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The Hutton Inquiry Am I the only one to find the Hutton Inquiry news coverage terribly boring and trivial? Almost the entirety of ITV news tonight was taken up by it. The feeding frenzy is so all encompassing George Bush was blamed for a world problem only once or twice in the entire hour!
I humbly submit I’d prefer Tony Blair to come out of this with his teflon coating intact. Why? If he loses and resigns we might well find ourselves governed by Gordon Brown.
If Tony wins, the BBC can be taken down that final peg or two. It could lose its’ semi-governmental ability to tax every telly in the land.
Tony’s time in power is limited but the Beeb is forever. Let’s think of the long term.
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I have to admit I never greatly cared whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (I felt that it was blindingly obvious that there were, which I still believe, but that was only a small part of the reason for fighting the war. As for a legal justification for fighting the war, I go for “Saddam Hussein was flagrantly in breach of the 1991 ceasefire”, which of course he was whether or not there actually were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq). I think that the BBC has behaved shamefully in this business, and while I loathe that organisation this is only one small and relatively unimportant example of why. (Although it is obviously terrible that Dr Kelly is dead).
Nevertheless, we can expect that the BBC will be less boot-licking of the Labour Party when the next General Election comes round.
Expect the LibDems to get an easy ride…
Dale Amon enquires:
“Am I the only one to find the Hutton Inquiry news coverage terribly boring and trivial?”
I have no idea whether your boredom is a solitary state or not – but I certainly don’t share it,
To see both the BBC and that pip-squeak Messiah Blair turning nicely on the spit suits me down to the ground.
A pox on both their houses. Long may they rotate!
Ron writes:
“Expect the LibDems to get an easy ride…”
They already have. After the last election the BBC clearly decided that the Lib-Dems were the ‘true’ opposition, which is why they have been accorded vastly more air-time than their meagre support warranted.
You are right, though, of course. The next election will see a concerted effort on the part of the BBC to get a party of the true Guardianista Left into power.
And it won’t be ‘New’ Labour.
Dale: I certainly share your view of the Hutton Inquiry news coverage as boring and so far I managed to avoid getting excited by the whole thing. It usually suffices to read a weekly account of what’s happening…
I’ve been slowly hacking my way through the myriad italics, and, sub-clauses, of this article:
http://www.electricreview.com/cgi/viewnews.cgi?id=1061938354
and although I disagree with some of his assertions (grin), I do like this thought:
“One tragically missed opportunity came when Alistair Campbell was revealed by the paper [sic] trail to have canvassed the idea of leaking Dr Kelly’s name by means of planting it on a tame hack. Sadly no one at the Inquiry asked the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications & Strategy, ‘now, how would you have done this? Do take us through the process, pull back that curtain and show us the magic at work . . . I see, you’d have rung up who? Tom what-win? At The Times? And what, he’d have written it up just so — how jolly interesting, who’d have thought?’”
Yawn Hutton enquiry… I just love to see the British Board of Communists and Bliar both punch each other drunk, marvelous!
Big news is the gold price. Check it out (the torygraph have an article)
Hutton, boooring.
Michael, WMDs. Israeli intelligence has apparently located Iraqi material in containers in the Bekaah Valley in the southern part of Syria’s fiefdom of Lebanon.
Hi Dale,
If he loses and resigns we might well find ourselves governed by Gordon Brown.
You know, I still think I’d prefer El Gordo. If Tony Blair is Julius Caesar, then Gordon Brown is nothing more than a Mark Antony.
And if I was going up against either of them, I’d much rather try to take on M. Antony than J. Caesar.
Tony Blair is far too slippery, far too likeable, and far too talented a socialist to wish for, I reckon. With Gordon, we have a target we can hit.
He hides in the Treasury, he breaks up under the easiest of questions, and his economic competence is highly dubious, and unravelling on a daily basis.
I also suspect Tony Blair knows that, and that this will be the deciding factor which makes him resign. Then when it all goes terribly wrong under Gordon, Tony can say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t have let me go’.
Living under Gordon will be terribly painful, and I may come to regret these words, but the brighter oxygen of his more rapacious socialism will more quickly consume the goodwill of the British people, and then we will be rid of them quicker. And for longer, afterwards.
But I suppose only history will really give us the answers, once the events have played themselves out.
Andy…
Similiar arguements got Barbara Boxer elected Senator from California in ’96. It was a 2-year term, and some people expected to be able to push her out for the same reasons. She’s still a senator.
The feeding frenzy is so all encompassing George Bush was blamed for a world problem only once or twice in the entire hour!
Well, based solely on my visits to various British blogs, it seems that a great many Brits have invested considerable emotional energy in “Hutton” — and they’re not at all amused at the way things seem to be turning out.
What most stikes me (as an American) is the visceral assumption that New Labour not only is lying in la affaire Kelly, but that it’s fundamentally incapable of being truthful about this or anything else. At this point, I’m just hoping I’ve “misunderestimated” the British temper.
George:
We know that Big Government sexes up everything in its attempts to get ever more intrusive laws enacted. (Look at what Big Government did to Small Tobacco, for example.) And most journalists are perfectly comfortable going along with this, sexing up their own reports to try to make things seem like a crisis so that we can get the new law of the day passed.
