News from the New Party

Inquiries we don't need

David Aaronovitch in the Times has some apposite comments regarding the Government's decision last week that there would not be an independent inquiry into the 7/7 bombings, and the efforts of a campaigning group of survivors and the bereaved to seek judicial review of that decision:

There is a straightforward problem here. We know who did it. We know why they did it, because they told us. We know how they did it. We know, from court testimony, that some of the bombers were in contact with people who were under security surveillance, but were not considered to be a threat themselves. We know that this judgment was wrong. But it is a huge leap from this to the idea that an inquiry would, in the words of a representative, "help prevent innocent people from suffering the fate of all those who were caught up in the awful events of that day".

Let me pose the obvious objection. Suppose that extra surveillance had been placed on a 7/7 bomber - surveillance that had to be taken off another target. And suppose that the second target had been successful in an attack. So there seems to be magical thinking going on here - if only (with hindsight) X had happened, then disaster would have been averted.

Had the call for an inquiry not come from "victims" then I don’t think it would have lasted five minutes. Six of those bereaved (52 died) and 18 survivors (out of several dozen) have put their names to the campaign, though others may well support it. But it could equally be that a majority of "victims" have made no such demand.

The Greater London Assembly passed a motion in May supporting the call for an inquiry "to ensure that public confidence is retained within the security services". This seems a poor reason to me, and it emphasises that several agendas are being followed here. One of the most public campaigners has said that her problem "is with the government cover-up that happened after the bombings". Another that an inquiry should "raise questions" about the Government’s foreign policy. David Davis, before the summer, argued for "an independent inquiry into the attacks of July 7 and 21, and their implications for our security strategy" for a whole series of strenuously yoked-together issues.

Presumably we’d now have to have another inquiry into the Glasgow and Haymarket bombs. Or do we inquire only into attacks that succeed? Motivations here seem to me to be varied. Some victims may well be seeking "closure". Some, I am afraid, may be seeking the absolute opposite. Others are on the bandwagon. Yet we have no idea what the opportunity cost of an inquiry would be in terms of time better spent stopping the next Mohammad Sidique Khan.

Meanwhile Martin Bell in the Guardian demands a thoroughgoing inquiry into the Iraq War, a demand which receives short shrift from his nephew Oliver Kamm. 

Bell comments:

We need to understand why the warpath was chosen when diplomatic options were not exhausted; why there was a plan for war but not for peace; why the armed forces were sent to kick in the door of a sovereign state on the basis of a whim about regime change and a falsehood about weapons of mass destruction. And what lessons can be learned, so that never again do we park our foreign policy so unconditionally up the Potomac.

Kamm responds:

These are political questions about the decision to go to war. They are not about the effectiveness of our armed forces once deployed in war. Raising those questions is legitimate in itself without resorting to tendentious analogies.

Even so, it cannot have escaped Martin's notice that those of us who identify with the foreign policies of Tony Blair have no particular diffidence in answering those questions (apart from the one about postwar planning, on which the principal failure is not British). There is never an obvious point at which diplomacy is exhausted, but there is a point at which you can reasonably say that diplomacy is futile and counterproductive. The government concluded that that point had been reached in our relations with Saddam Hussein. American security strategy can be faulted at immense length for its execution, but a strategy of pre-emption against hostile regimes is far from being a whim: it has historical precedent and academic weight...

The decision to go to war was a political decision. Martin is not satisfied with the inquiries that have taken place because he disagrees fundamentally with that political decision. The place to manage - not resolve - fundamental political disagreements is in the political process. Martin is instead proposing a quasi-judicial arrangement to supplant the political process; in short, his proposals are not a reform to make good a weakness in our political system, but a challenge to cabinet government and the principles of representative democracy.

Both Aaronovitch and Kamm are exactly correct.  Too often in response to almost any event of significance the demand goes up from some quarter for a public inquiry, which in many cases would yield no useful information at enormous expense.  For the purpose of inquiries is neither to provide an outlet for personal grief (there are more appropriate forums for this), nor to indulge conspiracy theorists, nor even to provide opposition parties with ammunition against the government.  On the contrary the purpose of inquiries should be to find the truth of a matter where the truth is not glaringly apparent, and to make suitable recommendations where appropriate. In no circumstances should they act as a substitute for, or be subversive of, the normal democratic process.