History > 2006 > UK > Politics > Prime Minister (II)

Peter Brookes

The Times        June 16, 2006

R: British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Blair forewarned Bush

of terror threat to US airlines

· Decision to sanction raids took ministers by surprise
· First Cobra meeting took place late on Wednesday

Friday August 11, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour, political editor

Downing Street admitted Tony Blair would not have left the country on Monday for his Caribbean holiday if he had known the police would need to swoop so quickly to disrupt a terrorist plot. He has known about it in general terms for months, and has spoken to President George Bush about it on a number of occasions. The two leaders discussed it in more detail on Sunday, during a conversation on a secure line in which the prime minister outlined what he knew of the British cell being monitored by the security services.

Downing Street officials said he had also mentioned the specific surveillance operation. Mr Blair warned the president that it showed there was a specific threat to US airlines and urged total secrecy, warning premature leaks would destroy the monitoring of the group.

From his holiday home, he spoke again to Mr Bush on Wednesday around 8pm UK time, again mentioning the security threat, but primarily discussing fresh plans to break the deadlock at the UN on the Middle East. Hours later police and security services were in contact with their US partners to say a specific threat was being acted upon.

The decision to sanction the raids took ministers by surprise. Douglas Alexander, the transport secretary, was on holiday in Mull on Wednesday when he was told by security officials he needed to be briefed on a threat to UK aviation. The official flew to Mull, and he was told there was a plot to blow up planes simultaneously.

Mr Alexander immediately decided he needed to be in London. So an RAF helicopter was flown to the island and he was taken to London in time for the first Cobra meeting that began a little before midnight. John Reid, the home secretary, chaired the meeting, which included senior figures from the security services, defence chiefs and Metropolitan police.

The discussion centred on how to handle the likely transport disruption yesterday as well as the economic and community implications of the raid. It was also agreed that Mr Reid should brief the leaders of the opposition parties. John Prescott, the deputy leader and in charge in the prime minister's absence, was not at the meeting.

Midnight meeting

Largely the same group met again at 5am yesterday - midnight US time - to discuss the details of the raid, and how to handle the media, including the early morning statements from Mr Reid and Mr Alexander as well as the need to involve local communities in the fight against terrorism.

Mr Prescott was given the job of speaking to constituency MPs about the reasons for the raid but was not give a prominent media role. The communities minister, Meg Munn, spoke to Muslim religious leaders.

No 10 was reluctant to go into details of exactly how much Mr Blair has known about the scale of the plot in the past few months. Some of the near desperate tone in Mr Blair's speeches, especially in Los Angeles, suggest he was exercised by the levels of alienation of Muslim opinion in the Middle East and Britain. British foreign policy was not perceived to be even-handed or just, he conceded, even if he offered no criticism of the invasion of Iraq or the scale of Israeli bombings in Lebanon.

He said radical Muslims were backward looking, intolerant and a perversion of true Islam. But he seemed acutely aware that there had to be a new push towards solving the Palestinian problem once the Lebanese crisis was settled. He has also stressed at his Downing Street press conferences that there was a tendency in too many Muslim groups to give ground to those who argued British foreign policy justified terrorism. He said with open frustration that British Muslim leaders needed to be a lot more aggressive to confront such thinking.

The foiling of the alleged plot also fuelled the demands for a recall of parliament originally made to debate the British approach to the Lebanese crisis.

Shahid Malik, the Labour MP for Dewsbury, argued : "I think today's events may well have an impact, but I think the momentum was always there. We want to make sure that the representations made to us by our constituents are actually debated in the chamber of the house. I think that is the democratic thing to do."

Mr Malik has been one of many Muslim MPs who have questioned the degree to which the government followed up the recommendations of taskforces set up by ministers in the wake of 7/7 designed to ensure Muslims remained fully bonded into British society.

Praise

On the Tory and Liberal Democrat benches there was no attempt to make political capital. The shadow home secretary, David Davis, confined himself to praise for the security services.

The Tory MP Paul Goodman, whose constituency includes High Wycombe, spoke for many Tories when he said it was an "inexpressibly sad day" for the town, where community relations were "traditionally good".

He said the events highlighted two key points: "First, that the vast majority of Muslims in High Wycombe and elsewhere are peaceful and law-abiding citizens and that any hostile action towards them is reprehensible. Second, that all Muslims must strive ceaselessly to condemn, confront and root out support for terror from their communities. Loyalty to Britain and its way of life must come first."

Blair forewarned Bush of terror threat to US airlines, G, 11.8.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1842313,00.html

Bush gives ground

as UN pushes Israel peace deal

· Draft plan calls for bombing to stop
· Blair welcomes move to end 'tragic crisis'

Sunday August 6, 2006
The Observer
Gaby Hinsliff, Ned Temko and Paul Harris in New York

A ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah forces in Lebanon moved decisively closer last night after America, Britain and France agreed an outline deal to resolve what Tony Blair described as a 'tragic crisis'.

A draft United Nations resolution hammered out in New York calls for a 'cessation of hostilities' between Israel and Hizbollah, following what senior Foreign Office sources said was a climbdown by Washington, which had been holding out for a 'suspension' of fire. Under the latter wording, Israel could more easily have resumed bombing at any time it felt threatened.

Crucially, however, the resolution does not demand an immediate halt to violence, which will be seen as pacifying Israel in turn. And hopes of an early peace were dashed last night as Lebanon indicated unhappiness with the draft, while both sides in the conflict indicated they were not yet ready to stop.

Nonetheless it is hoped that if the new resolution - to be discussed with other members of the Security Council today - is formally voted through by ministers tomorrow or Tuesday, international pressure will bring a swift halt to the bombing.

The Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, also told The Observer she was pushing Israel for the urgent creation of 'humanitarian corridors' in Lebanon to let food and medical supplies through to stricken civilians, with the offensive scaled down at least enough to give safe access to aid workers.

The new resolution states a ceasefire is dependent on 'in particular, the immediate cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks' - seen by some as a victory for Israel - but also on Tel Aviv halting all military offensives. It will be monitored by the current UN force in Lebanon, rather than waiting for an international stabilisation force to arrive and police it, as Israel and the US had originally insisted, and will prompt immediate work to begin on a detailed political settlement, including the demilitarisation of southern Lebanon.

Last night Tony Blair welcomed the tabling of the resolution. He said: 'This is an important first step in bringing this tragic crisis to an end. The priority now is to get the resolution adopted as soon as possible and then to work for a permanent ceasefire and achieve the conditions in Lebanon and Israel which will prevent a recurrence.'

He added that he would work 'tirelessly to re-energise the broader Middle East peace process' by moving to create a 'Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel'. He has told confidants he won a personal pledge from President George Bush last week to revive the search for a negotiated deal over Palestine and that further unilateral withdrawals by Israel from the occupied territories would risk 'complicating' the situation.

However the text met with some hostility in the Middle East. Asked whether Beirut accepted the text, Lebanese foreign ministry official Nouhad Mahmoud said 'no'; Mohammed Fneish, a Hizbollah member of the Lebanese cabinet, said his group would only stop fighting if Israeli troops quit Lebanon. The Israeli government did not respond officially, but tourism minister Isaac Herzog told an Israeli TV channel that it would not stop yet, adding: 'We still have the coming days for many military missions, but we have to know that the timetable is increasingly short.'

Israel yesterday warned residents in the port of Sidon to flee, suggesting it may maximise its impact in the time left. Yesterday it attacked Hizbollah guerrillas near Tyre in a raid which Lebanon said killed four civilians and a soldier, while three people were reported dead in Galilee after a Hizbollah rocket attack.

With the push to get the resolution formally adopted under way, a key priority is aid for refugees and bombing victims. Blair and Beckett have raised concerns with the Israelis in recent days over the destruction of key routes used by aid convoys. 'We have to get humanitarian aid flowing,' Beckett said.

'You can get hooked up [on the resolution] but in the meantime there are people who need food and water and medical care who are not necessarily getting it. We have raised concerns with the Israelis over a number of days about the need to have what you might call humanitarian corridors. We have to try and get a situation where the aid agencies can feel a greater degree of confidence in their ability to move humanitarian supplies.'

Britain wanted 'a reduction in levels of violence, a greater practical possibility of bringing in humanitarian relief' even before a formal ceasefire, she said. Blair spoke yesterday to Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, and to Oxfam about getting aid moving.

The US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, said yesterday that work would continue tomorrow to get the resolution adopted but that it had a deal with the main players, adding: 'We're prepared to move as quickly as other members of the council want to.'

The resolution calls for a ceasefire allowing work to begin on a longer-term political settlement, to include a respect on both sides for the so-called 'blue line' borders; a demilitarisation of the south, between the border and the Litani River - an area about 20 miles deep into Lebanon - with the disarming of Hizbollah guerrillas there and the withdrawal of Israeli troops who had moved into villages just over the border; and the 'elimination of foreign forces' in Lebanon. An international force would police this settlement, its mandate to be determined by a second resolution next week.

The resolution also calls for the release of kidnapped Israeli soldiers and settlement of the issue of Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel - giving the Secretary-General a month to produce proposals on disarmament and formally delineating Lebanon's disputed borders.

Both sides have gained and given ground to secure the deal, with Israel reserving the right to retaliate if Hizbollah rocket attacks continue and the US also giving way over the choreography of any ceasefire.

The text was all but agreed late Friday night, but the US and France remained deadlocked on whether to demand a cessation or suspension of violence. Britain adopted what officials called a 'pragmatic' position of neutrality. But for once, Paris held a trump card - it is supplying troops for the stabilisation force, and made clear it was not willing to have its soldiers fight their way in without a full ceasefire.

'What it means is the Americans have backed down - cessation is the key word,' said a senior Whitehall source.

In Britain, the Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell said any progress was welcome but it was a 'matter of profound regret' there was no call for an immediate ceasefire.

Beckett also admitted 'great concern' that the conflict could increase the radicalisation of young Muslims in Britain angered by the scenes of Arab suffering. Yesterday she resumed her interrupted caravan holiday with her husband, even though Blair has delayed his own family holiday. However, aides said Beckett would be back from her break in time for this week's UN meeting.

    Bush gives ground as UN pushes Israel peace deal, O, 6.8.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1838348,00.html

Blair faces new war challenge

· Bereaved service families launch anti-war party
· Up to 70 Labour-held seats to be fought at election

Saturday August 5, 2006
Guardian
Will Woodward and Steve Boggan

Tony Blair's domestic problems over his foreign policy will intensify this month when a new political party launched by the families of British soldiers killed in Iraq lays out its plans to contest every by-election and field up to 70 candidates at the next general election.

Reg Keys, who stood against Mr Blair in last year, unveils details of the launch of his party, Spectre, in the Guardian today. His son, Thomas, was killed with five other Royal Military policemen in Iraq in 2003. "We all feel we've been lied to, ignored and, frankly, insulted. But now it's different. Now we're going to make ministers pay with their seats," Mr Keys said. He said the bereaved relatives behind the new party would meet to establish its strategy over the next two weeks.

The move came as Mr Blair unexpectedly postponed his holiday yesterday to thrash out terms of a UN resolution on the Israel-Lebanon war, which he believes is in sight. But the political problems he faces over alliance with the US, encompassing the war against Iraq and his refusal to criticise Israeli bombing as "disproportionate", continued to mount.

Today, thousands of protesters are expected to join a march in London to demand an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, arranged by the Stop the War Coalition, CND and the British Muslim Initiative. This is supported by, and reflects, disquiet and outright anger in the parliamentary Labour party over Mr Blair's stand.

Antiwar campaigner Walter Wolfgang, thrown out of the Labour conference last year for heckling Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, was voted on to the party's national executive committee this week.

Yesterday, Tony Woodley, leader of the Transport and General Workers' Union, offered a preview of the criticism Mr Blair will face at next month's party conference.

In separate letters to Mr Blair and all Labour MPs, Mr Woodley called on the prime minister to "stop being, and being perceived to be, the European voice of the Bush administration" and warned that his failure to demand an immediate ceasefire "is seriously undermining Britain's moral authority across the globe".

Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, wrote in similar terms to Labour MPs earlier in the week.

Lebanon latest

· Israel yesterday cut off the main supply route for aid from Syria, destroying four bridges north of Beirut and escalating the humanitarian crisis

· At least 33 Syrian Kurdish farm workers were killed in one strike as Israeli aircraft struck deeper into Lebanon

· Hizbullah continued to demonstrate their ability to attack Israel as nearly 200 rockets were fired at towns and villages

· More than 50 reported buried under rubble in one Lebanese village

· Tony Blair postponed his holiday as talks about a peacekeeping force continued at the UN

    Blair faces new war challenge, G, 5.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,,1837680,00.html

10.45am

Blair delays holiday

to work on UN peace deal

Friday August 4, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Oliver King and agencies


Tony Blair today decided to delay his summer holiday for a few days to help secure a United Nations resolution that would call for an immediate cessation of hostilities in the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

Mr Blair's decision, following that of his foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, to delay her own break, came as attempts to secure a diplomatic solution at the United Nations in New York yesterday continued to prove elusive.

Both protagonists in the conflict yesterday threatened to escalate their bombing campaigns and intensify the fighting before the international community finally united behind a new UN resolution.

Downing street said Mr Blair took the decision for logistical rather than political reasons because the prime minister felt the "crucial" time lost on a transatlantic flight to the Caribbean could be better spent on making diplomatic phone calls.

No 10 said the prime minister, who had been expected to leave today, believed the next few days were "crucial" in the efforts to agree a United Nations security council resolution on a ceasefire.

The prime minister's spokeswoman said he was speaking this morning to the French president, Jacques Chirac, about the French-drafted UN resolution , following a telephone conversation last night with the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan.

Mr Blair, who told reporters at his press conference yesterday that he was in regular contact with President Bush as well as the Israeli and Lebanese leaders, also expressed the hope that a UN resolution would be agreed within days.

But although diplomats remain confident of eventually securing a resolution, there was still a lack of urgency in New York, according the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman.

He reported that there was no indication if, or when, foreign ministers, including Margaret Beckett, might travel to New York to vote on the resolution.

Key principles in the draft resolution include respect for Israel and Lebanon's sovereignty, the release of two captured Israeli soldiers, and Lebanon's compliance with the security council's resolution 1559, requiring it to disarm Hizbullah.

The sticking points between the French and US positions continued to revolve around how to structure the process in order to elicit the cooperation of the two warring sides.

In one telling linguistic detail, diplomats considered changing "cessation of hostilities" to a phrase such as "cessation of offensive operations". This was to meet Israeli objections to the resolution because it did not allow for it to take defensive action in the event of a Hizbullah attack during a ceasefire.

Hizbullah indicated yesterday that even if a resolution was adopted by the security council, that would not necessarily bring fighting to an end.

Naim Kassem, Hizbullah's deputy leader, said it would not accept a ceasefire that did not include the withdrawal of all Israeli troops from "any land it might have occupied" in Lebanon during the present offensive, and that all those forced from their villages must be allowed to return.

It is expected that Mr Blair will resume his holiday plans "within the next day or so" Downing Street added.

Mr Blair told reporters yesterday that once on holiday he would remain in regular telephone contact with officials in London and world leaders regarding the conflict.

    Blair delays holiday to work on UN peace deal, G, 4.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1837297,00.html

Blair begins fightback

against backbench critics

· Hints he will lead Israel Palestine peace drive
· Bombing of Lebanon unacceptable, says PM

Friday August 4, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour

Tony Blair battled to quell the Labour revolt over his Lebanon policy yesterday by saying he had not given a green light to Israel's military operations, and insisting he was only interested in securing a long-term settlement that must also encompass a Palestinian state.
He also suggested he would personally lead a drive to re-energise the Palestinian peace process in September, claiming he would regard it as a personal failure of his leadership if he could not help negotiate a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

Mr Blair's hour-long exposition of his policy at a Downing Street press conference came after a cabinet and backbench revolt in the wake of the conflict in Lebanon and his own five-day absence in California. His remarks did not satisfy his most vocal critics, but cabinet members denied any coordinated revolt was being organised."It is not surprising to me that there are people who profoundly disagree with the policy," Mr Blair said. "Or that there is anxiety amongst members of the cabinet; members of the parliamentary Labour party; people in the country. This is a very difficult situation."

Ceasefire

Mr Blair gave his strongest criticism of Israel's bombing campaign, describing it as "unacceptable", but he refused to describe it as disproportionate.

Responding to Labour backbench demands for an unconditional ceasefire, he said: "I have got to try and get a solution to this, and the solution will not come by condemning one side, it will not come simply by statements that we make, it will only come by a plan that allows a ceasefire on both sides and then a plan to deal with the underlying cause, which is the inability of the government of Lebanon to take control of the whole of Lebanon."

The scale of the anger at next month's Labour conference may turn on whether he can, as he promised yesterday, re-energise the Palestinian peace process, and secure the active involvement of George Bush.

He said yesterday "much of the Arab and Muslim world do not think we approach [the Palestinian issue] in an even-handed way, and that in my view is of far greater significance than even the differing views of the tragedy in the Lebanon".

Downing Street suggested he would propose that the peace process needs to be "micro managed" in the way that the Northern Ireland peace process has been. One option would be to call a peace conference on the lines of the 1995 Dayton process for Bosnia in which the warring factions were effectively locked together until an accord was signed 21 days later.

Negotiations

Mr Blair suggested, for the first time, that it might be necessary to talk to elements of the democratically-elected Hamas government in Palestine, even though Hamas has not renounced violence or accepted Israel's existence.

He said he hoped a UN resolution could be passed by early next week but significantly he said it would require Israel only to suspend offensive operations - an acknowledgement that Israel will not accept a ceasefire which rules out acts of self-defence.

Mr Blair has come under severe criticism from backbench critics for being too close to Israel and the US. Unusually he acknowledged the internal splits saying: "I do not doubt there are people who disagree in the system and I do not doubt that there are cabinet ministers who have doubts about this or that aspect, or possibly the whole policy."

But he dismissed reports that he was in conflict with either the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, or with his foreign policy specialists in Downing Street as "complete rubbish".

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's former ambassador to the UN, said Mr Blair should have criticised the scale of the Israeli bombing, and Michael Connarty, a Labour backbencher, said the prime minister was no longer listening to his party.

"All these deaths have occurred during the period in which he would not call for an absolute and immediate ceasefire," said Mr Connarty. "It's embarrassing and, as far as I'm concerned, it's entirely unacceptable."

Blair on ...

Labour dissent

The idea Margaret Beckett and I are at odds over this is complete rubbish. We have been at one. It's not surprising there are people who profoundly disagree with the policy ... this is a very, very difficult situation and when you see terrible scenes of bloodshed and the death of innocent civilians it is a terrible thing ... my job is to try to bring it to an end.

Israeli actions

The reason why this problem has arisen is that, in defiance of previous UN resolutions, Hizbullah have continued to operate with their militias outside the control of the government of Lebanon down in the south of Lebanon. No one is giving anyone a green light [to continue military action]. That is just not correct.

Diplomatic strategy

The UK and France, with the US and others, are in intense negotiations - I hope it may be possible, even within 24 or 48 hours, for people to see the [UN] resolution we are working on. Then, provided the three of us are in the same place, it should be days to get ... [agreement].

Iran and Syria

Nobody is contemplating military action [against them]. If they want an opportunity to come into the international community and participate fully they can do so - but it's got to be on basis that they're not exporting terrorism around the region or in the case of Iran trying to acquire a nuclear weapon in breach of international law. I find it quite shocking that the president of Iran says the solution is to eliminate Israel. How helpful is that at this moment in time, when ... the rockets that have been fired into Israel are very similar, if not identical, to those used against British forces in Basra?

Leaving John Prescott in charge

In relation to whatever I'll be doing in the next few days, the most important thing is to realise that, wherever I am, I have got full communications ... The truth is that several of the leaders I am speaking to are actually on holiday as well.

    Blair begins fightback against backbench critics, G, 4.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1837149,00.html

3pm

Aid groups urge Blair to back ceasefire

Thursday August 3, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
David Fickling and agencies


A coalition of aid agencies has appealed to Tony Blair to reverse his Middle East policy and call for an immediate ceasefire in the Lebanon war.

The agencies, including Christian Aid, Oxfam, Save the Children and Islamic Relief, announced in Beirut that Lebanon could be on the brink of a major humanitarian crisis.

Christian Aid's emergencies specialist, Dominic Nutt, warned that the country could be suffering an "underground disaster" even bigger than hitherto realised and that the population would be "close to breaking point" in a fortnight's time.

"It is stunningly simple. We're calling for a ceasefire, with all the UK agencies - in common with the rest of the world, it seems, apart from Bush and Blair," he said.

"We're calling on Tony Blair to have the moral courage to reverse his policy and call, without qualification, for an immediate ceasefire."

The International Organisation for Migration announced this week that 900,000 people have been driven from their homes in southern Lebanon, and prime minister Fouad Siniora said today that 900 Lebanese had been killed and more than 3,000 injured in 23 days of fighting.

Mr Nutt warned that aid groups were unable to operate in large swathes of the country because of the risk of Israeli bombardment.

He also said children, the old and infirm, and the poor were suffering the most from the conflict.

"This is not a tsunami where you can see the people who have been affected," he said. "By definition, many people are in hiding. They have run away from the bombing."

Oxfam worker Shaista Aziz said that the region was "imploding". "It is day 23 of the conflict and there is no more room for waiting. It is an absolute disgrace," she said.

"This is a clear message to Tony Blair, George Bush and Western leaders - enough is enough. The longer it goes on, the more anger towards the western world increases."

Mr Blair is facing a growing revolt within the Labour party and civil service over his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire.

Yesterday he attempted to justify his stance in a speech in California in which he said that any ceasefire would have to be coupled with a promise to disarm Hizbullah, and in his monthly press conference today he conceded that some ministers had reservations about his position.

Moves to broker a ceasefire agreement through the UN security council were now "coming together", he said.

Aid agencies, which often remain silent on contentious political issues, have been some of the most vocal critics of Mr Blair's Middle East policy since the start of the war in Lebanon.

Last week a group of agencies wrote an open letter to the prime minister calling on him to "rethink your policy as a matter of urgency", and on Tuesday a group including Islamic Relief Worldwide, Save the Children, War on Want, World Vision UK, Cafod, Care International, Christian Aid and Oxfam handed a 35,000-strong petition into Downing Street calling for an immediate ceasefire.

    Aid groups urge Blair to back ceasefire, G, 3.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1836643,00.html

1pm

PM admits divisions

but says UN peace plan imminent

Thursday August 3, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Oliver King and agencies

Tony Blair admitted today that a "couple of ministers" had doubts about his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict but told his critics that a United Nations resolution to bring about an "immediate ceasefire" would be agreed within days.

But Mr Blair told reporters at his monthly press conference that reports of a split with his foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, were "complete rubbish" and that both were "at one" in working hard for a practical solution to the crisis at the UN.

"The US, the UK, France and others have been working very hard to get agreement on a United Nations resolution and I am now hopeful that we will have such a resolution down very shortly and agreed within the next few days," Mr Blair said.

Mr Blair did accept though that there were officials "within the system" and a "couple of ministers" who have doubts about the policy, but he dismissed reports of serious splits, saying "it always happens" in such situations.

Asked about comments by senior Labour MPs who have expressed anger and "despair" at his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire, Mr Blair said their criticisms were "not surprising" but they were just "talking about it" with a plan to end the conflict.

"The difference between me and those people who are criticising me is not that I am indifferent to the suffering of people in the Lebanon," he insisted.

"On the contrary, I stand in complete solidarity and sympathy with people in the Lebanon, innocent people who have died in Israel as well, in what is a terrible, terrible situation, but my job is to bring it to an end. You don't bring it to an end unless you have got a plan to do so."

On the diplomatic manoeuvres in the UN security council in New York Mr Blair said, "This is obviously a critical time. I think it is coming together. I think the remaining differences are very slight."

"The purpose ... will be to bring about an immediate ceasefire and then put in place the conditions of the international force to come in, in support of the Lebanese government, so we get the underlying issues and problems dealt with."

Mr Blair said that it was "vital" to have a genuine ceasefire on both sides, as well as addressing issues raised by Fuad Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, and Israel's requirement for security on its northern border.

Israel has got to "be sure that whatever arrangements are in place guarantee that security for the medium and long term", he said.

Mr Blair condemned comments by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, calling for the destruction of Israel as a solution to the Middle East crisis, as "deeply unhelpful".

    PM admits divisions but says UN peace plan imminent, G, 3.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1836524,00.html

11.45am

Former diplomats turn on Blair

over Lebanon

Thursday August 3, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Oliver King

Already facing a backlash from within the cabinet and the Labour party over the Middle East, Tony Blair was also publicly attacked today by two former British ambassadors over his backing for George Bush's stance on the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

Comments by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a retired former ambassador to Moscow who also served as chairman of the joint intelligence committee, and Sir Oliver Miles, a former ambassador to Libya, revealed the depth of division between the prime minister and the Foreign Office establishment.

Mr Blair, who will face questions from reporters at noon today about his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict, has damaged British interests - according to Sir Oliver - through his "unthinking adoption of the Israeli side of the story".

The public criticism from the former diplomats comes as the Guardian reports today that Mr Blair has not only ignored the advice of the Foreign office but also that of his own foreign affairs specialists within Downing Street.

Writing on the Guardian's comment is free website today, Sir Oliver, one of the 52 former ambassadors who wrote an open letter criticising Tony Blair's Iraq policy in 2004, says the prime minister's lumping together of radical islamist groups in the region is an "oversimplification to the point where it interferes with the facts".

