In a small room in London

Clare Short, the Minister for International Development who resigned (a long time after threatening to) from the Cabinet over the Iraq war is giving a bracing alternative version to Tony Blair's. She's always been halfway between a machine politician and a maverick, and Iraq was probably her finest moment.

So far, she's said:
Blair lied about war planning
He ignored Cabinet government
The attorney-general misled the cabinet about the legal basis for the war
Brown had nothing to do with it - it was all Blair's fault.

I do think Blair took all the decisions on his own, but she can't wriggle out of it. She helped found New Labour, she was part of the leadership team which made all the decisions, and she is bright enough to know that Cabinet Ministers still wield power and influence. She eventually resigned, but only after conniving in a lot of other mean-spirited and illiberal actions, and after the war had started. Sainthood isn't conferred for leaving halfway through - it's conferred for resisting evil in the first place.

Blair: the digested digest

To save you the effort, here's basically what Blair has had to say so far.
1. F**k the lawyers.
2. F**k the liberals, invasion's cool.
3. It doesn't matter if evidence is fake and/or hyped up by his advisers, what's important is whether he personally believes it.
3. Let's f**k Iran!
4. Mmmmmm, Bush.

Mmm, great plan. He really is a third-rate mind (at top rate fees - £2000 per minute at one recent function - more than Ronaldo).

More for the Iraq junkies

Former Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith is giving evidence to the Chilcot Enquiry. It seems that he thought that the war was illegal, then probably illegal, then maybe legal and finally definitely legal - we haven't quite reached the stage where he explains this, but there's plenty of good stuff already, such as Blair's unwelcoming response to legal advice.

Clearly everyone giving evidence so far is passing the blame to Blair, as though we lived in a dictatorship rather than a parliamentary, Cabinet democracy. If true, government's broken. If not, what a spineless bunch.

Blair gives evidence soon. He may take one for the team by accepting blame, he may proclaim God's permission and refuse to accept that anything at all was even slightly dubious, or he may dump Brown and his surviving colleagues in it. My guess is a mix of b and c with a side order of enormous arrogance.

Conspiracists, start your engines!

The lonely death of Dr. David Kelly gets stranger. He was, if you recall, the defence analyst who leaked the story that the government 'sexed-up' the dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, because he felt that we were being rushed into war on a false pretext.

Once unmasked by an astonishingly vengeful government (an anonymous aide let a journalist read out a short list of suspects until the right name was reached), and after an appearance before a House of Commons Select Committee which was sympathetic but clear about his situation ('you've been hung out to dry', a Labour MP told him), Kelly went for a walk in the country and killed himself.

And so there the matter rests - or it did until today, when it turns out that the Hutton Inquiry into the Iraq war secretly sealed Kelly's medical records for 70 years - twice the usual period, and doubly odd given that he never received a proper inquest. Needless to say, those who feel that governments occasionally practice assassination are putting two and two together.

I don't think Kelly was assassinated. Alastair Campbell and friends destroyed his livelihood, credibility and employment - that was enough. That said, I can quite understand why this very strange decision is fuelling the suspicions of the conspiracists.

Roll up, Roll up for the Charismatic Hoon

Mr Hoon, you'll recall, was the co-author of the pathetic little plot against Gordon Brown a couple of weeks ago. Those of you with a penchant for very dull men might even recall that he was a spectacularly dull Minister of Defence for a few years.

Today he's giving evidence to the Chilcot enquiry into the war. As you'd expect, he's fighting the spirit of enquiry with the shield of yawn-inducing boredom, but there are a few gems.

He was asked, as Minister of Defence, whether he knew that Britain was offering troops for the Iraq war.

Lyne says that by May 2002 the Americans had reached the view that the British were offering a large land contribution. Sir Christopher Meyer referred to this in his evidence. Did Hoon know about this?

Hoon says that he was not aware of this.

This man was in charge of Britain's armed forces.

Update: understatement of the century:

Chilcot asks if there was a concern about the British not being able to control what the Americans were doing.

Hoon accepts this was an issue.

Just for Kate

As she's the only one as obsessed with politics as I am (though she gets a partner - that's not fair), another politics post. Everyone else can look away now.

Stop and Search has been banned by the European Court of Justice. Yet again, it took the EU to point out to this government and the police that stopping and searching people without reasonable grounds is oppressive. Under UK law, the cops can take you aside and go through your pockets without even having to suspect that you're up to anything.

In the 1970s, this behaviour was known as the 'suspicion of being black' law, as black youths were targeted out of all proportion. The laws were changed in the 1980s, then changed back in the 2000s under the Terrorism Act. Lo and behold, the cops started harassing ethnic minorities again. Then they turned their attention to anyone planning to hold a legal demonstration, and photographers - a very useful tool to prevent democracy.

The sole condition was that the search had to look for articles used in connection with terrorism – but this covered many things commonly carried by people in the street. Police did not even have to have grounds for suspecting such articles were present.

The judges said that, because of this, there was a "clear risk of arbitrariness in granting such broad discretion" to a police officer.

Their concerns were compounded by the fact that black and Asian people were four times more likely to be stopped under section 44 and there was a risk that the power could be misused against demonstrators.

"The absence of any obligation on the part of the officer to show a reasonable suspicion made it almost impossible to prove that the power had been improperly exercised," the judges said in describing the lack of judicial checks.

This lightens my mood even more. Poetry marking is going well (congratulations, students) and Alastair Campbell is coming out with some corking BS to the Iraq war inquiry.

