Martin Bell: A Very British Revolution

photo credit: Gaetan Lee

The peculiar circumstances of the Tatton campaign at “a time of hope beyond ordinary imagining”. And how short-lived that time of hope was!

Before long I was described as “a fully paid up member of the awkward squad”.  But I wasn’t awkward enough.  I should have resigned from the Standards and Privileges Committee, where MPs seemed more interested in their privileges than their standards.  And they got rid of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Elizabeth Filkin, who madem the uncomfortable by doing her job too well.

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Our government was elected on the votes of less than a quarter of the electorate.  Yet we preach democracy and dare to impose it on others by force of arms.

The House of Commons was the setting for the four most shocking years of my life.  To hear about it is one thing.  To see it for yourself is another.  Surely Chesterton was right when he said  “Can anyone on earth believe that if the seeing and telling of the whole truth were one of the ideas of the English governing class, there could conceivably exist such as things as the English party system?”

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MPs, whose creative accounting and financial abuses have the people up in arms, seem unable to see themselves as others see them.  A new wave of scandals has broken up us, leading to the conclusion that petty and not-so-petty corruption is widespread and endemic.

I’ve been there and I know too well the kind of things that happen.

MPs represent us, but they are not representative of us.  They cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.  Nor can the present crisis of confidence be resolved under the present Speakership.

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Actually, there is one.  But it is limited (until recently) to the management of the economy, to the government’s record on foreign aid and to the Northern Ireland peace deal.  I speak from experience. I was a young reporter on the streets at the height of the troubles.  Those who helped to make this miracle happen – and Tony Blair was one of them – deserve the credit for it.

Why then tarnish the record with two such terrible mistakes – the failure to restore trust in politics and the war in Iraq?  These failures connect.  The war, which was launched on the basis of a falsehood, was the worst mistake by a British Prime Minister in living memory.  It had graver consequences even than Suez.  Then we had the Americans to restrain us.  In Iraq we emboldened them and travelled in their slipstream.

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The abuse of patronage was an issue that haunted Tony Blair’s government  for its last two years.
It wasn’t confined to Labour, but it was Labour who had come to power on a promise to clean up politics.  Now its major donors and benefactors, like the Tories’, were routinely nominated  for peerages.  The trade in honours was there for all to see.

So Yates of the Yard investigated.  Some of those closest to the project, including Lord Levy, were arrested.  The Prime Minister was questioned twice as a witness. The verdict in the end – “not provable” – was inconclusive.  But it did further damage to the mortally wounded cause of honest politics.

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The most serious decision a government takes is to send the armed forces to war.  In the case of Iraq the Labour Government took it almost nonchalantly, and on the basis of intelligence which was not only flawed but false.

The untold story – and the one that I think I am able to tell – is what the soldiers thought of it.  I was a soldier once.  I know the military quite well.  And from meetings with them, I have been able to tell the story of their dismay at being sent to fight in such circumstances, to be treated as occupiers rather than liberators, and to have invaded Iraq with a plan for war but not for peace.

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To send the armed forces into action five times in eight years was a high “war count” by anyone’s  standards, but this was New Labour’s record.

The doubt here is about its do-ability.  This is Britain’s fourth Afghan war.  So guess who won the other three?  We didn’t.  And the troops were sent to Afghanistan on the hope, expressed by the then Defence Secretary John Reid, that they could complete the task “without firing a shot in anger” – instead of which, they fired 400,000 in the first six months.

What follows is as balanced an account as I could manage, based on my travels in Afghanistan, of the pluses and minuses of our Fourth Afghan War.

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This is about our sense of history and how we seem to have lost it. Someone close to the New Labour project described Tony Blair’s Ten Downing Street as “A history free zone”.

Maybe that’s why he sent the soldiers to two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, where the British Army had previously fought losing campaigns. All we need is armed interventions in Gallipoli and Singapore and we shall have a full hand in revisiting the scenes of our past military disasters.

The fundamental problem here – which I set out wit my old soldier’s hat on – is that for the first time in living memory we have politicians in power have themselves never served in the military, know nothing of warfare and therefore believe that war can achieve outcomes which it cannot. It becomes a policy option – with terrible consequences.

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The point here is that we are not just facing unprecedented perils – climate change and nuclear proliferation among them – but doing it under the leadership of politicians who are remote and disconnected figures with little personal experience of anything but politics.

The gap is wider than it has ever been between the government and the governed, the politicians and the people. The emergence of a growing political class, with its allowances and entitlements a national scandal, does nothing to reassure us.

If this is an anti-politics stance, I make no apology for it. I have been driven to it by my personal experiences in the Mother of Parliaments and other hostile environments. And I know that we cannot go on as we have been. The scale of our delusions is staggering. We are literally fighting blind.

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