"There is little indication that he has grasped the horror of what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon; still less that he is aware that Lebanon today is a repeat of what happened when Israel invaded last time. This is in strong contrast with the empathy he shows for Israelis," Sir Oliver writes.

The more vitriolic attack comes from Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who has previously criticised Mr Blair's manipulation of intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war. Writing in the Financial Times today, Sir Rodric says that Tony Blair's premiership has descended into "scandal and incoherence" and that he should resign immediately.

Sir Rodric mocks Mr Blair for being a "frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussauds" programmed by the CIA "to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent".

Mr Blair, Sir Rodric claims is "stiff in opinions, but often in the wrong; he has manipulated public opinion, sent our soldiers into distant lands for ill-conceived purposes... and reduced the Foreign Office to a demoralised cipher because it keeps reminding him of inconvenient facts."

Mr Blair is constructing foreign policy out of "self-righteous soundbites", Sir Rodric writes.

"Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago... Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself; who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ grinder?"

Sir Rodric concludes that Tony Blair's foreign policy leaves Britain vulnerable to al-Qaida attacks: "And though he chooses not to admit it, he has made us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks." Whitehall officials told the Guardian's diplomatic editor, Ewen MacAskill, today that the government's policy of resisting calls for an immediate ceasefire had been "driven by the prime minister alone".

    Former diplomats turn on Blair over Lebanon, G, 3.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1836440,00.html

Comment

Against the advice,

against the facts

August 3, 2006 10:09 AM
The Guardian
Oliver Miles

What are we to make of Tony Blair's speech in Los Angeles on Tuesday about the struggles (or, as he would maintain struggle, in the singular) going on within the Muslim world as well as between it and the west? The most striking thing about it is what it leaves out.

One can hardly accept an analysis of Middle Eastern politics that does not mention nationalism. Nor is there any mention of occupation (except for an assertion that the resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan is not about occupation). In the important section on the Middle East peace process, there is no mention of Israeli settlement building, nor of the wall, which the international court of justice has found to be illegal. Nor is there any detail about the present crisis; any reference, for example, to any of the points Brian Whitaker lists in his 10-step programme for peace or any alternatives. He also fails to mention the resupply of bombs to Israel by the US via British air bases, contrary to declared British arms control policy.

The second point to make is that much of the speech shows a bias towards Israel. Having sat on the fence for so many years, I am something of an expert on this. Blair's unthinking adoption of the Israeli side of the story is visible in the account he gives of contentious areas such as what provoked the present crises in Gaza and Lebanon, and in his description of the removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza as "disengagement" (which it was not) and a "brave step" that should have been the opportunity to restart the peace process.

There is little indication that he has grasped the horror of what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon; still less that he is aware that Lebanon today is a repeat of what happened when Israel invaded last time. This is in strong contrast with the empathy he shows for Israelis who feel that their existence is under threat from their neighbours, a feeling that is real enough but which in terms of experience of suffering and death simply does not match the horrors that Palestinians and Lebanese have lived through in the last generation.

To lump together the Taliban, al-Qaida, Hizbullah and Hamas under the heading "reactionary Islam" is oversimplification to the point where it interferes with the facts. The description of what is happening in Iraq or Afghanistan as "battles between the majority of Muslims in either country who wanted democracy and the minority who realise that this rings the death knell of their ideology" might just pass in an army recruitment pamphlet, but not as serious conversation between consenting adults.

An obvious difficulty about the simplistic division of the Arab world into democrats and terrorists is that so many states, let alone individuals, defy definition as either. There is a feeble attempt to address Egypt, a friend but no democrat, but no mention at all of the richest and perhaps most influential state in the region, Saudi Arabia.

And it's irritating to be told again: "So many people told us that, 'You just don't understand it: people in Iraq aren't interested in democracy.'" Who were these people? My Iraqi friends are deeply interested in democracy, but they object to the idea of voting under foreign occupation and are horrified at the extent to which confessionalism, the division of Sunni from Shia, dominates the form of democracy they are now offered.

Tony Blair's disregard for the advice of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) emerges most clearly not from his pro-Israel positions, as against any pro-Arab advice he may be thought to have received from the camel corps, but from his insistence that the invasion of Iraq did not contribute to the proliferation of terrorist violence. An FCO memorandum leaked last year contained advice to the contrary. I doubt whether many people would side with Blair.

So is there nothing in the speech at all? Yes, there is the insistence that the Middle East peace process is central - though even this is preceded by a paragraph of apology to the effect that, "I know it can be very irritating for Israel to be told that this issue is of cardinal importance," etc, etc. Let us hope that this insistence leads to action: it is about time. But this is not the first time it has been said.

This speech will not be remembered as a policy milestone.

    Against the advice, against the facts, G, 3.8.2006, http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/oliver_miles/2006/08/tony_blair_and_the_arc_of_extr.html

Blair:

You've misunderstood me

over the Middle East

· PM to confront critics today at press conference
· Dismay at approach spreading through party

Thursday August 3, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour and Ewen MacAskill

Tony Blair will face down his critics today over his controversial handling of the Middle East crisis by insisting that he has been working throughout for a ceasefire in Lebanon and that his position has been misunderstood. He will argue at a Downing Street press conference that he wanted a ceasefire, but only if it was coupled with a clear understanding that the Hizbullah militia would be disarmed.

Mr Blair, who returned from his US trip yesterday, will say that he is trying to secure a durable settlement, rather than a short-term fix which would leave armed militias operating on the border of Israel.

But Mr Blair has being criticised publicly and privately by ministers and senior backbenchers, and has antagonised most members of the EU as well as the United Nations secretariat.

It emerged yesterday that he ignored not only the advice of the Foreign Office but foreign affairs specialists in Downing Street, who argued that the Israeli offensive was counter-productive and favoured a call for an immediate ceasefire.

Critics inside the Labour party said Labour MPs, dispersed throughout the country because of the parliamentary recess, were in despair over his handling of the crisis, and a 12-strong group of backbench MPs, including many Muslim MPs, led by Mohammed Sarwar, called for a return of parliament to discuss the crisis.

Joan Ruddock, a former minister, said there was a sense of "despair" within Labour ranks. "I have not met any member of the Labour party who actually agrees with our strategy," she told BBC Radio 4's The World At One. "I really can't envisage at the moment how the party conference will go. There is enormous anger, disappointment and the sense that there has to be a change of direction, but that the damage has been done. "

The chairman of the parliamentary Labour party, Ann Clwyd, who was an unwavering supporter of Mr Blair in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and is in regular contact with him over the Lebanon issue, also said feelings were running high. "Before the recess ... a lot of people were very angry. I think the vast majority of them felt that there should be a ceasefire and the vast majority of them are very critical of Israeli policy."

Mr Blair suffered a blow from an unexpected source yesterday when the UN deputy secretary general, Mark Malloch Brown, urged him to take a back seat, calling his involvement in the negotiations on ending the crisis counter-productive. "It's important to know not just when to lead but when to follow," he said.

The US state department went to Mr Blair's rescue. Sean McCormack, the state department spokesman, said: "We are seeing a troubling pattern of a high official of the UN who seems to be making it his business to criticise member states and, frankly, with misplaced and misguided criticisms."

Ministers privately conceded yesterday that the crisis had damaged the prime minister, and that there was frustration, rather than outright revolt, around the cabinet table. Gordon Brown, the chancellor, who is almost certain to replace him as prime minister, has so far said nothing publicly about the Lebanon crisis.

Mr Blair could face more sniping after opting last night to press ahead with his summer family holiday this weekend rather than delay to concentrate on trying to help negotiate an end to the conflict. After a strategy meeting in Downing Street last night, his aides insisted he could be in contact with world leaders during his Caribbean holiday. His departure will leave the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, in charge.

Mr Blair has been leading almost single-handedly the British telephone diplomacy with world leaders on the shape of a UN resolution to resolve the conflict. Although the resolution could be voted on by early next week, there are still big problems ahead, with questions over whether either Israel or Hizbullah would accept a ceasefire and which countries would contribute to a proposed international force for southern Lebanon.

Mr Blair will also be pressed today to produce substance to back his claim in a foreign policy speech in Los Angeles that a dramatic change was needed in the west's approach to the fight against global terrorism.

    Blair: You've misunderstood me over the Middle East, G, 3.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1835955,00.html

Blair admits Lebanon violence

could fuel extremism

August 03, 2006
Times Online
By Jenny Booth
 

Tony Blair today acknowledged that there was a risk that the destruction and death in the Middle East could fuel extremism.

The Prime Minister said that in the short term the outrage at civilian deaths in Lebanon could make finding a solution to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah harder.

"It's a perfectly valid point that there may be so much damage done in the short term that it becomes more difficult to find a long term solution in the future," said Mr Blair.

"No sentient human being could fail to be moved by the suffering and death. It's terrible."

But, he added, this only fuelled his determination to find a lasting solution to the conflict that could pave the way for a long term peace.

Mr Blair was seeking to face down the voices of criticism that have grown louder while he has been away on a six day visit to the United States. His stance on Lebanon and Israel - blocking calls for an immediate ceasefire and refusing to criticise Israel's military campaign in southern Lebanon that has left more than 700 people dead on the Lebanese side, as well as more than 50 in Israel - has caused enormous unease in the Cabinet, the Parliamentary Labour Party and the country at large.

Jack Straw, the leader of the Commons, became the most senior Labour figure openly to voice dissent, when last weekend he called Israel's bombing of Lebanon "disproportionate" - a legally loaded term that hints at war crimes.

Today Mr Blair said that he was not surprised that people in the Cabinet had doubts. But he drew a distinction between voicing distress at the deaths and wanting them to stop at once - a view which he said everyone shared - and the process of finding a working solution.

"It doesn't surprise me at all that people are concerned or worried. I don't disrespect what they say, or fail to understand why they say it. But I am trying to get a practical solution."

He appeared to aim a sideswipe at armchair critics of his stance who had no alternative long term policy. Any ceasefire would have to be agreed by both sides - and that meant it must be agreed by the Hezbollah ministers in the government of Fouad SIniora, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, as well as the more moderate voices, he said.

"There's no point saying there has got to be a ceasefire, but only on one side," he told a Downing Street press conference

"Unless we get an agreement that involves not just Prime Minister Siniora but the whole government of Lebanon, and put it in place in such a way that it's going to hold, we are just expressing a view, we are not getting the job done.

"The reason for the problem is that, in defiance of UN Resolution 1559 (which called for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarming of sectarian militias), Hezbollah has continued to operate with their militia in the south of Lebanon. The conflict started when Hezbollah crossed the UN blue line.

"We grieve for the innocent Israelis who have died, we grieve for the innocent Lebanese who have died. A solution will not come by sympathising with one side, or by the statements we make, it will only come by dealing with both sides."

He strongly played down accusations that the rifts in his Cabinet were serious, categorically denying reports that he has had differences with Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, or that senior Foreign Office officials had been pleading with him to take a different tack.

Mr Blair returned to elements of a foreign policy speech he gave in the US last week, stating that the Middle East and the world faced a stark choice between extremism and moderation. The West must work with moderate Muslim opinion for long term peace, stability and democracy, or hand over the fate of the Middle East to the religious extremists, he warned.

This meant a redefinition of President Bush's war on terror to work with Muslim moderates, Mr Blair said. He warned that the disquiet felt in moderate Islamic countries that nothing is being done to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was very serious issue, and said that it was important to get back to underlying issue of MIddle East peace process as soon as Lebanon has quietened down.

Mr Blair condemned as shocking and very unhelpful the comments made today by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, that the solution to the Middle East crisis lay in the elimination of Israel.

Syria and Iran should try to help to solve problem, he said.

He denied that anyone was proposing military action against either state, but strongly attacked Iran for arming and financing Hezbollah - with virtually identical weaponry to the bombs being used against British soldiers in Basra, he added pointedly - and for trying to seek an atomic bomb in defiance of international law.

Mr Blair also said he was disappointed at the court ruling that control orders - intended to allow for the monitoring of terror suspects - breached human rights.

He added that plans for identity cards would go ahead in Britain, to combat terrorism. MPs are due to publish a report tomorrow on the spiralling costs of the identity cards scheme.

    Blair admits Lebanon violence could fuel extremism, Ts, 3.8.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,17129-2297586,00.html

6pm update

Blair returns

to growing backlash on Lebanon

Wednesday August 2, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Matthew Tempest and Oliver King

Tony Blair flew back to Britain from the United States tonight to face a growing backlash in the Labour Party about his backing of George Bush's stance in the in the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

And a senior official at the United Nations joined Labour backbenchers in expressing dismay that Mr Blair had refused to back international calls for an immediate ceasefire.

A former Labour minister, Joan Ruddoch, claimed the party was "in despair" at the position the prime minister had taken and Ann Clywd, the chair of the parliamentary party, said that the "vast majority" of his Labour backbenchers wanted a ceasefire.

Meanwhile, human rights lawyers have outlined moves to challenge the American use of Scottish airports for the transporting of arms to Israel.

This morning, Kofi Annan's deputy at the United Nations delivered a blunt put-down to the PM - who outlined his fears of an "arc of extremism" in the Middle East in a speech in Los Angeles last night.

The UN's deputy secretary general, Mark Malloch Brown, said that the current crisis should be dealt with by France, the US, Egypt and Jordan - with the UK "following not leading" on Lebanon.

In an interview with the Financial Times Mr Malloch Brown said that the crisis between Israel and Lebanon could not be resolved by "the team that led on Iraq".

"This cannot be perceived as a US-UK deal with Israel," he added.

Mr Malloch Brown - who is British - said that the UK and US were poorly placed to broker a deal over Lebanon because of their role in bringing about war in Iraq.

"One of my first bosses taught me it's important to know not just when to lead, but when to follow. For the UK, this is one to follow.

"We need [the French president, Jacques] Chirac and Bush, or Chirac, Bush and [the Egyptian president, Hosni] Mubarak and [Jordanian King] Abdullah on a podium, not President Bush and Mr Blair."

Ms Clwyd said that the "vast majority" of Labour MPs were "very critical" of Mr Blair's Israeli policy and wanted a ceasefire to get humanitarian aid to the Lebanese civilians.

Ms Clwyd defended Mr Blair from accusations of "taking his eye off the ball" regarding the plight of the Palestinians, but she said it was "nonsense" to think that Hizbullah could be eradicated.

"It's like veins running through the body of the Lebanon," she told the BBC's Good Morning Wales radio programme.

"Before the recess, in the run-up to the end of our session, a lot of people were very angry.

"I think the vast majority of [Labour backbenchers] felt that there should be a ceasefire and the vast majority of them are very critical of Israeli policy.

"That I know is a fact because that is a view that has been expressed very strongly in the House of Commons."

She did not criticise the PM, saying: "He has not taken his mind off the ball I can tell you that. I know the amount of time he has spent phoning individuals up, attempting to get some movement on what is a very difficult issue.

"He wants conflict to end. His argument is there's no point in having a pretend ceasefire.

"We have seen that of course in the last 48 hours where Israel was supposed to cease its air bombardment, but certainly that didn't happen. It continued on and off.

"He wants a ceasefire that's going to be meaningful."

But she added that "some of us would like a ceasefire at any price" in order to get humanitarian aid to the Lebanese.

In another interview, with the BBC, former foreign office minister Tony Lloyd bemoaned the UK's loss of influence with allies such as Egypt and Jordan, and expressed the hope Mr Blair's speech represented a "rowing away" from Washington's stance.

He said: "Any sensible observer would have said that these last weeks and days have meant that Britain's influence on the people worth influencing - our friends like Egypt, our friends like Jordan - is smaller now than it would have been at the start of this present conflict.

"If the Foreign Office were advising a much more cautious approach, a much more sensible approach, an approach that said that values do consist of not bombing the life out of the civilian population of the Lebanon, then the Foreign Office would, of course, be right in that.

"I hope it's a rowing away from Washington. I do hope, very fervently, that what we can see, for example, is a recognition that most of the issues in the Middle East that we've got to resolve - the settlement, for example, of the question of Iran's nuclear ambition - have been probably made more difficult by the last three weeks, not easier.

"An independent Palestine is more likely to see a democratically-elected Hamas element in any government and a democratic Lebanon would almost certainly see a stronger Hizbullah.

"That's the price we all pay for the last three weeks.

"I think people this morning waking up in the slums of the now broken cities and towns of the Lebanon might wonder about the values being stronger and better and more just, and would look at America as being part of the problem, frankly, not part of the solution," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

"US-inspired policies see Iraq engulfed in problems, Afghanistan not finished and Israel tearing apart both the Lebanon and Gaza."

In Glasgow today, human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar, backed by the Stop the War coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain, outlined possible legal action to stop flights carrying weapons from the US to Israel via Britain.

Acting on behalf of Lebanese clients, Mr Anwar argues that the UK's continued permission for the flights is a breach of international law.

The landing at Prestwick airport near Glasgow last week of two US aircraft believed to be carrying bombs to Israel sparked major protests.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said yesterday that US military planes en route to the Middle East can land at UK airfields "as long as the proper procedures are followed".

It would not confirm reports that only military, rather than civilian, airfields would be used for the flights.

The Labour MP for Merthyr Tydfil, Dai Havard, today wrote to Mr Blair telling him that he was "deluded" if he thought he had any influence over Mr Bush and accusing him of a "misdirected obsession" with being a mouthpiece for the Bush administration.

He said that the prime minister and the US were "sanctioning the wrong strategy" in the region by assisting Israel in getting arms.

The "real effect" of that was the misuse of materiel in the Israeli attack on Qana, "and by association making the British people culpable in such actions".

Mr Havard said that the prime minister's position was "morally indefensible", "stupid" and out of kilter with the middle England voters that he wooed in 1997.

In the letter he wrote: "We need you to change the 'realpolitik' not by retaining the delusion that you 'have the ear of Bush', but by stating what is morally, politically and strategically right.

"I recognise that action is required on both sides of the conflict but the misdirected obsession with continuing to publicly mouth the same policy as the Bush administration in order to convince yourself and others that this gives you the ability to influence and ameliorate its actions is a deluded pretence, which we all need you to abandon."

He said that Mr Blair's stance isolated Britain in the Middle East.

"It is misguided and counter-productive as well as sanctioning unacceptable actions," Mr Havard wrote.

"Whatever the detail of individual incidents, the reality remains that you are, in effect, sanctioning the wrong strategy, wrong tactics and unacceptable actions and that must stop now."

The prime minister will face tough questioning on his stance on the war in the Lebanon when he hosts his monthly press conference in London tomorrow.

Mr Blair is expected to leave for his August family holiday in Barbados shortly after tomorrow's grilling.

    Blair returns to growing backlash on Lebanon, G, 2.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1835538,00.html

Comment

At last, Tony's perfect role

If Mr Blair accepts Arnie’s offer of a film part,
it will be a fitting end to his journey into fantasy

August 02, 2006
The Times
Alice Miles

YESTERDAY Arnold Schwarzenegger jokingly invited Tony Blair to play his role in Terminator 4 when he eventually leaves No 10. With production repeatedly delayed and now rumoured to be beginning in the first half of next year, could Terminator 4 and our Prime Minister be the collision of two destinies for which the world has been waiting?

“The future has not been written,” began Terminator 3. “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” By god, he sounds just like Mr Blair.

It took 12 years to write the script for Terminator 3; the Prime Minister has been working on his own story for as long. And yesterday’s meeting with Schwarzenegger was part of an extraordinary round of speeches and movements by Mr Blair over the past few weeks that might, just might, suggest that he has the end of “Tony Blair 3: Prime Minister” in his sights.

You may not have noticed that he has begun a series of speeches, “Our Nation’s Future” — what the No 10 website dubs a “lecture series”. In the two speeches we have received so far, on criminal justice and public health, Mr Blair refers to the “personal journey” he has made, generally meaning that he has realised he should have been tougher — on smoking, on obesity, on personal responsibility, on criminals. Just as his power seeps away, the Prime Minister realises what he should have done with it. But there is a sort of wistful resignation to the tone: he talks of how the great public health reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries saw what needed to be done, pulled the levers, and it was done. (I’m sure it didn’t feel like that at the time.)

“It is very different from today,” he said last week. “Our public health problems are not, strictly speaking, public health questions at all. They are questions of individual lifestyle — obesity, smoking, alcohol abuse, diabetes, sexually transmitted disease. These are not epidemics in the epidemiological sense. They are the result of millions of individual decisions, at millions of points in time.”

Has the Prime Minister come to realise the limits of his power?

My CPU is intact. But I cannot control my other functions.

In a third speech on “the impact of the modern world on leadership” on Sunday, made to News Corporation’s annual conference in California, Mr Blair laid out his philosophy, declaring that political cross-dressing is here to stay: “There is no longer a neat filing of policy to the Left or to the Right.”

There are only problems and the search for workable solutions: in which case, why bother with party politics at all? And in truth Mr Blair barely does any longer. Our Nation’s Future appeals way beyond politics to the voluntary and private sectors, while the cross-dressing message was guaranteed — like his meetings with President Bush and Rupert Murdoch this week — to anger his already fractious party.

If our restless Prime Minister sees the problems more clearly now, his solutions remain muddled. So on criminals who take drugs: “The truth is, each suspect and then offender should be tracked throughout the system, given not just a sentence but an appropriate process for sorting their life out; and if they don’t, be followed up, brought back to court. Local authorities need to have the powers to take account of such behaviour when assessing service entitlements . . .” In a system that presses more and more people into overcrowded jails, that routinely loses sight of even the most serious offenders and where hundreds of prison officers smuggle drugs into jails, this is fantasy government.

As is the grandiose version of Mr Blair that he plays abroad. Look at the peroration to his California speech: “For a leader, don’t let your ego be carried away by the praise or your spirit diminished by the criticism and look on each with a very searching eye. But for heaven’s sake, above all else, lead.”

All I know is what the Terminator taught me:

Never stop fighting.
And I never will.
The battle has just begun.

So Terminator 3 ends, and Schwarzenegger heads off into politics. And as if things weren’t surreal enough, there he was yesterday with Tony Blair, promising to sort out climate change, and get the Prime Minister a job in Hollywood. They produced a “mission statement” to “share experiences” on emissions between the UK and California. Sounds good. But what does it mean? “We are at least on our way to putting in place the framework that will resolve this problem,” Mr Blair said. That’s that sorted, then.

On Friday the Prime Minister will go on holiday for three weeks, leaving John Prescott in charge of the country, accompanied by the usual protests that the Deputy Prime Minister isn’t up to it. In reality, everybody knows that it makes not a blind bit of difference — not because Mr Prescott will not achieve anything real, but because Mr Blair doesn’t either. It probably suits No 10 to have the pretence maintained that the country might fall apart without the Prime Minister at the helm. The truth is far more alarming.

Part of the growing fury and frustration within Labour at Mr Blair’s approach to the Israeli assault on Lebanon is that he talks so much talk without achieving anything. It is just pretend power, striding around with Mr Bush. Yet MPs can find no consolation in Gordon Brown, their usual outlet for such disappointment, for nobody has the faintest idea how he would act in these circumstances, as in so many others. Were they more certain about the Chancellor, it would be dangerous for Mr Blair to be so at odds with so many senior Cabinet ministers on this.

It is humiliating for the Prime Minister, the leader of the Labour Party, to be forced to qualify what he recognises as the “urgent need for a ceasefire” with “as soon as possible” in order to try to remain shoulder to shoulder with Mr Bush. Surely, a Prime Minister possessed of so many words, so much moral certainty, and capable of so many contortions, can find a way to utter the one word, “stop”. Or perhaps Arnie could show him how the Terminator might do it.

    At last, Tony's perfect role, Ts, 2.8.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2295372,00.html

We must rethink the War on Terror - Blair

- New strategy needed to defeat militant Islam
- Downing Street rift with Foreign Office over Israel


August 02, 2006
The Times
By Rosemary Bennett in Los Angeles and David Charter

FIVE years into the War on Terror, Tony Blair called yesterday for a “complete renaissance of our strategy” to defeat militant Islam.

Speaking in Los Angeles, the Prime Minister admitted that the use of force alone had alienated Muslim opinion, and said that there was now an “arc of extremism” stretching across the Middle East and beyond. He called for an “alliance of moderation” that would combat terrorism using values as much as military might.

On a day when four British soldiers were killed by insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Prime Minister’s words were an apparent admission that the use of military force alone had failed.

His speech came amid growing Cabinet dissent and backbench unease that Britain was too readily following Washington’s lead over the Middle East. Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, deliberately broke the Cabinet line last week by criticising Israel’s response as disproportionate.

The Times has learnt that the Foreign Office tried and failed to get Mr Blair to call for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon when he saw Mr Bush last Friday. It had also failed to persuade No 10 to stop US aircraft delivering weapons to Israel from using British airports.

Aides to Mr Blair described his speech to the World Affairs Council as a challenge to the US, not a change of attitude. They said it was “nonsense” to suggest Mr Blair was having doubts about war in Iraq. But dissident Labour MPs were delighted. Fabian Hamilton, who sits on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said that he hoped the party and the Muslim community would welcome the speech, “even if they might say ‘ it’s about time, too’.”

He continued: “It was obvious from the start that you do not fight terror by condemning a whole section of the world community as extremists and exacerbating that by supporting the dreadful bombing on Lebanon. It sounds like he has seen the light.”

