THE SLOGGER POSTED THIS COMMENT THREAD BENEATH AN EXCELLENT GUARDIAN PIECE
FROM TODAY’S EDITION:

Like everything else in Cool Britannia, when it comes to defence spending, what the voters want to see is evidence of principled and accountable leadership.

The first form of honesty required in the endless debate about armed forces needs is far higher up the ethical queue than top brass parochialism. It involves the blatant lies told by the man who was Chancellor at the time of the Iraq invasion.

The second form involves the attitude of the media, who continue to adopt the Nelson strategy to the existence of financial data on Gordon Brown’s actions over Iraq budgeting when in Number Eleven.

Richard Norton-Taylor has written a commonsense and well-argued piece. And while many of us never agreed with the War in the first place, the military clearly do need to minimise hype and maximise learning as to the changing nature of War in a different and more dangerous world.

But this whole debate is academic in the light of what most voters would like to know: who is telling the truth about Treasury support for the Iraq conflict – Geoff Hoon, Clare Short and most of the top military heads…or Gordon Brown?

The MoD website page devoted to Iraq spending and approved by the Government shows without equivocation that:

* Brown underfunded the invasion
* He capped the budget rigidly over the following two years.
* Only when he left the Chancellorship did Iraq military budgets go up by some 50%.
* The budget increases he allowed were forced on him by laws relating to UK involvement in war.
* The totals spent on all overseas military activity during and after his watch do not come anywhere near to this completely invented figure of £18 billion. Around £13 billion is as high as it gets.

When the dust settles on this lesson in infamous mendacity, future generations will ask – with good reason – just what the Hell the media and the Opposition were doing while it was being delivered by the highest public official in the land.

Even more, they will ask why the Chilcot Inquiry didn’t use these data, which can be unearthed by the use of Google within three minutes. And why the Prime Minister wasn’t grilled as to the difference between what he alleged – and what exists as a recorded public fact. And why Liam Fox didn’t bother to use them in his letter to Sir John. And why Sir John gave such a casually uncaring reply even without the data.

Many will (as always) shout ‘conspiracy’. And (as usual) they will be wrong. The answer is ‘sloppy idleness and dumbed-down ability to add up, coupled with abbreviated attention span and utter incompetence’.

This quite extraordinary mixture of uninformed certainty and polemical ignorance is what alienates British people of all ages, ethnicity, religious beliefs and social class from the Establishment. Our surreal governing elite has no ability to listen and learn – only a talent for preaching and demands, asking citizens to do things the recipients know instinctively to be completely stupid.

This will not change until our sclerotic political process has been razed to the ground, and replaced with one based on better ethics, better selection methods, better voting systems, better leadership, and above all much, much more accountability.