Hugo Young (London Guardian):This crisis is not about a dossier

From the Guardian of London
Dated Tuesday July 22

If politicians want power, they must give some away
This crisis is not about a dossier, but the political elite that made it
By Hugo Young

The British political class is in deep crisis. Its promises are not trusted, its words are not believed. The people who are meant to be our leaders no longer get any real purchase on the public mind. Many of them know it. Oliver Letwin, one of the few political voices who retains the calm and quizzical tone of a normal human being, alluded to it yesterday morning. The political class needs rescuing from a predicament that poisons the life of the entire country.
The agents of such a rescue are, in fact, to hand. But they lie outside the political class, and the government, befitting its own blindness to the problem, seems determined not to recruit them.
The Hutton inquiry looks like one form of rescue. Enter the independent judge. He is assigned to drain the heat of partisan battle out of the appalling death of Dr David Kelly. Judges are trusted as politicians seldom are. Lord Hutton, who spent years on the Northern Ireland bench, knows what it is to pick a way between some of the most unforgiving partisans in the world. He may break free from his narrow terms of reference, and plunge into the minutiae about the infamous September dossier - the 45-minute deployment time for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and all that - that brought about this bloody mess. It will be, after all, hard to divine what Kelly told Gilligan about what Campbell did or did not do without getting into that. The ball of wool is bound to unravel some of the way.
But that's not what the government wants. It wants the threads kept tightly furled. In that respect, Kelly's death is a kind of lurid convenience. It demands inquiry. There has to be a judge. The apparatus of judicial reassurance can therefore be wheeled in, giving a perhaps unwary public the sense that the politicians have subcontracted what bothers people to this agent of untarnished credibility.
However, they have not. The Kelly tragedy is a pimple on the hide of a bigger elephant. Why did Tony Blair go to war? Was there a discrepancy between his stated reasons and his real reasons? Did he and his people distort intelligence assessments for propaganda (an issue now dogging George Bush and receiving serious Congressional inquiry)? Was the country manoeuvred into war on a false bill of goods, drawn up sincerely or otherwise? These questions have attracted much more scepticism after the "victory" than before.

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I go all goosepimples when I hear the truth of troubling current events stated so plainly -- how about you?

I really think We the People of the USA need to stand for democracy in OUR country as well! IMAGINE what we could do with a Free Press and a multi-party system HERE, in the US!

/sarasm off

VERY SAD when the former colonial masters have to teach the rebellious colony how to fight oppressive authority....

LaFayette -- we are HERE!!!

But for now I will just :kick: for later

Point 1, that British policitians are waaaay out of touch with voters is very true. Certainly "new" labour has become very disconnected from ordinary life and has become highly arrogant, refusing to listen to what people are saying.

Secondly, about trusting the people, Blair has displayed very little trust indeed of the British people, indeed it seems more to be the cas ethat "new" labour holds Britain in deepest contempt. This distrust of the people has resulted in a government with a nasty dislike of democracy and openess, a government that feels that it needs to spin, distort and tell outright lies in order to do business.

That is not the sort of government that people want really. I suspect that people would like to have politicians who actually belive in something but instead we have "new" labour, which is about nothing more than power at any cost and which gathers votes only on the basis that it is the least worst option, and even the least worst bit is fast disappearing thanks to Blair's arrogance, capitulation, cowadice, spin & lies.