Rescuing Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected Dictatorship

Spin, not face-to-face confrontations with the voters, is the Government's chosen method of communication. Ordinary people are dangerous. Ordinary people might ask a question which throws a politician 'off message'; the Cabinet member might reveal himself or herself to be a human being like us, and not a programmed android. Worse still, he or she might tell the truth. Ann Leslie - Daily Mail, September 16, 2004

 

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Dateline - November 25, 2004 A clutch of celebrities joined the parliamentary campaign to impeach Tony Blair for 'gross misconduct' over the Iraq war yesterday. Novelist Frederick Forsyth, playwright Harold Pinter, musician Brian Eno and actor Corin Redgrave backed a move to punish the Prime Minister for allegedly misleading the country over the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. A motion was tabled on Tuesday backed by 23 MPs, who want a select committee to be set up to examine Prime Minister Blair's conduct. The last attempted impeachment against a minister was in 1848 against Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston. The move is led by Welsh Nationalist Party Plaid Cymru. Among its supporters is Labour MP, former Defence Minister, Peter Kilfoyle.

A suitable case for the Nixon treatment

Commentary by Peter Oborne - Daily Mail August 27, 2004

A group of MPs is about to take the astonishing step of launching impeachment proceedings against Tony Blair. Most people associate such a procedure with the United States, where it has ruthlessly been used to remove presidents from office, most recently Richard Nixon.

But this very dramatic and powerful act is rooted deep in British history. For hundreds of years, it has been used as the ultimate sanction against abuse of power by ministers. But it is only used rarely, because the need only arises in desperate circumstances. That is why it is so telling that a group of MPs, drawn from a cross-party coalition, feel certain that the moment has now arrived to put this ancient weapon into practice. They are in a state of despair at the way the Prime Minister systematically misled the House of Commons and the British people over the Iraq war.

For several weeks, a powerful draft document setting out the charges, provisionally entitled 'A Case to Answer: A report on the possibility of the impeachment of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair for high crimes and misdemeanours in relation to the invasion of Iraq' has been in private circulation at Westminster. It sets out with great clarity the numerous falsehoods told by Tony Blair. It has only been possible to compile this document since the publication of the Butler Report last July. Although Lord Butler's conclusions were insipid, his report nevertheless brought a great many fresh intelligence documents into the public arena.

When this material is compared to contemporaneous statements made by the Prime Minister, the audacious scale of the deception becomes very clear. Thanks to Butler, we now know that Blair was not merely wrong about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, it is not possible to show that his reckless statements clashed with the state of knowledge within the intelligence community at the time.

It is possible to demonstrate that the Prime Minister was guilty of at best a culpably negligent failure to acquaint himself with the true state of affairs, at worst mendacity and bad faith. Indeed, Mr Blair never gave the British public the chance to make up their mind ahead of the war, because relevant evidence was manipulated and, in some cases, suppressed.

For example on April 3, 2002, he made the following confident assertion: "We know that he (Saddam Hussein) has stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons."

Compare this (and numerous other pronouncements of equal certainty he made around the same time) to what he was being told by the Joint Intelligence Committee, which, three weeks earlier, stated that 'intelligence on Iraq's WMD's is sporadic and patchy ... we believe Iraq retains some production equipment, and some small stocks of CW agent precursors, and may have hidden small quantities of agents and weapons.'

The discrepancy beggars belief.

Equally, Downing Street asserted the UN inspectors 'proved' that illicit weapons existed inside Iraq. The truth is that they merely said that the materials were unaccounted for.

There is not graver charge that could be laid against a Prime Minister than that he misled the British people on the eve of conflict. But the impeachment document makes out a potent case with great intellectual clarity, accusing the Premier of resorting to a flimsy and fallacious justification for war because he had already entered into what amounted to an arrangement with President Bush to invade Iraq well before Parliament voted for war in March 2003.

Last winter, the Home Office Minister Beverley Hughes, resigned from her portfolio following charges that she lied to MPs. She told the Commons that she accepted that she 'may have given a misleading impression' to MPs over immigration controls. That, for her, was grounds enough to leave office. By any criteria,, the case against Tony Blair is far stronger and the issue - a war in which tens of thousands have died - of infinitely greater importance.

Yet the Speaker bans discussion of the Prime Minister's integrity on the floor of the Commons. But it will be hard to resist debate on an impeachment motion.

The great legal expert William Holdsworth concluded his analysis of impeachment with an urgent call for its revival, stating that 'if ministers were sometimes made criminally responsible for gross negligence or rashness, ill-considered activities might be discouraged, real statesmanship might be encouraged and party violence might be moderated.'

Holdsworth could not have described more lucidly the case for impeaching Tony Blair over the Iraq war.

For the health of our democracy, we, the people of the United Kingdom, must find a way to force Mr Blair to resign

Mr Blair has lied and deceived us over Iraq. He must resign at once. Do you agree? Agree strongly Agree Disagree Disagree strongly Don't know Don't care Please click one of the links above to cast your vote Current results

Such defiance of the democratic process and the will of the majority of we people of the UK, must be exposed by voters as a matter or urgency, and not just in the two by-elections we have had this July and the European elections in June 2004. But how can this be done?

The most effective way of getting our deceitful PM to resign would be to mobilise the army of Labour MPs currently in the House of Commons and get them to demand it, the loss of their seat to be a penalty if they did not. All voters in Labour-held constituencies need to write a letter along these lines to their local Labour MPs:

 

Dear Despite his absolute and unequivocal assurances over the past year of the serious risk to our security of Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', Prime Minister Blair has admitted, that the threat was non-existent. For that critical error of judgement and for his gross incompetence in handling this very important issue, I ask you to take immediate steps to ensure that Tony Blair does the honourable thing and resign without delay.. I would therefore be much obliged if you would propose and help mobilise a Parliamentary vote of 'No Confidence' in Mr Blair which, despite Labour's huge majority, would leave the PM with no option but to resign. If I get no reply to this letter, I shall assume you will continue to support Mr Blair as our Prime Minister. In such circumstances I shall not vote for you in the forthcoming General Election. Signed:

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