Cop out

You stand on an election platform and make your pitch and one of yesterday’s subversives jabs a finger and demands: “Do you support the police?”

Like they were a football team, maybe? Or in preference to Sting as a solo artiste?
Suddenly, around our way, supporting the police is the sine qua non for Looking To The Future.
“By endorsing the PSNI, we are creating a dynamic for a new phase of struggle which will lead on to a united Ireland,” explained Caoimhín, speaking for “the men and women who fought the Brits to a standstill.”
No, you work it out.
A few years back, Caoimhín told me I was “a reactionary and a dilettante” when I confessed to having been upset at the sight of a dead policeman’s blood trickling down the gutters of Shipquay Street.
Tony Blair has been unstinting in his praise for the “remarkable leadership” shown by former guerrillas who have coaxed their movement into accepting the authority of the State they’ve spent decades attempting to overthrow. Remarkable it has been.
Have you recently been denounced for observing that, “All coppers are bastards”?
You’ve kept your lip buttoned in the presence of Shinners, then? Fair enough.
Still, it’s a wonder nobody in the North has had the gumption to tell Blair they’ll think about urging their followers to help the police with inquiries into, say, the murder of Robert McCartney, just as soon as he starts helping police inquiries into the biggest of the gangs running guns to Islamic extremists.
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As mentioned last month, Blair personally intervened just before Xmas ‘06 to ensure that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) abandoned an investigation into whether the arms company BAE had bunged Saudi Arabian middlemen truck-loads of cash to win orders to supply the savages running the country with the means of terrorising the population into continued subjection. Attorney General Goldsmith startled his fellow Lords into semi-consciousness with his revelation that the Prime Minister had learnt from the intelligence agencies that Britain’s national security would be seriously imperilled if the Saudi inquiries weren’t halted tout suite.
Now the endangerment of Britain’s national security doesn’t strike me as an adequate reason for pulling the plug on a probe into arming a regime which tortures dissidents and persecutes women. But that, as it happens, isn’t the point. It subsequently emerged that the reference to intelligence information was untrue. No surprise there. Blair is so crooked corkscrews uncurl in his presence. But the circumstances of this particular untruth were more interesting than most.
In January, the head of MI6, Sir John Scarlett, was asked to put his name to a dossier confirming that it “endorsed” Blair’s claim. The dossier was intended for presentation to a Paris meeting of the 35-country Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is responsible for combating corruption in world trade. But Scarlett refused point-blank to sign.
If the name rings a bell, it’s because Scarlett had been head of the Joint Intelligence Committee which signed off on the 2002 dossier “confirming” that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction which could be unleashed at British targets within 45 minutes. If Blair thought, on this basis, that Scarlett could be counted on to go along with whatever new lies New Labour came up with, he thought wrong. Perhaps Scarlett took the view that one dodgy dossier to save Blair’s bacon was enough for even the chief of MI6 to be associated with. Or perhaps he was cheesed off to have been awarded only a knighthood and not a peerage in recognition of his previous dishonesty. Whatever the reason, he wouldn’t put his name to Blair’s false claim.
We will hear more, much more, on this matter soon.
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The intervention of Blair to frustrate the SFO’s efforts illustrates the moral deterioration of the New Labour leadership.
Ten years ago, in May 1997, British and Irish media moralists swooned at Blair’s triumph over the Tories. His cleansing promise of a new era in government excited the approbation of many who had flinched from the sight and sound of Tory snouts snuffling in the trough of arms sales corruption.
Remember Jonathan Aitken? Fell from grace after he’d lied about a 1988 meeting in a Paris hotel with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia to discuss “commissions” on the sale of BAE Tornados? So desperate was Aitken to conceal the purpose of the meeting, he persuaded not only his wife but also his 17-year-old daughter to perjure themselves in a libel case arising from exposure of the affair.
The scale of the “commissions” involved may be calculated from the fact that the factory-gate price of a Tornado at the time was £20 million, whereas the mega-rich Saudis were paying £35 million.
The Tornado sales were part of the Al Yamamah deal, the biggest arms contract in history, negotiated by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s. It is this same Al Yamamah deal which Blair today is determined to keep hidden.
Four years after Aitken’s rendezvous at the Ritz, in 1992, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee considered a National Audit Office (NAO) report on arms sales to the Saudis. John Major’s Government decided to suppress it. New Labour, naturally, cried foul and pledged that, once in office, they’d lay the truth before the people.
Last summer, the SFO asked for sight of the NAO report. But the auditor general, on instructions from New Labour, which 15 years ago had lacerated the Tories for refusing to hand it over, refused to hand it over.
Pressure on the SFO to lay off BAE appears to have been continuous over a long period before Goldsmith announced the abandonment of inquiries in December. The details came in a series of answers on the 22nd of last month from Goldsmith and Solicitor General Mike O’Brien to parliamentary questions from the Liberal Democrats. Curiously, these revelations seem to have been virtually ignored.
Blair personally intervened three times in an effort to persuade SFO chief Robert Wardle to call off his investigation. In addition, in November 2005, John Reid and Jack Straw, at the time Defence Secretary and Foreign Secretary, had written to the SFO urging an end to the inquiries.
In November and December last year, the British ambassador to Riyadh, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, held three meetings with Wardle, warning him of the dire consequences of persisting with his search for the truth. It was after the third of these meetings that Wardle says he “felt obliged” to agree to abandon the inquiry.
Tell me this: Given that Aitken was hauled into court and consigned to prison for not coming clean about the Paris meeting, should Blair not now be charged with the surely greater crime of conspiring to pervert the course of justice?
And tell me another thing: would not a person who took a pot-shot at Blair the next time he claims to have a mission to bring democracy and peace to the Middle East have a fair defence of righteous anger?
And on top of that: when will local political leaders acquire the gumption to tell Blair to fuck off when he lectures them on the need to cooperate with the law?