Election reflections: remember Charter 88?

Who now remembers Charter 88, founded in 1988, when the Tories had been in power, like today, for 9 years, having won three general elections? More than 85,000 people signed its demands for a written constitution, an elected second chamber, and a freedom of information act among other things.

But the most important demand in my view was proportional representation for the House of Commons. The existing system, first-past-the-post (FPTP), means British governments are formed by parties that most people have voted against. If you want to know why so many people are disillusioned with politics and feel their vote doesn’t matter, here surely is the main reason.

I became quite active in Charter 88 locally. Tories were almost universally hostile, but Labour nodded in our direction. I was even at a Charter 88 party at which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put in an appearance. Blink twice, though, and you would have missed them.

We had meetings with local Labour people, and, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been, I was taken aback at how tribal and hostile they were towards proportional representation. ‘How will we ever win an election under that system?’ seemed to be the main preoccupation.

In 1997, after 19 years in the wilderness, Labour finally won power, but although Blair had spoken fair words to the LibDems, in 13 years, the party did nothing to reform the electoral system. For 18 of the 31 years since Charter 88 was founded, Labour have been out of power, and it doesn’t look as though they’ll be coming back any time soon, particularly as in the past they have been so dependent on winning seats in Scotland.

Labour’s view still seems to be: FPTP means for most of the time the UK gets Tory governments that make our voters suffer, but that’s a price worth paying so that every so often we can get a go at being the government without winning a majority of votes. What a shame! If the party had thought a bit more about the interests of the nation, there would have been no Brexit and no Boris Johnson as prime minister.

Iraq and madness

‘Put a sock in it!’ That was London Mayor Boris Johnson’s advice to Tony Blair after his latest attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Mr Johnson, who voted for the war, declared that Mr Blair ‘has finally gone mad’.

You can see why the mayor might take this view. Bush and Blair attacked the country as part of the ‘war on terror’. When they launched their invasion, there was plenty wrong with Iraq, but there was no terrorism to speak of. Now Prime Minister David Cameron rates the ISIS Islamic extremists of Iraq and Syria as the biggest terrorist danger to the UK.

One of the reasons why so many people in the UK opposed invading Iraq was that it would put us at risk of events like the 7.7 bombings of 2005. Now, what do you know? Mr Cameron is warning us that ISIS is planning attacks in the UK.

It is, of course, the Iraqi people themselves who are the main victims of terrorism, and I have blogged frequently about their suffering. Last month nearly 800 people were killed, and already this month, hundreds more have died.

Baghdad bridge disaster anniversary

In the week when it was revealed that back in 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair secretly promised President Bush that Britain would join in the bombing and invasion of Iraq in defiance of the United Nations, a sombre reminder of the chaos the deadly duo left behind.

On this day, six years ago, a million Shi’ite pilgrims had thronged to a holy site in Baghdad.  The atmosphere was tense after a number of attacks by Sunni extremists.   When rumours of a suicide bomber began to spread through the crowd, people fled to the Al-Aaimmah Bridge to try to escape.

Soon there was a dreadful crush, with pilgrims being suffocated and trampled to death.   Railings gave way, and many people fell into the River Tigris below, while others jumped to escape the crush.   One Sunni  drowned from exhaustion after rescuing a number of people from the waters, but altogether up to 1,000 people died.

A Sunni group with links to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for one of the earlier attacks that had helped cause the panic, but the government claimed the stampede had simply been a dreadful accident.

The letter that reveals Blair’s secret promise to Bush:-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/aug/29/tony-blair-iraq-un-resolution

Iraq chaos continues Part 94

The carnage unleashed by Messrs Blair and Bush when they plotted their invasion of Iraq nearly 8 years ago still continues. The death toll from a suicide bomb yesterday aimed at Shi’ite pilgrims near the city of Samarra has risen to 48. Another 80 people have been injured.

The bomber detonated his explosives at a bus depot as Shi’ites were gathering to commemorate the death of one of their most revered imams. Some are blaming al-Qaeda.

