Scott et al I do have a copy of the Scott Report but I simply have not had time to read it. It seems pretty clear from the comments of a number of the knowledgeable minority who have followed this story for the past few years that, for whatever reason, Scott and his team have not delivered the goods. Too many of the real issues never made it onto the agenda. In any case, for all the apparent anxiety the inquiry caused in Whitehall, it was never really serious. You don’t get to the bottom of a subject as complex as this simply by appointing a judge and a couple of bright lawyers. You would need a large team, intelligence personnel with access to everything and Prime Ministerial power to sack people for non-cooperation or obstruction, and expert guidance from some of the participants. And none of these were made available. It should be noted, for example, that the Inquiry’s Secretary – and thus its chief gate-keeper and agenda setter – Christopher Muttukmaru, now has a senior position within the Ministry of Defence.
Analogies have been drawn between Scott and the Warren Commission. A better analogy, I suggest, would be between Scott and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Somewhere in the account of the latter by one of its investigators, Gaeton Fonzi, was the comment that while the JFK assassination experts thought the HSCA had set up an proper investigation, the man in charge of it, Robert Blakey, saw his job not as investigating the killings of the sixties but simply as writing a report, to a deadline.
The affair has already produced a number of books, two of which are of particular note.
Truth is a Difficult Concept: Inside the Scott Inquiry
Richard Norton-Taylor with Mark Lloyd
Fourth Estate/The Guardian,
London, 1995, £7.99
Short of the publication of the complete proceedings of the inquiry this will be the best account we have. No better insight into the workings of Whitehall has appeared in book form (though that isn’t saying much).
This received few notices in the major media, a combination, I would guess, of the absurd prejudice of review editors that only hard-back books deserve to be taken seriously, and the unwillingness of some newspaper editors to give attention to a reporter from a rival newspaper. The Independent, for example, had a review but didn’t run it.
The book, mostly extracts from some of the encounters between Scott and Baxendale and the Whitehall warriors and assorted politicians, shows as clearly as it is possible to imagine that Whitehall is run by semi-clever men (mostly men), educated at Oxbridge, who are experts are deceiving over-worked and frequently naive politicians. (Quite why the politicians – who sign the cheques for the civil servants – have put up with this for so long is a mystery to me.) It also shows how the British system of winks, nods, evasions and ambiguous drafting disintegrated under pressure in the 1980s.
But what was the pressure? This is the one thing which is missing from the book. Norton-Taylor and Lloyd, two of a tiny handful of journalists to sit through the entire Scott hearings, tells us it was about business, selling kit to the Arabs. What they have omitted – perhaps because it is so obvious – is the fact that the pressure was coming as a result of the Thatcher administration’s assault on the British manufacturing sector, in the 1980-83 period in particular. This was rationalised at the time by the likes of then Chancellor of the Exchequer Lawson with the line that, reduced as a consequence of North Sea oil revenues (which, he claimed, had pushed up the exchange rate; see Lobster 27), the manufacturing sector would expand again as oil revenues diminished. This miraculous growth did not occur and the Treasury computer models began turning out predictions of the British balance of payments which gave the mandarins the runs. The British economy had to sell more actual goods – things – unfashionable though they were in the Thatcher oil boom years.
And what kind of goods did the British state try to sell? Armaments; and the technology of repression. This sector was chosen for several reasons. It was a form of ‘public spending’ or ‘public enterprise’ which was acceptable to the ruling City-Treasury-Foreign Office nexus in Britain: arms exports are good for British foreign policy and influence abroad. Arms sales could be stimulated in ways – essentially bribery – which, that nexus believed, had no awkward political repercussions in the UK. For a free market Tory regime could not be seen actively – let alone successfully – intervening in the domestic manufacturing economy. And because the ‘national security’ blanket could be thrown over arms sales, the payment of millions – maybe billions – of pounds of bribes and general ripping-off of the public purse could be done on the quiet. Hence Malaysia and the Pergau dam fiasco; hence arming Iraq, Iran, Saudia Arabia, Indonesia and who knows which other scum-bag regimes; hence the huge subsidies of the arms industry by the British state.
In the Public Interest
Gerald James
Little and Brown, London, 1995(1)
Some of these events are described in great detail by Gerald James. This is an important book, perhaps a very important book, and it is fascinating. James, as boss of Astra, was one of the minor players in the arms game in the 1980s who got screwed by the bigger players and the covert arms of the British state, and who has been doing his best to wreak his revenge on them ever since. James’ book makes it clear, if it wasn’t already, that he has been the major source of information for the small group of journalists who have been pursuing this story for the past four or five years.(2) (Most of his allegations were studiously ignored by Scott and his team.)
James recounts how Astra began expanding in the arms industry and was encouraged to do so by personnel in the British state who then moved into his company. Eventually he discovered that branches of Astra was being used as ‘cover’ for some of the clandestine arming of Iraq. James began poking around and things began to unravel. Much of this feels familiar; patriotic right-winger, believer in the Thatcher revolution, becomes disillusioned as the real nature of the British state is revealed and he gets screwed.
I have one or two reservations. Fascinating though this story is, I found it difficult to follow in places: partly because of a large cast of companies and people unfamiliar to me; and, partly because of the interweaving of James’ own narrative with a more general account of the arms bazaar in the 1980s. James believes that the expansion of the arms industry in the 1980s was the key to the Thatcher administrations. This is debateable. The sums involved in the arms deals, though large, were relative peanuts compared to, say, North Sea oil revenues, or the sums generated by selling off public assets at bargain basement prices. He takes as true some reports, for example of the funding of the Tory Party and Mark Thatcher’s wealth, I would not. (These particular stories appeared in Business Age, and striking though they were, did not include any reliable evidence.) He is also occasionally inclined to assume that chronology is causation.
The vast state conspiracy he describes against the smaller firms involved in the arming of Iraq, complete with murders, blackmail, and corruption in almost every government department, is probably true. But the evidence is sometimes suggestive rather than conclusive. On the other hand, this text got past Little Brown’s libel lawyers and James must have been able to convince them that this is true or defensible.
This is big stuff. James’ book is an unprecedented insider account of the military-commercial-intelligence network at the heart of the British state.
Notes
- This was reviewed in the Sunday Telegraph, 7 January 96; James was profiled in Independent on Sunday, 18 June 1995.
- James is another disillusioned Tory. There is a fascinating early chapter in which James describes his political trajectory in the early 1970s, through the Monday Club, where he met G. K. Young, and thence into Young’s Unison and the Freedom Association.