Mr Blair said that once peace had been restored in Lebanon “we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those who threaten us”. To defeat extremism, the world needed an “alliance of moderation to paint a different future in which Muslim and Christian, Arab and Westerner, wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other.

“We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in the applications of those values to the world. At present we are far away from persuading those we need to persuade that this is true.”

The West had to address issues such as poverty, climate change, trade, but above all to “bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Palestine and Israel”. Unless that happened “we will not win, and it is a battle we must win”.

In an implicit rebuke to Mr Bush, Mr Blair said that an opportunity had been missed when Israel pulled out of Gaza. “That could have been and should have been the opportunity to restart the peace process. Progress will not happen unless we change radically our degree of focus effort and engagement, especially with the Palestinian side. In this, active leadership of the US is essential but also of the participation of Europe, of Russia and of UN.

“We need . . . to put a viable Palestinian government on its feet, to offer a vision of how the roadmap to final-status negotiation can happen and then pursue it week in, week out until it’s done. Nothing else is more important to the success of our foreign policy.”

Mr Blair’s speech followed growing tensions over his tough approach to the Lebanon conflict. The Times understands that Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, who endorsed the unsuccessful move to try to persuade Mr Blair to push for an immediate ceasefire, had made it plain to the Prime Minister that a wide body of opinion in the Foreign Office and the Labour Party was strongly opposed to his tactics.

Plans for Mr Blair’s holiday, which was due to start this weekend, were under review because of the Lebanon conflict, officials said.

    We must rethink the War on Terror - Blair, Ts, 2.8.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2295604,00.html

6pm

Blair calls

for complete rethink

of Middle East policy

Tuesday August 1, 2006
Press Association
Guardian Unlimited

The prime minister will tonight call for a radical rethink of foreign policy in the wake of the Israel-Lebanon crisis.

In a keynote address to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles Mr Blair will say that the battle of ideas must be joined in the struggle to make sure the forces of moderate Islam prevail over reactionary and terrorist elements.

He will say that "a complete renaissance of our strategy" is needed to combat "an arc of extremism stretching across the Middle East".

Mr Blair will tell his 2,000-strong audience: "I planned the basis of this speech several weeks ago. The crisis in the Lebanon has not changed its thesis. It has brought it into sharp relief.

"The purpose of the provocation that began the conflict was clear: it was to create chaos, division and bloodshed to provoke retaliation by Israel that would lead to Arab and Muslim opinion being inflamed not against those who started the aggression but against those who responded to it."

The PM will go on to say: "It is still possible even now to come out of this crisis with a better long-term prospect for the cause of moderation in the Middle East succeeding but it would be absurd not to face up to the immediate damage to that cause which has been done.

"We will continue to do all we can to halt the hostilities but once that has happened we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us.

"There is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and clutching with increasing definition countries far outside that region.

"To defeat it will need an alliance of moderation that paints a different future in which Muslim, Jew and Christian, Arab and Western, wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other.

"We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world."

Mr Blair will go on to concede: "In reality we are at present far away from persuading those we need to persuade that this is true.

"Unless we reappraise our strategy, unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to make peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win, and this is a battle we must win.

"What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future.

"It is in part a struggle between what I will call reactionary Islam and moderate mainstream Islam but its implications go far wider.

"We are fighting a war but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st century, about global values."

Mr Blair's official spokesman said the Prime Minister - due to go on holiday later this week - was reviewing his plans day by day to see whether he needed to stay in the UK to deal with the current crisis.

However, most observers believe Mr Blair will take his holiday as planned but keep in constant touch with fellow world leaders.

    Blair calls for complete rethink of Middle East policy, G, 1.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1835022,00.html

Speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council

1 August 2006

The Prime Minister has delivered a major foreign policy speech on the Middle East to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.

In the speech he called for a "complete renaissance" on foreign policy to combat "Reactionary Islam".

PM calls for "complete renaissance" on foreign policy
Parts of this transcript may have been edited

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Read the Prime Minister's speech[check against delivery]

Overnight, the news came through that as well as continuing conflict in the Lebanon, Britain's Armed Forces suffered losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. It brings home yet again the extraordinary courage and commitment of our armed forces who risk their lives and in some cases tragically lose them, defending our country's security and that of the wider world. These are people of whom we should be very proud.

I know the US has suffered heavy losses too in Iraq and in Afghanistan. We should never forget how much we owe these people, how great their bravery, and their sacrifice.

I planned the basis of this speech several weeks ago. The crisis in the Lebanon has not changed its thesis. It has brought it into sharp relief.

The purpose of the provocation that began the conflict was clear. It was to create chaos, division and bloodshed, to provoke retaliation by Israel that would lead to Arab and Muslim opinion being inflamed, not against those who started the aggression but against those who responded to it.

It is still possible even now to come out of this crisis with a better long-term prospect for the cause of moderation in the Middle East succeeding. But it would be absurd not to face up to the immediate damage to that cause which has been done.

We will continue to do all we can to halt the hostilities. But once that has happened, we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us. There is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and touching, with increasing definition, countries far outside that region. To defeat it will need an alliance of moderation, that paints a different future in which Muslim, Jew and Christian; Arab and Western; wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other. My argument to you today is this: we will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world.

The point is this. This is war, but of a completely unconventional kind.

9/11 in the US, 7/7 in the UK, 11/3 in Madrid, the countless terrorist attacks in countries as disparate as Indonesia or Algeria, what is now happening in Afghanistan and in Indonesia, the continuing conflict in Lebanon and Palestine, it is all part of the same thing. What are the values that govern the future of the world? Are they those of tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity or those of reaction, division and hatred? My point is that this war can't be won in a conventional way. It can only be won by showing that our values are stronger, better and more just, more fair than the alternative. Doing this, however, requires us to change dramatically the focus of our policy.

Unless we re-appraise our strategy, unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade, and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win. And this is a battle we must win.

What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future.

It is in part a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam. But its implications go far wider. We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st century, about global values.

The root causes of the current crisis are supremely indicative of this. Ever since September 11th, the US has embarked on a policy of intervention in order to protect its and our future security. Hence Afghanistan. Hence Iraq. Hence the broader Middle East initiative in support of moves towards democracy in the Arab world.
The point about these interventions, however, military and otherwise, is that they were not just about changing regimes but changing the values systems governing the nations concerned. The banner was not actually "regime change" it was "values change".

What we have done therefore in intervening in this way, is far more momentous than possibly we appreciated at the time.

Of course the fanatics, attached to a completely wrong and reactionary view of Islam, had been engaging in terrorism for years before September 11th. In Chechnya, in India and Pakistan, in Algeria, in many other Muslim countries, atrocities were occurring. But we did not feel the impact directly. So we were not bending our eye or our will to it as we should have. We had barely heard of the Taleban. We rather inclined to the view that where there was terrorism, perhaps it was partly the fault of the governments of the countries concerned.

We were in error. In fact, these acts of terrorism were not isolated incidents. They were part of a growing movement. A movement that believed Muslims had departed from their proper faith, were being taken over by Western culture, were being governed treacherously by Muslims complicit in this take-over, whereas the true way to recover not just the true faith, but Muslim confidence and self esteem, was to take on the West and all its works.

Sometimes political strategy comes deliberatively, sometimes by instinct. For this movement, it was probably by instinct. It has an ideology, a world-view, it has deep convictions and the determination of the fanatic. It resembles in many ways early revolutionary Communism. It doesn't always need structures and command centres or even explicit communication. It knows what it thinks.

Its strategy in the late 1990s became clear. If they were merely fighting with Islam, they ran the risk that fellow Muslims - being as decent and fair-minded as anyone else - would choose to reject their fanaticism. A battle about Islam was just Muslim versus Muslim. They realised they had to create a completely different battle in Muslim minds: Muslim versus Western.

This is what September 11th did. Still now, I am amazed at how many people will say, in effect, there is increased terrorism today because we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. They seem to forget entirely that September 11th predated either. The West didn't attack this movement. We were attacked. Until then we had largely ignored it.

The reason I say our response was even more momentous than it seemed at the time, is this. We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values. We said we didn't want another Taleban or a different Saddam. Rightly, in my view, we realised that you can't defeat a fanatical ideology just by imprisoning or killing its leaders; you have to defeat its ideas.

There is a host of analysis written about mistakes made in Iraq or Afghanistan, much of it with hindsight but some of it with justification. But it all misses one vital point. The moment we decided not to change regime but to change the value system, we made both Iraq and Afghanistan into existential battles for Reactionary Islam. We posed a threat not to their activities simply: but to their values, to the roots of their existence.

We committed ourselves to supporting Moderate, Mainstream Islam. In almost pristine form, the battles in Iraq or Afghanistan became battles between the majority of Muslims in either country who wanted democracy and the minority who realise that this rings the death-knell of their ideology.

What is more, in doing this, we widened the definition of Reactionary Islam. It is not just Al-Qaeda who felt threatened by the prospect of two brutal dictatorships - one secular, one religious - becoming tolerant democracies. Any other country who could see that change in those countries might result in change in theirs, immediately also felt under threat. Syria and Iran, for example. No matter that previously, in what was effectively another political age, many of those under threat hated each other. Suddenly new alliances became formed under the impulsion of the common threat.

So in Iraq, Syria allowed Al-Qaeda operatives to cross the border. Iran has supported extremist Shia there. The purpose of the terrorism in Iraq is absolutely
simple: carnage, causing sectarian hatred, leading to civil war.

However, there was one cause which, the world over, unites Islam, one issue that even the most westernised Muslims find unjust and, perhaps worse, humiliating: Palestine. Here a moderate leadership was squeezed between its own inability to control the radical elements and the political stagnation of the peace process. When Prime Minister Sharon took the brave step of disengagement from Gaza, it could have been and should have been the opportunity to re-start the process. But the squeeze was too great and as ever because these processes never stay still, instead of moving forward, it fell back. Hamas won the election. Even then, had moderate elements in Hamas been able to show progress, the situation might have been saved. But they couldn't.

So the opportunity passed to Reactionary Islam and they seized it: first in Gaza, then in Lebanon. They knew what would happen. Their terrorism would provoke massive retaliation by Israel. Within days, the world would forget the original provocation and be shocked by the retaliation. They want to trap the Moderates between support for America and an Arab street furious at what they see nightly on their television. This is what has happened.

For them, what is vital is that the struggle is defined in their terms: Islam versus the West; that instead of Muslims seeing this as about democracy versus dictatorship, they see only the bombs and the brutality of war, and sent from Israel.

In this way, they hope that the arc of extremism that now stretches across the region, will sweep away the fledgling but faltering steps Modern Islam wants to take into the future.

To turn all of this around requires us first to perceive the nature of the struggle we are fighting and secondly to have a realistic strategy to win it. At present we are challenged on both fronts.

As to the first, it is almost incredible to me that so much of Western opinion appears to buy the idea that the emergence of this global terrorism is somehow our fault. For a start, it is indeed global. No-one who ever half bothers to look at the spread and range of activity related to this terrorism can fail to see its presence in virtually every major nation in the world. It is directed at the United States and its allies, of course. But it is also directed at nations who could not conceivably be said to be allies of the West. It is also rubbish to suggest that it is the product of poverty. It is true it will use the cause of poverty. But its fanatics are hardly the champions of economic development. It is based on religious extremism. That is the fact. And not any religious extremism; but a specifically Muslim version.

What it is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is not about those countries' liberation from US occupation. It is actually the only reason for the continuing presence of our troops. And it is they not us who are doing the slaughter of the innocent and doing it deliberately.

Its purpose is explicitly to prevent those countries becoming democracies and not "Western style" democracies, any sort of democracy. It is to prevent Palestine living side by side with Israel; not to fight for the coming into being of a Palestinian State, but for the going out of being, of an Israeli State. It is not wanting Muslim countries to modernise but to retreat into governance by a semi-feudal religious oligarchy.

Yet despite all of this, which I consider virtually obvious, we look at the bloodshed in Iraq and say that's a reason for leaving; we listen to the propaganda that tells us its all because of our suppression of Muslims and have parts of our opinion seriously believing that if we only got out of Iraq and Afghanistan, it would all stop.

And most contemporaneously, and in some ways most perniciously, a very large and, I fear, growing part of our opinion looks at Israel, and thinks we pay too great a price for supporting it and sympathises with Muslim opinion that condemns it. Absent from so much of the coverage, is any understanding of the Israeli predicament.

I, and any halfway sentient human being, regards the loss of civilian life in Lebanon as unacceptable, grieves for that nation, is sickened by its plight and wants the war to stop now. But just for a moment, put yourself in Israel's place. It has a crisis in Gaza, sparked by the kidnap of a solider by Hamas. Suddenly, without warning, Hizbollah who have been continuing to operate in Southern Lebanon for two years in defiance of UN Resolution 1559, cross the UN blue line, kill eight Israeli soldiers and kidnap two more. They then fire rockets indiscriminately at the civilian population in Northern Israel.

Hizbollah gets their weapons from Iran. Iran are now also financing militant elements in Hamas. Iran's President has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". And he's trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. Just to complete the picture, Israel's main neighbour along its eastern flank is Syria who support Hizbollah and house the hardline leaders of Hamas.

It's not exactly a situation conducive to a feeling of security is it?

But the central point is this. In the end, even the issue of Israel is just part of the same, wider struggle for the soul of the region. If we recognised this struggle for what it truly is, we would be at least along the first steps of the path to winning it. But a vast part of the Western opinion is not remotely near this yet.

Whatever the outward manifestation at any one time - in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iraq and add to that in Afghanistan, in Kashmir, in a host of other nations including now some in Africa - it is a global fight about global values; it is about modernisation, within Islam and outside of it; it is about whether our value system can be shown to be sufficiently robust, true, principled and appealing that it beats theirs. Islamist extremism's whole strategy is based on a presumed sense of grievance that can motivate people to divide against each other. Our answer has to be a set of values strong enough to unite people with each other.

This is not just about security or military tactics. It is about hearts and minds about inspiring people, persuading them, showing them what our values at their best stand for.

Just to state it in these terms, is to underline how much we have to do. Convincing our own opinion of the nature of the battle is hard enough. But we then have to empower Moderate, Mainstream Islam to defeat Reactionary Islam. And because so much focus is now, world-wide on this issue, it is becoming itself a kind of surrogate for all the other issues the rest of the world has with the West. In other words, fail on this and across the range, everything gets harder.

Why are we not yet succeeding? Because we are not being bold enough, consistent enough, thorough enough, in fighting for the values we believe in.

We start this battle with some self-evident challenges. Iraq's political process has worked in an extraordinary way. But the continued sectarian bloodshed is appalling: and threatens its progress deeply. In Afghanistan, the Taleban are making a determined effort to return and using the drugs trade a front. Years of anti-Israeli and therefore anti-American teaching and propaganda has left the Arab street often wildly divorced from the practical politics of their governments. Iran and, to a lesser extent, Syria are a constant source of de-stabilisation and reaction. The purpose of terrorism - whether in Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon or Palestine is never just the terrorist act itself. It is to use the act to trigger a chain reaction, to expunge any willingness to negotiate or compromise. Unfortunately it frequently works, as we know from our own experience in Northern Ireland, though thankfully the huge progress made in the last decade there, shows that it can also be overcome.

So, short-term, we can't say we are winning. But, there are many reasons for long-term optimism. Across the Middle East, there is a process of modernisation as well as reaction. It is unnoticed but it is there: in the UAE; in Bahrain; in Kuwait; in Qatar. In Egypt, there is debate about the speed of change but not about its direction. In Libya and Algeria, there is both greater stability and a gradual but significant opening up.

Most of all, there is one incontrovertible truth that should give us hope. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, and of course in the Lebanon, any time that people are permitted a chance to embrace democracy, they do so. The lie - that democracy, the rule of law, human rights are Western concepts, alien to Islam - has been exposed. In countries as disparate as Turkey and Indonesia, there is an emerging strength in Moderate Islam that should greatly encourage us.

So the struggle is finely poised. The question is: how do we empower the moderates to defeat the extremists?

First, naturally, we should support, nurture, build strong alliances with all those in the Middle East who are on the modernising path.

Secondly, we need, as President Bush said on Friday, to re-energise the MEPP between Israel and Palestine; and we need to do it in a dramatic and profound manner.

I want to explain why I think this issue is so utterly fundamental to all we are trying to do. I know it can be very irritating for Israel to be told that this issue is of cardinal importance, as if it is on their shoulders that the weight of the troubles of the region should always fall. I know also their fear that in our anxiety for wider reasons to secure a settlement, we sacrifice the vital interests of Israel.

Let me make it clear. I would never put Israel's security at risk.

Instead I want, what we all now acknowledge we need: a two state solution. The Palestinian State must be independent, viable but also democratic and not threaten Israel's safety.

This is what the majority of Israelis and Palestinians want.

Its significance for the broader issue of the Middle East and for the battle within Islam, is this. The real impact of a settlement is more than correcting the plight of the Palestinians. It is that such a settlement would be the living, tangible, visible proof that the region and therefore the world can accommodate different faiths and cultures, even those who have been in vehement opposition to each other. It is, in other words, the total and complete rejection of the case of Reactionary Islam. It destroys not just their most effective rallying call, it fatally undermines their basic ideology.

And, for sure, it empowers Moderate, Mainstream Islam enormously. They are able to point to progress as demonstration that their allies, ie us, are even-handed not selective, do care about justice for Muslims as much as Christians or Jews.

But, and it is a big 'but', this progress will not happen unless we change radically our degree of focus, effort and engagement, especially with the Palestinian side. In this the active leadership of the US is essential but so also is the participation of Europe, of Russia and of the UN. We need relentlessly, vigorously, to put a viable Palestinian Government on its feet, to offer a vision of how the Roadmap to final status negotiation can happen and then pursue it, week in, week out, 'til its done. Nothing else will do. Nothing else is more important to the success of our foreign policy.

Third, we need to see Iraq through its crisis and out to the place its people want: a non-sectarian, democratic state. The Iraqi and Afghan fight for democracy is our fight. Same values. Same enemy. Victory for them is victory for us all.

Fourth, we need to make clear to Syria and Iran that there is a choice: come in to the international community and play by the same rules as the rest of us; or be confronted. Their support of terrorism, their deliberate export of instability, their desire to see wrecked the democratic prospect in Iraq, is utterly unjustifiable, dangerous and wrong. If they keep raising the stakes, they will find they have miscalculated.

From the above it is clear that from now on, we need a whole strategy for the Middle East. If we are faced with an arc of extremism, we need a corresponding arc of moderation and reconciliation. Each part is linked. Progress between Israel and Palestine affects Iraq. Progress in Iraq affects democracy in the region. Progress for Moderate, Mainstream Islam anywhere puts Reactionary Islam on the defensive everywhere. But none of it happens unless in each individual part the necessary energy and commitment is displayed not fitfully, but continuously.

I said at the outset that the result of this struggle had effects wider than the region itself. Plainly that applies to our own security. This Global Islamist terrorism began in the Middle East. Sort the Middle East and it will inexorably decline. The read-across, for example, from the region to the Muslim communities in Europe is almost instant.

But there is a less obvious sense in which the outcome determines the success of our wider world-view. For me, a victory for the moderates means an Islam that is open: open to globalisation, open to working with others of different faiths, open to alliances with other nations.

In this way, this struggle is in fact part of a far wider debate.

Though Left and Right still matter in politics, the increasing divide today is between open and closed. Is the answer to globalisation, protectionism or free trade?

Is the answer to the pressure of mass migration, managed immigration or closed borders?

Is the answer to global security threats, isolationism or engagement?

Those are very big questions for US and for Europe.

Without hesitation, I am on the open side of the argument. The way for us to handle the challenge of globalisation, is to compete better, more intelligently, more flexibly. We have to give our people confidence we can compete. See competition as a threat and we are already on the way to losing.

Immigration is the toughest issue in Europe right now and you know something of it here in California. People get scared of it for understandable reasons. It needs to be controlled. There have to be rules. Many of the Conventions dealing with it post WWII are out of date. All that is true. But, properly managed, immigrants give a country dynamism, drive, new ideas as well as new blood.

And as for isolationism, that is a perennial risk in the US and EU policy. My point here is very simple: global terrorism means we can't opt-out even if we wanted to. The world is inter-dependent. To be engaged is only modern realpolitik.

But we only win people to these positions if our policy is not just about interests but about values, not just about what is necessary but about what is right.

Which brings me to my final reflection about US policy. My advice is: always be in the lead, always at the forefront, always engaged in building alliances, in reaching out, in showing that whereas unilateral action can never be ruled out, it is not the preference.

How we get a sensible, balanced but effective framework to tackle climate change after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 should be an American priority.

America wants a low-carbon economy; it is investing heavily in clean technology; it needs China and India to grow substantially. The world is ready for a new start here. Lead it.

The same is true for the WTO talks, now precariously in the balance; or for Africa, whose poverty is shameful.

If we are championing the cause of development in Africa, it is right in itself but it is also sending the message of moral purpose, that reinforces our value system as credible in all other aspects of policy.

It serves one other objective. There is a risk that the world, after the Cold War, goes back to a global policy based on spheres of influence. Think ahead. Think China, within 20 or 30 years, surely the world's other super-power. Think Russia and its precious energy reserves. Think India. I believe all of these great emerging powers want a benign relationship with the West. But I also believe that the stronger and more appealing our world-view is, the more it is seen as based not just on power but on justice, the easier it will be for us to shape the future in which Europe and the US will no longer, economically or politically, be transcendant. Long before then, we want Moderate, Mainstream Islam to triumph over Reactionary Islam.

That is why I say this struggle is one about values. Our values are worth struggling for. They represent humanity's progress throughout the ages and at each point we have had to fight for them and defend them. As a new age beckons, it is time to fight for them again.

Read the Q and A Question:

Mr Prime Minister, can Britain take the lead in speaking to Iran and Syria directly?

Prime Minister:

You know the thing that always surprises me about this is that people talk about this issue of engagement with Iran and Syria as if there was some doubt about what we were saying, or where we stood, or maybe the message hadn't been clear enough. Actually the message is absolutely clear, the message is if you stop supporting terrorism, if you stop trying to acquire nuclear weapons and breach your international obligations then we are willing to have a partnership with you, but if you export terrorism around the region and destabilise democracy in Iraq, we will confront you. Now I know there are all sorts of people who engage, and of course we do, we send messages the whole time to both governments, but I am afraid I have come to the conclusion that this is not an issue of communication, it is not that people can't read our handwriting, it is actually that they lack the will to do what they need to do and we need to make sure they have that will.

Question:

What is the United Nations capable of, and what is it not? Can all it do is pass meaningless resolutions?

Prime Minister:

Actually I would say to you that I think the United Nations can, in certain circumstances, be absolutely essential to solving the world's problems, and there are situations that have arisen in which the United
Nations has come together and made a real difference, and indeed some of the things that we were talking about earlier in relation to some of the disputes in Africa and so on indicate that very, very clearly too. But there are two things that need to happen. The first is that we need to reform the institutions of the United Nations thoroughly because they are not as they should be; and the second thing is you can make any amount of institutional change, but the key thing is whether there is the right political alliance at the heart of the Security Council of the United Nations.

Now I think there is a case incidentally for broadening the Security Council and I favour that, but in a way whatever institutional framework you have, the basic point is we have to have political agreement between the leading powers. And that is why I say in particular I think the transatlantic alliance is really, really important. Europe and America, whatever their differences from time to time, they have the values system in common and they should be proud of their alliance and we should make sure that we use that as a basis for trying to engineer the right type of political alliance within the UN Security Council. So look, if the UN didn't exist we would be inventing it, that is for sure, at least some people would, but I think it could be so much more effective but it needs reform, it needs leadership and it needs the right political alliance to motivate it.

Question:

In what ways does our passion for western democracy get in the way of resolving global or regional conflicts?

Prime Minister:

Well that is a very interesting question and a very good question. You see I have come to the conclusion, and I really confess to you I have changed my view of this, that actually there are no stable relationships in the long term unless there is progress towards democracy and freedom, that in other words the idea that countries that are governed by either secular or religious dictatorships provide a solid basis for progress, I think is just wrong. And the interesting thing about Iraq and Afghanistan, and this was the fascinating thing, is that so many people told us that you just don't understand it, people in Iraq aren't interested in democracy. The turnout in Iraq, despite people being threatened and in some cases killed on the way to the polls, was higher than the last Presidential election or the last general election in Britain. So people do care about this and democracies by and large don't fight each other. So I actually think in the end, yes, short term sometimes the passion for democracy can be difficult because there are so many vested interests that don't want it. Long term I have come to the conclusion that actually it is only through the spread of liberty, and democracy, and the rule of law and basic respect for human rights that we will get peace and security.

Question:

Should NATO be used in Lebanon, as it is in Afghanistan and Bosnia?

Prime Minister:

I think it depends on what is most helpful for the situation there, because we will need both the support of the government of Israel and the government of Lebanon for the force to operate. And I think at this point in time it is not possible to be clear about it, although I would say to you that the majority of people probably would say that NATO shouldn't be involved. But whatever force is involved it has to have the capacity of making sure that the original reason for the conflict, which were the activities in breach of the United Nations resolutions down in the south of Lebanon by Hezbollah are curtailed, because unless the government of Lebanon is given proper authority over the whole of Lebanon this will erupt again. And in my view the purpose of any multi-national force has got to be able to provide a bridge between the position for the government of Lebanon now, and the position we need to get to, which is not a permanent multinational force on the ground, but is a Lebanese democracy that is capable of having its writ run in every single part of the country without armed militias taking over parts of the country and running them in the way that they want.

