Minority Government & Collateral Damage in Afghanistan

Leading the nation to war is the prerogative of the sovereign. 

In the seventeenth century and before, the British sovereign was the monarch, who was an absolute ruler. By the end of the seventeenth century sovereignty rested with Parliament, as the representative of the British people. From time to time a British Prime Minister with a commanding majority has been able to act like an absolute monarch. This was the case with Tony Blair when he led Britain into an invasion of Iraq, declared illegal by the United Nations. That Tony Blair should wield absolute power  for a few years at the beginning of the 21st century seems especially wrong, when we realise that only 37 % of the British electorate voted Labour into power in 2001.

 All this will form the subject of other posts. For the moment, I merely want to stress that the rights and wrongs of going to war, or continuing a pointless war, are an integral part of our notion of national sovereignty.

 We, the British people, the British taxpayers,  have been dragooned against our will into supporting involuntarily, first an illegal invasion of Iraq with consequent deaths of British service personnel and many many more Iraqi civilians,  not to mention a huge expenditure of cash,  and then secondly – with the same deaths of British service personnel and innocent civilians,  and further huge expenditures of cash – a war in Afghanistan which is declared unwinnable by a British officer commanding there, and for the continuance of which no minister has given adequate explanation.

Sovereignty is only granted to Parliament as our representatives. How many of us consider ourselves represented by Parliament? The only secure justification for sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan would be if the British citizen body as a whole had voted for such invasions by referendum.

So war points the way to constitutional reform.. A possible first step: hold a referendum of the British people on whether to bring the troops home from Afghanistan. If the British people voted for withdrawal from Afghanistan, they might also throw in a vote to free Joe Glenton from prison. 

Behold the head of a traitor!

A cold January day. The deposed King Blair, stripped of his royal robes, wearing only simple breeches and a white shirt with the collar open, is marched by a squad of soldiers bearing pikes and muskets, to the scaffold on Tower Hill. The executioner, dressed all in black, his face masked except for the eye slits, waits motionless, the enormous axe at his side. Blair kneels at the block. The traditional drum roll. The axe descends.

“Behold the head of a traitor.”

 The camera’s time code flickers between January 1642 and January 2010.

Let it flicker a bit more. A more appropriate execution scene. It is 1789. Le Roi Tony, condemned by the people of Paris, is being driven by tumbril to execution, while Queen Cheri Antoinette nibbles at cake sandwiches helplessly. The tumbril approaches. Suddenly, the crowd is pushed aside; an unutterably hideous washerwoman, using her stinking laundry baskets like clubs, shoves her way to the guillotine. As Le Roi mounts the platform, the washerwoman draws a rapier, and disposes of the entire guard with a few fancy thrusts and ripostes. For, of course, once we see a hideous washerwoman anywhere near Madame Guillotine, we know it is that master of disguise and accent, Sir Percy Blakeney Bush, turning his aristocratic drawl into perfect Parisian gutter argot. Robespierre raises his impotent hands in horror, as Sir Percy Bush whips up the horses, and the tumbrel, with the King on board, gallops unscathed through the entire French Republican army, and another Carry On film shoot hears the call “Wrap.”

Today will be a farce. We all know Blair knew the invasion of Iraq was illegal. But Blair has escaped the scaffold, and will live out his life of shame, struggling in penury, forced to depend on pathetic hand-outs of $20,000 dollars a minute on the American lecture circuit.

Blair acted like an absolute monarch. Cromwell and co attempted to abolish absolute monarchy for ever. Absolutism popped up again, once the British Prime Minister established his right to act like a monarch and declare war.

In 2003 Parliament was incapable of checking Blair. Parliament is no longer a suitable defence of our rights as citizens to say whether our fellow citizens should die in foreign field.

Let the lesson of Britain’s illegal invasion of, and ultimate disgraced retreat from, the ravaged country of Iraq be written into our non-existent constitution. The right to declare war must be exercised by referendum of the entire citizen body. No other person or organisation should be allowed to usurp that right of ours.

Is Alastair Campbell mad?

 Is Alastair Campbell mad? I don’t mean “Is he wild, crazed with testosterone-stuffed aggression, and possessed by an ego inflated to the size of a helium balloon en route for the ionosphere?” That question must obviously be answered in the affirmative. No, I ask seriously whether he is a schizophrenic, completely unable to tell the difference between reality and his private delusions. I allude of course to his impersonation of a talking robot at the Iraq Inquiry on Tuesday January 12th. No human being with normal intelligence, and five senses in working order, could possibly, after nearly seven years, assert complete confidence in the ludicrously false intelligence reports which Blair used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq.

The question whether Alastair Campbell is a schizophrenic – or indeed a robot – is the most supremely uninteresting question to be posed by current events. At the moment we, the citizens of Britain, can relax in the hope that Alastair Campbell is confined to a dirty past, stained by the wrong judgements and grinning self-assurance of the disastrous premiership of Mr Blair. But Campbell’s robot impersonation takes our minds back to 2003.

Everyone whose intelligence I respect was perfectly well aware that the Iraq invasion was illegal, and would probably have disastrous consequences. I guess the majority of the British people would have voted against the invasion, had they been given a chance. I salute a businessman by the name of Julian Dunkerton www.drapersonline.com/julian-dunkerton, who owns a chain of fashion stores. So that his work-force had a chance to protest, he gave everyone a day off in order that they could, if they wished, march against the war. He reckoned it would lose him £100,000. (I heard later that he made this money back again later: happy ending)

Just as it is almost impossible now to find a white South African who “supported apartheid”, it is likely that many people who now say they opposed the invasion of Iraq may not have done much opposing in 2003. But had the wretched Blair thought a referendum on the invasion would have gone his way, he’d have ordered one. Blair must have known his arrogant action appalled the majority of the British people. Or is Blair a schizophrenic too? Was it a Blair robot full of Bush disks that led the Iraq invasion?

In 2010, it would be impossible to find a sane British citizen willing to defend the Iraq war. Objection! There are politicians who still do defend it. I exclude politicians from the ranks of the sane; constrictions of party discipline impose a kind of schizophrenia and delusion on every member of a political party. How else can we explain the fact that Campbell was allowed to say what he did, and, apparently, leave the enquiry unscathed?

Blair’s high-handedly wrong decision raises an important matter of political philosophy. When Britain was ruled by absolute monarchy, as it was up till Charles I was dethroned and then beheaded, the King / Queen took the decision to go to war. Once the office of Prime Minister was established, the Prime Minister, as de facto Sovereign, takes the decisions for war or peace, and when he has an overwhelming parliamentary majority as Blair had, can start a war without reference to anyone else. This is, in the 21st century, patently absurd, horrifically unjust. What right to order the deaths of British people did Blair have? A nonentity politician who happened to lead a political party voted into power by a minority of the British people as result of our ridiculous electoral system.

The disaster of Iraq should ram home to us who should be the Sovereign of Britain. There is only one just solution. Sovereignty belongs to the citizen body as a whole.

The sooner we, the citizens of Britain, work to bring this about, the better. I’m hoping The Guy Fawkes Option blog can become a forum to encourage this.