The camp of discredited former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is continuing to obstruct publication of the report of the Public Inquiry led by Sir John Chilcot into Britain’s involvement in Iraq between mid-2001 and July 2009.
The inquiry was announced by then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, on 15th June 2009 and commenced its first open session almost six months later, on 24th November 2009. It concluded on 2nd February 2011.
It has not yet reported and there is no date for it to report. The reason for this centres largely on continuing challenges by Blair’s representatives to the detail of what the report is saying – leaving the ever-grinning one free to shrug and say, with a threadbare shred of credibility, ‘I know nothing about it’.
At issue is Blair’s determination to prevent those who carry the risk from his actions from being in a position to confirm what they suspect on secure grounds – the level of culpability and deception practised by the most dangerous Prime Minister this country has known in living memory.
The British public are paying the price of the military project in Iraq which, more than anything else, provided the foundation for what is now known to be the £100 million fortune Blair has amassed since he left office. He has done this by effectively calling in debts owed him from that time for his delivery of Britain to the battlefields of Iraq to legitimise by association the American assault – and by trading on the status cynically gifted him by those debtors.
No one alive today has witnessed a British Prime Minister who so shamed the office and so milked it for private gain.
Never forget that this was a war in which we chose not to record fully the numbers of the Iraqi civilians killed. That made deniability so much easier.
The British public paid for all of this:
- first in the single life of weapons expert, Dr David Kelly, lost in the strangest of circumstances, the nature of which is unlikely ever to be known;
- then in the 179 military lives lost in the illegal and ill-resourced war in Iraq;
- then in the 52 civilians killed and the more than 700 injured in the London bombings of 2005 – this country’s first ever suicide attack;
- then in what looks like the irrecoverable loss of authority of its public service broadcaster, the BBC, in its spineless response to the illegitimate scapegoating it received in the paper-thin Hutton ‘inquiry’ into the death of Dr David Kelly;
- and continuingly, in the ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism this country had never attracted before the man with the pound signs in his eyes and a manic grin led this country to war in the deserts of Iraq, on a knowingly false prospectus, to make his fortune for him – with no little help from the House of Bush and the House of Saud.
The Chilcot inquiry is a public inquiry in the principal interests of the public who paid that complex price, who pay for the inquiry itself and who are owed the truth.
The public will pay for that truth – they have paid for everything else.
The Chilcot report must now be published with no further delay.
Rather than negotiate to protect against potential law suits before publication – Chilcot should publish at once; and the public, as it pays for everything, will pay for the cost of any litigation resulting from publication. That litigation and its arguments would then also be a matter of public record rather than – as now, of deniable private threat.
No one has a special right above all others to be freed from the consequences of their actions – and Tony Blair most certainly does not.
The gulf between the rootless Westminster village and the stable judgment of ordinary folk has never been more easily measurable than in how each of these regards the man who stole what innocence we still had back on that night of 1st May 1997.