Once again, 3 cheers for the European Union. Now we just need to make it socialist.

You spin me right round

Morning all. It's marking hell for me again today. I've finished Communications Studies Pile 1, and now I'm moving on to Poetry. 40 down, 190 to go…

By way of distraction, I'm keeping an eye on Alastair Campbell's examination at the Iraq war inquiry. True to form, instead of answering questions reflectively, Blair's spin doctor is behaving strategically, obfuscating and blocking like a pro. Apparently Blair is a big fan of the UN, didn't do whatever George Bush wanted, and never wanted a war at all. Well, well, well.

Inconveniently, the Dutch released their report on the war today (they offered the US 'political and (defensive) military support'). They've concluded that it was an illegal war (paragraphs 18 and 20) and that reports made public were significantly less nuanced than those provided by the intelligence services to government departments and parliament (30, 32) - just like the 'dodgy dossier' here, because the government preferred to rely on US and UK claims.

In my absence

In my absence, many things have appeared in my brain which would have occasioned a cyberrant.

Amongst them, of course, was Tony Blair's announcement that he'd have found some other excuse to invade Iraq if he'd definitively known that there weren't any WMDs (which he must have known anyway).

It's not, of course, a surprise that he'd have done this. There are two aspects of the interview which are classic Blair.

1. The 'I did what I thought was right according to my conscience' routine. It's evasive and unacceptable. I could punch my mum and claim that I was being true to myself. It's no defence. Ken Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, rightly called it a 'narcissist's defence', and he's right - the only validation, for Blair, is Blair. That's a total rejection of objective standards, law and democracy.

2. There's an inquiry into the Iraq war on (a bit of a whitewash, but at least it's on). Did Blair say these things to the inquiry? No, he bloody didn't. He did what he did right through his premiership: sat on a sofa in a TV studio, answering questions from unqualified light-entertainment presenters. He never hid his contempt for Parliament, and he never went on the serious news shows, like Today, Newsnight or Channel 4 News. Instead, he oiled his way onto shows like Richard and Judy. This time it was Fern Britton, most famous for hosting This Morning, Ready Steady Cook, Soapstar Superstar, Magic Moments, and Mr. and Mrs., alongside a host of other hard-hitting political shows.

Poppy or not?

A quick question to the UK readers - others are very welcome to comment on the issue.

Are you wearing a poppy?

Some background: poppies are sold and worn very widely indeed during this time of year. The charity thus aided is the Royal British Legion, which cares for ex-forces veterans. Everybody appearing on television wears one - except for the occasional Sinn Féin representative.

I don't wear one. I think it's fundamentally wrong to commemorate the veterans of one side. These soldiers may have been conscripts and they may have been enthusiastic killers. In a sense, this doesn't matter so much - they're all in need of help. However, by singling out one side, we're assuming that all others were enthusiastically on the wrong side and the poppy sellers say things like 'support our boys'. We're also enabling successive governments to get away without caring for veterans properly, and (though this may not be the intention, it's certainly how many people feel), it's a visible sign of patriotic chauvinism, hence Nick Griffin's latest comments.

I'm of Irish heritage. It's less than a hundred years since members of my family fought in a bloody war of independence against the UK, and the history of the past 600 years has been one in which the British fought some just wars and an awful lot of unjust ones. Individual soldiers are largely not to blame, but I just can't bring myself to participate in this way. I'd rather pay more tax to fund NHS care for ex-servicemen, vote for a government which doesn't send boys to illegal and/or pointless wars, or support a global veterans' charity.

It's an emotive issue, and I'm aware that my stance may not be entirely rational, but it's how I feel. Some of these soldiers saved the West from the Nazis - others took aim at my family. However, the appeal's couched in terms like 'our boys' and 'our heroes'. They're not my heroes.

The alternative is the White Poppy, the Peace Pledge Union's attempt to commemorate the fallen of all sides while opposing the concomitant potential glorification of militarism apparent in the red poppy campaign - although I'm not a pacifist.

There's one final irony to the current Red Poppy campaign: while soldiers on all sides are dying in Afghanistan, millions of real red poppies are flowing out of the country as heroin, seemingly unaffected by the presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, arriving here and devastating thousands of lives.

iPod - weapon of choice

Seems like the US Army has co-opted the cool kids' toy for use in Iraq.

Jack be nimble… with the truth

Jack Straw has vetoed the Information Commissioner's order to release the minutes of the Cabinet meetings which authorised the Iraq War. His reasons are fascinating:

"Cabinet is the pinnacle of the decision-making machinery of government," Straw said. "It is the forum in which debates on the issues of greatest significance and complexity are conducted".

Now Jack's always been a bit of a slippery customer, but this is such a howling lie that it shouldn't be allowed to stand. Read the memoirs of any of the Cabinet ministers since 97 - Mowlam, Short, Mullin loads of others - and you'll realise that there's no Cabinet discussion of any substance. There's even a phrase to describe Blair's style: sofa government, which denotes the unminuted, word-in-your-shell-like way he conducted business. To listen to Jack, you'd think that every Cabinet meeting was a meeting if Titans thrashing out the moral and political ramifications of every decision. It's not true. All the big decisions, including the Iraq war, were planned by Blair and his unelected advisers, then the Cabinet were presented with them for their tame acceptance. Debates went unaired, votes weren't taken. Like the rest of the party but with more spineless desire, the Cabinet accepted this as the price of power. Jack's a liar.

Bloody Blogger - changing my fonts and won't change them back