Government By Deceit

MONDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2009

Government By Deceit

Deception all round

Bliar's last Director of Public Prosecutions is now back practising law with Cherie at Matrix Chambers, the operation he set up with her in the late 1990s. A long-time Labour insider, he was appointed DPP in 2003 just after the invasion of Iraq, but it seems he's finally recognised a horribly inconvenient truth:

"The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television* does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge... to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible..."

Now given that Ken Macdonald went to work for Bliar after the invasion of Iraq, and after they hadn't found those notorious Weapons of Mass Destruction, you may think he is in no position to criticise. But let's park that.

The key point is the deceit. As Macdonald says, Bliar deceived us over WMD. Worse, large swathes of the British establishment - including the Tory Party - went along with that deceit. Whether for reasons of self-aggrandisement, or because they thought we needed to side with the yanks whatever, they went along with the wafer-thin fiction that Iraq's invisible WMD somehow posed a clear and present danger to us. 

But of course, once discovered, such deceit has a price. As Macdonald puts it, "it rendered any affair of the heart between government and people no more than a wisp, like a lie in the wind. It broke faith."

And that's a pretty good summary of where we are overall. Right from the early days of so-called "triangulation", deceit has been at the very heart of this government's entire approach. 

Consider just a few of catastrophes we blog so often on BOM:

• The debt mountain - Brown's self-monitored "Golden Rules" were nothing more than a fiscal con, designed to reassure the financial markets while allowing him to stretch and break their so-called limits at his convenience; the definition of National Debt failed to account for his hundreds of billions of off-balance sheet liabilities, massively understating the true total
• Public sector efficiency savings - the "non-cashable" Gershon programme allowed Brown to claim savings where none existed
• Immigration - Labour claimed mass immigration would make us all richer: it has done nothing of the kind; in reality, it seems it was driven by Labour's desire to destroy the right in British politics
• Edukayshun - Labour has dumbed down the UK exam system to make us think education is improving; in reality we are plummeting in the international league tables
• Crime - Labour has spun the crime stats to make it look like crime is falling: in reality, violent crime - the stuff we really worry about - has risen
• Climate change - Labour claims the "science is settled" and spends shedloads paying for research and propaganda to prove that; in reality, it is far from settled
• Tax - Labour promised not to increase tax... enough said

Last week Tyler met a bunch of quite senior civil servants. They were pretty downhearted, and not just about the public spending outlook. As one of them explained en route to the tube afterwards, they have been corrupted by government spin.

These days, everything they do, from official statistics to the latest Pre-Budget Report, has to be shaped and spun to support the government line. Nothing is genuine any more, and it has corroded the entire civil service structure. Those that have done Labour's bidding have prospered, and those that haven't are now toiling in a Strategic Health Authority just outside Omsk.

Ultimately we get the governments we deserve, so why have we ended up like this? Do we like being deceived? 

Well, no, of course not. But we are all suckers for a nice simple story. The real world is horribly complex, and we are crying out for someone credible to make sense of it for us. Especially someone like Bliar who has first convinced himselfhe's right.

Eventually of course, the real world will out, and no amount of deception can escape from it. But nobody likes facing up to harsh truths, and the last time we were there back in the 70s/80s the woman who dealt with them was reviled by a large section of the population. She got herself into the all-time lexicon of evil and remains there to this day. 

Deception seems so much easier all round.


*Footnote In case you missed it, Bliar was paying footsie with Fern Britton on her new TV show. Ah, Fern, Fern. Tyler first met Fern in a lonely hotel room up North. She was sparkling and funny and warm and seemed so genuine. It was madness of course - Tyler was a boring financier and she was the hostess of Ready Steady Cook. Plus, she was the other side of a TV screen. But no more for that - Tyler was smitten, and watched with pleasure as her career blossomed. But then one day she let him down. Badly. She'd lost a sensational amount of weight, and was looking fantastic. She claimed she'd done it through diet and exercise and sheer willpower, and even started to lecture Tyler about how he could do the same if only he had as much self-discipline as her. Alas, it subsequently emerged that her new look was entirely down to the surgeon's knife and a large elastic band twanged tight round her stomach. How could she? How could she break faith? How could Tyler ever trust her again? Heartbreak. And now she's even playing footsie with the liar's liar.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2009

News From BOM Correspondents - 22

Absolutely fabulous darling

It's been a while since we did a correspondent round-up, so here's a quick selection:


1 Latest from Stoke on Trent

The terminally awful Stoke City Council has featured on BOM several times (eghere). Among its other triumphs was the decision to close its only properly functioning secondary school on ideological grounds (see here). 

Now Tom W draws our attention to the following:

"Concerns have been raised over why a firm was awarded a contract to knock down a former Victorian workhouse which was more than three times the price quoted by an award-winning company. 

Stoke-on-Trent City Council set a budget of £1.2m for demolishing the building and last month it accepted a price of about £1.1m from a firm to complete the work. 

However, documents obtained by the BBC showed the cheapest quote received by the council was actually £309,000. The lowest bid was rejected, despite the contractor being an award-winning firm and one of the biggest demolition companies in the UK.

So for unknown reasons Stoke Council agreed to pay three times what it needed to pay. There's more:

"Concerns were first raised over tenders for the contract by councillor Alan Rigby, who was asked to witness the tenders being opened. 

He claimed there were serious irregularities in the process and said he was asked to sign a form which did not contain details of prices. When Mr Rigby asked to see prices, they were written in and ranged from £618,000 to £210m."

So a councillor was asked to sign off the process without being shown the competing bid prices. Hmm... riiigght...

Council leaders have blamed it all on a "computer glitch", and faced with a stewards' enquiry have agreed to re-run the whole process. But if we lived in Stoke, we'd be demanding that enquiry anyway.


2. Pagan Sex, Money Laundering, and Self-Abuse

It's been too long since we linked a story on David Blackie's excellent blog The Language Business, which is dedicated to exposing the moneypit that is the British Council. 

On 6th Jan the BC's Knowledge and Learning Centre clocks up its eighth anniversary, and David has recently been investigating some of the outstanding study opportunities it currently markets to foreigners who wish to dodge UK immigration controls to study at a world-class British university. According to its website, it's Exeter for Pagan Sex and Portsmouth for Money Laundering. But as he explains here, if it's self-abuse you're after, the University of Huddersfield is the one for you, with its tempting choice of three specialist courses. 

A course on terrorism? 

No need to head off to Tora Bora any more. According to the BC, there's now a choice of 146 Terrorism courses offered right here, by no fewer than 41 UK universities. Here's just the first page of results (click on image to enlarge):

And remember - you're paying.


3. Frocks

Nick L sent an FOI to Bliar's new Supreme Court, asking what their new frocks cost (pic above). His letter and the reply are here (and see MoS story here). They said:

"The total cost including VAT of the robes for the 12 Justices of the Supreme Court was £137,956.

...the Justices do not wear robes while they sit in court... However the Justices recognised the need to have a robe for certain ceremonial occasions... They therefore have robes... made from black brocade with gold lace and some gold ornamentation on the sleeves with the Supreme Court emblem embroidered on the back."

Nick L suggests we establish a new unit of account - the Standard British Peasant Year:

"Minumum wage is £5.80. 40 hour week, 52 week year, equals £12,064 pa. Ignoring employer's NI, they have deductions of £1,816.19 a year

So £137,956 for the robes divided by £1816.19 is 76 - ie the Justices have spent 76 Standard British Peasant Years on their new frocks. 

Of course, that assumes a Standard British Peasant doesn't consume any public services. 76 of them slave away for an entire year, simply in order to kit the justices out in some bling."