Blair on the Ropes?

By NiallO’Dowd

THE hue and cry in Britain over the last week or so over the Hutton report which exonerated Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government and castigated the BBC over Iraq and weapons of mass destruction coverage hardly comes as a surprise.

After all, the judge at the center of the whitewash for Blair, Brian Hutton, would be very well known to anyone who has followed his career in Northern Ireland where he was born, and where he left lots of controversy in his wake.

Hutton’s official title is Baron Of Bresagh, a wonderful thing indeed, and the former public school boy in Northern Ireland and Oxford graduate first made his mark in 1969. He was selected as a key legal adviser to the blatantly discriminatory Unionist government at Stormont which was just about to collapse under the weight of its sectarianism.

Hutton kept up his establishment credentials when he unsuccessfully defended the British government before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 1978 when he argued that Nationalists had not been mistreated under internment without trial – a bridge too far for even most Unionists.

The baron then showed up as a High Court judge, operating under the non-jury Diplock system of course. He made it into the news in 1984 when he jailed 10 men for over 1,000 years on the highly dubious words of a supergrass, or informer, named Robert Quigley.

Hutton’s willingness to accept the word of the supergrass was too much even for the Northern Ireland appeals court and they set aside all the convictions, thereby causing the supergrass era to come to a crashing end. 

But Hutton was not finished yet with putting the Taigs in their place. In 1986 he refused to convict an RUC policeman of the manslaughter of a man named Sean Downes, who was killed at point blank range by a plastic bullet which was fired after police attempted to arrest then Irish Northern Aid leader Martin Galvin at a rally in Belfast. Hutton ignored the fact that the Downes killing was shown on television and revealed the policeman had fired at point blank range.

No doubt in appreciation of his service, Hutton was named chief justice in Northern Ireland in 1988, leapfrogging more senior judges to become the main man.

He made a very significant ruling in 1989 when he stated that the RUC, and not the courts, would decide on whether controversial marches should be re-routed, sowing the seed for the violence and mayhem at the Drumcree parade a few years later.

Later on as member of the House of Lords Hutton was one of the judges who ruled that General August Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, could only be prosecuted, if extradited to Britain, for crimes committed after 1988, thereby essentially absolving him.

All in all a wonderful record of service to the establishment, be it Tory or Labor. Journalist Stephen Price, writing in The Sunday Business Post this past weekend, summarized it best when he wrote, “It can be said that his verdicts across three decades have generally reflected the thrust of British government policy, be it Labor or Conservative.”

The Hutton “whitewash,” as so many commentators have derided it, may actually plunge Blair into more trouble than he was in before the report exonerated him. 

It seems to have inflamed British public opinion to such an extent that many now believe more than ever the whole affair was a massive cover-up. The latest opinion poll shows that a majority now believes Blair should resign, and 62% do not trust Blair to tell the truth on any issue. Even 55% of the public says that the Hutton report was a complete whitewash.

Indeed, the Guardian newspaper has commenced a competition to create a new entry for the Oxford Dictionary, and offering prizes to readers who can “Huttonize” a major historical event in a few hundred words or less.

The parallels with the U.S. are obvious. Here too, President George W. Bush is struggling to explain the war in Iraq because of the absence of weapons of mass destruction. 

At least here we have a distinguished and bipartisan group of investigators who will look at the intelligence failures which lead to the war. The irony, of course, is that neither Blair nor Bush may survive because of a war that was wildly popular in both countries when it was first fought.