Hardly a day goes by in Iraq without a bombing or some other terrorist attack. Last month, dozens of Shi’ite pilgrims were killed in attacks near the holy city of Kerbala, while last Wednesday, at least seven died in the northern city of Kirkuk.

* I was going to keep this under my hat a little longer, but the all-seeing internet has revealed that I’m writing a new book - Britain’s Worst Military Disasters: from the Roman Conquest to the fall of Singapore. Here are a couple of links:-

https://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/john+withington/britain27s+worst+military+disasters/8396464/

http://www.whsmith.co.uk/CatalogAndSearch/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=9780752461977

Iraq - a war crime in Fallujah? + my new book

A study has revealed that birth defects suffered by children in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are greater than those inflicted by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Since a ruthless American attack in 2004, there has been a twelve-fold increase in childhood cancers, and a fourfold increase in cancer overall.

Children have been seen with grotesque deformities – an eye or nose in the middle of the forehead, and so on. The suspicion is that the Americans’ use of depleted uranium and other “special weapons” is to blame, but the BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson pointed out last night that US law would make it virtually impossible for the victims to hold the USA to account. Maybe Americans will feel they should hand over some of the $20bn they’re extracting from BP? No, thought not.

The Fallujah revelation comes just as we are learning that in 2002, the then head of Britain’s secret service MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, was warning Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair that if he joined in the attack on Iraq it would expose Britain to a greatly increased risk of terrorism. Blair and his Labour cronies ignored this, of course, just as they ignored the biggest mass protest in history by the British people. We are now paying the price.

*My new book London’s Disasters: from Boudicca to the Banking Crisis is out! Published by the History Press, ISBN: 9780752457475. City AM was kind enough to write about it yesterday:-
http://www.cityam.com/news-and-analysis/allister-heath/why-britain-needs-save-far-more

Bombing for God + paying for ignorance

The murderous Islamic religious struggle between Shias and Sunnis goes on. In Pakistan, 25 people – mainly Shia pilgrims – were killed by two bombs in Karachi, the second of which went off at a hospital where victims of the first blast were being treated.

Meanwhile in Iraq, two suicide bombers have killed at least 40 Shias on the outskirts of Karbala, where they were visiting one of their holiest shrines. The bombs went off at either end of a bridge that the pilgrims were crossing. On Monday, more than 40 pilgrims were killed on the outskirts of Baghdad as they began their journey to Karbala. Yesterday was the last day of a period of mourning that Shias observe for the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson.

According to a former American ambassador, shortly before he ordered the attack on Iraq, President Bush was unaware that there were Sunni and Shia Muslims. Did Tony Blair know? (See also my blog of June 22)

* An updated version of my Disastrous History of the World has just been published by Skyhorse in the United States as Disaster! A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues and Other Catastrophes.

Terrorism v road accidents

So as I exclusively predicted – well not exactly exclusively – the suspected war criminal Tony Blair ran rings around the Labour stooges whose unhappy task it is to exonerate him and all others responsible for the Iraq disaster. (See my blog of Jan 28)

Now here’s a real exclusive, though. You remember that Labour raised the terror alert for the UK a few days ago to “severe”. Well I can reveal they are now going to raise the ROADS ALERT to “very, very tremendously severe - in fact, totally scary”.

The reason is that government statisticians have discovered that while 56 civilians have died in terrorist attacks in the UK over the last four years, the number killed in road accidents is just short of 12,000! That means you are about 215 times more likely to be killed travelling on or crossing the roads than in a terrorist attack. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Btw – what is the terrorist alert level in “liberated” Iraq? Today, another 40 people were murdered – Shia pilgrims blown to bits by a woman who had hidden her suicide bomb under her long black gown.

Iraq - dependent inquiry

Tomorrow Tony Blair will face the UK’s Iraq inquiry. He should not have much to fear from an inquiry into Labour’s conduct whose members and terms of reference were decided by Labour, who also decided which documents would be kept secret.

An independent inqury by the Dutch government has already declared the war illegal. This week two senior UK Foreign Office lawyers made clear to the UK inquiry that they had told the Labour government the same thing before the bombing and invasion. One of them, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, joins Robin Cook on the very short list of people to come out of this episode with any credit. She resigned when Labour attacked Iraq.

