s ultimate audience is surely his fellow plutonocrats. They will be enthralled by Blair’s capacity to continue to hog the limelight, and put forward his view of the world. It’s a bit like Blair saying to the big boys and girls, “look, this is how it’s done. This is how you maintain, and further the aims of plutonomy.”

One, no two more thoughts:

–Have a look at this blog, which comments on some names that are not in the index of Tony Blair’s book

–if you thought David Cameron, and Dem Tories are opposed to plutonomy, think again.

Jack Straw and the Chilcot Inquiry, Round 2: a prediction

It is one thing to try to predict the weather a week away, and quite another to say what weather there will be the very next day. This blogger readily admits that the following post is best likened to the latter kind of prediction. Indeed, it is probably best compared to a prediction produced by a weather forecaster on the very same day: by noon today, we can expect…

The prediction concerns Jack Straw, the same politician described by the Independent‘s Matthew Norman in this op ed piece.

In an analysis offered by the same newspaper on 7 February 2010, titled ‘Angry Jack Straw to tell Chilcot he didn’t ignore legal advice‘, the Independent‘s Brian Brady and Jane Merrick explain that Jack Straw has been ‘recalled’ to the Chilcot Inquiry to explain his actions in regard to the allegations that he disregarded the advice of top Foreign Office legal experts about the legality of the Iraq War.

Actually, to this blogger at least, these seem like rather more than just ‘allegations’. As remembered by the Independent,  Sir Michael Moore, Straw’s chief legal adviser at the time that Straw was the Foreign Secretary, ‘claimed [in the Chilcot Inquiry] that Mr Straw had dismissed his advice as “dogmatic and international law was pretty vague”. Sir Michael also claimed the minister “wasn’t used to people taking such a firm position”. [...] The revelations came amid growing claims that ministers had systematically overruled the advice of advisers in their haste to join the US in military action against Iraq. The then attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, confirmed that he had originally ruled the invasion would be unlawful but subsequently changed his mind.’

This blogger would remind the reader that, beyond Moore’s j’accuse, the other key Foreign Office lawyer, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, had such big issues with the way that things were going in Straw’s department that she resigned her post in the run up to the Iraq War. This action and numerous other declarations would appear to corroborate what many of us suspected: that at the time, the only tune that was acceptable was one that may be Tony Blair’s favourite: Onward, Christian Soldiers.

Alas, on Monday 8 February 2010, Straw is to get a chance to ‘set the record straight’. In fairness to Sir John Chilcot, this will be because his Inquiry has not kept all of the cats in the bag. But having let out a few (it could hardly do otherwise),  now is when trusty Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry may play the role that many believe it was given from the start. This blogger has already noted the extraordinary intervention that Chilcot made during Clare Short’s appearance in the inquiry, in which Chilcot effectively accused Short of inhabiting a ‘counter-factual universe’ when she refused to put her herself in ‘Blair’s position’ (or so the Guardian’s account has suggested).

The prediction is this: that in so far as the Inquiry produces, however inadvertently, information that really is unsettling to the powers that be, then those with enough power, and with a name that needs to be cleared, will be given a chance to return to the Inquiry to do just that. In this blogger’s interpretation, if and when they choose to do so, their interventions will be carefully aided and abetted by the Inquiry members.

Conversely, those that don’t have enough power, or whose narratives run contrary to the tune that the New Labour government wants to be heard, will either not be invited back, or if they do get recalled, it will be to try to dig them what will be made to seem like deeper graves.

I do hope that I’m entirely wrong in this interpretation. But if I’m not, a Chilcot Inquiry ‘recall’ will be like one of Toyota’s: it will be a chance for people like Straw to repair the political damage caused when accelerators got stuck in 2002-2003—I refer of course, to the Bush-Cheney accelerators that sped Britain and the U.S. into the disaster that was, and still is, the Iraq War.

By way of a postscript, here is a nugget from the same article in the Independent,

‘Take one: An informal chat in a London club

Sir John Chilcot, former civil servant, treated Tony Blair with almost painful deference during his marathon evidence session at the Iraq inquiry last month. But he could have greeted him as an old acquaintance as 13 years before, they had met in a much more sedate – and far less public – arena. It was so discreet that few knew about the encounter until now.

The then Mr Chilcot had faced Mr Blair, Opposition Leader, in the exclusive Travellers Club, in Pall Mall, London. Mr Chilcot, the top civil servant at the Northern Ireland Office, had consented to the most unusual clandestine meeting with Mr Blair, almost five months before he became prime minister.

Civil servants are allowed to meet Opposition politicians for briefings in the run-up to an election, but these are usually held in controlled conditions in departmental headquarters. That this was held in a private club where Mr Blair later met espionage chiefs, demonstrates the importance of the nascent peace process to his political calculations. Mr Chilcot was knighted on his retirement at the end of that year. The meeting is recalled by Mr Blair’s chief-of-staff, Jonathan Powell, in his book Great Hatred, Little Room.’

Is Tony Blair still willing to say ‘Blame me’ for the BAE affair?

Momentous news: BAE has, in effect, accepted that it is, after all, guilty of business practices that have resulted in corruption. The defence giant said today it had agreed to pay fines totalling £286 million to settle corruption charges with the Serious Fraud Office and US Department of Justice.

