05.02.2004

Blair's stitch-up backfires

The virtually complete exoneration of the Blair government of any wrongdoing in regard to the death of Dr David Kelly by Lord Hutton can only produce incredulity, says Ian Donovan

The long-awaited report from James Brian Edward Hutton, former chief justice of Northern Ireland, recently retired law lord, and chair of the public enquiry into the death of government weapons expert Dr David Kelly, has produced incredulity across the length and breadth of the country - indeed around the world. The virtually complete exoneration of the Blair government of any wrongdoing, the avalanche of criticisms directed at the BBC's reports on the 'sexing up' of the September 2002 'dodgy dossier' - all have given rise to a feeling not of 'closure' and 'drawing a line' under the issue, as the government no doubt hopes, but of massive popular revulsion at this Orwellian whitewash.

Opinion polls commissioned by several newspapers consistently show that a majority of the public thinks that Hutton was a whitewash, that the BBC was treated unfairly, that the government was to blame for the death of Kelly and lied about it. As Blair blatantly did on the plane home from his laudatory sojourn in Washington when the news of Kelly's suicide broke, denying he had authorised the naming of Kelly - it subsequently emerged in the Hutton hearings that he chaired the Downing Street meeting where the strategy for naming Kelly to the media was actually decided. The bald assertion that no one in government was to blame for this, that it was all the fault of BBC officials and reporters for making 'unfounded' allegations of government lying in the first place, is so outrageous and at variance with reality that Hutton became in popular terms a laughing stock as soon as the news broke of his 'findings'.

But the BBC is not laughing about it. The immediate result of Hutton was the resignation of the chairman of the board of governors, Gavyn Davies. The very next day Greg Dyke, the director-general, also resigned, followed a couple of days later by Andrew Gilligan, the BBC Radio Four journalist whose material, gleaned from an off-the-record interview with Kelly last summer shortly after Bush prematurely declared an end to 'major combat' in Iraq, started the whole business off. After Dyke's 'resignation', which was subsequently revealed to have been effectively a sacking brought about by a terrified board of governors, thousands of BBC staff walked out at various sites to protest in his defence; many thousands of them later contributed to the publishing of a full-page advertisement in The Daily Telegraph denouncing the injustice of the Hutton conclusions. And on Saturday lunchtime, about 200 demonstrators gathered opposite the gates of Downing Street to protest against this fraudulent report. Called by the Stop the War Coalition, supported by Media Workers against the War, the crowd heard anti-war speakers denounce Blair and Hutton, after which a copy of the report was publicly burned.

Of course, overarching the whole affair is the much more significant issue of the war in Iraq itself, the undisputable fact that the government claims that Iraq had in its possession enormous stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, supposedly able to be launched at 45 minutes' notice, has been shown to be utterly false.

Recently, David Kay resigned from the Iraq Survey Group, saying there were no WMDs in Iraq, and probably had not been for at least a decade. Kay was the head of this US team of self-appointed weapons inspectors, put in place by the invaders to comb Iraq looking for evidence to back up the rationale for the war - his resignation statement was more guardedly echoed by Colin Powell, US secretary of state, shortly afterwards. This being the same Colin Powell who earlier accused Iraq of stockpiling these weapons as part of the Bush-Blair attempt to get official United Nations backing for their planned invasion and occupation of Iraq. And of course, Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector, whose work was a key part of the build-up for war, now publicly states his belief that Iraq's western-supplied WMDs were destroyed under threat of further attack shortly after the end of the 1991 Kuwait war.

For opponents of the war, these were not great revelations at all. Even on this level, Blix, Kay, Powell, etc are simply adjusting their stated views to agree with Scott Ritter, anti-war campaigner and another former UN chief weapons inspector, who testified at length, as the war preparations were getting underway, that the imperialists' accusations of Iraq's possession of WMDs were false. All these facts, even remaining within the framework of the pronouncements made by 'respectable' figures like Ritter, show conclusively that what was involved in the war preparations was not 'intelligence failures', which is the latest pathetic refrain of Bushites and Blairites on the defensive now it becomes clearer and clearer than no WMDs existed in Iraq, but rather conscious, systematic lying on a massive scale.

The report produced by Hutton - the product of a naked political fix by Blair in appointing this ultra-conservative judge, a veteran of Northern Ireland's frame-up system of juryless Diplock courts - is just the latest manifestation of the incredibly arrogant, deeply anti-democratic and thoroughly imperialist and predatory Blair regime (Blair of course also gave the judge a particularly narrow remit to investigate, although, judging by the bias in his conclusions, that may not have been necessary). However, given the show of openness that pervaded the procedure, with the publication of large swathes of the evidence on Hutton's website, the conclusions are too much at variance with all this material in the public domain to be believed by anyone who is not personally corrupt, or lacking normal intelligence. Hence the almost universal disbelief.