The then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, admitted that in January 2003, he too had said the war would be illegal. Then, for reasons he never explained, he completely changed his mind, so that by March, just in time for the attack, he decided it was legal!

He also confirmed that the 20-odd Labour ministers sitting around the Cabinet table did not think the legality of the war was a matter they needed to discuss. So all bear their share of guilt for one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in British history.

On Monday, 36 people died after a triple car bombing in Baghdad and on Tuesday, a suicide bomber killed another 18 in the city.

Blair official: "I lied over Iraq"

Of course, Mr Blair is not going to come out and say “OK, l lied so I could bomb, invade and occupy Iraq, killing tens of thousands of innocent people who never did us any harm.” He’s a lawyer, for Heaven’s sake, but he has admitted as much in the unlikely environment of an interview with Fern Britton.

He told her that he didn’t care whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or not. Even if he hadn’t, “I would still have thought it right to remove him.” It would simply have meant that other pretexts would have needed to be found: “I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments.”

So when Mr Blair told the House of Commons in February 2003 that if Saddam was prepared to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, he would not attack his country, he was lying. I’m old enough to remember a time when a minister who lied to the House of Commons about a love affair had to resign – at once, no arguments.

In many ways, the most interesting thing about the whole Iraq fiasco is not Mr Blair – who has plainly never been burdened by any sliver of respect for the truth – but the Labour party. They have managed to persuade themselves that it’s no problem if you tell a pack of lies so you can have a war. Until they unpersuade themselves, there will be no escape from the political wilderness.

Stop Blair! Prevent a disaster!

This week the families of British people killed in Iraq have been trying to stiffen the backbone of Sir John Chilcot's inquiry, and ensure that it finds out exactly what lies we were told, why, and by whom. And what of the man who brought you the UK's greatest foreign policy disaster in at least half a century? Well, he is being touted for further aggrandisement.

Those who want Tony Blair as the lavishly rewarded President of Europe have been joined by……. the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. By their friends ye shall know them. Mind you, Mr Berlusconi may find himself rather too busy to campaign very actively. Now that his claim that he should be above the law has been dismissed, he could face three court cases, including one in which he is alleged to have handed over a huge bribe to get the estranged husband of one of Mr Blair’s henchpeople to give false evidence.

It is, of course, a scandal that Europe’s “President” should be chosen secretly in some stitch-up by national political leaders. But we don’t just have to stand by and accept it. Sign the “Stop Blair” petition now! http://stopblair.eu/

See also my blogs of Feb 25, 28, March 1, 11, 22, May 1, June 16, 22, July 30, August 3.

Iraq - in my beginning.....+ redaction

As it began, so it is ending. The famous secret Downing Street memo of 23rd July, 2002 made it clear that by then the Americans had already cooked up their conspiracy to attack Iraq and “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”, and that at least Messrs Blair, Straw and Hoon knew it.

Then the imperative was to get into Iraq, now it’s the opposite – to get the hell out. (Note for all political leaders – history shows it is much easier to start a war than to end one.) But the tactics are the same.

Yesterday a car bomb killed at least six people in the market place at Haditha, on Friday the death toll was at least 29 from a series of explosions outside mosques in Baghdad, on Thursday seven were killed by a blast in Baquba, north-east of the capital. The spin machine is still on track, though. The line is unshaken - the security situation has improved “amazingly” and US troops may be able to leave earlier than expected.

Redacted….I had never heard the word until a few months ago. Now we get it all the time – it’s what Labour did with documents providing evidence of the security services' complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed. MP’s did lots of it when they published “details” of their expenses.

Let’s get rid of this word. There are perfectly decent alternatives – censored, concealed, suppressed, hidden from the prying eyes of the lower orders, for example. As Orwell saw – an attack on language is a vital element in the destruction of liberty.

Iraq - Labour's last chance

Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq inquiry opens today. It ought not to be the thing uppermost in his mind, but he probably represents the last chance for Labour to re-establish itself as a fundamentally decent and honest party that foolishly allowed some bad apples to dominate it. That can happen if the inquiry is searching, open, independent and fearless, and if those responsible for the Iraq disaster are held to account. If Sir John serves up another bucket of whitewash, the conclusion of the British people is likely to be that the whole party is irredeemably corrupted.