And that is why in Lebanon what is important is to support Lebanese democracy. They have done amazing things in that country, it is why it is so tragic what has been brought about, but the only way, whether it is NATO or anybody else, we are going to get an effective multinational force there is if it has at its heart one principle, which is that our purpose is to make sure that when the Lebanese people vote in their government in a democracy, they do so without outside interference from Syria or anyone else, and without inside interference by well armed militia.

Question:

To many Americans there seems to be a latent and growing anti-Semitism in Europe. How can this be stopped?

Prime Minister:

I think that there are really two parts to this. I think there are people who are anti-Semitic in Europe and there has been a growing rise of anti-Semitic attacks which are appalling and terrible in different parts of Europe. But I think there is another strain of opinion, and this is the reason I devoted some of my speech to doing this, that just doesn't see it from Israel's point of view at all, I mean just doesn't understand what it is like to be a country surrounded by a lot of people who basically want to deny your right to exist, and in a way I think that is part of the problem. And I also think it then gets run in with the issue to do with anti-Americanism because of America's support for Israel. And again I said this in a speech I made a couple of months ago, the only way you ever confront this is confronting the basic ideas.

What I said in that speech, let me try and explain this, a lot of what happens in the western debate, in the European debate very specifically, but also in other countries too, less so in America but still in parts I guess in the American system, is that everybody abhors the terrorist method, people don't get up and support terrorism but they kind of buy half way into some of the ideas that they are putting forward in the sense that they say yes well you do have a real sense of grievance against America and its allies, but you shouldn't blow people up in pursuit of it. And my point the whole way through is we are never going to defeat this until we say actually that is wrong, you have no sense of grievance.

In Afghanistan and Iraq we have billions of dollars waiting there to help reconstruct the country, the country is a democracy, where is the suppression? You know the Taliban down in the south where British troops have gone in to try and clear out the Taliban, they have literally taken teachers out in front of their class and executed them in front of class for teaching girls. Now where should the sense of grievance be - against us who have actually helped those countries and those people get democracy for the first time, or these absolutely brutal murderous terrorists who want to send them back into some sort of feudal time?

In other words unless we are prepared to stand up and say, 'No actually what you think about America is nonsense', I mean I said this to some people the other day and it was difficult, but you have got to say it. I said look, as far as I am aware people in America are free to practise their religion as Muslims, and they certainly are in Britain, what is the sense of grievance?

Now we may disagree about this or that aspect of foreign policy, but that is not the same as saying that our purpose in going to Iraq and Afghanistan was something to do with the fact that those countries were Muslim, it was to do with the fact that they were threatening our security. That is where this is difficult.

So the answer to your question is yes, there are real worries about anti-Semitism, but I think that the problem is slightly different from that, if I am frank about it, it is that there is a world view there that is very, very, well I would call it somewhat soggy and unable just to see the realities of what is happening. And that is what you have to confront, not just the activities of the terrorists, but their ideas, because far too many of their ideas have some purchase on opinion in the western world.

Question:

Will you continue your government's leadership on global climate change now that you are no longer President of the G8?

Prime Minister:

I think, as I was saying yesterday with Governor Schwarzenegger - it is great to be with him. I phoned my wife up and she said to me: "How do you feel being with Arnie Schwarzenegger?" I said: "Actually I felt acute body envy really." But anyway we were discussing climate change. The important thing is this. I actually think that there is a real chance for America to take leadership in this area because President Bush made his State of the Union address, talking about the need for America to move to a low carbon economy, we established at the G8 last year a G8+5 dialogue, that is the G8 countries plus Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and of course India and China, and the purpose of it was to try to get the main countries together.

When we look at what is going to succeed Kyoto, instead of trying to get 150 countries, or however many it is, round the table and negotiate something, get the main people together, let's work out a framework but the framework has to include not just America, but China and India on the other side. And we should work out how we manage to get the right binding framework in place with the right targets that allow our economies to grow, and this was the importance of yesterday's meeting, we had a wide range of business leaders there.

What business wants to know is the direction of policy, it wants some regulatory certainty, it wants to know that if we are going to make the investment in the research and the development which is necessary for the science and technology to work, you know they are not suddenly going to find policies move in a different direction.

And I think this is the time for us to work now on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012, make sure it has all the main players in it, and I think it is a fantastic thing if there are places in the United States that are showing leadership now on this issue because it hugely empowers and emboldens the rest of us. And I want to see this issue back on the agenda for the German G8 next year, I think that will happen, and I do honestly believe that the evidence of climate change is clear and this is a major, major subject for us.

Question:

This gentleman says he is a Los Angeles County fire fighter who responded to the 9/11 disaster in New York, and he would like to know how the events of 9/11 changed you personally?

Prime Minister:

Well first of all I would like to pay tribute to the fire-fighters from Los Angeles, from New York, from elsewhere who did such a fantastic job, and the public servants everywhere. It did change me personally because some of the things that I have said tonight I can trace back to the speech I made actually in Chicago in 1999 at the time of the Kosovo crisis. But I think what September 11 did for me, quite apart from everything else obviously, the emotional impact such a terrible thing makes, it showed me that the world is genuinely interdependent. I always believed that it was not just an attack on America but it was an attack on America because America was the most powerful country espousing our values and therefore it was an attack on all of us. And I from that moment became determined that we should do everything we could, not just to defeat those that had committed such murder and slaughter of innocent people, but to make sure that in every single part of the world, given its interdependence, we should give people the chance of hope and prosperity and that we should never believe that people languishing in poverty or under extremist governments were not our responsibility.

And one of the things that I find most difficult about politics is that everything really works through the media today, which is the way it is, but sometimes I get frustrated when you can call any numbers of people on to the street to protest against say military action in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever it might be, or against what Israel is doing in Lebanon. There are no demonstrations about North Korea, there is not a placard there, not as far as I know, maybe there is here but not that I have ever seen, and these people live in complete and total enslavement, and I think our job has got to be, if the world is interdependent, that is something we can't help. We can't help globalisation, globalisation is a fact, but the values that govern globalisation are a choice and our choice should be, and this is what came home to me as well as everything else after September 11, our choice has got to be the values of liberty, and tolerance and justice, it has got to be a world that is free but also a world that is fair, and that is what I decided after that time to dedicate our foreign policy to trying to do.

    Speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, 1 August 2006, 10 Downing Street, http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page9948.asp

1.15pm

Abandon your Lebanon policy,

former Foreign Office spokesman tells Blair

Tuesday August 1, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Matthew Tempest, political correspondent

The former chief spokesman for the Foreign Office has called on Tony Blair to abandon his current policy on Lebanon and head an EU-led peace conference on the crisis.

John Williams, who was spokesman for the past three foreign secretaries, said the prime minister now needed to salvage his reputation by resurrecting the Anglo-French-German axis which had negotiated with Iran to deal with the war in Southern Lebanon.

And he suggests that with foreign policy being made in Downing Street, Margaret Beckett, the current foreign secretary, is little more than a "frustrated bystander".

Mr Williams, chief spokesman for the FCO until this summer, writes today that Mr Blair must bluntly tell George Bush and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert that their "strategy has failed".

Instead, the PM should use his "credit" in Washington and "high repute" in Tel Aviv to organise a peace conference brokered by the British, French and German foreign ministers.

The intervention from Mr Williams comes as a 35,000-strong petition was handed in to Downing Street demanding Mr Blair call for an immediate ceasefire in the region.

Martin Bell, the former war reporter and independent MP, handed in the petition, which was backed by a plethora of aid agencies and the Muslim Council of Britain.

Writing on the Guardian's website today, Mr Williams - who served under Robin Cook, Jack Straw and Margaret Becket - explicitly calls the crisis "a terrible failure for president Bush's championing of Middle East democracy".

He adds: "It's easy for me to write that, now that I am no longer a government spokesman. I'm not going to criticise friends and former colleagues for not describing the situation as harshly as a commentator can. But Tony Blair should now use his credit in Washington and Israel to persuade President Bush and prime minister Olmert that their strategy has failed, and must be abandoned.

"If Tony Blair did that, he could repair some of the collateral damage done to his reputation in the last three weeks."

The former voice of the Foreign Office added that it was "hard to see American diplomacy doing what is necessary while President Bush remains in office".

"Britain should therefore take the lead, as we have in the nuclear negotiations with Iran. I'd like to see the prime minister using his leverage to get US support for a mission by Margaret Beckett and her French and German counterparts to Israel and Palestine. If Arab states - and Russia - took part, all the better.

"Olmert and [Mahmood] Abbas were quite close to agreeing terms for a summit when this crisis erupted. The European Three should be mandated by the Security Council to get them to the table and keep them there. Tony Blair could open the conference, using his high repute in Israel to give prime minister Olmert the political cover he needs for a return to diplomacy.

"Meanwhile Hilary Benn should be asked to organise a Europe-led reconstruction effort in Lebanon.

Tellingly, he adds: "I'm sure that both he and the foreign secretary would rather be given these challenges than remain frustrated bystanders."

Mrs Beckett herself is in Brussels today for a meeting of foreign ministers - with the UK still isolated in Europe in resisting a call for an immediate international ceasefire.

On the agenda is the idea - promoted by Mr Blair but so far delayed by the UN - of an international stabilisation force, amid signs that member states are reluctant to sign up in the current climate.

While the Irish government indicated that it would send 200 troops to the region if the climate was right, the Italians warned that rounding up enough troops was going to be difficult.

The Italian foreign minister Massimo d'Alema said bluntly: "In a climate like this, nobody would send their own soldiers."

With the PM enroute from California to his summer holiday, campaigners at Number 10 accused Mr Blair of not doing enough to exert pressure on the US president as they handed in the petition.

Aid agencies handing in the petition were joined by former Mr Bell and Muhammad Abdul Bari, the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain.

They carried a 6ft x 4ft gravestone-shaped placard from Parliament Square to Downing Street bearing the message: "Ceasefire Now."

Smaller similar gravestone placards bearing some of the names of the signatories were handed in with the petition. Today's petition was backed by agencies including Save the Children, Christian Aid, CARE International and Oxfam.

Mr Bell said: "These are all the main charities and aid agencies which work in Lebanon and there is a humanitarian crisis.

"They cannot help the people while the fighting continues."

He added that there was "huge dissatisfaction" among backbench Labour MPs about the prime minister's failure to demand an immediate ceasefire.

Amelia Bookstein of Save the Children said: "It is very clear from a humanitarian point of view that children are bearing the brunt of this crisis."

She said that about 45% of those being killed were children and better protection for civilians was desperately needed.

Despite the dangers of aid convoys being bombed, relief agencies were still carrying out their work in the region, she said.

But she added: "We cannot scale up to the size we need without a ceasefire."

She said: "Innocent children are being killed daily in a war they had no part or place in."

Mr Bell added: "These tens of thousands of signatures gathered in just a few days show how strongly the public feel - the Government would do well to heed them."

The petition was gathered after adverts were placed in three national newspapers four days ago.

An ICM poll last week showed most voters believed Israel had gone too far with its military action in Lebanon.

Just 22% believed Israel's response had been proportionate, 61% believing that the country overreacted to the threat facing it.

    Abandon your Lebanon policy, former Foreign Office spokesman tells Blair, G, 1.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1834931,00.html

Blair hardens line on Israel

after cabinet criticism

Monday July 31, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour in San Francisco
and Tania Branigan

Tony Blair yesterday responded to a growing backbench and cabinet revolt over his handling of the Middle East crisis by saying the Qana bombing showed that a peace agreement must be reached.

Mr Blair has been under mounting internal criticism for refusing to endorse calls for an immediate unconditional ceasefire or to condemn the Israeli bombing as disproportionate.

He has instead focused on securing a UN resolution to deploy a multinational force in southern Lebanon.

"What happened at Qana shows this situation simply cannot continue," he said last night. "This is an absolutely tragic situation, but we have got to make sure the discussions we are having and the negotiations we are conducting does lead to a genuine cessation of hostilities."

Downing Street slapped down the former foreign secretary Jack Straw, who at the weekend condemned Israeli action as disproportionate and likely to undermine support across the Middle East.

Mr Blair's spokesman denied a cabinet revolt over his handling of the issue, although cabinet sources said there was widespread concern that the prime minister's position leaves the government open to the charge that it is indifferent to the suffering of the Lebanese people.

Some cabinet members pointed out that Mr Straw, the leader of the house, had not voiced concerns in last week's cabinet meeting.

The leading figure to express concern at the Israeli action was David Miliband, the environment, food and rural affairs secretary. Allies of Mr Straw, who is now on holiday, insisted he made every effort to quote accurately the words of the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells who visited the region recently.

Speaking during a round of interviews in the US, Mr Blair told Channel 5: "There was a perfectly good discussion at the cabinet actually and it certainly wasn't a divisive discussion at all. Of course what they were saying is 'let us make sure with urgency we can stop a situation that's killing innocent people'."

Mr Blair was expected to reassert robustly his view that the "underlying cause" of the conflict - Islamic terrorism - must be addressed when he made a speech to executives from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp organisation in California last night.

The foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said the government was "united" around the goal of ending the conflict.

"I'm a little bit sorry to see some of the reports that suggest there is a lot of division in cabinet. There is not division. There's not a single person in the cabinet who is not desperately anxious about the situation, isn't really worried and concerned and wanting to do everything we can to bring it to an end, and agonising over whether we are in fact doing everything we can and how can we do more."

Asked on the Sky News Adam Boulton programme what she disagreed with in Mr Straw's statement, she said: "I don't use the words Jack used about a number of things, for precisely the reason that I sometimes think it hinders understanding rather than supporting it."

She insisted the UK had "repeatedly urged on the Israelis to act proportionately".

Mr Straw's statement said: "Disproportionate action only escalates an already dangerous situation. One of many serious concerns I have is that the continuation of such tactics by Israel could further destabilise the already fragile Lebanese nation." He said Israel had the right to defend itself "proportionately", and expressed sympathy for their victims of the conflict. But he also "grieved" for the "10 times as many" Lebanese civilians killed or injured.

It is understood the statement was not cleared with Downing Street, although Mr Blair was aware what he intended to say.

Several hundred protesters, some carrying banners calling for "Freedom for Palestine and Lebanon", gathered in Trafalgar Square, London, yesterday. Comedian Alexei Sayle - who with other entertainers read poems and told stories of travels to Lebanon, said: "While Israel has all the privileges of a state it behaves worse than a terrorist organisation."

    Blair hardens line on Israel after cabinet criticism, G, 31.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1833961,00.html

Blair to defy Bush over stem cells

PM will publicly back
California's research into disease treatment
despite White House's strong opposition

Sunday July 30, 2006
The Observer
Gaby Hinsliff in San Francisco

Tony Blair is to use his trip to America to back stem cell research despite sharp opposition from President George Bush. The Prime Minister will give his support to scientific research into the treatment of incurable diseases, which has been blocked by Bush.

The President objects on moral grounds to the technique, which involves harvesting human stem cells, the most basic building blocks of life. These are then stimulated to grow replica human tissue, which could ultimately be used for transplants or the treatment of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's.

Pro-life and religious groups oppose stem cell research because one source of the cells is human embryos created during fertility treatment and subsequently destroyed. Bush vetoed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research five years ago, driving some US scientists to Britain to continue their work, but the state of California - where Blair will deliver a speech tomorrow - has legislated to fund research locally.

The Prime Minister will meet 10 bioscience companies in the San Francisco area and unveil plans for a joint UK-Californian conference on stem cell technology in Britain in November.

Announcing the conference in America will be seen as a bold contradiction of Bush's views, less than two weeks after the President personally vetoed another bill passed by the Senate that would have allowed federal funding for the research, saying it crossed a 'moral boundary'.

However, a Downing Street spokesman insisted there was no conflict, adding: 'George Bush has his own approach [to stem cells], we have our own, and California has its own.'

Blair's attempt to boost the profile of British researchers was in danger of backfiring last night, however, after Downing Street, apparently mistakenly, published private criticism of one of the flagship bodies he is promoting.

Among the 'strengths' of British research listed in a briefing pack handed to journalists was the UK Stem Cell Foundation, set up last year to help turn lab work into medical treatments. Unfortunately, a junior official had failed to remove before publication a note, apparently added for Downing Street consumption, that 'the UKSCF hasn't done much since its establishment'.

It then referred helpfully to further material on 'the difficulties of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine'. The institute is among the US organisations Blair is meeting tomorrow.

    Blair to defy Bush over stem cells, O, 30.7.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,1833431,00.html

Cabinet in open revolt

over Blair's Israel policy

· Straw joins criticism of Lebanese toll
· Rice in Jerusalem to push peace plan

Sunday July 30, 2006
The Observer
Gaby Hinsliff in San Francisco,
Ned Temko in London
and Peter Beaumont in Beirut

Tony Blair was facing a full-scale cabinet rebellion last night over the Middle East crisis after his former Foreign Secretary warned that Israel's actions risked destabilising all of Lebanon.

Jack Straw, now Leader of the Commons, said in a statement released after meeting Muslim residents of his Blackburn constituency that while he grieved for the innocent Israelis killed, he also mourned the '10 times as many innocent Lebanese men, women and children killed by Israeli fire'.

He said he agreed with the Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells that it was 'very difficult to understand the kind of military tactics used by Israel', adding: 'These are not surgical strikes but have instead caused death and misery amongst innocent civilians.' Straw said he was worried that 'a continuation of such tactics by Israel could destabilise the already fragile Lebanese nation'.

The Observer can also reveal that at a cabinet meeting before Blair left for last Friday's Washington summit with President George Bush, minister after minister pressed him to break with the Americans and publicly criticise Israel over the scale of death and destruction.

The critics included close Blair allies. One, the International Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, was revealed yesterday to have told a Commons committee that he did not view Israel's strikes on power stations as a 'proportionate response' to Hizbollah attacks.

Another Blairite minister among the cabinet critics said: 'It was clear that Tony knows the situation, and didn't have to be told about the outrage felt by so many over the disproportionate suffering. He also completely understands the effect on the Muslim community - both in terms of losing Muslim voters hand over fist and the wider issue of community cohesion.'

Blair responded to the dissenters by 'engaging seriously', the minister said. 'But he made it clear why he felt he had to choose the high-risk strategy of trying to move things forward for the future of the Middle East through his talks in Washington.'

In addition to the cabinet critics, one of Blair's closest Labour confidants was understood to have urged him last week to 'place distance' between himself and Bush over the crisis.

In interviews last night in San Francisco, the Prime Minister defended his decision not to call for an immediate ceasefire, but voiced the hope that an agreement on a UN framework for ending hostilities could be reached within a period of days. Asked by Sky News if he was too close to the White House, he said: 'I will never apologise for Britain being a strong ally of the US.'

He said there had been 'perfectly good' cabinet discussions on Lebanon, telling the BBC they had not been divisive: 'What they were saying was: "Let us make sure with urgency we can stop this situation which is killing innocent people".' Yet there had to be a long-term solution, he said.

The increase in political pressure came as shifts by Israel and Hizbollah provided the first faint signs of encouragement for US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's efforts to sell a Blair-Bush plan for a ceasefire.

Diplomats said her mission would still be difficult, with Israeli strikes continuing in a bid to end rocket attacks by Hizbollah and the militia vowing to increase them. But as Rice arrived in Jerusalem last night, an Israeli official said his government would no longer insist on immediate disarmament by the militia as part of a deal. The Israelis would accept an interim arrangement under which an international force moved it back from the border and prevented it firing into Israel. Hizbollah has accepted a Lebanese government proposal including an international force.

Rice was due to meet the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, last night and, after further meetings in Jerusalem, to travel on to Beirut.

Straw's decision to go public with his concerns deepened the rift between the Prime Minister and his cabinet and MPs in what threatens to become his biggest foreign policy crisis since the Iraq war.

It also puts Straw's successor, Margaret Beckett, on the spot. She was planning to go on holiday this week, but may now have to go to New York to help pilot the draft UN resolution. Eyebrows in Whitehall were raised last week when she sent Howells to Beirut and Tel Aviv at the height of the conflict.

The timing of the revolt is awkward for Blair, forcing him to choose whom to upset: his colleagues back home or his two main hosts on the five-day trip to the US. President Bush and Rupert Murdoch both back the Israeli military action. The Prime Minister is due to make a major speech in California today at a conference hosted by Murdoch. He is expected to argue that his Washington talks with Bush were geared towards an 'urgent cessation of hostilities'.

He will also suggest the conflict could have been avoided. Instead, he will argue, the world turned a blind eye to Lebanon as Hizbollah built up its arsenals in breach of a UN resolution that required it to be disarmed and the Lebanese army to be deployed in the border area.

Blair won a concession in the Washington talks - an apology from President Bush for having failed to ask permission for a plane carrying bombs bound for Israel to land at Prestwick airport, near Glasgow. But yesterday, the civil aviation authorities announced that permission had been granted for two similar refuelling stops by US aircraft carrying 'hazardous' cargo to Israel.

    Cabinet in open revolt over Blair's Israel policy, O, 30.7.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1833538,00.html

Blair risks 'poodle' jibes

to join Murdoch's jamboree

Prime minister knows applause at conference
will come at a cost

Saturday July 29, 2006
Guardian
Michael White

On Sunday afternoon an executive jet will interrupt Tony Blair's five-day US visit to fly him from San Francisco on a short hop to the Monterey peninsula. Waiting for the prime minister will be 500 of Rupert Murdoch's News International executives, plus their partners and VIP guests, who are in conference at the luxurious Pebble Beach golf resort until Thursday.

Mr Blair will stay only two or three hours, give his address on a favourite theme, leadership in the modern world, take questions and probably attend a reception. In an audience of admirers of his unfashionable pro-Americanism he is certain to be well received. Mr Murdoch himself admires steadfastness in adversity. "Iraq means Rupert will never dump on Blair," explains a close Murdoch-watcher.

But Mr Blair knows from experience that he will pay for the applause: his enemies at home will see it as yet further proof of a "poodle" relationship with the Australian-turned-American media tycoon, scarcely less malign than the servility he supposedly gives President George Bush, whom he saw yesterday.

Media gossip, unconfirmed by insiders, claims that if Mr Blair had turned down the invitation, it would have gone to David Cameron, the kind of rising star News International prides itself on cultivating. Given Mr Murdoch's known coolness towards the Tory leader (he thinks "not much" of him, he told CBS TV last week), that seems unlikely. Gordon Brown would be a better bet. "I like Brown very much on a personal level," he said on CBS.

Either way a ticket to a Murdoch-fest is one politicians deem worth having and Mr Blair is only one of several star speakers at Pebble Beach, who include Bill Clinton and California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And at least two possible 2008 presidential contenders will be present, the maverick Arizona Republican Senator John McCain (Rupert is a fan) and Al Gore, who is close on green issues to son James Murdoch, head of Sky TV.

These jamborees are staged every few years at a major tourist destination. For Mr Blair it is a swansong. He first spoke at a Murdoch conference in 1995, a year after becoming Labour leader. It was his entry into the big time of first-class travel and VIP suites. Tomorrow's speech may be a year before he throws off the relative austerity of elected office and joins the Clintonian lecture circuit full-time.

Apart from the speeches, what goes on at a Murdoch-fest? Insiders, who speak on condition of anonymity, say they vary. In Aspen there was golf, hot air balloons, white water rafting and an unfortunate experiment with strippers. Cancun, run by Lachlan Murdoch, was gruelling from 8am working breakfasts to dinner time.

"It depends on Murdoch's mood. If he thinks we've been having too much fun he says 'we have have more work, it's not a jolly'," explains one veteran attender.

Sometimes there are mainly plenary sessions, sometimes working groups charged with explaining their strategy to colleagues or listening to a successful businessman from another field entirely. The Yahoo! entrepreneurs, who made more money in a few years than Murdoch has in a lifetime, have appeared. "Rupert is fascinated by big business, he admires successful rivals, even al-Jazeera," says another insider. General Tommy Franks, head of the Iraq invasion, was a popular turn.

The theme at Pebble Beach is new media, and how to achieve synergy and integration with older media. Mr Murdoch came late to the internet and lost millions. Encouraged by MySpace's success, the great networker is back and - at 75 - keen to learn more. All four UK Murdoch editors, Rebekah Wade (Sun), Andy Coulson (News of the World), Robert Thomson (Times) and John Witheroe (Sunday Times) will be there, along with NI's UK capo, Les Hinton, and a few favoured executives or writers.

Some attenders will never recover from a gaffe at Pebble Beach. The conferences are replete with malicious stories: the executive who produced that striptease at Aspen; the woman columnist whom Murdoch personally slapped down; the fumbling tabloid executive whose presentation bombed. Down - or out - they go.

In tomorrow's speech Mr Blair is expected to rehash familiar themes - the need for democracy and open markets, for greater cooperation to defeat the challenges of poverty, global warming and terrorism, the urgent case for reform of bodies such as the UN. A message U2's Bono, another speaker, will probably reinforce.

Mr Murdoch knows how to play the global game. In an idealistic moment he boasted that his satellite TV stations had helped destroy Soviet tyranny, though he backed down in China when Beijing pulled his chain. Candidates in Beijing elections do not depend on the Sun's support to succeed.

"We regard the occasion as a useful opportunity to get our case across," explains a Blair aide.

