It’s Well the Government told a pack of lies to take us into an illegal war causing untold

It’s, “Well, the Government told a pack of lies to take us into an illegal war causing untold carnage, and the BBC made a couple of grammatical errors in one broadcast at four in the morning, so honestly, they’re both as bad as each other.”
It’s as if the judge at the Nuremberg trials had summed up by saying, “But let’s not forget that one prosecution witness signed the wrong form for his expenses, so perhaps we can all learn something from what’s happened.”Most spectacularly, the point that was yelled again and again to justify the war, that Saddam could launch his weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes, is now admitted to have been a total lie. The fundamental ideological divide which the unions and some activists will seek to expose does not on the whole reflect the Brown-Blair relationship, both of whom remain broadly on the New Labour side of that divide. But stripped of the natural suspicion which characterises that relationship, there are some real questions to be answered here, as the Prime Minister might do well to acknowledge in his speech next Tuesday.d.macintyre independent.co.uk
More from Donald Macintyre. Much of the establishment seems to have already made its verdict on the Hutton inquiry.

Nor he is anything other than an ardent Atlanticist, who might well have acted exactly as Mr Blair did on Iraq. Yet the logic of a more proactive and confident approach to foreign policy may conceivably suggest some limits to the level of co-operation with a US administration when no clear British interest could be seen.That is still open. But one conclusion that flows from all this is that the differences between the two men remain relatively narrow even where relatively deep. His attitudes to the European side of this equation are well known. He is convinced that that the British electorate won’t accept full European integration until it sees the continent making some of the economic changes taken as read in the UK.

He sees the British lead – of the kind it showed over the EU directive on the taxation of savings – as vital to persuading its EU competitors to look outwards to its global competition rather than inwards to internal harmonisation.This approach could have implications for the transatlantic relationship. For example, Gordon Brown is said to be planning to revisit his first-term theme of “Britishness”, challenging the notion that foreign policy can be defined merely as being a “bridge” between Europe and the US. And the second concerns how the money will be paid back by markedly different income groups. Is it right, for example, that a badly needed graduate nurse or teacher should pay a much higher proportion of his or her income than – say – an accountant?Whether these issues will be reopened in the current discussion of ways of making fees more palatable remains to be seen.