Understand a little less

John Major's 1993 statement that "We must condemn a little more and understand a little less" horrified me at the time I heard it. How could a politician believe that anything could be solved by less understanding? It seemed a very anti-intellectual and populist thing to say, and he went down in my estimation when he said it. However, things have moved on since then, and now I am not sure that he wasn't right. Take these stories (1) (2) (3):

A teenage girl has been jailed for life for killing a Fife grandmother during a row over £5 and a borrowed cigarette. ... Mrs Gray, 63, died as a result of a head injury after she was knocked to the ground and repeatedly stamped on.

A man convicted over the death of a Matalan store manager in east London was on police bail at the time of the killing. ... Maina, of Canning Town, was bailed after Rizwan Darbar, 17, was stabbed in West Ham during a mobile phone robbery. He was later convicted of the 17-year-old's murder and jailed for life.

DOZENS of college pupils were involved in violent clashes with police yesterday afternoon (November 3), forcing the closure of Orpington High Street. ... The trouble flared at around 5.25pm when more than 40 Orpington College students waited for a bus outside Boots in the high street.... Around 15 of them boarded a route 51 before the driver shut his doors and a patrolling PCSO told the remaining teenagers they would have to wait for the next bus.

So we have a 16-year-old girl who lends and old lady a cigarette and stamps her to death when she goes to collect what she is owed. And we have a man who murders a 17-year-old while robbing him of his phone, and while on bail for that offence acts as look-out in a robbery where the store manager is stabbed in the neck and dies. And he wasn't idle in between the two killings, either:

In the ensuing 15 months Maina was involved in Mr Simpson's killing, was caught with a knife, cannabis, crack cocaine and heroin, before finally being charged in January last year with the 17-year-old's murder.

And we have a group of college students who think it is OK to riot (including hospitalising the PCSO who spoke to them and involving police from three areas, a dog unit and the TSG) because a bus was full and they were told they would have to wait for another one.

In each case, no doubt, there will be the usual pleas in mitigation, citing poor backgrounds, boredom, the newest excuse of "toxic upbringing" and probably racism, too. And the courts will listen to all this, and the sentences will be ameliorated to, if not quite a slap on the wrist, then something that most people will regard as utterly inadequate.

Nicolle Earley (the girl who killed the old lady) was given a life sentence for murder. As one who still doesn't support the death penalty, that seems about right to me. But wait - the 'life sentence' is really 14 years. That means she gets out and is a free woman at the age of 32. In what way that is an adequate punishment for murder escapes me.

Anthony Maina was given a life sentence for the murder of the 17-year-old - again, 14 years [1]. He won't serve a sentence for the manslaughter of the store manager, as he is already on a life sentence.

Several youths were arrested following the disturbances in Orpington. Who knows what chilling punishments await them?

Two things occur to me here: one is that there is now a large section of society that has no respect for human life or the law, and the other is that we don't seem to have any concept of punishing people in line with the seriousness of their offending.

I wonder if we had listened to John Major in 1993, and spent less time trying to understand people who commit crimes like this, and more effort in bringing home to them the consequences of their actions, things might be a little different? I might suggest:

• If you murder someone, you go to jail for life, and you will never get out, regardless of your home circumstances, mental state or prior history;
• If you deliberately injure someone, you will be taken out of circulation in very unpleasant circumstances and kept there for a time commensurate with your offence;
• If you riot, damage property and frighten ordinary people half to death, then those ordinary people can take you out of circulation for as long as is necessary.

The principle that we should try to understand criminals in order to help them integrate in a peaceful society is a laudable one. But it would seem that we have taken the idea that 'to understand is to forgive' a little too far, and we now fail to protect ourselves and our society against people who have grown up with the idea that no-one can restrain them in any way.

[1] Yes, I know these are 'minimum' tariffs, but does anyone seriously believe that they will be kept in after this time, or even released early if the jails are crowded enough?

At last

A politician says something I can agree with about the Iraq war.

Former Prime Minister Sir John Major has criticised Tony Blair's handling of the Iraq war and his presentation of the case for invasion in March 2003. Sir John said he had reluctantly backed the war because he believed what Mr Blair had said as prime minister. But now, he said, big questions had been raised by the evidence given to the Chilcott Inquiry into the war.