    Blair risks 'poodle' jibes to join Murdoch's jamboree, G, 29.7.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,,1832815,00.html

Bush and Blair lay out Lebanon plan

but warn Tehran

· Timetable 'could lead to ceasefire by next week'
· Iran nuclear plan will lead to 'confrontation' - Blair

Saturday July 29, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour and Julian Borger in Washington and Ewen MacAskill

Tony Blair and George Bush delivered yesterday their sharpest warning yet to Iran over its involvement in Lebanon and its suspected nuclear weapons programme.

As they set out a vague plan for bringing a cessation of violence in the Israel-Lebanon conflict at a joint press conference in the White House, they repeatedly referred to the threat posed by Iran and Syria, and their links with Hizbullah.

Mr Blair said events such as the conflict in Lebanon underscored the "simple choice" faced by Iran and Syria. "They can either come in and participate as proper and responsible members of the international community, or they will face the risk of increasing confrontation," he said.

Tehran, and to a lesser extent Syria, are alleged to have supplied weapons and money to Hizbullah and are due next month to deliver a response to a UN security council demand over their alleged ambition to secure a nuclear weapons capability. Mr Blair said Iran and Syria were making a "strategic miscalculation" if they thought the US and UK would be "indifferent" to their actions because of the pressure of events.

Speaking of their plan for a peace deal in Lebanon, Mr Blair and Mr Bush set out a timetable that the prime minister said could lead to a ceasefire by next week. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, is to return to the Middle East today to present the plan to Israel and Lebanon.

Her aim is to tempt Israel with a pledge to install the Lebanese army, backed by an international force, in southern Lebanon to stop Hizbullah rocket attacks and to tempt Hizbullah with the return of the disputed Sheba'a Farms area. Hizbullah will not have to disarm immediately.

The details of who will join the international force will be discussed at the UN on Monday.

Mr Bush and Mr Blair have been resisting calls for an immediate ceasefire in every international forum for the past fortnight. This has been seen by their critics in Europe and the Middle East as an implicit green light to Israel to carry on its military offensive against Hizbullah.

The Foreign Office has been pressing Mr Blair for days to adopt a more critical policy towards the Israel even if it meant a rift with Mr Bush, but he ignored the civil servants' pleas. Some cabinet members fear Mr Blair, with his references to the "arc of extremism", is misreading the crisis as the next phase in the war between terrorism and democracy across the Middle East.

Although there was no change in policy, Mr Blair's tone changed, emphasising the suffering in Lebanon in a way he had not before.

By calling for a meeting on Monday on the creation of an international stabilisation force, before a ceasefire resolution is passed, Washington and London hope to put pressure on other world leaders to back their calls for a ceasefire.

Among the possible troop contributors being discussed are Turkey, Indonesia, Germany, Italy, Brazil and Greece. But British and US officials hope to exert maximum pressure on France, which has historical ties with Lebanon and forces capable of rapid deployment.

If a multinational force is agreed, British officials have said they envisage its deployment in two phases: an initial small force on the border almost immediately after a ceasefire is agreed, and a bigger body of between 10,000 and 20,000 troops that would, as Mr Blair put it, allow Lebanese forces into the south, which has long been a Hizbullah fiefdom.

US officials privately shrugged at the suggestion, eagerly promoted by their British counterparts, that Mr Blair's visit had accelerated movement towards a ceasefire. A source in the White House described the notion as something that had been "cooked up" for political ends, and Mr Bush appeared to refer to it at yesterday's joint press conference when he said: "We share the same urgency of trying to stop the violence."

The US believes significant damage has been inflicted on Hizbullah and that prolonging the war would enhance the Shia group's standing in the Islamic world more than it hurt its capacity to fight.

Meanwhile, Israel said it killed 26 Hizbullah fighters near the town of Bint Jbail, while Hizbullah launched a new rocket, the Khaibar-1, at the northern Israeli town of Afula, in its deepest strike yet.

    Bush and Blair lay out Lebanon plan but warn Tehran, G, 29.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1832856,00.html

Cabinet concern over PM's stance

Saturday July 29, 2006
Guardian
Tania Branigan and Alexi Mostrous

Ministers are growing increasingly concerned about the government's approach to the conflict in Lebanon, as normally loyal MPs warn that Britain is damaging its international standing.

Cabinet members feel the tone of government pronouncements is making it look indifferent to the suffering of Lebanese civilians, and senior backbenchers are openly critical of Tony Blair's stance. "We could do with sounding a little bit more like Kim [Howells] and a little less like Condi [Rice]," said one minister.

Foreign office minister Mr Howells has repeatedly called for Israel to show "proportionality and restraint", while the foreign secretary and prime minister have refused to condemn its actions.

Greg Pope, a Blairite and member of the Commons foreign affairs committee, told the Guardian that there was widespread dismay that the government had not called for an immediate ceasefire.

"Tony has misjudged [this issue], and is leaving us isolated among European countries and at home," he said.

    Cabinet concern over PM's stance, G, 29.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1832866,00.html

Blair to tell Bush: we need a ceasefire

Drawn out Lebanon crisis will boost militants across Arab world, PM fears

Friday July 28, 2006
Guardian
Ewen MacAskill, Simon Tisdall and Michael White

Tony Blair will press George Bush today to support "as a matter of urgency" a ceasefire in Lebanon as part of a UN security council resolution next week, according to Downing Street sources.

At a White House meeting, the prime minister will express his concern that pro-western Arab governments are "getting squeezed" by the crisis and the longer it continues, the more squeezed they will be, giving militants a boost. The private view from No 10 is that the US is "prevaricating" over the resolution and allowing the conflict to run on too long.

But diplomatic sources in Washington suggest the US and Israel believe serious damage has been inflicted on Hizbullah, so the White House is ready to back a ceasefire resolution at the UN next week. Today Mr Bush and Mr Blair will discuss a version of the resolution that has been circulating in Washington and London.

The draft peace deal involves two phases. In the first, Israel and Lebanon would agree a ceasefire and a small multinational force would be deployed on the border, allowing Israeli troops to withdraw. Then a much larger force of between 10,000 and 20,000 troops would be assigned to implement UN security council resolution 1559, agreed two years ago, under which militias such as Hizbullah would be disarmed and the authority of the Lebanese government forces extended to the country's southern border.

European officials are sceptical about disarming Hizbullah. But they believe that, if other countries in the region can be persuaded to contribute to the buffer force, it would give them a vested interest in addressing Hizbullah's threat to Israel.

A British official said the two-phase idea was raised by Britain at Wednesday's international conference in Rome and "the US are almost certainly going to push something through next week".

France, which holds the presidency of the security council, has drafted its own resolution which it wants to push to a vote early next week. The French plan calls for an "immediate halt to the violence", "a handover of prisoners to a third party enjoying the trust of the two belligerents", UN shuttle diplomacy in pursuit of a "general settlement framework", and the deployment of an international force in support of the Lebanese army. Controversially, it says a buffer zone should straddle the Israel-Lebanon border.

It is unclear whether Mr Blair will urge Mr Bush to do something the administration has decided to do anyway. The prime minister is intent on demonstrating that he has influence in the White House and Britain has its own policy. Polls this week showed public disquiet over his closeness to Mr Bush and the failure to act more decisively to end the bloodshed.

The US and Britain have stood against most of the rest of the world in refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire. Mr Blair has not changed his position on that, but a Downing Street source said he would urge the US to move faster in backing the resolution. "Collectively we have to step up the urgency of the search for a ceasefire."

With an eye on the Arab world, Mr Blair wants to ensure that Hizbullah and other militant groups such as Hamas do not emerge stronger from the crisis. He will reiterate to Mr Bush that the key to resolving the violence is resolution of the Palestinian issue.

No 10 dismissed the row over US military flights using Prestwick airport, Scotland, to send weapons to Israel without telling Britain as an issue of process, not principle.

    Blair to tell Bush: we need a ceasefire, G, 28.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1832122,00.html

Stand up to US, voters tell Blair

63% say PM has tied Britain too close to White House

Leader: Standing back from America

Tuesday July 25, 2006
Guardian
Julian Glover and Ewen MacAskill

Britain should take a much more robust and independent approach to the United States, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today, which finds strong public opposition to Tony Blair's close working relationship with President Bush.

The wide-ranging survey of British attitudes to international affairs - the first since the conflict between Lebanon and Israel started- shows that a large majority of voters think Mr Blair has made the special relationship too special.

Just 30% think the prime minister has got the relationship about right, against 63% saying he has tied Britain too closely to the US.

Carried in the wake of the accidental broadcast of the prime minister's conversation with President Bush at the G8 summit, the poll finds opposition to this central element of the prime minister's foreign policy among supporters of all the main parties.

Even a majority of Labour supporters - traditionally more supportive of Mr Blair's foreign policy position - think he has misjudged the relationship, with 54% saying Britain is too close to the US. Conservatives - 68% - and Liberal Democrats - 83% - are even more critical.

And voters are strongly critical of the scale of Israel's military operations in Lebanon, with 61% believing the country has overreacted to the threats it faces.

As pressure grows for a change of strategy, the poll finds that only 22% of voters believe Israel has reacted proportionately to the kidnapping of soldiers and other attacks from militant groups in southern Lebanon. Israel has repeatedly sought to assure the world that its actions are a legitimate response to threats to its own territory, including missile attacks on the north of the country.

The finding follows more than a week in which Mr Blair has come under fire for echoing US caution about the practicality of an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East and for allying himself too closely to Israel.

At a press conference in London yesterday Mr Blair defended his position and expressed sympathy for the plight of the Lebanese. "What is occurring in Lebanon at the present time is a catastrophe. Anybody with any sense of humanity wants what is happening to stop and stop now," Mr Blair said. He added: "But if it is to stop, it must stop on both sides."

This did not amount to switch in policy but a change in emphasis, in part to answer critics who accuse him of being indifferent to the plight of the Lebanese. A British official said: "He wants to make it clear he has the same feelings as everyone else but the job of government is to find an answer. The proof of the pudding is if we are able to find a way through."

Unlike other international leaders, Mr has refused to describe the Israeli attacks on Lebanon as disproportionate. But the official said there was a difference between what Mr Blair said in public and what Mr Blair and other members of the government said to the Israelis in private.

Public unease about Israel's approach is reflected in public attitudes to the Iraq war, with support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein falling to a record low since military action began in March 2003.

Although a solid core of Labour supporters - 48% - still think the war was justified, overall only 36% of voters agree - a seven-point drop since the Guardian last asked the question in October 2004.

Older voters, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and people living in the south are particularly critical, suggesting the anti-war movement has a base of support well beyond student groups and the left.

Support for the war reached 63% in April 2003, in the wake of early military success. Now a narrow majority of voters - 51% - believe it was unjustified, the highest proportion for more than two years.

Amid fears that the armed forces are operating at the limit of their resources, voters also believe that British troops are doing more harm than good in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They are more concerned by the role of British forces in Iraq than Afghanistan, with 36% saying their presence is making the situation worse in Iraq against 29% who think this is true of Britain's more recent deployment in southern Afghanistan.

But both findings outweigh the proportion of voters who think British troops are improving the situation on the ground: just 19% of all those questioned think they are making progress in Iraq and 23% think this is the case in Afghanistan. Around a third of voters think that at best British forces are making no difference one way or the other in the two countries.

There is also minimal public appetite for fresh foreign policy commitments, such as a multinational force in Lebanon. An overwhelming proportion of voters think current deployments are already overstretching Britain's military resources: 69% agree; 19% do not.

Conservatives - 78% of whom believe the armed forces are overstretched - are especially concerned, despite David Cameron's support for an interventionist policy, symbolised by his visit to troops in Kandahar yesterday.

· ICM Research interviewed a random sample of 1,001 adults over 18 by telephone on July 21-23. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.

    Stand up to US, voters tell Blair, G, 25.7.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1828225,00.html

Foreign affairs

Standing back from America

Poll: Stand up to US, voters tell Blair

Tuesday July 25, 2006
Guardian
Leader


Yesterday's shift in Middle East policymaking away from military escalation and towards diplomacy is welcome as far as it goes. It signals, but does not yet deliver, the winding down of the current hostilities. The change of direction, marked not just by the US secretary of state's overdue visit to Beirut and Jerusalem but also by Condoleezza Rice's own statement that a ceasefire is urgent, is doubly necessary. Both the human and the international consequences of Israeli bombing of Lebanon and Hizbullah missile attacks on Israel have begun to escalate out of hand. A ceasefire cannot now come soon enough for civilians on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border who have been subjected to unprovoked and devastating assaults over the past week. But that ceasefire, if and when it is achieved, will have little practical meaning unless it is also durable. The process must also address the grievances that provoked the recent conflicts and must put in place a wider, internationally-enforced security agreement that protects civilians in both nations against a recurrence of the violence.

But a ceasefire cannot come too soon for British foreign policy either. These have been damaging days for Britain's standing, not just abroad but at home too. The perception that our government has set British and European interests aside in order to stay in the slipstream of the US administration is in certain respects a caricature - as the robustly supportive attitude of Downing Street towards the strong statements of the foreign office minister Kim Howells indicates. But the caricature contains enough truth to further weaken British interests abroad and to further damage the government's already weakened standing at home.

It is indeed a global and an American tragedy of our era that the Bush administration is so rarely willing to engage wholeheartedly with international issues and crises, including in the Middle East, except on its own terms. The answer to that tragedy is certainly not to play to the international anti-American gallery as some would prefer. But Britain garners little respect and sustains enormous damage from pretending that the uniquely difficult character of the Bush administration somehow does not matter. Ministers do not deceive us by this pretence and they should not deceive themselves either. If they are not prepared to face up to the domestic and international consequences this time, it will be clear that they have learned nothing from the Iraq war.

The serious disjunction between British public opinion and the stances taken by the Labour government on these issues was a crucial reason why Labour's standing at home, so strong until the Iraq war, was so much weaker in the 2005 election and continues to be so weak now. The theme is powerfully illustrated once more in this morning's Guardian/ICM poll. Our survey depicts a nation that seeks to play a major role in the world but is uneasy about the way Tony Blair's government has gone about doing it. It depicts a nation which decisively - even among Labour's own voters - rejects the closeness of the Blair government to the Bush administration, and which thinks, as Mr Howells said at the weekend, that Israel reacted disproportionately to the challenges that it faces from Hizbullah and its anti-Israel backers. It is a nation in which a majority no longer believes the Iraq war was justified and in which there are serious umbilical reservations about the effectiveness of the continuing British military presence both there and in the very different situation in Afghanistan. It is a nation that accepts its international military roles, but also one that is also clear that its resources are being stretched too far. This is not a troops-out or a ban-the-bomb nation, though it contains many people who are. The British people, in short, have a realistic and commonsense view of our role in the world - and Mr Blair risks being out of step with it again.

    Standing back from America, G, 25.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1827945,00.html

The PM, the mogul

and the secret agenda

Tony Blair flies to California this week to address the annual get-together of News Corporation - led by one Rupert Murdoch. From Europe to broadcasting, terrorism to the direction of the nation, what is the truth about one of the most intriguing relationships in British public life?

Sunday July 23, 2006
The Observer
Gaby Hinsliff, political editor

From its manicured golf course with the breathtaking ocean view, to its pampering spa, the Pebble Beach resort in California should be an ideal spot to unwind. But the guests checking in next weekend - globetrotting politicians, hotshot analysts and senior executives from Rupert Murdoch's mighty News Corporation - are not here to relax. They will gather for one of the media empire's legendary conferences, an intellectual beauty parade before one of the most powerful men on the planet.

Careers will be made and broken this weekend, millions staked or withheld. The man described by a Downing Street spin doctor as the hidden member of Tony Blair's cabinet is looking to the future: and the decisions Murdoch makes could change the way you read, watch, consume and, perhaps, even vote. Which is why Blair is going.

The fortunes of New Labour and News Corp have always been entwined, but just how closely is now emerging. The Observer can reveal the extraordinary efforts Blair and Murdoch make to conceal their relationship, even arranging clandestine meetings abroad because the tycoon regarded Downing Street as too public. Also clear for the first time is the belief among senior aides that Blair would have held a referendum on the euro had it not been for the Eurosceptic Murdoch newspapers.

It can also be disclosed that News International's latest lobbying offensive is against the BBC's bid for a significant rise in its licence fee. Murdoch fears the above-inflation increase would give the corporation an unfair advantage in developing new markets.

But does Murdoch really wield the unhealthy influence his enemies claim, skewing the British political debate thanks to the sheer number of his media outlets - or is he just one among many voices, and one that, so News Corp insiders protest, is often ignored by the Government? And can Labour keep his support once Blair steps down?

Gnomic utterances from the tycoon last month, indicating that he could back either Gordon Brown or David Cameron at the next election, have only intensified the battle for his affections. Asked on US television yesterday what he thought of Cameron, the brutal retort was 'not much' - but while Brown is still ahead in his esteem, the tycoon has doubts about him as well. 'He's sending a signal, which is, "My vote is up for grabs and you've got to work for it",' says one ex-minister.

At Pebble Beach they will ponder the future of the media in a digital era - and the future of the planet, with former presidential candidate Al Gore screening his film on climate change.

But this is also about Blair's future, and ultimately New Labour's. His invitation is partly a personal tribute, a signal that Murdoch wants an 'enduring relationship' with Blair once he leaves Downing Street. 'Being a friend of Rupert's is a very valuable thing in America,' says one of Murdoch's intimates, who argues the media magnate will want to offer the departing premier a job.

Choosing Blair also, however, avoids having to invite, and therefore endorse, either Brown or Cameron... just yet. Because for all its fabled power, Murdoch's flagship newspaper is now almost as nervous as Labour about its choice.

The Sun's reputation depends on backing winners and, unsure which way the electorate is now swinging, it knows if it picks the loser next time, it may end up looking like a chump. 'People are beginning to question whether it's got the political clout it had. If you call this wrong then I think a lot of people will say, "It's now dead as a political force,"' says one former News International executive. The two sides teeing off in California are more evenly matched than they look.

It was Neil Kinnock - convinced the Sun's hostility cost him the 1992 election - who persuaded Blair to take the tabloid seriously. Within months of Blair's coronation as leader of the Labour Party, the carefully courted Murdoch was telling his editors this was 'someone you could imagine people voting for'.

His blessing matters not just because a man who owns a paper that reaches 42 per cent of the reading market should know what makes people tick. Chasing the Sun's endorsement in 1997 after decades of support for the Tories symbolised New Labour's coming of age.

'It was what a party wanting to be in government would do,' explains one architect of the New Labour project. 'It continues to have a symbolic importance that is not actually because of Murdoch, because it's a right-of-centre newspaper and modern politics is about building coalitions.' The Sun wouldn't back any party that had not first captured its millions of readers, and wasn't therefore likely to succeed: it doesn't make winners, it adopts them.

The irony is that Murdoch himself is not party political at all: he is, says the ex-executive, driven by individuals rather than parties. If there's one thing Rupert looks for in people, it's courage, gut instinct, being prepared to stand out from the crowd. One of the reasons he has such respect and affection for Blair is that he's in a minority of about one on Iraq and Rupes thinks he's right.

'What's really interesting is that Rupert doesn't have any respect for politicians who kowtow to his newspapers,' the executive said.

Nor does he respect intellectual lightweights, a category in which he currently places Cameron. Another well-placed News International source says all the Tory leader has managed so far is a 'smallish lead in the polls': he remains an unknown quantity, a view Murdoch reflected yesterday by dubbing Cameron bright but 'totally inexperienced'. The Tory leader's wealthy background may also be an issue - Murdoch's inner circle prefers self-made men.

By contrast Murdoch admires Brown's intellect, but fears his instincts for state regulation and redistributive taxes, and considers him over-cautious. 'He admires Gordon's work ethic, and he's seen as intellectually attractive,' says the source. 'Whether he's courageous or not, is not known. He has not grasped any nettles. And we don't know where he stands on Iraq.'

This matters: Blair's Pebble Beach pass is partly a salute to his support for the war. Murdoch believes fundamentally in strong defence and law and order, small government, and low taxes: he would only support a candidate sceptical on Europe, committed to the war on terror, and free market-orientated enough not to threaten his business interests.

In his book The Spin Doctor's Diary, Lance Price, Downing Street's former director of communications, portrayed a one-sided relationship hyper-sensitive to Murdoch's whims - including the suggestion that Blair bought the Sun's support in 2001 by promising not to rush into the euro. 'Whenever any really big decisions had to be taken, I had the impression that Murdoch was always looking over Blair's shoulder,' Price says. He recalls constantly 'rushing into the Home Office' because Sun headlines about rising crime or asylum chaos had upset Blair, and says he was left with 'the pretty clear impression' that discussions with the Murdoch camp had dictated the handling of the single currency.

Without that pressure, would Blair have held the euro referendum he wanted? 'I think if there hadn't been Murdoch there, he would have felt braver and more able to follow his instincts. It was certainly under consideration for early in the second term. The fact that there wasn't one is a credit to Rupert Murdoch rather than to anyone else,' Price said.

It is a drastic charge, that Murdoch altered the course of history and the economy. News International sources certainly confirm that Anji Hunter, then the Prime Minister's gatekeeper and key custodian of the Murdoch relationship - alongside Alastair Campbell, head of strategy, and chief of staff Jonathan Powell - clearly signalled in 2001 there would be no early referendum, as did the Chancellor's envoy, Ed Balls.

The foreign secretary, Robin Cook, was not in this loop. 'I always took the view that Tony Blair's real Europe minister was [Sun political editor] Trevor Kavanagh,' says Cook's then special adviser, David Clark.

Nonetheless, one former Cabinet minister close to the discussions argues the real problem was that the polls never moved to a clear majority for the euro: Blair simply realised he couldn't win.

Moreover, in 2001 the Sun was not demanding much for its support: it was clearly not going to back William Hague, the man it portrayed as a dead parrot.

In other areas Murdoch's pro-American, pro-Israeli, pro-military intervention stance on the war on terrorism is faithfully reflected in Downing Street. His close associate Irwin Stelzer, the economist viewed as Murdoch's public mouthpiece - although the relationship is actually rather looser - argued in an article last week that Israel must be allowed to 'finish the job' and attacked Iran and Syria for fuelling the conflict, a position Blair echoes publicly.

But that does not prove anything sinister: the view is consistent with positions Blair has taken in the past on Israel. And while News Corp is certainly voluble on media policy - it lobbied ministers six times during the 2003 Broadcasting Bill - so was Lord Birt, the Downing Street aide who formerly ran the BBC.

Nonetheless, Government insiders say James Murdoch - Rupert's son and heir apparent - has made clear he is 'very, very grumpy about BBC funding': News International is in touch with the office of Shaun Woodward, the broadcasting minister, to discuss it. It is particularly irritated by suggestions the BBC could develop a rival to Myspace, its lucrative social networking website. The Treasury is already said to be scanning the BBC bid with a 'very sceptical eye', with a decision due this autumn.

And doubts over the relationship are fuelled by the extraordinary secrecy surrounding it. When his visits to Number 10 began attracting embarrassing attention, Murdoch would slip through the back door: but eventually he resorted to meeting Blair abroad.

'Rupert has a specially adapted 727 which can get anywhere, so if he is wanting to see Blair he doesn't necessarily have to see Blair here,' confirms one News International source.

In fact, Blair meets Murdoch two or three times a year: there are more frequent contacts with Stelzer and with News International managing director Les Hinton. Then there are the myriad smaller connections: Campbell writes a column for The Times; Murdoch's publishing imprint, Harper Collins, is seeking the rights to Blair's memoirs.

Such constant dialogue, Price argues, ensures Murdoch rarely has to lobby directly: Labour already knows what he wants. And that leads to what another ex-Downing Street staffer calls 'the danger of self-censorship': ministers automatically rejecting anything likely to outrage his newspapers, without even having to be told. Will Brown and Cameron be strong enough to resist?

But it is the Sun that counts, and Brown takes nothing for granted. 'Gordon had more of an obssession personally [with Murdoch] than Tony Blair did,' says a former News International executive. 'I never saw any instance of Blair being particularly bothered himself, but I did see it with Gordon - "What would Rupert think of this, how is Rupert?"'

After Pebble Beach, there will be one more News Corp gathering before the next election. The race for the golden ticket has begun.

Who's who in pebble beach

HILLARY CLINTON

Who? New York senator and presidential hopeful
Why? Serious, glamorous and looking for political backing. And she brings her husband, Bill, into the bargain
The Murdoch verdict: His New York Post has been championing her. But he said yesterday he was likely to back Republican John McCain instead.

 

AL GORE

Who? Former Democratic presidential candidate
Why? To show his film on climate change - and liven up the debate over the next Democrat nominations
The Murdoch verdict: James Murdoch, Rupert's son, is so into green issues he's made BSkyB carbon-neutral, meaning it redresses the damage it does to the environment.

NEWT GINGRICH
Who? Former Republican speaker of the House
Why? Neocon pin-up; active in moves to impeach Clinton, which should make for lively dinner conversation with fellow guests
The Murdoch verdict: Hired as a commentator for Murdoch's Fox TV.

    The PM, the mogul and the secret agenda, O, 23.7.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,1827023,00.html

4.30pm update

Blair dismisses Archbishop's ceasefire call

Friday July 21, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Oliver King and agencies


Tony Blair today dismissed increasing demands from the Archbishop of Canterbury and senior Labour MPs to back a UN call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

The prime minister's official spokesman said a ceasefire call would only "make people feel good for a few hours" and would have no impact.