In fact, such was the weight of evidence against the government that the enquiry's proceedings put into the public domain that many eminent figures in the ruling class believed that serious and damaging criticism of the government was inevitable. Michael Howard was visibly and obviously rubbing his hands with glee at the prime minister's likely embarrassment - until, fairly late in the day, he was obviously tipped the wink about the nature of the upcoming whitewash. Too late for the Tory leader, who faced the bizarre situation of a supposedly exonerated government demanding he apologise for his entirely justified (if utterly hypocritical) attacks on government wrongdoing and lying.

Indeed, the spectrum of those denouncing Hutton included not just the usual suspects on the Labour left and the anti-war movement, but extended as far to the right as the Daily Mail and Max Hastings, the former high Tory and Daily Telegraph editor. The Daily Mail seemed to read like the Daily Mirror over this issue. Pretty much only the Murdoch press remained sycophantic to the government - for obvious reasons, given Murdoch's hatred of the BBC and desire for a Berlusconi-type monopoly of the British and international media.

Indeed the BBC is itself a pillar of the establishment - its wide reputation for 'independence', 'impartiality' and 'professionalism' in no way contradicts that. Such a public image - which, of course, has to be earned by allowing a considerable amount of journalistic freedom and relatively honest reporting on matters considered not fundamental to the well-being of British capitalism - make it an asset, not a liability for the more far-sighted sections of the ruling class. A certain amount of such leeway is essential to allow the BBC to maintain its credibility as a more subtle, and thereby more effective, propagandist and defender of the interests of capital. But such leeway carries with it the risk of periodic clashes with the more flagrantly anti-democratic components of the political system and state machine, which are also vital for maintaining the conditions for capital and in particular its depredations in the wider world.

Something along these lines appears to be behind the Hutton/Kelly affair - hence the divisions and disquiet in the ruling class over this whole messy business. But we should not thereby make the mistake of concluding that this is simply a quarrel within the establishment in which the working class has no interest. On the contrary, there are quite serious dangers of a chilling of political discussion and attacks on press and journalistic freedom posed in this affair. It is in the interest of the working class movement to actively defend every element of democratic space that exists under this system, and oppose all attacks on democratic rights, even if such attacks begin with what appears to be a quarrel within the establishment.

Workers do have a side, and an interest, in seeing such attacks (which are palpable in the government's aggressive demands for blood and sackings at the BBC, threats to interfere in the process of renewal of the BBC's charter, etc) defeated and the Hutton whitewash comprehensively shattered. Hence the actions of BBC workers in protesting these attacks, and indeed of officials like Greg Dyke in taking on Blair and Hutton over these Orwellian lies and in defence of some measure of press and broadcasting freedom, deserve our critical solidarity.

Indeed, this in large measure is why many bourgeois figures are worrying out loud that Hutton will prove counterproductive. It may bring discredit on the judiciary and the judicial system, they muse. Well they might!

The fact that the government is able to appoint a judge, a supposedly independent arbitrator, to investigate itself is blatantly anti-democratic. Judges of course are drawn mainly from the most privileged social layers; they are selected for their loyalty to the established order and their general social conservatism. They are also official representatives of the crown. This is particularly true of the law lords - judicial appeals to the House of Lords are designated in legal terms as appeals to the monarch herself. In reality the law lords are simply specialised representatives of the monarch who carry out these functions on a day-to-day basis.

And, of course, what is particularly grotesque about this recent example of judicial-governmental shenanigans is the fact that the key decisions about the tenor of the report into this governmental intelligence scandal were made by one unelected, unaccountable individual - Hutton.

That is why our Draft programme demands that all judges "be subject to election and recall." Moreover, all investigations into government-state wrongdoing should "carried out in complete openness" and be judged by juries made up of ordinary working people. Judges should be there only to advise on technical-legal matters, not to decide the verdict. This is certainly how the wider inquiry into WMDs and the whole Iraq war that the majority of the population now supports, according to opinion polls, ought to be carried out. And if the government persists in rejecting such a basic democratic demand the Stop the War Coalition is well placed to take the initiative and establish a people's enquiry of its own.

With Hutton, the massive democratic deficit in British society has once again been thrust centre-stage. In this regard, it is doubly unfortunate that the principle of republicanism - abolition of the monarchy, privy council, the House of Lords, law lords, etc - which concretely targets the anti-democratic institutions that underpin the British state, was voted down by the Socialist Workers Party majority at the Respect founding convention last week. An own goal if ever there was one.