The British electorate this week used local elections — where the issues are normally refuse collection, policing and other local services — to deliver a resounding rejection of the government’s part in the invasion of Iraq. Even Prime Minister Tony Blair himself has acknowledged that Iraq was the key issue. There is now growing speculation that the prime minister’s job may be on the line as his Labour party contemplates defeat in a general election likely next year.
What has shaken the Blair administration is the extent of the defeat. Labour lost approaching 500 council seats. Turnout, which normally struggles to reach an average of 30 percent, was over 40 percent this week, a clear sign that sufficient voters were angry enough with the Blair administration to register their protest.
The irony is that on local issues such as health, education and law and order, where the government has been pouring in money, there have been improvements, though by no means enough given the vast resources thrown at them. But this has not been the issue. Tony Blair is seen to have led the British into an illegal war, despite massive public protest beforehand.
Last week’s Security Council resolution which effectively validated the future role of British troops within the multinational force of peacekeepers under Iraqi government supervision, clearly cut no ice with the British electorate. Ever since it was established that Saddam’s WMD programs, the excuse for London committing its forces to the US-led invasion, no longer existed at the time the decision was made, there has been a profound sense of anger and betrayal among ordinary Britons. Blair could have tried to tackle the problem by admitting his mistake.
Yet Blair never wavered in his belief that British Iraqi policy was correct, even if the “intelligence” about WMD was wrong. He simply followed the US lead, as ever, and shifted his justification to the need for regime change in Iraq. His argument that Saddam’s dictatorship was loathsome and brutal cannot be denied. But invasion without full UN backing was illegal.
And even this argument might have been sold successfully to the electorate, few of whom were sorry to see the end of Saddam. The trouble is that Blair stuck to the line that when the invasion decision was made, the WMD intelligence was entirely credible — including the key report that it could be readied within 45 minutes. Enough leaks have come from the British intelligence community to suggest that there were serious doubts and that the evidence given to Blair by the key Joint Intelligence Committee led by John Scarlett was, if not outright lies, at least massaged and manipulated.
The key to Blair’s error would seem therefore to be John Scarlett, for whom an early pension and retirement would have seemed appropriate. Instead Blair appointed him the new head of MI6, a move that in voters’ — and indeed everyone else’s — minds must have raised even more questions about the prime minister’s integrity.