I can understand Labour MPs not speaking out about the catalogue of deceit and spin that constituted the Government's 'case' for going to war. Not many of them have the courage of the late Robin Cook. And of course the Conservatives have been hamstrung by their pallid acquiescence in the Commons vote which - well, I was going to say 'took Britain to war', but it was more like a rubber stamp on a decision that had been taken many months before and a long way away. Only the LibDems spoke out against it, and I found myself in the curious position of agreeing with a party that I normally think of as irrelevant. Now, at last, someone in a senior position has said what I have been thinking all along.

In the run-up to the war, I was highly suspicious of the way things were going. Hans Blix had not completed his search for the WMDs that we were assured were there, and I was sure that no decision about war would be made until the facts were clear. I was wrong, of course. I certainly wasn't in favour of war, but neither was I completely against it either. It was only when Tony Blair made that claim - in Parliament - that Saddam Hussein had WMDs that could be mobilised at 45 minutes' notice, that I came down reluctantly behind the Government's position. I guess I was naïve enough to think that if the British Prime Minister said something in Parliament, it would be true. I know that Blair and his cronies now say that the 45-minute claim only ever referred to battlefield weapons, but that was certainly not the impression that they were giving out at the time. This was a massive piece of misinformation, and I was taken in by it.

I think my anger at Blair and the whole lot of them is because I allowed them to compromise my principles. I believe that war is sometimes necessary, but must always be a last resort, and must be engaged in for the highest ethical reasons. If Iraq is threatening Britain, or British people, or British forces, I reasoned, then a hard strike against them is unfortunately justified. Blair was quite specific with the British people - the war was not about regime change, it was about WMDs (the reverse of what Bush was feeding to the American people at the same time, incidentally). When it turned out that the war was indeed about regime change, and pursued partly to advance US interests in the region, partly about oil, and partly about Bush Jr finishing off the job that Bush Snr couldn't do, I felt betrayed.

Betrayed. It's a strong word, but Blair's lies to Parliament and the British people caused me to give my tacit support to something which I later realised was completely wrong, and something that on principle I would never have supported had I know the facts. Blair made me feel stained by my association with a vicious and unjustified act of aggression against a country that posed us no threat whatsoever, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders (people who, in theory, we were acting to protect against the evil Saddam). What no-one pointed out at the time, but which seemed a reasonable question, was that the War On Terror was a result of 9/11, but that Iraq had no connection whatsoever with Al-Qaeda. It was like having the bully from No. 15 set fire to your shed, and kicking the door of No. 28 down as revenge.

So John Major's intervention is welcome.

Sir John said it now seemed there were doubts before the invasion about whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said he wanted to know whether the Cabinet had known about those doubts. He said: "I had myself been prime minister in the first Gulf War, and I knew when I said something I was utterly certain that it was correct, and I said less than I knew. "I assumed the same thing had happened and on that basis I supported reluctantly the second Iraq war."

My position exactly.

Sir John said the argument that someone was bad was an inadequate argument for war. "There are many bad men around the world who run countries and we don't topple them, and indeed in earlier years we had actually supported Saddam Hussein when he was fighting against Iran.

There is a moral case to be made for going to war to remove 'bad men' from positions of power, although I wouldn't agree with it. But we don't do this anywhere else in the world. Zimbabwe and North Korea are two obvious examples. But then, those countries don't have oil.

Sir John said concerns about the Iraq war needed to be addressed if the public's trust in politics was going to be restored.

That's certainly true for me. I think the events of 2003 an onwards regarding Iraq are what turned my attitude from healthy suspicion to downright cynicism. I didn't use to follow Louis Heren's advice (when listening to a politician, always ask yourself "why is this lying bastard lying to me?"), but I am more inclined to do so now. If the Prime Minister can lie to Parliament and the people so comprehensively and with so little remorse, what else are they lying about? Then, of course, all the crime statistics and the educational achievements (which always sound so good, and never ever match what you see in the real world) start to look like the spin they really are. It is now commonplace, when presented with official figures about anything, to look first for the manipulation. The corrosion of trust in politicians may well be a truer legacy of Prime Minister Blair than anything else he did.

John Major says a lot more about Parliament and politicians, and it's worth reading. He might not have been the greatest Prime Minister we ever had, but he had integrity.

Integrity, that's what has been lost.