Why anybody’s acting so shocked that exaggerations were made in the Iraq dossier is beyond me. And what infuriates me is the journalists, especially the BBCWS types, trying to act as though they’re some sort of paragons of virtue protecting us from the Big Bad Government that they’ve been perfectly happy to advance the rest of the time.
Initially I thought the whole “sexed up” dossier affair was interesting, both because of what it said about the ghastliness of the government, and also of the mendacity of parts of the BBC current affairs network. Now I am utterly bored. Unlike some commentators, I don’t believe that Blair will be forced out on this, though he has clearly suffered great damage to his reputation.
Like Michael Jennings above, the actual existence of X amounts of WMD stockpiles in Iraq was never the key acid test – excuse the pun – of deciding the rightness or wrongness of going to war in Iraq. The justification came from several interlocking elements, none of which are affected by the turn of events. Those elements are that Saddam was in repeated breach of the 1991 ceasefire; he had, and continued to seek to acquire, WMDs; he has used them in the past against both Iran and against his own people; he failed to come clean with weapons inspectors even after the coalition forces were sent to the Gulf; he had sponsored terror groups, though a direct link to al Quaeda was not proven, and his regime’s removal would be a key turning point in bringing some semblance of prosperity and freedom to one of the most oppressed people’s on earth.
Those reasons are still rock-solid today. What is so disgusting about most, if not all, of the anti-war brigade is that they ignore or just plain lie about such reasons.
The only good reasons in my mind for leaving Saddam in power were the isolationist arguments of Jim Henley et al, particularly the prudential argument that attacking Iraq could spawn more, not less trouble, and that war would inevitably increase the power and taxation of the U.S. and British governments. Those points apart though, the arguments used by those backing the hounding of Blair have been pretty feeble thus far.
I’m with Andy Duncan on this. Get rid of the vile Blair. He is doing horrendous damage to Britain, some of it irrepairable. For example, today it was reported that 120,000 people have been granted British citizenship – according to The Telegraph, up 1/3 from the previous year and more than three times the number six years ago when Blair first slithered into office. In other words, almost half a million non-British are now legally entitled to live in our overcrowded little island and partake of the social system to which native Brits have been contributing for 60 years. (This is just the legal ones. Half a million new voters, who have no stake in Britain, to vote for the euro. He has pulled down the pillars of British law, curtailed ancient British freedoms, is seeking to divest us of our currency and is intent in shovelling us, against our will so it has to be done by stealth and lies, into a socio/communist melange of a non-country called the EU. Like Andy, I think Brown’s a target we can hit, and his faults are far more evident. Many are still dazzled by Blair, which I find inconceivable.
The Hutton Enquiry is a giant, bland coverup, as we knew it would be. Blair, ever the actor, came out perfectly rehearsed and patently fake. How many QCs grilled him and rehearsed him for the days leading up to his appearance? Tony would have resigned if it had come out that he lied about the WMD? Just as well it didn’t come out then, isn’t it? All those rehearsals of the star and the supporting cast didn’t go for nought.
G Cooper wrote: “After the last election the BBC clearly decided that the Lib-Dems were the ‘true’ opposition, which is why they have been accorded vastly more air-time than their meagre support warranted”
Spot on.
The local government elections were a disaster for the Conservatives according the BBC’s (shameful) reporting at the time. The election results programme was a thinly veiled attack on the Conservatives while the Labour party got off scot free when they should have been roasted.
Whenever the BBC interview opposition MPs to get reaction to government announcements or initiatives, it’s likely to be a Lib Dem rather than Conservative that gets first shot at talking (if the Conservatives get a shot at all).
I sometimes wonder whether the ineffectual performance by the Conservatives is also due in part to the lack of proper respect and air time given to them by the BBC.
If I were IDS, I think I might be tempted to follow the Israeli’s example and refuse to cooperate with the BBC. Perhaps that decision has already been made. Not sure its good for political debate but the political coverage currently offered by the BBC is hardly debate anyway.
seems to me that the “i would resign line” is a perfect example of blair spin; – the media seem to have inintaly pushed this line, but in this it has been encouraged by downing street. Why? Well I suspect that they had a fair idea how any enquiry was going to play out in the end since they had all the evidence. So at the end of the day, the stories just going to be Tony stares death in the face and triumphs once again. Perfect spin.
And you know what? I expect he’ll go easy on the Beeb in a great show of magnanmity (and to encourage them to get back onside for election time). So I’d jsut exepct a coupl of resignations from Gordinistas in the BBC then businees as usual.
Campbell has gone
Maybe a sign that they saw Blair as dangerously tainted by the enquiry. A goat-sacrifice, not just one of the sheep, was needed to purge the public sin.
A very interesting comment from Blair: “The Alastair Campbell I know is an immensely able, fearless, loyal servant of the cause he believes in, who was dedicated not only to that cause but to his country.” Can it be that TB makes a distinction between the interests of the Project and the interests of the country?
Guy Herbert – Well caught, sir!
Posie writes:
Guy Herbert – Well caught, sir!
I second that emotion.
Top work! 🙂