'Blairgate' - Britain's Election Tsunami

'Blairgate' - Britain's Election Tsunami
'Our Man in Barnsley'
by Felicity Arbuthnot

'Blairgate', the political tsunami threatening to engulf Britain's
Blair
government over the Iraq war, dodgy dossiers, dodgy advice by Lord
Goldsmith, the Attorney General, two 'whitewash' Enquiries - Chaired by
Lord
Hutton and Lord Butler - and allegations that the Prime Minister even
lied
about lying, has thrown up some charismatic and unlikely political
opponents
running in key constituencies. Lord Butler's Enquiry, however, it
should be
pointed out with the benefit of acres of newsprint hindsight, begins
to
look like an a base coat, rather than a full whitewash. His Lordship
allegedly might also been mislead by the Prime Minister and reportedly
remarked of Lord Goldsmith 'if he was my lawyer, I'd change him.'

From clarity to charisma. Craig Murray, 'our man in Blackburn' in the
north
of England, challenging the charismatically challenged Foreign
Secretary,
Jack Straw, used to be 'our man in Uzbekistan', the British Ambassador.
A
diplomat with experience in Nigeria, Poland and Ghana, he was offered
the
Uzbekistan post in 2002. 'He said 'yes', put down the 'phone and took
out
the atlas to find out where it was.' 1.

Having found it, on arriving he quickly discovered the country's
appalling
human rights record - in a country where it seems both Britian and the
US
send suspects to be 'interrogated'. Murray returned to the UK, to
report to
the Foreign Office 'barbaric tactics' by the intelligence forces,
including
boiling a man alive. He was met, he says with 'indifference'. 2.
The allegations he made resulted in leaks to the media that he had been
selling passports for sex and had a drinking problem. Finally recalled,
he
was paid a hefty severance fee by the Foreign Office which he is
putting to
good use trying to overthrow its chief Minister.

Blackburn has a somewhat Uzbek style of democrocy - attempting to hire
public halls for their campaign's public meetings, refusal is
mysteriously
total - though Labour party members have no such problems. Murray is
routinely asked to remove his posters - on 2nd May this applied to a
meeting
where the speaker was Moazzam Begg, a charismatic former prisoner in
Guantanamo Bay, aid worker and book shop owner whose plight was long
ignored
by the Foreign Office. A dance hall was finally found for the
occasion.
Conservative Muslims - the Muslim vote is almost a quarter of the
elecotorate - would have found this a new experience.

Early in his campaign, says Murray, Muslim voters, given the draconian
terrorist laws now in place and with Muslims incarcerated without
charge in
Belmarsh high security prison - and who knows, Uzbekistan - this
population
was reluctant even to leaflet, or help, should Jack Straw win and
retaliate
- that Britian with its 'mother of parliaments' - should have come to
this.
All that has now changed, Murray states. His 'campaign bus' is an
ancient
army 'green goddess', the sevices fire tenders. Reflecting charges of
lack
of, or shoddy equipment for soldiers, it failed to start for a while,
but,
like the campaign, suddenly burst into life. Murray now travels the
constituency, standing on the back, car horns hooting approval, Muslim
youth
dancing behind, singing imaginative slogans 'Strawman', 'last Straw'
.....
'man of Straw' cannot be far behind.

Murray beieves another war can be stopped 'right here in Blackburn.' If
The
Foreign Secretary loses his seat, he contends, it would be near
impossible
for the Prime Minister to follow Bush into Iran or Syria. 3. A play
based on
Murray , 'Talking to Terrorists', is to be premiered in London. His
book
'Should not be Known', is published later this year. 'Nothing makes me
so
determined as injustice', he said, in a call as I write. Perhaps he
should
be Foreign Secretary.

The Quiet Man who could Defeat the Prime Minister.

If Blackburn is mildly Uzbek, fortress Sedgefield, The Prime Minister's
home
in his Durham constituency would tempt his nemesis Saddam towards envy.
Security for his seldom visited home in this ex-mining area - with its
picuresque village green, welcoming tourist-poscard pubs, vibrant
flowers
tumbling from window boxes, brightening the dullest northnern day - is
the
proverbial ring of steel. since sightings of their constituency MP are
as
rare as the dodo, considerable resentment and the expese he generates
for
the taxpayer is a frequent comment by locals. Another is that these
dod-like
appearances, they say, only occur when he wants a photo opportunity.
One
such was dubbed the 'million pound pint.'

