The Filtnib's Progress

At the end of November last year, the BBC World Service made a Freedom of Information Request. Almost 4 months later, the requested information was finally released, and the BBC reported the findings on Monday.
Their revelation is shocking and disheartening. Yet strangely, coverage has been minimal. I can only hope this is due to the inevitably headline-grabbing Iranian-captive story, not some more sinister working of our government's political PR machine.
In brief: in October last year, respected British medical journal The Lancet published a breathtaking statistic: the total Iraqi death-count since the war began was at least 655,000. To put the figure in some sort of perspective, that's an average of over 500 people EVERY DAY.
At the time, the public was advised not to take the report seriously. Blair said the figure "wasn't anywhere near accurate". The Foreign Office questioned the Lancet's technique: "It is a fairly small sample they have taken and they have extrapolated it across the country". Stateside, President Bush was similarly dismissive: "I don't consider it a credible report." Hardly surprising, considering that in December 2005, Bush had suggested the death toll was only "30,000 more or less".
So what did those determined researchers at the BBC find out?
Here's Owen Bennett Jones from the World Service, writing in The New Statesman:

The documents, released to the BBC World Service, show civil servants suggesting that ministers should not "rubbish" the Lancet report. In one email, an official, apparently from No 10 but whose name has been blanked out, asks: "Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies."Another nameless official replies: "We do not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate", but goes on to say: "The survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones."
The documents advise ministers to use figures from the Iraqi health ministry, which estimates the number of deaths at less than 10 per cent of the Lancet's figure.The ministry in Baghdad relies on hospitals to report the number of victims of terrorism or military action. But, critics say, the ministry did not start counting until well after the invasion and required busy hospital staff to report daily. A statistician at the Department for International Development was also asked for an opinion of the Lancet study. The techniques used were "tried and tested", he said. If anything, the method "should lead to an underestimation of the deaths in the war and early post- invasion period".

In fact, chief scientific adviser to the Defense Ministry, Roy Anderson, called the report's methods "robust... close to best practice". And in the memo that the BBC obtained, Anderson's office told senior officials that the chief scientist "recommends caution in publicly criticizing the study."

At which point, Blair and Bush decided to publicly criticize the study.
There's something incredibly depressing about a government that not only made a terrible mistake by going into war in the first place, without a UN mandate or a referendum, but could not even do their war's innocent victims the justice of acknowledging their deaths. You'd think the existence of the Freedom of Information Act would discourage officials from ignoring their own experts' written advice, but then again, the way this story has been underreported suggests they don't need to worry.

I've just finished "My War Gone By, I Miss It So" by Anthony Loyd and am feeling that minor sense of loss one gets when you close the cover on a book you have loved. Were it not the property of my colleague I would be inclined to immediately reread. Had my breath knocked clean away by its incredible honesty and inspired prose. Most commentators seem to agree that Loyd is one of the best war correspondents of his generation, I'm no expert but certainly I've never read anything about conflict that comes close in terms of immediacy, elegance and intelligence. Most recently he's been writing amazing pieces for the Times from Afghanistan. This is his 1999 book based on his time in Bosnia during the Balkan conflict, aswell as his struggle with heroin addiction. Beautifully written and confronts you with impossible questions on every page. It did make me wonder what the point of learning about Hitler at school was, pretending it was HISTORY, when there was genocide and ethnic cleansing going on within Europe while we sat in our classrooms thinking things had changed. I'm ashamed to say I had no idea about the true horror of what happened in Bosnia until reading this.

Loyd has a new book out, "Another Bloody Love Letter", and I was lucky enough to hear him speak at the Frontline Club on Thursday night. Fairly soon you should be able to watch the video of the event on their website, well worth a look.

Church on the Corner

Brilliantly informative, often surprising, illuminating and entertaining. This is what church should be about.

“I remember Bill Clinton explaining this to me and saying… you may do 100 different things in a day but the 30 seconds that people see of you on the evening news is what you have done that day so far as they are concerned.”

Tony Blair, Podcast Interview with Stephen Fry, 6 February 2007


Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, the longest serving Labour Prime Minister in British history, has reached the twilight of his career. In the course of the coming year he will hand over the Premiership after a decade in power; a period that – fairly or unfairly - will be remembered less for its record-breaking longevity than for the impact of his deeply controversial foreign policy. At 54, he’s incredibly young to have concluded his time in office; when he entered Downing St at the age of 43, he was the youngest Prime Minister for 185 years. Blair’s final months do not hold out the promise of a gentle farewell; in many ways the battles he is currently fighting are the toughest of his career. The situation in Iraq has plumbed new depths; with the long-avoided term “civil war” now the default phrase in both news reports and policy documents, even American opinion has finally begun to turn, and as the Neo-Con star expires, past condemnation of Blair’s steadfast support of Bush echoes ever louder. At home, aggressive criticism over the NHS, the beleaguered prison service, military budgets and Labour’s unpopular education reform, stalks the government, while the unresolved cash-for-peerages scandal continues to cast a shadow over Labour’s collective integrity, with party chairman Hazel Blears admitting it has had “a corrosive effect”. Within his own party, Blair’s authority wanes. Many ministers admitted his refusal to state a leaving date created a limbo of inaction and confused loyalties.