There are some hopeful signs – Labour’s attempt to hush the whole thing up by conducting the inquiry in secret has been thwarted, but overall the indications are not good. Sir John Chilcot is an establishment man to his fingertips, and has a track record of letting Tony Blair and his cronies off the hook as an underling on the Butler inquiry. The inquiry panel has been packed with Blair apologists, and Labour has specifically told Sir John that he is not supposed to “establish civil or criminal liability”.

All a bit odd isn’t it? When Baby P was killed, Labour was only too happy to apportion blame and sack those responsible. Why should it be different when we are dealing with the much greater disaster of Iraq?

So far the only people to lose their jobs over Iraq have been the chairman and director-general of the BBC, and the BBC reporter who dared to tell the truth. And Labour wrings its hands, claiming not to understand why people are so cynical about it.

Carry on covering up + a great fire of London

As Labour continues to try to hide the truth about Iraq (see my blog of June 16), in that unhappy country itself, the bombs go on exploding. The death toll from the latest – a huge truck bomb in Kirkuk – has now risen to at least 72. It went off as worshippers were leaving a Shia mosque, and there is speculation that it could be the work of al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile it’s been revealed that Tony Blair has been lobbying Gordon Brown to keep the Iraq inquiry secret. Apparently, he wasn’t very keen on being questioned in public and under oath about the decision to bomb, invade and occupy. I’ll bet he wasn’t. Not sure how much persuading was required, though. Do you think Mr Brown himself, not to mention Messrs Straw and Hoon would have been queuing up to tell us all?

On this day….148 years ago, what was then London’s worst fire since the Great Fire of 1666 broke out in the great line of warehouses that stretched between Tooley Street and the south bank of the Thames. The buildings were packed with inflammable goods – cotton, sugar, oil, tallow – and once they had got going, the flames spread mercilessly. The river itself caught fire as burning rum floated on its surface.

The Tooley Street inferno claimed the life of London’s first ever fire chief, James Braidwood – killed when a wall collapsed on him. The flames raged out of control for two days, and it was a whole month before they were put out completely. For more details, see The Disastrous History of London.

Bye-bye Iraq

As Britain’s role in the occupation of Iraq is declared officially over to the frenetic whizzing of the Labour spin machine, a reminder of the reality we leave behind us. At least 41 people killed by car bombs this week, another 150 the week before. That is nearly four times as many as were killed in London’s 7/7 bombings.

Of course, we did not bomb and invade Iraq to liberate its people. That was another hurried Labour invention following the exposure that Tony Blair’s claims about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction were false. Indeed, before launching his aggressive war Mr Blair made it clear that if Saddam was prepared to give up his non-existent weapons, Labour would be perfectly happy to leave him in power. We do not know how many Iraqi civilians were killed as a result of our actions as Labour and its American allies were not sufficiently interested to keep count, but independent studies suggest it could be as high as a million.

Apart from those most slavishly loyal to Messrs Blair and Brown, few now seriously dispute that this was the greatest British foreign policy disaster in at least half a century, possibly longer. Labour’s excuse for denying us a proper inquiry was that it could not happen, for some mysterious reason, while British troops were still in Iraq. So now they’re leaving, when does it kick off, Gordon? Usual advice applies – d.h.y.b. (I note, incidentally, that 400 British troops will be staying after the “withdrawal”. Is their key strategic role to delay any inquiry until after the next general election?)

See also my blogs of February 25 and 28, and March 1, 11, 20 and 28.

Iraq - continuing disaster

Reminders over the last few days of how dangerous Iraq remains. The latest attack targeted a national reconciliation conference close to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Delegates had just set off on a walking tour when the suicide bomber struck, killing 33 people including a local army chief, tribal leaders, and soldiers.

On Sunday, more than 30 people died in a suicide attack on people queuing outside a police recruitment centre in Baghdad, while on Thursday a car bomb killed ten at a cattle market in Babel province. A US spokesman trotted out the standard line that the attacks show how desperate the insurgents are becoming.