Perhaps someone should now ask the obvious question: as reported by the Guardian on 13 June 2007, and after being asked at prime minister’s questions about the £43bn arms deal between BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia by Sir Menzies Campbell, Blair said: “If you want to blame anyone for this, blame me. I am perfectly happy to take responsibility for it.” (Menzies asked which minister was responsible for withholding information from the world’s anti-corruption watchdog, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, about secret payments to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia. The Guardian had reported that the prince received payments totalling more than £1bn to secure the al-Yamamah deal.)

Just to be clear, today’s mea culpa does not involve that deal. It involves BAE’s business transactions with Tanzania, South Africa, the Czech Republic and Romania.

Saudi Arabia must, of course, have involved a very different set of practices, with no corruption whatsoever. If not, why would Blair have made such a risky statement?!

Question for Chilcot: whose facts, whose universe?

Anyone who still has any doubts about Sir John Chilcot’s role in the Chilcot Enquiry may wish to ponder the following exchange between Chilcot and Clare Short, as reported by The Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow:

’12.26pm: Chilcot asks Short to put herself in Blair’s position in April 2003. Were the terms of UN security council resolution 1483 the best he could get?

Short says she would not have been in Blair’s position.

First, she would have insisted on progress in the Middle East.

Second, she would have done everything throught the UN.

“A counter-factual universe,” Chilcot says.’

*   *   *

If still in doubt, have a look at what Phillippe Sands, a professor of law at UCL, said in The Observer:

‘The role of chairman [of the enquiry] is crucial. I don’t know Sir John Chilcot and have no reason to doubt that he is a dedicated civil servant who believes himself to be acting in the public interest. But questions abound. What was it about his role in the Butler inquiry that caused the prime minister to conclude he was suitable? Some who have worked closely with him, including on the Butler inquiry, fear he is not the right person. Someone who has seen him first hand described his approach as one of “obvious deference to governmental authority”. This is a view I have heard repeated several times. More troubling is evidence I have seen for myself.

A few years ago, in the book Lawless World I revealed the existence and contents of attorney-general Peter Goldsmith’s initial legal advice to the prime minister on the legality of the war – the one that wasn’t made public; the one that differed markedly from the one-pager that was given to the cabinet and Parliament. The Butler inquiry had seen the advice, but only after considerable cajoling of the attorney general.

He gave evidence on 5 May 2004. The uncorrected transcript shows some members of the inquiry pressing him hard. By contrast, Sir John’s spoonfed questions give every impression of being designed to elicit a response from the attorney general that would demonstrate the reasonableness of his actions and those of the government.’

Chilcot faces Blair: Justitia interrumpere

Updated 30 January 2010 (scroll down to see update)

Tomorrow is Tony Blair’s big day — actually, in this blogger’s view it may well be the day when it is revealed just how small a politician he was. Here is a quick thought about the crazy times we live in.

A large number of people — quite possibly a substantial majority of Britons — probably have little doubt that Tony Blair committed a crime of agression in Iraq. (For an analysis of the case for this, see Monbiot’s Arresting Blair). Another significant portion of people — again, quite possibly a majority of Britons — probably have little doubt that Tony Blair’s New Labour allowed what Seumas Milne has described as a ‘culture of corruption‘ to seep far into the UK’s government.

The latest news — that Hutton, the judge who absolved Blair of any wrongdoing in Dr David Kelly’s death, sealed some of Kelly’s medical records for 70 years — raises even more devastating possibilities with respect to Blair’s government. It is early days yet, but the possibility that Kelly might have been murdered cannot be discounted. This is, to be sure, a possibility that has been mooted for some time in both factual and fictional accounts of the events surrounding Kelly’s death — see for example the Telegraph’s Who Killed David Kelly?

Of course, the number of people who believe one thing or another does not mean that something is true; but it does recommend the need for a very thorough enquiry of the kind that the Chilcot is not. Indeed, the extraordinary thing, to this observer at least, is that tomorrow Blair will most probably provide perfectly (un)reasonable justifications for his actions (he has already admitted that he would have invaded Iraq, WMD or no WMDs). And that will be that. Life will, of course, go on, and Blair will continue to rake in his mysterious millions (mysterious in the sense described by The Guardian).

In the opinion of this blogger, in any other society, either there would have been a complete cover-up, with the oligarchy closing ranks to defend the man that has, after all, so furthered their interests; or in a real democracy, the man would be, if not in jail, then certainly awaiting trial. Here we will get the satisfaction of neither. Pardon the slightly crude simile, but frankly, this is the judicial equivalent of Catholicism’s traditional recommendation of the advantages of coitus interruptus.

Justitia interrumpere [any experts in Latin please advise on translation!]

Update: 30 January 2010, the day after Blair appeared

Simon Carr really puts his finger on the true nature of the Chilcot Enqury when he notes in today’s Independent that

‘Decent old Chilcot began by saying two new documents had been declassified. Terrific, one would be the devastating Manning Memo, leaked some years ago, and now all over the internet. One of Blair’s big advisers had met with Condi Rice before the Crawford signed-in-blood meeting, and he reported this: “I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and… public opinion.”

Incredibly, that’s still classified. It’s a state secret that everybody can read.

Google the full text and in six seconds you’ll see things the Inquiry can’t mention. It’s a line directly into Blair’s brain and backs up his Fern Britton interview. Confronted with that text he couldn’t have got away saying, “I didn’t use the words ‘regime change’”.

The memo makes it impossible to believe him when he says: “I really hoped 1441 would avoid conflict.”

There isn’t space for full denunciation of the committee but as ever, they really didn’t nail it.’