Independent UK: Yet another reason to condemn Blair over Iraq

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Andreas Whittam Smith: Yet another reason to condemn Blair over Iraq
There was no analysis of British interest in joining the invasion. Now I understand why
Monday, 31 March 2008


You need a big dose of cynicism to understand politics. Yet even though I regularly take my medicine, I was still deeply shocked by my colleague Steve Richards's recent account of the factors that propelled Mr Blair into the Iraq war. His article was published on these pages last Thursday. The decision was, Mr Richards wrote, "part of a New Labour approach to politics".

I quite see that we all come at problems with a particular mindset developed over the years. At the time I accepted the New Labour style in so far as I understood it, and I voted for Mr Blair in both 1997 and 2001. Steve Richards explained further: "When there are highly controversial policy areas, Labour worries hugely that the Conservatives might be on the more popular side. It is determined always to keep Rupert Murdoch's newspapers on board."

I am not so naive that I hadn't already come to see the justice of this observation. Recent memoirs by former ministers and Downing Street aides point in this direction. But just think what is described here: an inability to exercise leadership, a Labour government which spends its time in a perpetual funk. This a fraud on the electorate. When we elect a government, we assume that it will summon up a bit of courage from time to time. We don't choose it to do what the opposition would do or to take orders from a newspaper proprietor.

Then Mr Richards goes on to describe the political setting for the decision to go to war. With a cautious New Labour timidity, he wrote, Mr Blair must have weighed up the domestic situation. If he had opposed the war, he would have been in alliance with President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany, while Mr Duncan Smith (Conservative leader) would be the one who supported the US. Mr Blair would have given up the space he had jealously protected as a new Labour leader. He would be back to the Neil Kinnock era, when a US President treated Labour leaders with disdain. He would lose The Sun, which would cheer for Britain's only war leader, Mr Duncan Smith. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/andreas-whittam-smith/andreas-whittam-smith-yet-another-reason-to-condemn-blair-over-iraq-802745.html