The disaster of Iraq has been well chronicled (see my blogs of Feb 25, Feb 28, March 1 etc), but Labour still deny us the right to know how on earth they got us in this mess. Funny old place, Britain. We can’t be shown the official account of the crucial cabinet meetings that rubber-stamped Tony Blair’s disastrous decision, but it’s perfectly o.k. for ministers like David Blunkett and government servants, or should that be masters, like Alastair Campbell to produce partial and self-serving accounts of the same events for their own further enrichment. Time we got a constitution.

Genocidal priest + Iraq + Gaza

A former priest has been convicted of genocide in Rwanda. Emmanuel Rukundo, who had been an army chaplain, helped remove Tutsis who had taken refuge at a seminary. Many were then killed. Altogether 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in just 100 days of 1994 – the fastest mass slaughter in history.

Rukundo is the second Roman Catholic priest to have been convicted of genocide. Many victims were murdered in churches where they had been urged to shelter by government radio. Five thousand were killed in one at Ntarama, where one man hidden under a pile of bodies managed to escape and tell the tale. See A Disastrous History of the World.

Iraq. So it’s confirmed. Jack Straw’s grounds for vetoing the release of cabinet minutes on Iraq are just another piece of Labour’s spin and deception. He says it’s to protect the confidentiality of what people say in Cabinet, but Clare Short has now confirmed what so many of us suspected (see my blog of Feb 25) – that actually the cabinet were too cowardly to question Blair’s decision to go to war, and said nothing. And some of these people are still in power – Brown, Hoon, Straw, Darling, Beckett.

Stranger than fiction. When Blair had to step down as PM, he was appointed Middle East “peace” envoy by the Americans. Yes, I know the man who helped kill tens of thousands in Iraq, and obstructed a ceasefire in Lebanon so the Israelis could sow thousands of cluster bombs to blow the arms and legs off little children might seem an odd choice, but not to George Bush. But even I had to pinch myself when I saw this – the “peace” envoy has just made his first, yes his first, visit to Gaza – though, of course, he is refusing to meet representatives of Palestine’s democratically elected government. Don't want to get confused by listening to both sides, do you Tony?
FACT. In the 2006, Palestinian general election, Hamas won more than 44% of the vote. In the last UK general election, Labour won less than 36% of the vote.

Iraq - closing a disaster?

So, nearly six years after George W Bush announced American “victory” in Iraq, the US has finally found a way to scramble out of the morass it created. To a considerable fanfare, Barack Obama has announced that troops will leave by the end of August next year. As with all politicians, though, you have to look at the small print, and in fact, it turns out that a modest little contingent of 50,000 – the same size as half the entire British army – will not leave, and could stay until the end of 2011. It seems like a clear breach of President Obama’s promise, before he was elected, to withdraw all troops within 16 months of coming to power, but, hey, you know election promises sometimes turn out to be nothing more than, well....election promises.

The US-UK attack did remove a murderous, tyrannical regime – though this, of course, was not the reason for it. Indeed, a few days before the attack, Tony Blair promised Saddam Hussein that he could remain in power – and presumably continue to be a murderous tyrant – provided he gave up his (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction.

We do not know what Iraq would have been like today if we had not bombed it to smithereens. We do know that after the “shock and awe” we inflicted on them, nearly a million Iraqi people today do not have enough food, that many are without electricity for more than half the time, that only one person in three has clean drinking water, that only one in five is served by a proper sewerage system, that cholera is a constant danger, that the country is riven by bitter sectarian enmities, and that, as the BBC’s John Simpson so eloquently pointed out last night, although violence has fallen, it remains one of the most dangerous places on earth.

How many Iraqi deaths did we cause? As far as we and the Americans are concerned, the answer is the one given by Nikita Khruschev when asked about the victims of the great famine created by the Soviets in Russia in the 1930’s – “No one was counting.” A number of independent research organisations, though, have tried to answer the question and have come to the conclusion that we may have been responsible for the deaths of up to 1.4 million Iraqi people.