In an area where unemployment is high, the visit of Blair's best buddy
George W, Bush last year, to the village's picturesque DunCow Inn
caused
fury. Weeks before, secret servie agents were drafted in, police,
locals
say, searched homes for miles around, manhole covers were sealed. When
the
great day arrived, the consistent story is, those who did not leave
their
homes before breakfast for the business of the day, were locked down.
Those
who did could not return home till mid evening. One manual lbourour in
his
fifties told me of being unable to get into his home for two hours
after a
gruelling day - the road to his modest estate sealed off by police.
Another
said wryly, at his local pub, 'if I hadn't been let in at 7.45 a.m., I
couldn't have got here at all.' Some hardships are more trying than
others.

When the great moment arrived, police helicopters hovered over the
green and
ancient church, heavies with ear pieces hovered on the ground and a
vast
bullet proof motorcade swept down the sleepy, sunny street. The
President
and his pal posed for a photo opportunity outside the Inn with pints -
the
former's reportedly alcohol free - disappeared in side for a meal in
the
charming, timbered hostelry - and swept out again. The whole excercise
allegedly cost the local tax payers one million pounds. The landlord of
another welcoming venue, the Hardwick Arms, stuck signs outside reading
'No
Protesters, No Press and No Presidents.'

Just before the election was announced, a quiet, reserved man decided
to run
against the Prime Minister. Reg Keys, a former paramedic training
officer
from further south in the Midlands, lost his twenty year old son, a
military
policeman, Tom who was killed with five colleagues in the eastern Iraqi
town
of Al Majar Al Kabir in June 2003. He spent endless months trying to
find
out what went wrong, writing to the Ministry of Defence, attending the
Enquiry in Germany. He pieced many details together painstaikingly,
only to
be telephoned by the Ministry of Defence he says and asked to desist
,'You
are pissing off a lot of people in high places' he claims he was told.

Al Majar, in fact is a poor, proud, clannish, conservative town, where
if
invited as a visitor, courtesy, tiny glasses of tea, food and courteous
welcome would be proffered. Come as a fresh faced invaders telling this
hierarchical society two to run their affairs could only end in
disaster. In
a complicated story, still not entirely unravelled, they six - their
equipment entirely removed except for fifty rounds of bullets and
radios
fixed to vehicles. A crowd, believed to be of about five hundred
attacked
the police station after a series of incidents by coalition troops
fuelled
further resentment. When Tom's body was returned it had been hit by
over
thirty bullets and half his face was missing. In a terrible irony Tom's
last
conversation with his father recounted an incident which had disturbed
him
deeply. For no apparent reason a row of homes had been destroyed by
allied
missiles. Tom and his colleagues had helped a man dig his wife and
young
children from the rubble. Unable to get to the cemetary they helped him
bury
his family in some waste ground at the end of his street.

Afterwards, they asked him if they could take him anywhere. 'Where', he
asked, 'I have no where to go', then 'yes, please, to my home.' He dug
with
his hands in the rubble, Tom told his father, until he unvovered an
ancient
Kalashnikov. Then he looked at the sky and shook his fist heavenwards.
He
thanked them for their help and turned to leave. Where was he going,
they
asked 'To Baghdad to kill Americans' he said. One young man's story - a
metaphor for the tragedy. carnage and disaster that is Bush and Blair's
Iraq.

Keys was originally going to run against the Defence Secretary Geoff
Hoon,
but Roxy Music's Brian Eno was prepared to give moral, political,
public,
publicity backing to someone who might catch the imagination of the
public
against the Prime Minister. Key's hesitated for barely an hour. 'Why go
for
the monkey' he said, 'when you can go for the organ grinder , I'll do
it for
Tom. Win or lose, I can't bring him back, but I can walk down the path
to
his grave and tell him 'I gave it all I've got, son.'

