Nothing ever changes

Nigel Meek has been doing some digging around in the archives.

Having flicked through a digest of British politician’s speeches about the war, and looking at just the contributions from some members of the Labour Party, four themes seem to stand out.

1. Devotion to the United Nations as the only real legitimising agency before, during, and after the war.

2. That because of the various dealings that we may indeed have had with the regime in the past, it is therefore unacceptably hypocritical of us to tackle them now.

3. Pessimism about the eventual outcome.

4. Irrespective of the outcome, a belief that it will be extremely costly not least to our own side.

Iraq in 2003? No, the Falkland Islands in 1982.

For reasons that I won’t bore anyone with, earlier today I was puttering around the Latin American section of the University of London’s library at Senate House. My eyes fell on a dusty tome entitled “The Falkland’s Campaign: A Digest of Debates in the House of Commons, 2 April to 15 June 1982” published by HMSO, London.

By a remarkable coincidence, the book fell open at a speech by none other than that master of decisiveness, Robin Cook. Randomly dipping further into the book, it was eerie to read the ‘usual suspects’ such as Cook and Tony Benn making the same speeches then as they’ve been doing two decades later. It’s as if they’ve had their secretaries scan in their old speeches from Hansard, convert them into Microsoft Word documents, and then use Word’s find and replace facility to swap ‘Argentina’ and ‘Iraq’.

There was even dear old Tam Dalyell using the words ‘South Atlantic’, ‘mire’, and ‘Vietnam’ in one speech!