Downing Street has been highly supportive of Israel's right to defend itself aggressively against Hizbullah rocket attacks in northern Israel and the kidnapping of two soldiers.

Earlier Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury urged the US and UK government to "change their minds" and back Kofi Annan's demand for an immediate cessation of hostilities which has killed over 300 people in the region.

The archbishop's comments echoed those of many Labour MPs, including three former ministers, in the Commons yesterday who were angered at the government's refusal to take a tougher line against Isreali military action.

Today, Mr Blair's spokesman said Britain would not ask Israel to stop its attacks against Hizbullah positions without the militia group halting their rocket attacks and releasing the captured Israeli soldiers. The spokesman said: "The prime minister has made it clear right from the beginning that he wants the conflict to end. What, however, people appear to want him to do is to call for a unilateral ceasefire.

"That may make people feel good for a few hours but a) it's unlikely to have any impact; and b) a quick fix will not deliver a sustainable peace in the Middle East. We do support the UN in calling for an end to the conflict on all sides and that is why we have put forward - and Kofi Annan believes it is a good idea - the idea of a stabilisation force.

"But this is not going to end so long as Hizbullah is firing rockets into Israel, so long as soldiers are kidnapped and not released."

The spokesman also denied a report in The Guardian that a rift has developed between Tony Blair, who has been supportive of Israeli military action, and officials and junior ministers in the Foreign Office who want the UK to back the UN ceasefire call.

The paper reported that the foreign secretary Margaret Beckett was attempting to straddle the divide between Mr Blair's pro-Israeli stance and those who are pro-arab in her own department.

Today Mr Blair's spokesman insisted the government was united. "What we all are united in is seeking a sustainable peace, a peace in which the paramilitary tail does not wag the democratic dog," he said. "In which an elected government, the Lebanese government, is able to exercise its sovereignty throughout all of Lebanon."

The Archbishop of Canterbury told the BBC earlier that he had written to religious leaders in Lebanon condemning the escalating violence but said the British government needed to recognise the growing feeling of public despair and dismay at Israel's actions.

Interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, he said: "I think here we really have to ask whether the governments of some western countries are catching up with the consciences of their own people."

Asked to spell out what he meant, Dr Williams said: "I mean that the major players in this at the moment who are not supporting a ceasefire - our own government and the United States government - may perhaps have to reckon with a rising level of public despair and dismay at the spiral continuing and I hope very much that they will bring their influence to bear in moving towards a ceasefire. They need to change their minds."

Dr Williams also questioned the coherence of Israel's military strategy as he appealed to Jewish and Muslim leaders to help broker a peace. He said he was prepared to travel to Lebanon himself if it would help the situation.

Dr Williams said it was "clear" that provocation for the crisis came from Hezbollah's actions. But he also suggested that Israel's response was exacerbating tensions.

"The difficulty is that many of us see the reaction that there has been as contributing not to the short and middle-term security of the state of Israel and its citizens but to further destabilisation."

Chris Mullin, a former foreign office minister, expressed frustration at his own government's stance: "We rightly condemned Hizbullah as a terrorist organisation, which it is, but we only use words like 'regret' when it comes to what the Israelis are up to," he told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme. "And I think, frankly, that what the Israelis are up to is a war crime and they ought to be condemned for it."

He added: "They have created a huge humanitarian disaster out of all proportion to the wrong that they themselves have suffered."

Mr Mullin argued that the UK and Europe had "no influence" over Israel but America could halt the crisis "overnight" if it wanted to.

    Blair dismisses Archbishop's ceasefire call, G, 21.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1826049,00.html

Downing St and Foreign Office

at odds on Lebanon

Friday July 21, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour and Ewen MacAskill

A rift has opened up between Downing Street and the Foreign Office over Israel's continued bombing of Lebanon and the high civilian death toll.

Tony Blair is publicly highly supportive of Israel and has declined to call for an immediate ceasefire. But some in the Foreign Office are now privately urging greater restraint by Israel amid concern that the scale of the bombardment is counter-productive, disproportionate, and undermining the political stability of the Lebanese government.

Margaret Beckett, who only became foreign secretary three months ago, is trying to straddle the divide between Downing Street and her department. But she refused to bow to intense Labour backbench pressure yesterday in the Commons either to call for an unconditional ceasefire or condemn the Israeli action as disproportionate.

The Tories for the first time condemned the Israeli actions as disproportionate.

Mrs Beckett limited herself to calling for restraint on all sides, and pointing out it would be "a pity" if Israel lost the "window of opportunity in which it can highlight to the international community the scale and nature of the danger which Israel and its people face". She added that "the government has no wish or desire for the events in Lebanon to continue for a second longer than is necessary".

Her remarks were taken to imply that the Israeli action, in response to the arrest of two Israeli soldiers and the Hizbullah rocket attacks, was necessary.

By contrast, her junior minister, Kim Howells - due to travel to the region today - was more openly critical of the Israelis, as well as Hizbullah, reflecting the mood among many British diplomats and most Labour MPs.

Mr Howells revealed the Foreign Office "had repeatedly urged Israel to act proportionately, to conform with international law and to avoid the appalling civilian deaths and suffering we are witnessing on our television screens".

He added that Louise Arbour, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, had to be taken very seriously when she said this week that the attacks on both sides could be war crimes under international law.

No 10 has given no sign that it is shifting from its support of the US position of giving Israel time to reduce Hizbullah's military capacity.

In private, the Foreign Office, which has a reputation as being traditionally pro-Arabist, is sceptical about the Israeli strategy and its impact on the wider Middle East. It regards the Israeli bombardment as partly reflecting a need by the new Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, to establish his credibility as successor to the hawkish Ariel Sharon.

Reports from British representatives in Lebanon challenge whether Israel, after its initial attack, is having much impact on Hizbullah. A British official in London warned there was a danger that the civilian deaths risked alienating Arab governments that until now had refrained from condemning Israel's attacks.

Fighting flared on both sides of the border yesterday, amid signs that Israel was preparing a ground invasion. At least two Israeli soldiers and two Hizbullah fighters were killed. Later two Israeli helicopters collided six miles from the border, injuring four Israeli servicemen.

There has been an apparent policy vacuum at the Foreign Office since the conflict began last week. A Foreign Office source said: "It is difficult for the British to do anything. We cannot work out the direction of travel until we hear from the UN security council and know the intent of the US."

In the Commons, many Labour MPs were furious that the the shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, was prepared to be tougher in his warning to Israel than Mrs Beckett. "I think we can say that elements of the Israeli response are disproportionate, including attacks on Lebanese army units, the loss of civilian life and essential infrastructure and such enormous damage to the capacity of the Lebanese government, [which] does damage the Israeli cause in the long term," he told MPs.

The former international development secretary, Clare Short, described the British policy as "so unbalanced, morally wrong and counter-productive and disrespectful of international law".

The former Labour Foreign Office minister Chris Mullin asked Mrs Beckett if it was not "a tiny bit shameful that we can find nothing stronger than the word 'regret' to describe the slaughter and misery and mayhem that Israel has unleashed on a fragile country like Lebanon".

The Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, said: "The prime minister's uncritical acceptance of the Bush administration is not only wrong but deeply damaging to Britain's international reputation."

    Downing St and Foreign Office at odds on Lebanon, G, 21.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1825645,00.html

Opinion - Mary Ann Sieghart

The shocking silence from No 10

Blair’s tacit support for Israel’s
grossly disproportionate actions
sends the wrong message

July 21, 2006
The Times 
Mary Ann Sieghart

IT IS A CASE of the Blair that didn’t bark. Why hasn’t the Prime Minister publicly condemned the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza? Most British — and many Israeli — citizens are horrified when they see the devastation wreaked by Israeli bombings. There were 80 such raids in the early hours of yesterday alone. By late afternoon, some 327 civilians had died in Lebanon, compared with 34 Israelis. Go figure, as they say.

If this is a proportionate response, I’m a satsuma. Even the most hardline supporters of Israel, who justifiably point to the country’s right to defend itself against attacks from Hezbollah, must by now have come to realise that the “overkill” will have the opposite of its desired effect. For every member of Hezbollah who dies, another ten will be recruited to its cause. The world will be full of sympathy for the benighted residents of Lebanon who had thought, at last, that their country had secured itself a stable, peaceful democratic future. Half a million of them have been forced from their homes because two Israeli soldiers were taken hostage. That hardly looks like justice.

Meanwhile, a forgotten war is taking place in Gaza, overshadowed by the bigger one in Lebanon. Since Israel began its hostilities there, three weeks ago, some 110 Palestinians have lost their lives and countless more have been injured, while just one Israeli has died. The civilian infrastructure has been trashed. And all this just as the Hamas Government and the Fatah party had at last agreed on a formula for peace negotiations. What chance of peace now?

Mr Blair, by his silence, seems to be endorsing the US line: allow Israel at least another week to take action against Hezbollah before any calls for a ceasefire are made. He would doubtless argue that, unless he is supportive of the Israelis publicly, he will have no traction with them privately. Yet there are two big problems with this approach.

First, the UK has little traction with Israel anyway. Mr Blair had a frank private conversation with the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, when he visited Britain last month. It doesn’t seem to have done much good.

Secondly, and more importantly, Mr Blair’s silence is sending a strong message to the world’s — and particularly Britain’s — Muslim community. By failing to condemn Israel’s overreaction, he is allying himself with those acts. What more powerful ammunition could there be for the radicalisers of Britain’s young Muslims? “Your Government doesn’t care about you and your fellow believers. You need to take action to defend them in this noble cause.”

It is a terrifying prospect. Mr Blair is endangering our nation’s internal security by his reluctance to move a millimetre from the US stance. Even if he is engaging in private diplomacy with Israel, it is not without serious costs to the rest of us. Long after he leaves government, we may be paying the price.

At yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, there was some disquiet about the official line. Some ministers are wondering whether it was wise to move Jack Straw from the Foreign Office at the reshuffle. For, had he stayed, the British response to the Middle East crisis might have been more nuanced.

Mr Blair and Mr Straw used to play a clever triangulating game. The Prime Minister would sound more pro-Israeli, the Foreign Secretary more pro-Arab. They used the same tactic with Iran. This positively suited the US sometimes, as it allowed Mr Straw to follow avenues that were not open to Condoleezza Rice.

Margaret Beckett, though, is not experienced enough either to make her voice heard internationally or to strike out on her own, as Mr Straw used to. It is a great lost opportunity. Instead, yesterday, she just parroted the US line, refusing to condemn Israel despite being urged to do so by members on all sides of the House.

The danger of the current situation is that Gaza and southern Lebanon risk becoming another Iraq, with their populations radicalised and their governments unable to restrain the terrorists even if they wanted to. The conflict could even bring together Hamas and Hezbollah, who currently have little in common apart from their opposition to Israel. Hamas is made up of Sunni Muslims; Hezbollah of Shias. But united, they would make a formidably dangerous grouping on Israel’s doorstep.

Mr Blair should be saying all this to Mr Olmert, on the record. Britain could be acting as Israel’s critical friend, representing not just the outside world’s fears for the region, but also the half of Israel’s population who believe that their country has been going too far.

He could point out that the “eye for an eye” doctrine of the Old Testament was not a vengeful prescription but was designed precisely to restrict vengeance to that which was proportionate. The verse did not ordain ten eyes for one eye, which is the ratio the Israelis are currently pursuing.

The War on Terror is too easy a pretext for Israel to hide behind. It does not give free licence for a state to bombard the innocent citizens of another in the hope that a few terrorists might be killed in the process. Imagine if we had bombed Dublin in the same way, with more than 300 deaths in a week and half a million people displaced. That would surely have been seen as a war crime.

Mr Blair has moved too swiftly from defending Israel’s right to exist to supporting Israel right or wrong. It is bad for the Middle East and it is dangerous for Britain. He ought to know better.

    The shocking silence from No 10, Ts, 21.7.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1071-2279230,00.html

Arrest brings 'cash for honours' row

to No 10's doorstep

July 13, 2006
The Times
By Andrew Pierce, Philip Webster and Rajeev Syal

LORD LEVY, the Prime Minister’s personal fundraiser, was arrested yesterday by Scotland Yard, as the “cash for peerages” controversy engulfing Downing Street escalated.

The move came only days after The Times disclosed that a senior Labour figure had told a businessman nominated for a peerage to hide that he had lent the party £250,000.

The arrest brings the most serious parliamentary corruption investigation in 70 years to Tony Blair’s doorstep and prompted speculation at Westminster last night that the Prime Minister would also be questioned. Downing Street said last night that it had no idea whether Mr Blair would be questioned.

Lord Levy, nicknamed Lord Cashpoint for his role in raising millions of pounds for new Labour, was arrested at lunchtime yesterday and questioned for several hours at a Central London police station.

Whitehall sources said that he was arrested because of a failure by senior Labour officials fully to disclose correspondence regarding loans accepted by the party and peerages offered in 2005.

“It appears that the voluntary process has not worked, and that is why the arrest took place,” a source said.

Prosecution sources said that the arrest of Lord Levy was part of the police process and would not necessarily lead to charges. In a statement Lord Levy accused police of using their arrest powers “totally unnecessarily”. A spokesman added: “He vigorously denies any wrongdoing.”

The £14 million in secret loans was known only to Mr Blair, Lord Levy and Matt Carter, the general secretary of the Labour Party at the time.

The arrest came as Labour began a determined attempt to show that its supporters have not been deterred from funding it by the row over loans and cash-for-peerages. It has taken out a full-page advertisment in The Times today in which named donors say that they are “proud to help fund the Labour Party”. The police moved against Lord Levy after The Times reported on Saturday that Sir Gulam Noon, the curry magnate, had been asked by an unnamed Labour Party official to remove details of his loan from paperwork to be submitted by No 10 to the Lords Appoinments Commission in support of his peerage nomination. Sir Gulam retrieved the papers from Downing Street and submitted them again without mentioning the loan. It was Lord Levy who made the telephone call to Sir Gulam.

No objection had been raised by the commission to his peerage until The Times revealed that Sir Gulam had made a secret loan to the party. The law requires that all loans to political parties be declared unless they are genuine commercial transactions with an agreed redemption date.Under the Political Parties Elections and Referendum Act 2000 the penalty for failure to provide information about donors is up to one year’s imprisonment. Under the 1925 Act, those convicted face a maximum jail sentence of two years.

Last night Downing Street was refusing to distance itself from Lord Levy, Mr Blair’s tennis partner and close friend, who will continue as the Prime Minister’s personal envoy to the Middle East.

Three other businessmen who made secret loans to the Labour Party have also had their peerages blocked by the scutiny committees.

Friends of Sir Gulam said that they were shocked by the arrest, despite their disappointment at Lord Levy’s behaviour towards the curry magnate. One said: “This arrest will bring the Labour Party’s actions, as well of those of Downing Street, into sharp focus.”

The backers of the advertisement in The Times include Sir Ronald Cohen, a businessman, Eddie Izzard, the comedian, Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United, and Patrick Stewart, the actor.

Lord Levy’s arrest is the second since the corruption inquiry began in March. Des Smith, a member of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, was arrested after he was secretly recorded by an undercover reporter apparently offering a range of honours.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “Scotland Yard will have to question Tony Blair because he is at the top of the honours process.”

    Arrest brings 'cash for honours' row to No 10's doorstep, Ts, 13.7.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,17129-2267859,00.html

Trident is evil and against God,

bishops warn Blair

By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
The Independent
Published: 10 July 2006

Nineteen bishops have joined the row over the replacement of Britain's nuclear weapons by warning the Prime Minister that the possession of Trident is "evil" and "profoundly anti-God".

In a letter published in The Independent today, the bishops give weight to the growing opposition among Labour MPs to the plan to approve the Trident replacement by the end of the year.

Religious arguments against the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons could unsettle Tony Blair, who is a regular churchgoer.

Mr Blair is likely to feel on firmer ground when faced with the practical, moral and economic arguments for opposing Trident raised by the bishops.

The letter says: "Trident and other nuclear arsenals threaten long-term and fatal damage to the global environment and its people. As such, their end is evil and both possession and use profoundly anti-God acts."

The signatories to the letter include the Rt Rev Peter Price, the Bishop of Bath and Wells; Dr David James, the Bishop of Bradford; Jack Nicholls, the Bishop of Sheffield; and Colin Bennetts, the Bishop of Coventry.

They challenge Mr Blair over his commitment at the Gleneagles summit a year ago to make poverty history. "The costs involved in the maintenance and replacement of Trident could be used to address pressing environmental concerns, the causes of terrorism, poverty and debt," they said.

Labour MPs are likely to challenge the Secretary of State for Defence, Des Browne, over the Bishops' letter when he speaks to Labour backbenchers at a private meeting at Westminster tonight.

Mr Blair is also facing growing unrest among his MPs over his failure to guarantee a vote in Parliament on replacing Trident. A Commons motion calling for a vote has been signed by 122 MPs, including many senior Labour members.

It was tabled by Michael Meacher, the former environment minister, who welcomed the intervention of the bishops, saying: "It is essential that a decision of this magnitude be taken with a debate in Parliament.

"I support the arguments by the bishops but I would add to them - it is not an independent nuclear deterrent because if the Americans don't approve it, we cannot use it; and on non-proliferation grounds - it is impossible to say to countries like Iran you should not have nuclear weapons but we must have ours."

Church leaders have a long tradition of opposing Britain's nuclear arsenal and many senior church figures joined marches to ban the bomb in the 1960s with Labour stalwarts such as Michael Foot, later the leader of the Labour Party.

But this is the first time senior church figures have entered the debate on replacing Trident since the Prime Minister confirmed the Cabinet was about to carry out its review.

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has appalled some of his supporters, including Clare Short, by saying he would support the deployment of a new generation of nuclear weapons.

    Trident is evil and against God, bishops warn Blair, I, 10.7.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1169722.ece

11.15am

We must defeat ideas of extremists,

says Blair

Tuesday July 4, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Hélène Mulholland and agencies.

Tony Blair today said it was necessary to "defeat the ideas" of Muslim extremists after a poll revealed that one in eight British Muslims regarded the 7/7 bombers as "martyrs".

Speaking to the Commons liaison committee this morning, Mr Blair was taken to task over whether the government had done enough to "win the hearts and minds" of British Muslims.

John Denham, the home affairs select committee chairman, referred Mr Blair to a Times poll published today which revealed that 13% of British Muslims regarded the bombers as martyrs .

Mr Blair pointed out that the same poll shows the majority of Muslims (78%) are utterly opposed to terrorism.

"The government can't defeat this alone. You've got to defeat the ideas, and the completely false sense of grievance against the west," Mr Blair told MPs.

"You can't defeat the ideology of extremist Islam by saying we half agree with your grievances but you're wrong to deal with it that way - you have to defeat it entirely," Mr Blair said.

"It's a global movement with an ideology, not a British movement. There's a reason why people are being picked up in Canada, why people were picked up in Spain even after the troops were withdrawn."

But it wasn't just down to the government, Mr Blair insisted. It was also the responsibility of community leaders.

On the Forest Gate operation, Mr Blair said he believed most Muslims would recognise that the operation "had to happen, given the information the police had".

Mr Blair conceded to the 31 select committee chairs that it was important to work "very, very hard" to make sure the communities understand why these things happen.

He cited the efforts of the police and security services before pointing to a "greater debate" taking place within the Muslim community about tackling extremists,

But he defended his decision to rule out a public inquiry on the grounds that it would divert a "vast amount" of energy and resources from police and security operations.

Asked why the prime minister's committee on cohesion had still not met six months after it was convened, Mr Blair hinted at internal tensions within Muslim ranks.

"Not all the groups agree with each other," he said.

The Populus poll for the Times and ITV news reveals a deeply divided community over issues of security and nationhood in the wake of last year's atrocities.

While 13% glorified the London bombers, a further 16% believe that while the attacks were wrong, the cause behind the bombings was right.

While 65% of those surveyed for the Times poll believed their community needs to do more to integrate properly with British society, 7% said suicide attacks on civilians can be justified in some circumstances, rising to 16% for a military target.

The majority rejects extremism, with 56% believing the government is failing to do enough to fight extremism - more than the 49% of the population as a whole who agree.

The poll of more than 1,000 Muslims found that almost two thirds (64%) believe no more than a tiny minority within their community sympathised with the 7/7 bombers, while 59% of the general population believe the same.

One in two British Muslims thinks the intelligence services have the right to infiltrate Muslim organisations to gather information about their activities and the way they are obtaining funding.

Only a third of those surveyed believe that anti-terror laws are applied fairly, yet a similar number (35%) said they would feel proud if a close family member joined the police.

Britain's security services are seeking to increase the number of Muslim recruits to bolster their counter-terrorism capabilities.

But the Guardian revealed today that a number of al-Qaida sympathisers have unsuccessfully tried to infiltrate M15.

The majority (78%) of those surveyed said they would be angry if a close relative joined al-Qaida, with just 2% saying they be "proud" and a further 16% expressing indifference.

The poll was published as the government rejected criticisms made by a backbench Labour MP over its efforts to engage British Muslims after the London bombings.

Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting, said young Asians were becoming increasingly alienated from mainstream life in Britain, leading to polarisation and extremism.

Mr Khan also accused the government of letting down members of Muslim working groups set up by ministers after the London terror attacks to find ways of tackling extremism and the radicalisation of young Muslims.

In a speech last night to the Fabian Society to mark the anniversary of the July 7 bombings, Mr Khan said little of the vision put forward in a report by the working groups last November had been acted upon.

"What has happened to all the good ideas? Why hasn't an action plan been drawn up with time lines," he said.

"There has been limited progress but there is an air of despondency. Only three recommendations have been implemented, and group members feel let down."

He added: "We need to return to these ideas and this strategy. We need to show that it was not a short-term PR exercise, and that the ideas have not been shelved."

The Department for Communities and Local Government today rebutted the claims as it maintained that many community-led projects were under way to help "root out extremism and tackle the causes of radicalisation".

A DCLG spokesman said: "The 64 recommendations developed by the preventing extremism together groups represent a unique achievement.

"The practical suggestions the groups made were primarily for Muslim communities to take forward, although some will be delivered in partnership with government, and some will be for government to lead.

"To suggest that none of them are being delivered undermines the hard work that the groups have put in to tackling extremism."

    We must defeat ideas of extremists, says Blair, G, 4.7.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1812363,00.html

Blair laid bare:

the article that may get you arrested

In the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony Blair's Government has quietly and systematically taken power from Parliament and the British people. The author charts a nine-year assault on civil liberties that reveals the danger of trading freedom for security - and must have Churchill spinning in his grave

Published: 29 June 2006
The Independent
By Henry Porter

In the shadow of Winston Churchill's statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people - mostly young and dressed outlandishly - hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.

Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It is all rather silly and yet in Blair's Britain there is a kind of nobility in the amateurishness and persistence of the gesture. This collection of oddballs, looking for all the world as if they had stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometre, or a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not first acquired written permission from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire centre of British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman's permission.

The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn't always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain's national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away.

On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected that he almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting on their right to demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. "If you will not fight for the right," he once growled, "when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

Churchill lived in far more testing times than ours, but he always revered the ancient tradition of Britain's "unwritten constitution". I imagined him becoming flesh again and walking purposefully toward Downing Street - without security, of course - there to address Tony Blair and his aides on their sacred duty as the guardians of Britain's Parliament and the people's rights.

For Blair, that youthful baby-boomer who came to power nine years ago as the embodiment of democratic liberalism as well as the new spirit of optimism in Britain, turns out to have an authoritarian streak that respects neither those rights nor, it seems, the independence of the elected representatives in Parliament. And what is remarkable - in fact almost a historic phenomenon - is the harm his government has done to the unwritten British constitution in those nine years, without anyone really noticing, without the press objecting or the public mounting mass protests. At the inception of Cool Britannia, British democracy became subject to a silent takeover.

Last year - rather late in the day, I must admit - I started to notice trends in Blair's legislation which seemed to attack individual rights and freedoms, to favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime Minister to run departments of government) over the scrutiny of Parliament, and to put in place all the necessary laws for total surveillance of society.

There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the Acts - at least 15 of them - and to write about them in my weekly column in The Observer. After about eight weeks, the Prime Minister privately let it be known that he was displeased at being called authoritarian by me. Very soon I found myself in the odd position of conducting a formal e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I sitting in my London home with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation, the Prime Minister in No 10 with all the resources of government at his disposal. Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for action against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behaviour.

The day after the exchange was published, the grudging truce between the Government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in which he attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics naming me and two other journalists and complaining about "the pernicious and even dangerous poison" in the media.

So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British Government, but please don't pay it any mind. When governments attack the media, it is often a sign that the media have for once gotten something right. I might add that this column also comes with the more serious warning that, if rights have been eroded in the land once called "the Mother of Parliaments", it can happen in any country where a government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and uses it to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for security.

Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law - that is, that ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of experts, which makes up one half of the British constitution - is often well concealed. Many of the measures have been slipped through under legislation that appears to address problems the public is concerned about. For instance, the law banning people from demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament is contained in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has been affected by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and search people in a designated area - which can be anywhere - and by antisocial behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone from a particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person breaks that order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five years. Likewise, the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 - designed to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation - is being used to control protest. A woman who sent two e-mails to a pharmaceutical company politely asking a member of the staff not to work with a company that did testing on animals was prosecuted for "repeated conduct" in sending an e-mail twice, which the Act defines as harassment.

There is a demonic versatility to Blair's laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way they are being used. "What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming," he says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up."

Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is a fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same offence - the law of double jeopardy - no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, which also makes hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a court decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of control orders by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving about freely and using the phone and internet, without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence against him - house arrest in all but name.

Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which preceded Blair's Government, but which is now being used to patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old graduate of Balliol College named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the direction of two mounted police officers, "Mate, you know your horse is gay. I hope you don't have a problem with that." He was given one of the new, on-the-spot fines - £80 - which he refused to pay, with the result that he was taken to court. Some 10 months later the Crown Prosecution Service dropped its case that he had made homophobic remarks likely to cause disorder.

There are other people the police have investigated but failed to prosecute: the columnist Cristina Odone, who made a barely disparaging aside about Welsh people on TV (she referred to them as "little Welshies"); and the head of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who said that homosexual practices were "not acceptable" and civil partnerships between gays were "harmful".

The remarks may be a little inappropriate, but I find myself regretting that my countrymen's opinions - their bloody-mindedness, their truculence in the face of authority, their love of insult and robust debate - are being edged out by this fussy, hairsplitting, second-guessing, politically correct state that Blair is trying to build with what he calls his "respect agenda".

Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few people being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite whirlwind who runs Liberty believes that "the small measures of increasing ferocity add up over time to a society of a completely different flavour". That is exactly the phrase I was looking for. Britain is not a police state - the fact that Tony Blair felt it necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that - but it is becoming a very different place under his rule, and all sides of the House of Commons agree. The Liberal Democrats' spokesman on human rights and civil liberties, David Heath, is sceptical about Blair's use of the terrorist threat. "The age-old technique of any authoritarian or repressive government has always been to exaggerate the terrorist threat to justify their actions," he says. "I am not one to underestimate the threat of terrorism, but I think it has been used to justify measures which have no relevance to attacking terrorism effectively." And Bob Marshall-Andrews - a Labour MP who, like quite a number of others on Blair's side of the House of Commons, is deeply worried about the tone of government - says of his boss, "Underneath, there is an unstable authoritarianism which has seeped into the [Labour] Party."

Chakrabarti, who once worked as a lawyer in the Home Office, explains: "If you throw live frogs into a pan of boiling water, they will sensibly jump out and save themselves. If you put them in a pan of cold water and gently apply heat until the water boils they will lie in the pan and boil to death. It's like that." In Blair you see the champion frog boiler of modern times. He is also a lawyer who suffers acute impatience with the processes of the law. In one of his e-mails to me he painted a lurid - and often true - picture of the delinquency in some of Britain's poorer areas, as well as the helplessness of the victims. His response to the problem of societal breakdown was to invent a new category of restraint called the antisocial behaviour order, or Asbo.

"Please speak to the victims of this menace," he wrote. "They are people whose lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live next door to someone whose kids are out of control: who play their music loud until 2 am; who vilify anyone who asks them to stop; who are often into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a park where children can't play because of needles, used condoms, and hooligans hanging around.

"It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which the police could prosecute. In practice, they don't. It would involve in each case a disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment for what would be, for any single act, a low-level sentence. Instead, they can now use an Asbo or a parenting order or other measures that attack not an offence but behaviour that causes harm and distress to people, and impose restrictions on the person doing it, breach of which would mean they go to prison."

How the Asbo works is that a complaint is lodged with a magistrates' court which names an individual or parent of a child who is said to be the source of antisocial behaviour. The actions which cause the trouble do not have to be illegal in themselves before an Asbo is granted and the court insists on the cessation of that behaviour - which may be nothing more than walking a dog, playing music, or shouting in the street. It is important to understand that the standards of evidence are much lower here than in a normal court hearing because hearsay - that is, rumour and gossip - is admissible. If a person is found to have broken an Asbo, he or she is liable to a maximum of five years in prison, regardless of whether the act is in itself illegal. So, in effect, the person is being punished for disobedience to the state.

Blair is untroubled by the precedent that this law might offer a real live despot, or by the fact that Asbos are being used to stifle legitimate protest, and indeed, in his exchange with me, he seemed to suggest that he was considering a kind of super-Asbo for more serious criminals to "harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country". It was significant that nowhere in this rant did he mention the process of law or a court.

He offers something new: not a police state but a controlled state, in which he seeks to alter radically the political and philosophical context of the criminal-justice system. "I believe we require a profound rebalancing of the civil liberties debate," he said in a speech in May. "The issue is not whether we care about civil liberties but what that means in the early 21st century." He now wants legislation to limit powers of British courts to interpret the Human Rights Act. The Act, imported from the European Convention on Human Rights, was originally inspired by Winston Churchill, who had suggested it as a means to entrench certain rights in Europe after the war.

Blair says that this thinking springs from the instincts of his generation, which is "hard on behaviour and soft on lifestyle." Actually, I was born six weeks before Blair, 53 years ago, and I can categorically say that he does not speak for all my generation. But I agree with his other self-description, in which he claims to be a moderniser, because he tends to deny the importance of history and tradition, particularly when it comes to Parliament, whose powers of scrutiny have suffered dreadfully under his government.

There can be few duller documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005, which is perhaps just as well for the Government, for both vastly extend the arbitrary powers of ministers while making them less answerable to Parliament. The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in, particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.

One response might be to look into his actions by holding a government investigation under the Inquiries Act, but then the minister may set its terms, suppress evidence, close the hearing to the public, and terminate it without explanation. Under this Act, the reports of government inquiries are presented to ministers, not, as they once were, to Parliament. This fits very well into a pattern where the executive branch demands more and more unfettered power, as does Charles Clarke's suggestion that the press should be subject to statutory regulation.

I realise that it would be testing your patience to go too deeply into the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government has been trying to smuggle through Parliament this year, but let me just say that its original draft would have allowed ministers to make laws without reference to elected representatives.

Imagine the President of the United States trying to neuter the Congress in this manner, so flagrantly robbing it of its power. Yet until recently all this has occurred in Britain with barely a whisper of coverage in the British media.

Blair is the lowest he has ever been in the polls, but he is still energetically fighting off his rival, Gordon Brown, with a cabinet reshuffle and a stout defence of his record. In an e-mail to me, Blair denied that he was trying to abolish parliamentary democracy, then swiftly moved to say how out of touch the political and legal establishments were, which is perhaps the way that he justifies these actions to himself. It was striking how he got one of his own pieces of legislation wrong when discussing control orders - or house arrest - for terrorist suspects in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is incorporated into British law under the Human Rights Act. "The point about the Human Rights Act," he declared, "is that it does allow the courts to strike down the act of our 'sovereign Parliament'." As Marcel Berlins, the legal columnist of The Guardian, remarked, "It does no such thing."

How can the Prime Minister get such a fundamentally important principle concerning human rights so utterly wrong, especially when it so exercised both sides of the House of Commons? The answer is that he is probably not a man for detail, but Charles Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph, now a columnist and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, believes that New Labour contains strands of rather sinister political DNA.

"My theory is that the Blairites are Marxist in process, though not in ideology - well, actually it is more Leninist." It is true that several senior ministers had socialist periods. Charles Clarke, John Reid, recently anointed Home Secretary, and Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, were all on the extreme left, if not self-declared Leninists. Moore's implication is that the sacred Blair project of modernising Britain has become a kind of ersatz ideology and that this is more important to Blair than any of the country's political or legal institutions. "He's very shallow," says Moore. "He's got a few things he wants to do and he rather impressively pursues them."

One of these is the national ID card scheme, opposition to which brings together such disparate figures as the Earl of Onslow, a Conservative peer of the realm; Commander George Churchill-Coleman, the famous head of New Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist unit during the worst years of IRA bombings; and Neil Tennant, one half of the hugely successful pop group Pet Shop Boys.

The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism, identity theft, and illegal immigration until you realise that the centralised database - the National Identity Register - will log and store details of every important action in a person's life. When the ID card is swiped as someone identifies himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or insurance company, those details are retained and may be inspected by, among others, the police, tax authorities, customs, and MI5, the domestic intelligence service. The system will locate and track the entire adult population. If you put it together with the national system of licence-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to go live on British highways and in town centres, and understand that the ID card, under a new regulation, will also carry details of a person's medical records, you realise that the state will be able to keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find out about the most private parts of a person's life.

Despite the cost of the ID card system - estimated by the Government as being about £5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being between £10bn and £19bn - few think that it will attack the problems of terrorism and ID theft.

George Churchill-Coleman described it to me as an absolute waste of time. "You and I will carry them because we are upright citizens. But a terrorist isn't going to carry [his own]. He will be carrying yours."

Neil Tennant, a former Labour donor who has stopped giving money to and voting for Labour because of ID cards, says: "My specific fear is that we are going to create a society where a policeman stops me on the way to Waitrose on the King's Road and says, 'Can I see your identity card?' I don't see why I should have to do that." Tennant says he may leave the country if a compulsory ID card comes into force. "We can't live in a total-surveillance society," he adds. "It is to disrespect us."

Defending myself against claims of paranoia and the attacks of Labour's former home secretary, I have simply referred people to the statute book of British law, where the evidence of what I have been saying is there for all to see. But two other factors in this silent takeover are not so visible. The first is a profound change in the relationship between the individual and the state. Nothing demonstrates the sense of the state's entitlement over the average citizen more than the new laws that came in at the beginning of the year and allow anyone to be arrested for any crime - even dropping litter. And here's the crucial point. Once a person is arrested he or she may be fingerprinted and photographed by the police and have a DNA sample removed with an oral swab - by force if necessary. And this is before that person has been found guilty of any crime, whether it be dropping litter or shooting someone.

So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no reason to be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party conference speech, Blair said this: "The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first." The point of human rights, as Churchill noted, is that they treat the innocent, the suspect, and the convict equally: "These are the symbols, in the treatment of crime and criminals, which mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are a sign and proof of the living virtue in it."

The DNA database is part of this presumption of guilt. Naturally the police support it, because it has obvious benefits in solving crimes, but it should be pointed out to any country considering the compulsory retention of the DNA of innocent people that in Britain 38 per cent of all black men are represented on the database, while just 10 percent of white men are. There will be an inbuilt racism in the system until - heaven forbid - we all have our DNA taken and recorded on our ID cards.

Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, is one of the most vocal critics of Blair's new laws. In the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture at the City University, London, in April she gave a devastating account of her own party's waywardness. She accused government ministers of seeing themselves as the embodiment of the state, rather than, as I would put it, the servants of the state.

"The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the experience of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when a person is on trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one's liberty should be removed without evidence of the highest standard. By removing trial by jury and seeking to detain people on civil Asbo orders as a pre-emptive strike, by introducing ID cards, the Government is creating new paradigms of state power. Being required to produce your papers to show who you are is a public manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state."

The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people. "We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment," he says. "That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They've bought the Government's arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom."

Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being in one of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of impending danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do take some hope from the picnickers of Parliament Square. May the numbers of these young eccentrics swell and swell over the coming months, for their actions are a sign that the spirit of liberty and dogged defiance are not yet dead in Britain.

This article is taken from the current issue of Vanity Fair

Charged for quoting George Orwell in public

In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." In his possession, he had several copies of an article in the American magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair's Big Brother Legacy", which were confiscated by the police. "The implication that I read from this statement at the time was that I was being accused of handing out subversive material," said Mr Jago. Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine's London editor, wrote to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such articles were used in evidence under the Act.

Mr Porter said: "The police told Mr Jago this was 'politically motivated' material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to break the law. I therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity Fair within a designated area is not regarded as 'politically motivated' and evidence of conscious law-breaking."

Scotland Yard has declined to comment.

Enemies of the state?

Maya Evans 25

The chef was arrested at the Cenotaph in Whitehall reading out the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. She was the first person to be convicted under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which requires protesters to obtain police permission before demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament.

Helen John 68, and Sylvia Boyes 62

The Greenham Common veterans were arrested in April by Ministry of Defence police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the US military base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain can be jailed for a year or fined £5,000.

Brian Haw 56

Mr Haw has become a fixture in Parliament Square with placards berating Tony Blair and President Bush. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was designed mainly with his vigil in mind. After being arrested, he refused to enter a plea. However, Bow Street magistrates' court entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in May.

Walter Wolfgang 82

The octogenarian heckled Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, during his speech to the Labour Party conference. He shouted "That's a lie" as Mr Straw justified keeping British troops in Iraq. He was manhandled by stewards and ejected from the Brighton Centre. He was briefly detained under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.

    Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested, I, 29.6.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1129827.ece

2.30pm update

Blair pledges

to 'reclaim' criminal justice system

Friday June 23, 2006
Hélène Mulholland
Guardian Unlimited

Tony Blair today defied some of Britain's leading crime experts by outlining plans to "reclaim" the criminal justice system and change the mindset of an "out of touch" political and legal establishment.

The prime minister signalled moves to introduce more laws "that properly reflect reality", despite a welter of criminal justice legislation already introduced under nine years of Labour rule.

Politicians and the legal establishment were "in denial" about the changing world, which has seen crime spiral in the past 50 years, while both detection and conviction rates had dropped, he said.

The prime minister complained that previous efforts to introduce tough summary powers that had been watered down by parliament.

In a long speech outlining his philosophy on crime, Mr Blair said "unpalatable choices about liberty and security" needed to be made to "rebalance" a system in favour of the law-abiding public.

Mr Blair listed a number of improvements under his watch, but added that the criminal justice system was still "locked" in the 20th century following the great progressive reforms of Victorian times, which sought to tackle unfair sentencing policy in an era where there was no equality before the law.

One unforeseen consequence was that the pervading culture still ensured the fair treatment of suspects and criminals was detached from an equivalent concern with victims.

Part of the problem was the absence of a proper, considered intellectual debate about the nature of liberty in the modern word, Mr Blair said.

"It's about which human rights prevail," Mr Blair said. "In making that decision, there is a balance to be struck. I am saying it is time to rebalance the decision in favour of the decent, law-abiding majority who play by the rules and think others should too."

He added: "It's no use saying that in theory there should be no conflict between the traditional protections for the suspect and the rights of the law-abiding majority because, as a result of the changing nature of crime and society, there is, in practice, such a conflict; and every day we don't resolve it, by rebalancing the system, the consequence is not abstract, it is out there, very real on our streets."

Citing a number of causes for the changing face of crime in light of geographical and social mobility and more fluid family structures, Mr Blair said the establishment was "in denial" about the need for "wholesale reform".

"The public are anxious for a perfectly good reason: they think they play fair and play by the rules and they see too many people who don't, getting away with it.

"By the public, I don't mean the 'hang 'em and flog 'em' brigade. I mean ordinary, decent law-abiding folk, who believe in rehabilitation as well as punishment, understand there are deep-rooted causes of crime and know that no government can eliminate it.

"But they think the political and legal establishment are out of touch on the issue and they are right."

Laws already introduced, such as antisocial behaviour legislation, have made a "real difference", but have not been clear or tough enough, he warned.

"We need to do an audit of where the gaps are, and the laws that are necessary."

Mr Blair said the court system needed an overhaul to become fit for 21st century purpose. "... What is necessary is, piece by piece, to analyse where the shortcoming are and put in place the systems to remove them."

He concluded: "Such is the changing nature of that world and the ferocity of those forces, we need to adjust, to reclaim the system and thereby the street for the law-abiding majority.

"That means not disrespecting civil liberties but re-assessing what respect for them means today and placing a far higher priority, in what is a conflict of rights, on the rights of those who keep the law rather than break it.

"This is not the argument of the lynch mob or of people who are indifferent to convicting the innocent, it is simply a reasonable and rational response to a problem that is as much one of modernity as of liberty."

Mr Blair's speech drew on his own experiences stretching back to his days as an opposition home affairs spokesman, as well as the views of five experts - ranging from an MP to a criminologist - specially commissioned to provide research.

But one of the crime experts today rubbished notions that the criminal justice system was in crisis, stressing that crime rates had been falling for the last decade.

Professor Ian Loader, who submitted a written paper on the No.10 website, said those who felt let down by the criminal justice system were "a noisy minority".

Prof Loader, speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, said that instead of knee-jerk reactions, the government should encourage an informed dialogue and try to take some of the "heat" out of the debate.

"We have had 25 years of government that have taken law and order very seriously... We have had 40 pieces of law and order legislation from this government.

"We have had countless new criminal offences, we've got a prison population that is bursting at the seams and we have got sentences in aggregate terms going up not going down.

"And yet he [Mr Blair] is expecting us to believe that the criminal justice system has become unbalanced and therefore we need a further round of reform in order to protect the rights of the victim.

"I think that thesis needs some more evidence to support it. My current position is that is beggars belief."

The Conservatives also rounded on Mr Blair for accusing others of being in denial.

The shadow home secretary, David Davis, said: "Tony Blair claims that everyone is in denial - but he fails to recognise that it is he and his own government that has failed. "How can a prime minister who has had nine years in office - with some of the largest majorities in history - accuse parliament of watering down his legislation?

He talks about being beaten by the rules after nine years of setting the rules.

"As for talking about accelerating justice, we remember his proposed night courts and cashpoint fines for yobs - once the headline passed, so did the political momentum behind them."

The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, said Mr Blair's comments were an "admission of failure".

"It is striking that after 10 years in power, the gap between his rhetoric and reality is wider than ever. It is a continuing failure of government policy that is letting people down, not some nebulous 'liberal establishment' or an ill-defined need to 'rebalance' the system."

He added: "We have prisons bursting at the seams, a judiciary at loggerheads with the government, a probation service on its knees, falling conviction rates for serious crimes, one of the highest rates of reoffending in western Europe, and a Home Office in a state of institutional meltdown.

"One speech at the tail-end of his premiership cannot absolve Tony Blair of his responsibility for this dismal state of affairs."

    Blair pledges to 'reclaim' criminal justice system, G, 23.6.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1804422,00.html

Full text

Prime minister's speech

on criminal justice reform

Full text of Tony Blair's speech in Bristol today

Friday June 23, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

For me in many ways, this is the culmination of a personal journey. I was brought up in a legal household, studied law, became a barrister with the traditional lawyer's views of issues to do with civil liberties and crime.

I then became an M.P. and at the same time was living in London, in the inner city. I saw first hand in London and in Sedgefield through my constituents the changing nature of our society and of law and order.

The first article I wrote on ASB was in the Times in 1988. I volunteered to be Shadow Home Secretary after the 1992 election. I always remember John Smith saying to me when I told him the portfolio I wanted: "are you sure?" with that John Smith look that translated as: "are you out of your mind?"

The reason I wanted it, was not just because I thought it would be politically interesting, as indeed it turned out to be; nor even because I wanted to change radically the Labour party's stance on it, though I certainly did; but because I had become, through personal experience in London, in my constituency - the inner city and rural England - convinced that we were witnessing profound social and cultural change and that the legal establishment I had been brought up in and the political establishment I had joined, were completely out of touch with this, didn't understand it and certainly weren't dealing with it.

Nine years on as P.M and many pieces of legislation later, I find myself in a curious and not entirely comfortable position: attacked both for failing to be tough enough; and for being authoritarian; and sometimes by the same people on both grounds simultaneously.

The situation is complicated still further by the fact that, in Government, it is true that crime has fallen. Indeed we are the first post-war British Government that has seen crime fall during its term of office. In addition, the asylum system that was in virtual chaos when we arrived in 1997, is on any objective basis, substantially better run now than then.

But unsurprisingly, given the publicity, no-one would believe it. The truth is there have been improvements, there has been progress, but the gap between what the public expects and what the public sees is still there.

And the political and legal establishment is still in denial. I know what large numbers of such people believe.

They believe we are on a populist bandwagon, the media whips everyone up into a frenzy, and if only everyone calmed down and behaved properly the issue would go away. It may well be true that politicians can be overly populist; it may be true that, as I know more than most, the media can distort; but actually neither reason is the reason why the public are anxious.

The public are anxious for a perfectly good reason: they think they play fair and play by the rules and they see too many people who don't, getting away with it. By the public I don't mean the "hang 'em and flog 'em" brigade.

I mean ordinary, decent law-abiding folk, who believe in rehabilitation as well as punishment, understand there are deep-rooted causes of crime and know that no Government can eliminate it. But they think the political and legal establishment are out of touch on the issue and they are right.

So when we introduced ASB legislation, it was ridiculed and in part watered down. Each piece of asylum and criminal justice legislation has been diluted, sometimes fundamentally in the Houses of Parliament.

Each law on terrorism has been attacked, in one case as posing more threat to the country's safety than the terrorism itself. Sometimes the very parts of the political system most vociferous in their demand that we act on the issues have been the most determined in their resistance to the measures taken.

So here we are today with the Home Office, understandably, under siege. And, of course, I don't say, for a moment that mistakes haven't been made, that competence or lack of it has not been a serious complaint.

But I do say that it is a complete delusion to think that simply by changing Ministers, civil servants or practices, the gap I referred to earlier, is going to be bridged. It isn't. I have learnt many things in 9 years of Government and that is one of them.

I have also learnt something else. I have come to the conclusion that part of the problem in this whole area has been the absence of a proper, considered intellectual and political debate about the nature of liberty in the modern world.

In other words, crime, immigration, security - because of the emotions inevitably stirred, the headlines that naturally scream, the multiplicity of the problems raised - desperately, urgently need a rational debate, from first principles and preferably unrelated to the immediate convulsion of the moment.

What's more, I believe we can get to a sensible, serious and effective answer to these issues and build a consensus in favour of them. But we can't do it unless the argument is won at a far more fundamental level than hitherto.

I want to trace the combination of factors that brings us to where we find ourselves today - to a criminal justice system that needs to re-establish the public consent on which it will, ultimately, depend. In the latest BCS, 80% of the British people thought the system respected the rights of the accused. Only 35% said they were confident that the system meets the needs of victims.

Why are people so much more worried about crime? The answer to that is easy.

As the 20th Century opened the number of crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales per head of population were at its lowest since the first statistics were published in 1857.

By 1997 the number of crimes recorded by the police was 57 times greater than in 1900. Even allowing for population growth it was 29 times higher. Theft had risen from 2 offences per 1,000 people in 1901 to 55.7 in 1992.

Over the past 50 years, the detection rate almost halved. 47% of all crimes were detected in 1951 but only 26% in 2004/5. Conviction rates fell too, to 74% in 2004/5 from 96% in 1951.

This growth, in the second half of the 20th century, was historically unprecedented. The reasons are very complex. They are social, intellectual and systemic.

The communities of the Britain before the Second World War are relics to us now. The men worked in settled industrial occupations. Women were usually at home. Social classes were fixed and defining of identity.

People grew up, went to school and moved into work in their immediate environs.

Geographical and social mobility has loosened the ties of home. The family structure has changed. The divorce rate increased rapidly. Single person households are now common. The demography changed: the high-crime category of young men between 15 and 24 expanded. The disciplines of informal control - imposed in the family and in schools - are less tight than they were.

The moral underpinning of this society has not, of course, disappeared entirely.

That is why our anti-social behaviour legislation, for example, has proved so popular - because it is manifestly on the side of the decencies of the majority. It deliberately echoes some of the moral categories - shame, for example - that were once enforced informally.

There was, at the same time, something both comforting and suffocating about these communities. But they were very effective at reproducing informal codes of conduct and order. They contained a sense of fairness and honour, what Orwell habitually referred to as "decency".

Now, this fixed order of community has gone. Patterns of employment are different - women are more likely to work, nobody can expect to stay in a single job for life. Deference has declined. A more prosperous nation is a more demanding nation. Prosperity increases the opportunity for crime and makes it more lucrative.

But in a sense we still live in the shadow of the Victorians. Criminal justice reform was, along with public health, the great progressive cause of the times.

The capricious savagery of sentencing policy made routine victims of the poor. There was, in practice, no observed precept of equality before the law. The conditions in prison were a living hell.

The problem with the reform movement was not that it failed. On the contrary it succeeded. And, out of the great achievements of 19th century penal and legal reform, flowed an unintended consequence: the ideal of being a liberal in this field became associated, subtly and insidiously, with ensuring the fair treatment of suspects and criminals, detached from an equivalent concern with victims.

This was abetted by the intellectual convulsions on the academic and political left about the causes and consequences of crime. We got into the untenable position of arguing that recidivism was an entirely structural affair.

The millions of people who suffered the deprivation of the 1930s depression without resorting to crime give the lie to the thesis. It had the effect of deleting individual responsibility: you might be a criminal but it was never truly your fault.

The political right believed the mirror-image fallacy. Criminality, for them, was entirely a matter of individual wickedness.

Of course both positions can be true, sometimes at the same time. In retrospect, the argument looks sterile, silly even. New Labour finally arrived at what has now became the conventional position, summed up in the phrase: "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime."

In reality, what is happening is simply another facet of globalisation and a changing world. Fixed communities go. The nuclear family changes. Mass migration is on the march. Prosperity means most people have something worth stealing. Drugs means more people are prepared to steal. Organised crime which trafficks in drugs and people make money.

Violence, often of a qualitatively as well as quantatively different sort than anything before, accompanies it. Then there is the advent of this new phenomenon of global terrorism based on a perversion of Islam.

As a result of the scale and nature of this seismic change, the challenges faced by the criminal justice and immigration systems have grown exponentially, not in a small way but in a way that, frankly, mocks a system built not for another decade but another age. So we end up fighting 21st century problems with 19thcentury solutions.

In case anyone believes this is a uniquely British problem, I can tell you that at last Thursday's European Council meeting, the main topic of debate was precisely this. Every country from Malta and Spain in the south to the northern point of Europe faced the same issue with the same intensity and the same anxiety as to what to do.