The Prime Minister does not outwardly seem to rage against the dying of the light. Almost two-thirds of Britons polled in January by ICM said their opinion of Blair had worsened over the last year, and yet he seems to carry his unpopularity lightly; arguably he looked more haggard during the David Kelly affair of 2003. Interviewers note his current mood is surprisingly serene; despite being the only British PM ever to be called for interview in a criminal enquiry, he met the frantic questioning of journalists baying for blood in late January with calm detachment, appearing “the pattern of all patience”; no blush nor bead of sweat suggesting discomfort or shame.

In September, when asked which were the best and worst times of all his years in power, Blair said they had come within the space of twenty-four hours, in July 2006: “We won the Olympics one day and then we had the bombs the next day which was an extraordinary high to a low… that's probably the time I remember most vividly.” The many horrors of the war in Iraq are not mentioned. Over 34,000 Iraqi civilians are thought to have died in 2006 alone. The total death toll for the July bombings in London was 52. Blair’s afterthought – “that’s probably the time I remember most vividly” – is telling. He has yet to admit to himself his guilt over the chaos that currently engulfs the Middle East, that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and that, most alarmingly, shows no signs of reprieve. In March 2004, Desmond Tutu publicly criticised Blair for his part in an “immoral war”. For the deeply religious Prime Minister, this must have hit hard. The irony is that Blair is probably one of the most morally motivated leaders Britain has elected since Gladstone.


'Let us say one thing. If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive'

Tony Blair addressing US Congress, 2003


Blair may not feel he has compromised on his own morals, but by adhering to them so stubbornly, he has compromised much that his party held dear. On the 28 January edition of the Politics Show, Jon Sopel pointed out that criticism of Blair had increasingly emerged from within his own party: “You get Peter Hain coming out saying the problem for us as a government, is actually to maintain a working relationship with what is the most right wing American administration, if not ever, then in living memory.” Blair tried to laugh off the remark: “I don’t think it’s very surprising that people in the Labour Party aren’t Neo-Cons.” Which is of course true: the Labour party by nature is at odds with Neo-Con philosophy. But this makes it all the more surprising that their leader has been acting like a Neo-Con so convincingly and for so long. Already preparing his next question, Sopel did not pick up on Blair’s unwitting admission that his foreign policy decisions had intrinsically contradicted the principles of his own party.

Our Tony has brought Labour a long way. He comprehensively revamped a tired political movement that had for a long time seemed amateur in its economic ideology and feeble in its reach, enabling the party to achieve two landslide victories in 1997 and 2001, and an unprecedented three terms in power. The closest any other Labour leader has come is Harold Wilson, who won no less than four elections, but two were in the same year, and the other two were only 18 months apart. Blair has overseen a period of incredible economic stability and can count many historic reforms among his achievements: the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland; the introduction of a national minimum wage; the banning of fox hunting and fur farming; the writing off of up to 100% of debt owed by the poorest countries in the world; devolution in Scotland and Wales; the creation of paternity leave. All of which represent the enactment of traditional Labour values. He has also used his famous charisma and diplomacy to inspire other international leaders on what will be the key global issue of the century: climate change. One American foreign policy source confessed: “On the environment, I don’t know if Bush would have gotten to where he is now... Blair has always urged him to move in the direction he’s now taken”.

So does his foreign policy betrayal of Labour matter? It is instructive to look back to the party’s roots in the early twentieth century. Ramsay Macdonald proclaimed “Labour’s vision of an ordered world embraces the nations now torn with enmity and strife. It stands, therefore, for a policy of International Co-operation through a strengthened and enlarged League of Nations; the settlement of disputes by conciliation and judicial arbitration” (1923 Labour Party General Election Manifesto). For better or worse, no-one could claim that Blair has adhered to such a policy of “concilation and judicial arbitration”. In 1931, the Labour manifesto even included ‘International disarmament’ in its list of goals: “The Labour Party has always been in the van of the Movement for International Peace; and it is universally recognised that its record, as a Government, above all in solving disarmament by Arbitration, gave to Great Britain the moral leadership of the World. Labour will seek to make that record even more distinguished.” Has Blair made Great Britain’s record “even more distinguished”?

Yet Blair’s defenders would argue such comparisons are odious. The PM’s pragmatic approach to the traditions of his party brought necessary reform in every aspect of domestic and economic policy; why not also in foreign policy? It is worth remembering that in the wake of WWII, Labour’s Manifesto in some respects pre-empted the realpolitik of Blair’s current justification of war as a necessary evil: “If peace is to be protected we must plan and act. Peace must not be regarded as a thing of passive inactivity: it must be a thing of life and action and work.”

The aftermath of Blair’s Iraq strategy may define not only his reputation in the years to come, but also the future shape of global democracy. With such high stakes, his legacy is almost impossible to predict until the fog of war currently surrounding Iraq has at least partially dispersed; what is already clear is that the optimism he once inspired, and the Messiah-like quality with which he led Labour into the new millennium, have long-since dispersed. But as his surprisingly impeccable comic timing on last week's Comic Relief clip with Catherine Tate showed, (http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page11312.asp) his charm has never left him, and there's a very good chance that in his post-PM role, it will make a statesman of him yet.