Delay, dysfunction, dereliction of duty. Stormont during the Covid pandemic? Yes, but Westminster all the time.
Why does it take Britain so long – sometimes never – to redress public wrongs, major miscarriages of injustice, public disasters? Think of Hillsborough, Grenfell Tower, the Post Office scandal, the war crimes British armed forces committed in Iraq and later Afghanistan. That’ll do for a start.
People have begun to ask why it should be so, why British governments fail to deal with wrongs – scandals that are publicly known or suspected for years and often have been written about or been the subject of TV documentaries.
Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, asked this week why it took so long – decades – for an inquiry to report on the infected blood scandal, which he called “a criminal cover-up on an industrial scale”.
The chair of the inquiry, Sir Brian Langstaff, has recommended a statutory duty of candour for officials and healthcare leaders, as Mr Justice O’Hara recommended here after the hyponatraemia inquiry. Huh. Some hope.
More to the point, Langstaff also recommended that if a Westminster committee proposes an inquiry into a public policy failure, the relevant minister should have to come into the Commons and explain why they disagree with the proposal.
There you have it. Westminster committees are useless. Sanctions for ignoring them or refusing to answer questions are meaningless.
When Dominic Cummings refused to attend a committee hearing, the committee published a special report on his failure to attend and declared him in contempt of parliament. Big deal.
So it’s down to public inquiries. Under the Public Inquiries Act 2005 they have the power to compel witnesses and take testimony under oath, opening witnesses to prosecution for perjury. That is, if the minister agrees.
Senior officials and others have a vested interest in advising ministers not to hold inquiries. As we know from the infected blood inquiry, officials withheld information from ministers in successive governments and gave misleading information too. We know from the inquiry into the SAS murdering males of fighting age in Afghanistan that senior officers knew what was going on (quelle surprise) and that officials misled the minister, Johnny Mercer, who was asking questions about why so many prisoners had been killed.
The other enormous obstruction to discovering the truth about miscarriages of justice is the British fetish with secrecy and covering up evidence. Ministers’ officials take a pride in covering their own backsides, providing non-answers to parliamentary questions. Ministers are supposed to be accountable but question time is pantomime. If Westminster worked, there’s hardly anything revealed in the current inquiries that couldn’t have been made public years ago. It takes a public inquiry.
Now, perhaps, you can see the purpose behind the execrable Legacy Act. In halting inquests it removes the possibility of a public inquiry that compels witnesses under oath. There’s no possibility of a former minster or general being held to account in court. Civil actions against the British government are prevented. Instead, an investigation behind closed doors by a former senior RUC officer, potentially into the actions of former mates, will present findings.
Finally, even with the Public Inquiries Act, information can be withheld if a secretary of state deems it is, altogether now, a threat to national security. This sanction is a big lie. In Britain national security is whatever a secretary of state (or his senior civil servant) says it is. It’s invoked so often here that it’s a cut and paste job with the cynical title Public Interest Immunity certificate, cynical because it’s the opposite of the public interest.
It’s in the interest of the British government to withhold information so they can’t be called to account
It’s in the interest of the British government to withhold information so they can’t be called to account. Think about it. What national security is threatened by disclosing the truth about events 30 or 40 years ago? Before the internet, different weapons, tactics, communications procedures, surveillance techniques?
The whole charade is to keep under wraps the fact that ministers, senior officials and military officers were engaged in systemic collusion, which is a fancy word for the manipulation of people on the take in loyalist and republican organisations.
What for? To manage who was killed and who protected. In short, conspiracy to murder.