And the reason that it raises such profoundly disturbing questions about liberty in the modern world, is this. Because we care, rightly, about people's civil liberties, we have, traditionally, set our face against summary powers; against changing the burden of proof in fighting crime; against curbing any of the procedures and rights used by defence lawyers; against sending people back to potentially dangerous countries; against any abrogation of the normal, full legal process.

But here's the rub. Without summary powers to attack ASB - ASBO's, FPN's, dispersal and closure orders on crack houses, seizing drug dealers assets - it won't be beaten.

That's reality. And the proof is that until we started to introduce this legislation, it wasn't beaten and even now it can be a struggle. The scale of what we face is such that whatever the theory, in practice, in real every day street life it can't be tackled without such powers.

Without the ability to force suspected organised criminals to open up their bank accounts, disclose transactions, prove they came by their assets lawfully, you can forget hitting organised crime hard. It won't happen.

There is no point in saying to an overworked immigration officer: deport this foreign criminal to country X, if country X is dangerous; because at present the courts won't allow it and the officer is met with an army of lawyers and a system stacked against him. In theory, he might, just might be able to win it eventually. In practice he'll look to remove other people.

Take an even harder case: failed asylum seekers. We were being hammered for not removing enough failed asylum seekers, even though we remove roughly three times the number of the previous government. Then came the Zimbabwe case.

The court held that even failed claimants, if they claimed to be from Zimbabwe couldn't be returned. And we got hammered for even contemplating such a thing by the very politicians who previously had been complaining about removals.

But what happened? In the month after that case, asylum claims from Zimbabwe rose 50 per cent. In other words, because of the way modern mass migration works, the moment the system received a signal it reacted and numbers immediately went up.

Or you can say - many did - the right to trial by jury is inalienable and even the most serious and complex fraud cases, taking months, sometimes years to try, must be done that way. Fine: but the reality is a large proportion of such cases collapse or are never brought.

Here is the point. Each time someone is the victim of ASB, of drug related crime; each time an illegal immigrant enters the country or a perpetrator of organised fraud or crime walks free, someone else's liberties are contravened, often directly, sometimes as part of wider society.

It's no use saying that in theory there should be no conflict between the traditional protections for the suspect and the rights of the law-abiding majority because, as a result of the changing nature of crime and society, there is, in practice, such a conflict; and every day we don't resolve it, by rebalancing the system, the consequence is not abstract, it is out there, very real on our streets.

Let me give an even more pointed example. At present, we can't deport people from Britain even if we suspect them of plotting terrorism unless we are sure that, if deported, they won't suffer abuse on their return home.

In fact, even if we put them through a form of judicial process overseen by a High Court judge or even convict them, we cannot do it. As a result of what I announced last year, we are now seeking to deport people from various countries; but I say seeking, because the test cases in court are only now being decided.

I agree the human rights of these individuals, if considered absolute, would militate against their deportation. But surely if they aren't deported and conduct acts of terrorism, their victims' rights have been violated by the failure to deport.

And even if they don't commit such an act or they don't succeed in doing so, the time, energy, effort, resource in monitoring them puts a myriad of other essential task at risk and therefore the rights of the wider society.

This is not an argument about whether we respect civil liberties or not; but whose take priority. It is not about choosing hard line policies over an individual's human rights. It's about which human rights prevail. In making that decision, there is a balance to be struck.

I am saying it is time to rebalance the decision in favour of the decent, law-abiding majority who play by the rules and think others should too.

Of course the danger is that we end up with rough justice, a danger even now when we use summary powers to close crack houses or seize the assets of suspects. It is exactly to guard against such danger that the rebalancing has to be done with the utmost care and scrutiny.

But the brute reality is that just as with rights, rough justice works both ways too. There is not rough justice but rough injustice when neighbourhoods are terrorised by gangs and the system is not capable of protecting them.

These questions are fundamental, difficult and immensely controversial.

Unsurprisingly, there is a strong desire to escape their fundamental nature by taking refuge in simple explanations and remedies. One is repeal of the Human Rights Act. There are issues to do with the way the Act is interpreted and its case law, which we are examining.

But let me be very clear. These problems existed long before the Human Rights Act. Every modern democracy has human rights legislation: and in any event the British Human Rights Act is merely the incorporation into British law of the provisions of the ECHR, to which we have been bound for over half a century.

Besides, in the ECHR, there are countervailing provisions to do with public safety and national security which would permit precisely the more balanced approach I advocate. In addition, of course, Parliament has the right expressly to override the Human Rights Act.

And it's not the existence of the Human Rights Act or the ECHR that has made Parliament behave in the way it has.

Another false solution is to focus all the attention on sentencing. Again there are issues to do with sentencing guidelines, like the automatic reductions for guilty pleas and aspects of early release, which again we are looking at.

But the introduction of the Sentencing Guidelines Council has brought greater consistency. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 does allow indeterminate sentences for violent and sexual offences, ie life can mean life and Courts are using them. Prison sentences are longer - I mean actual time in prison. More people are in prison.

Prison places have expanded by 19,000 since 1997 and are due to expand still further. Also, once more, let me be clear. Judicial independence is a foundation stone of the British Constitution and our Judges are rightly respected and admired for their quality the world over.

I am afraid the issue is far more profound: it is the culture of political and legal decision-making that has to change, to take account of the way the world has changed. It is not this or that judicial decision; this or that law.

It is a complete change of mindset, an avowed, articulated determination to make protection of the law-abiding public the priority and to measure that not by the theory of the textbook but by the reality of the street and community in which real people live real lives.

So what would need to happen to bring about such a revolution in thinking? I would identify four strands of work.

The first is to put in place laws that properly reflect the reality. There is a myth that we have legislated 50 times, the problem still exists, ergo we don't need more laws. I disagree. These laws have made a difference.

The residents I spoke to on Southmead Estate here in Bristol yesterday complained bitterly about aspects of the Court system, to which I shall return in a moment.

However, it was only by dint of the ASB laws that they were able to take action at all and though it took too long, in the end the offending families had indeed been removed.

Likewise, there is no way we would have cut asylum claims from over 80,000 a few years back to just over 20,000 now and be removing more unfounded claims than we receive, without the laws passed, again in the teeth of fierce opposition, in 2002. And tell me how many senior police and those working for the SOCA would want to be without the Proceeds of Crime Act.

Laws have made a real difference, but they have not been clear or tough enough. We need to do an audit of where the gaps are, in the laws that are necessary. Just in the past few months, from talking to people and police, I can think of examples where such gaps exist.

For example, the powers to arrest and bring immediately to court those who break their undertakings to have treatment for drug addiction. We need swifter, summary powers to deal with ASB. The limits on the seizure of assets of suspects need to be changed.

We need to use the law to send strong signals that those who break bail or drug treatment orders or community sentences will get quickly and appropriately punished. And we will need to reflect carefully on the outcome of the pending cases on deportation and if necessary act.

The second strand is that along with the right laws, we need systems capable of administering them. The court system has improved over the years. But let me be honest: it is not what the public expects or wants.

Again, rather than blaming this or that court official, we need a more profound look at why they don't operate as they should. The CJS treats all cases in a similar way. But they aren't similar. There is a strong case for handling different types of crime in different ways.

We are developing now the concept of community courts, like the ones in Liverpool and Salford and specialist ASB, drugs and domestic violence courts - but these are the exception not the rule.

But what is necessary is, piece by piece, to analyse where the shortcomings are and put in place the systems to remove them.

Time and again I hear from angry victims and witnesses of how cases are dragged out, constant adjournments, ineffective trials through the non-attendance of the defendant; and for people facing violence or ASB in their street, every day, every week, every month they are having to live with the people who are making their lives hell.

There are already change programmes taking place in the SOCA to handle organised crime, in IND and in the new prison and probation service. And of course in the IT programmes to join the system up. But, as John Reid has rightly indicated, we need to use the current furore about the Home Office to go back over each and every part of them to make sure they will be fit for purpose.

This brings me to the third strand: focus on the offender, not just the offence. If an offender has a drug problem, or a mental health problem, and most do, then sentencing him for the offence will only do temporary good if the offending behaviour is not dealt with.

Now, again, work has begun on this. Those arrested are now tested for drugs.

Drug treatment is being rapidly expanded, in some places doubled or tripled. But the truth is each suspect and then offender should be tracked throughout the system, given not just a sentence but an appropriate process for sorting their life out; and if they don't, be followed up, brought back to court. Local authorities need to have the powers to take account of such behaviour when assessing service entitlements.

The system needs to share the information. The role of the NOMS will be utterly crucial. In other words, there is wholesale system reform that has to take place.

And here is where the fourth strand of work is relevant. Whenever I talk of public service reform, then, not unnaturally, people think of the NHS and education. But many of the same principles apply to the CJS. It is a public service, or at least should be. Its role is to protect the public by dispensing justice.

Yet of all the public services, it is the one which, the more the public is in contact with it, the less satisfied they are by their experience.

Capturing and disseminating best practice; using different and new providers, for example from the voluntary sector, in the management of offenders; giving the victim a right to be heard in relation to sentencing, at least for the most violent crimes; breaking down the monopoly, "one size fits all" court provision: all of these things should have a place in a modern CJS fighting the modern reality of crime.

It is on the detail of all this that John will focus at the end of July, but one other point remains vital. In none of this have I forgotten the causes of crime. I believe passionately that a person with a stake in society, something to look forward to, an opportunity to reach out for, is far more likely to be a responsible member of society than someone without such a life chance.

We have introduced Sure Start; the New Deal; increased Child Benefit; are spending a lot of money on innercity regeneration and all to good effect. It's not wasted, it's making a real difference to real lives. I also know that what happens in prison matters deeply and that the pressure on the prison population is a real problem.

Moreover, the blunt reality is that, at least in the short and medium term, the measures proposed will mean an increase in prison places. How prison works is an essential component.

All of these things - from help to poorer families to rehabilitation in prison - are crucial to fighting crime and in dwelling on the issues to do with the CJS I don't mean to imply otherwise.

But even in tackling the causes of crime, we come back to some unpalatable choices about liberty and security. The "hardest to reach" families are often the ones we need to reach most. People know what it's like to live on the same estate as the family from hell. Imagine what it's like to be brought up in one.

We need far earlier intervention with some of these families, who are often socially excluded and socially dysfunctional.

That may mean before they offend; and certainly before they want such intervention. But in truth, we can identify such families virtually as their children are born. The power to intervene is another very tricky area; but again, on the basis of my experience, the normal processes and the programmes of help we have rightly introduced, won't do it.

So we come back to the central conundrum. Most people would accept there is a gap between what the public expects in terms of society, the behaviour of others, and the CJS regulating or dealing with such behaviour; and what the public gets.

Our lives have changed in so many ways for the better. But in one part of modern life, people feel we have regressed and that is in the respect we show for each other.

Largely, at any rate, we have left behind deference and many forms of discrimination and prejudice. But respect on the basis of equality is something at the root of any civic society. It is what makes a community tick. It is what gives life order and allows us to pursue our aspirations and ambitions with peace of mind.

We won't achieve this by nostalgia by hankering after the past. It's gone. We will do it by recognising the reality of the modern world and the modern forces attacking such order and peace of mind. Such is the changing nature of that world and the ferocity of those forces, we need to adjust, to reclaim the system and thereby the street for the law-abiding majority.

That means not disrespecting civil liberties but re-assessing what respect for them means today and placing a far higher priority, in what is a conflict of rights, on the rights of those who keep the law rather than break it.

This is not the argument of the lynch mob or of people who are indifferent to convicting the innocent, it is simply a reasonable and rational response to a problem that is as much one of modernity as of liberty. But such a solution will not happen without a radical change in political and legal culture and that is the case I make today.

    Prime minister's speech on criminal justice reform, G, 23.6.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1804482,00.html

Experts tell Blair

to halt wave of crime laws

Friday June 23, 2006
Guardian
Alan Travis

Britain's leading crime experts have accused Tony Blair of becoming an uncritical "cheerleader for more punishment" and told him that yet another round of criminal justice legislation would be like "putting a plaster on a broken leg".

They warned the prime minister to "think hard" before today launching "another grand statement of governmental purpose and a further round of headline-grabbing legislation" to tackle crime.

Ian Loader, Oxford University's professor of criminology, one of a group of leading crime experts called in by Downing Street to advise Mr Blair on today's speech, told him: "As the Home Office has found to its cost in recent weeks, the dizzying pace of new initiatives has made it more difficult to keep one's eye on the ball of sound administration and deliver programmes that stand some chance of achieving positive results on the ground."

Mr Blair's speech is expected to lead to a new round of criminal justice legislation. Plans next month are expected to include a further extension of on-the-spot justice for low-level crime and disorder, and the introduction of "public protection advocates" to limit the impact of human rights legislation on the criminal justice system.

In his written advice among the submissions from crime experts posted yesterday on the N0 10 website, Prof Loader said that after interviewing victims of crime for a decade he was convinced that those who felt angry and let down by the criminal justice system were not the majority Mr Blair imagines; they were a noisy minority at a time when crime had been going down for a decade.

His warning was backed by Julian Roberts, of Oxford University, who said Mr Blair's "redress the balance" analysis would "lead to a tabloid justice outcome". Sir Anthony Bottoms, Wolfson professor of criminology, said anxieties about disorder in the streets could not necessarily be tackled by reforms to the justice system because of low detection rates for many crimes and the reluctance of people in the worst areas to report crime.

    Experts tell Blair to halt wave of crime laws, G, 23.6.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,,1804034,00.html

Blair accuses legal establishment

and insists on summary justice drive

· PM bemoans 19th century tools for today's problems
· Bristol residents tell of troubles - but some jeer

Friday June 23, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour and Tania Branigan

Tony Blair yesterday claimed the legal establishment was suffering from defeatism and in denial about a widespread public belief that the law was weighted against those who play by the rules.

Launching a drive for criminal justice reform, which he will underline with a major speech this morning, the prime minister called for an increase in summary justice which would bring the law "right down to the level of the street".

He will today warn that the UK is "fighting 21st century problems with 19th century solutions" because the criminal justice system has not adapted to changes in society, including the breakdown in communities and the impact of globalisation.

The government is determined to draw a line under the crises buffeting the Home Office and accusations that it is running scared of tabloid newspapers' agendas.

Mr Blair's spokesman said he was determined to look at the underlying issues, adding: "It is precisely the opposite of putting plasters on the problem - it is trying to come up with holistic solutions. What won't work is pretending the problem hasn't changed."

The prime minister told Labour supporters at an event in Bristol that members of the public felt they had lost control over their communities and way of life and wanted to get it back.

He added: "People feel that the criminal justice system is weighted in such a way that those that play by the rules and abide by the law are displaced, and not given a fair crack of the whip."

In a subsequent interview with ITV, he suggested changes such as the introduction of interim antisocial behaviour orders while the full court process continued. "You have to give the police summary powers. We cannot keep on having these delays in court, because in the meantime, if there's no action, people feel depressed, worried, frightened and intimidated. We need to bring justice down to street level."

The prime minister's remarks followed a series of meetings with communities in deprived areas of Bristol. He was jeered at and had an egg thrown at him at a community centre in Southmead, where he met victims of antisocial behaviour. Michelle Stone, 27, who lives near the centre, told him: "Things have actually got a lot worse, we've got groups of 30 youths who hang around outside my home causing chaos. They're armed with baseball bats and snooker cues and they are totally out of control."

Susan Headford, 53, said she had lived in the Southmead area for 40 years and had never known it to be so bad. "Things have gone downhill over the last nine years. The police try to move on troublemakers but they just come back, and you are back to square one."

James Gray, 65, told the prime minister he'd phoned 999 more than 180 times during the past 15 years but said officers rarely came round to his house. "I've lost £10,000 of my property because of these vandals. It's caused by one family but they say, 'If you go to court we'll have you'."

Mark Payne, 38, told Mr Blair that he had been forced out of his home after 17 months of intimidation and harassment. He said: "Groups of youths were bullying my son. I was intimidated after reporting a burglary next door and the builders working on my house were beaten up. I said enough is enough, and moved to another area."

Mr Blair admitted government programmes so far had struggled to reach some of the most difficult problem families that lay at the root of criminality. The prime minister has held several seminars with criminologists, policemen and politicians in advance of today's speech.

He also promised to roll out neighbourhood policing, which he described as a modern-day version of the bobby on the beat, and said he would extend the use of community justice panels - piloted in Liverpool - which give local people a say in the enforcement of the law.

In his speech today, Mr Blair will call for a "proper, considered and intellectual debate" about the nature of liberty. He will challenge those who have accused the government of playing to the tabloid gallery and attempt to draw a line under the controversies surrounding the Home Office, warning: "Because of the emotions inevitably stirred [by the issue of crime, immigration and security], the headlines that naturally scream, the multiplicity of the problems raised, we desperately, urgently need a rational debate from first principles, and preferably unrelated to the immediate convulsions on the issues of the moment."

He will say: "It's no use saying that there should be no contradiction between the traditional protections for suspects and the rights of the law-abiding majority. In practice there is such a conflict. Every day we don't resolve it by rebalancing the system, the consequence is not abstract - it's out there, very real, on our streets."

    Blair accuses legal establishment and insists on summary justice drive, G, 23.6.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1804004,00.html

Blair argues

law cannot deal

with threats of 21st century

Friday June 9, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour, political editor

Tony Blair yesterday revealed the government is planning to introduce a number of crime measures next month including an automatic jail sentence for anyone in breach of bail conditions.
He will also bring forward measures to take some minor anti-social behaviour offences out of the court system and make them subject to automatic fines.

He said: "If you are someone who breaches their bail then prima facie they should be going to prison but these are difficult things. We will build on what is already there and outline these proposals at the end of July."

Mr Blair made his remarks at his monthly press conference, arguing that traditional measures to crack down on crime were not sufficient. The proposals will be published in the form of a reply by John Reid to the letter from Mr Blair on his appointment as home secretary asking for a new Home Office strategy by July.

Mr Blair claimed the Home Office was operating in a new climate of mass migration and the break down of traditional communities that required new thinking on criminal justice.

Other measures are likely to include action to deport foreign criminals and suspected terrorists, even though these measures are circumscribed by European human rights law.

Mr Blair argued a fundamental shift was needed from the principles of the criminal justice system drawn up in the 19th and 20th centuries to deal with the threats of the 21st century.

He said: "If you want to tackle anti-social behaviour, the ordinary law and order system is not going to tackle it. You are going to have to give summary powers to police on the frontline. And if you want to tackle organised crime, you have to take the Proceeds of Crime Act and strengthen it ... so that for organised criminals, even without convictions, you are able to open up people's bank accounts and seize their assets and force them to prove they came by them lawfully."

He added: "There are more prison places, sentences are longer and sentences are tougher but if you took where the public is on this issue, the gap between what they expect and what they get is bigger in this service than anywhere else and we have got to bridge it."

Mr Blair also ruled out taking the job of UN secretary general after he retires and refused to comment on suggestions by the leader of the Commons, Jack Straw, that he will stand down well before the next election.

    Blair argues law cannot deal with threats of 21st century, G, 9.6.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1793624,00.html

5.15pm update

Blair:

Zarqawi death

a 'strike against al-Qaida everywhere'

Thursday June 8, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Bonnie Malkin and agencies

Tony Blair and George Bush today hailed the targeted killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as "a blow for al-Qaida".

Mr Blair told his monthly news conference the US air raid that killed Zarqawi - the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq - would severely damage the terrorist network.

"The death of al-Zarqawi is a strike against al-Qaida in Iraq and therefore a strike against al-Qaida everywhere," he said.

However, Mr Blair said the elimination of Zarqawi would not reduce the level of daily violence in Iraq or lessen the challenges faced by the Iraqi government and US-led forces.

In a statement delivered outside the White House, the US president, George Bush, said the "ideology of terror" had "lost one of its most visible and aggressive leaders".

He said Zarqawi's death was "a severe blow to al-Qaida and a significant victory in the war on terror", but warned the sectarian violence in Iraq would continue. "We have tough days ahead of us in Iraq that will require the continuing patience of the American people," he added.

Mr Blair said that, since the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime three years ago, al-Qaida had established itself in Iraq.

"Al-Qaida knows that if democracy takes root, their values of violence and hatred will in turn be uprooted," he said. "That is why they fought, and continue to fight, very hard.

"It is also why we should fight back, and do so as a united international community."

Earlier, the British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said Zarqawi's death was "an important day" for Iraq, but it was too early to say whether it was a turning point for the country.

She said violence in Iraq had been "damaging and undermining", and that "Zarqawi does seem to have been the prime mover in that conflict".

Stan Bigley, the brother of the British civil engineer Ken Bigley, who was kidnapped and beheaded by Zarqawi's group in 2004, said he was glad the terror leader was "off the face of the earth, not just for Ken, but for all the people he has killed".

However, in an interview broadcast on Channel 4 News at midday, Paul Bigley said the terrorist leader's death would not bring "closure" for his family or those of the murdered hostage Margaret Hassan and other victims of the violence in Iraq.

"The word closure has never entered our whole family's vocabulary at this stage and, indeed, that of Margaret Hassan's family," he said. "We both haven't got a person to bury. Margaret is still missing, Ken is still missing.

"There will never be closure on this until the two people are returned for a decent burial. That is when closure will take place."

The father of Nicholas Berg, a US contractor believed to have been beheaded by Zarqawi, said he did not see any good coming from his death in an air strike. "I see more death coming out of Zarqawi's death," Michael Berg said.

Nicholas, a 26-year-old businessman from West Chester, Pennsylvania, was killed in Iraq in 2004.

His father, a pacifist who is running for Delaware's House of Representatives seat on the Green Party ticket, said the terrorist's death was likely to foster anti-US resentment among al-Qaida members who felt they had nothing left to lose.

He dismissed the notion that Zarqawi's death could bring him closure. "First of all, I'm not even certain that Zarqawi even killed my son," he said.

"I think the news of the loss of any human being is a tragedy. I think Zarqawi's death is a double tragedy. His death will incite a new wave of revenge. George Bush and Zarqawi are two men who believe in revenge."

Alan George, an Iraq expert at Oxford University, urged caution over the killing. Mr George told Sky News that Zarqawi's death would have little impact on the level of violence and bloodshed in the country.

"I think the insurgency in Iraq, which is multifaceted, has reached such a momentum that, in my view, killing one leader is not going to make much difference," he said.

Killing Zarqawi would not improve the situation in Iraq any more than killing Osama bin Laden would, he said, predicting that it would lead to a wave of revenge attacks.

"These people, although iconic, are essentially symbolic of a current of political thought that's not going to go away just because they have," he said. "I imagine these groups will want to assert themselves and send a message that they're far from knocked out," he added.

Nadim Shehadi, a Middle East expert from the international analysis organisation Chatham House, said it was impossible to predict the impact of Zarqawi's death because so little was known about his influence.

"We don't know much about him and his organisation and what his position was," he said.

"The definition of an al-Qaida operation is it's done by people you don't know at a time you don't expect in a place you don't expect ... so we needed a face for that in Iraq and Zarqawi was appointed as that face.

"I'm not sure if anybody knows if there's such a structure that you can cut off the head and it will collapse."

However, some commentators argued that the death of Zarqawi would have a more positive effect.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former British representative in Iraq, told the BBC that the death of the "icon for terrorism for the jihadists in Iraq" should be celebrated.

"He was organising things immediately after the collapse of the Saddam regime," he said. "I think he's been extremely important in creating such a nasty, effective [kind of] terrorist, and he will not be quickly replaceable."

Professor Paul Wilkinson, the chairman of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University, said the death was "a very significant breakthrough".

Prof Wilkinson called Zarqawi "one of the most malignant individuals in the history of terrorism in Iraq".

"He has been responsible for organising the attacks which have killed hundreds of Iraqis, and was behind the attack on the UN building and attacks on religious shrines.

"There will be a sigh of relief, not only in Iraq but in the Middle East in general," he said.

Michael Clarke, the director of the International Policy Institute at King's College London, predicted that Zarqawi's loss to al-Qaida could be felt more keenly than the death of Bin Laden.

"If Osama is captured or killed, I would say it probably would not make much of a difference to the movement," he said. "But in the case of Zarqawi being killed, it is quite a big blow, which will not be felt immediately.

Ann Clwyd, Tony Blair's envoy to Iraq, called the killing "good news for the Iraqi government".

"It will give people confidence - particularly those who have had to face the [daily] possibility of bombings and kidnappings, particularly in Baghdad," she said. "I think it will be a great relief to them."

Zarqawi's own family has responded to his death by saying they had expected him to be killed for some time.

His older brother, Sayel al-Khalayleh, said: "We expected that he would be martyred. We hope that he will join other martyrs in heaven."

There was a mixed reaction to the news among Iraqi citizens.

Thamir Abdulhussein, a college student in Baghdad, said he hoped the killing would promote reconciliation between Iraq's fractured ethnic and sectarian groups.

"He was behind all the killings of Sunni and Shiites," he said. "Iraqis should now move toward reconciliation. They should stop the violence."

However, Amir Muhammed Ali, a 45-year-old stockbroker in Baghdad, said the resistance to US-led forces was likely to continue.

"He didn't represent the resistance ... someone will replace him and the operations will go on," he said.

Blair: Zarqawi death a 'strike against al-Qaida everywhere', G, 8.6.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1792868,00.html