It would be easy to say, this is a grief stricken man and his stand is
not
about politics, but pay back. No, it is about bringing back
accountability
and truth into polics, an attempt at restoring democrocy', says Keys.
He and
his wife Sally, a former trauma and emergency nurse Manager, say if Tom
and
the now eighty seven British serving in Iraq had died from weapons of
mass
destruction the grief would be of one dimension, That 'they died for a
lie'
he says, including all coalition service personnel and Iraqis is why he
stresses the truth -and accountability has an extra dimension. Given
their
medical background, the Keys have become listeners to much anger and
pain.
'A father who slept by his son's grave every night; then died; the wife
who
had just two legs returned in her husband's coffin - they were
different
sizes. She was asked to identify which was her husband's.' One family,
he
says, had to bury their son twice. His remains, from a helicopter crash
were
returned to them. 'When the helicopter was returned to the US,
investgators
found further remains and sent them. they had to exhume the casket, add
the
remains and have a second funeral' Life is indeed cheap for all in Iraq
it
would seem. 'We have moved on from Iraq' says the Prime Minister
airily,Try
telling that to countless families east and west. In a recent
television
programme Blair was asked how many British service people had died. He
didn't know.

The extraordinary backing Reg Keys has received is across the board.
Novelist Frederick Forsythe, appearing with Brian Eno and playwrite
David
Hare on the BBC's usually sedate Radio 4 Breakfast progamme - 3rd May -
perhaps capped his fellow interviewees on Keys and the invasion by
referring
to the formerly independent Parliamentary Upper House, the House of
Lords as
now, appointed 'botty fondlers.' From killer quote to killer article,
Rory
Bremner, arguably one of the world's astutest political satirists,
supported
Keys with a piece headed - ' Like a fish, Labour is rotting from the
head
down. For the sake of David Kelly and Tom Keys it's time for a
decapitation.' 4.

Richard Dawkins, distinguished Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public
Understanding of Science at Oxford University, wrote Keys was
'following in
Martin Bell's heroic heroic footsteps , but with a bigger target, Blair
himself.' 5.

Martin Bell, renowned former BBC war correspondent , the 'man in the
white
suit', won as an Independent in a campaign lasting just 28 days,
defeating
the Tory incumbant Neil Hamilton on an anti-sleaze ticket two elections
ago,
he retired at the second term, but has thrown his weight firmly behind
Keys,
campaigning with him in Sedgefield, walking miles on a leg injured in
the
Balkans.

The people of Sedgefield seem to have offered the traditional northern
welcome, noted for warmth and generosity. The north is known for down
to
earth no nonsense, celebrity means little, personalities mean all.
Derek
Cattell, a Labour Party Member for thirty years and a Member of the
Executive Committee for Sedgefield, resigned to support Keys. The
decision
to go to war with Iraq, he said ' raised many questions regarding the
honesty and integrity of' Blair's leadership. Bob Clay, campaign
Manager and
ten years a Labour MP, has also thrown his weight behin the Campaign,
John
Lansman, another thirty year suppoter, likewise. One resident, formerly
proud to live across the road from the PM, has Keys stickers covering
his
windows.

A Prime Minister who has taken the country to war in the Balkans,
Sierra
Leone, Afganistan and and Iraq, yet never seen a shot fired in anger,
may
have a battle of a different kind on his own doorstep. Oddly, in
keeping
with the last seven years there has been but one brief sighting of him
in
Sedgefield - he is expected to helicopter in for the count at around
midnight on 5th May.

'Dear Mrs Blair.'

Rose Gentle's son Gordon was nineteen when he was killed by a roadside
bomb
in Basra in June 2004. Had his vehicle been equipped with electronic
signal
jamming device, he might have been saved she says, claiming this was
not the
case and as in a host of other incidents, correct, potentially life
saving
equipment equipment was not available. Angry as she is at whoever
planted
the bomb, her main fury is at the British government who sent troops
not
only she says, into 'an illegal war', but made, she claims, little
effort to
protect them. Gentle, whose first action after her son's death was to
deliver a letter to the Prime Minister, accompanied by her equally
articulate and feisty daughter Maxine, then fourteen and old beyond her
years.

Her campaign has been relentless 'my son was used as a bit of meat' ,in
a
war not over wmd's but o-i-l. There are those who think Gentle ' ..
should
keep out of a debate that has the potential to bring down governments
on
both sides of the Atlantic.' 6. Far from it, is infact running as an
Independent, in the election against Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram
in
Scotland's East Kilbride.

Had the Prime Minister or his wife heeded her requests, the government
might
have had one less embarrassing candidate to haunt them. Gordon Gentle,
known
as 'the gentle giant' for his six ft frame, was unemployed, longed to
be a
mechanic and from a poverty stricken, proud area, Pollock, Glasgow.
Seeking
work, he went to an army recruiting centre in November 2003. The army
moved
in, knocked at the door, drove him to see videos. It was, he thought
the way
to get his driving licence and his trade. His family tried to dissuade
him,
but he was determined, he would return from Iraq, buy a car and have
the
means to find work. His dreams, like so many in the invasion died with
his,
when he was killed just weeks after the end of his training and two
days
before power was handed back to the 'democratically' elected
government.

Tony Blair was on holiday and a letter of condolence arrived after
seven
weeks. In the interim they gained a meeting with the combatative Deputy
Prime Minister who enraged Gentle and Maxine so much, they walked out.
7 She
wanted Tony Blair 'to come to Pollock and talk to the 'parents locally
with
sons still serving in Iraq 'perhaps then he would understand how
unemployment and poverty' leads to bright young to sign up. He would'nt
come, she said. 8.

She made a video letter to Cherie Booth, Human Rights Barrister and
wife of
the Prime Minister, with the help of an independent group of filmakers
called the Camcorder Guerillas. Titled 'Dear Mrs Blair' it appealed for
the
troops to come home from an illegal war 'mother to mother'. The video
had a
public screening on a chill night in Glasgow in December and a copy
delivered to Downing Street. It's plea fell on deaf ears.

On May 3rd, Gentle left the campaign trai for a day and travelled to
London
with nine other bereaved families and delivered another letter to
Downing
Street. A legal document drawn up by Phil Shiner of Public Interest
Lawyers,
who is also, ironically acting for Iraqi victims of coalition torture.
The
letter demands an immediate independent public enquiry into the
legality of
the law. The families will file for a judicial review if there is no
response within fourteen days. The families and Reg Keys, part of
Military
Families Against the War are also lodging papers with the International
Criminal Court in the Hague over the use of cluster bombs by British
Forces.

On election eve, the case for war seems so thin, that according to the
London Independent, one wife has claimed that her husband's insurance
company has said he is no longer covered, since the war may be illegal.
9.
'Disclosed documents difficult to reconcile with declarations' is the
heading regarding Shiner's letter in the Independent.

The government has one more shock to face. Paul Bigley whose
extraordinary,
relentless, lone fight for his brother Ken, kidnapped in Iraq last year
went
round the world, has flown in to campaign with Murray, Keys and Gentle.
On
May 3rd, he wrote an open letter which was also published in the
Independent. In the spirit of decency and conciliation, at his
brother's
memorial service in Liverpool Cathederal, he had apologised for his
fight
with the government, and said there was nothing personal, he had been
trying
to save his brother's life.

In part it reads -


'I was about to take my leave , the Foreign Secretary pulled me to one
side and whispered: " Oh by the way Paul, you have a rapport and good
connections with the media. Do you think the next time you are on air
you could mention this fact, re-iterate it, you know apologize because
Mr Blair is rather concerned about his re-election chances.

Its my personal belief that Ken's body may be lying in a fridge in the
US and we could be hearing an announcement shortly that they have
succeeded in identifying him.

Recovering Ken's body at this time would be opportune for Blair and
company, in the run up to the election it would provide a temporary
distraction. People have short memories. I know we can't keep whinging
on all the time because Ken has been put on the back burner, we
accepted
the inevitability of that.

If I am wrong and Ken was blown to pieces and there is no body in a
fridge anywhere then I will apologize. But they are not going to try to
use the body of my brother to distract from the real issue. '

It was one Eric Arthur Blair who wrote, 'political language ... is
designed
to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and give and
appearance
of solidity to pure wind.' 10. His pen name was George Orwell. What
goes
around, comes around, his namesake may be in for a rough ride.


1. Paul Routledge, New Statesman March 28th 2005. www.newstatesman.com
2. As above.
3. As above
4. Daily Mail, Friday April 24th 2005. Dr David Kelly was the
government
scientist and former weapons inspector found dead of an
alleged
suicide, after giving evidence to the Hutton Enquiry.
5. Independent - UK - 23rd April 2005.
graciousness - Shayler and Annie charisma.
6. Susan Flockhart, Sunday Herald, 29th August 2004.
7. as above.
8. as above.
9. Independent , 4th May 2005.
10. George Orwell '1984.'