Friday 19 April 2013

Unfortunate Things


Perhaps it goes with the stiff upper lip – that peculiarly English sense that it is as well not to mention the elephant in the room, since the elephant will still be there. In this spirit, Whitehall has made many absurd attempts to divert the attention from matters that are not merely inconvenient, but widely known.

Think of Spycatcher, where – in the name of protecting surveillance techniques used overseas – the Thatcher government went all the way to the law lords to try and stop the British media reporting on a book that already sold 2m copies globally. More recently, we had foreign secretary David Miliband asking British courts to conceal from the public what the CIA had told MI5 about the torture of a UK resident – only for the concerns about sparing US blushes to collapse after an American court publicly upheld the gist of the complaint.

Clumsy vanishing tricks are back on the stage, this time in connection with the Chagos Islands. In a shaming chapter of British colonialism, the islands' inhabitants were cleared away as part of a deal to create a US airbase, in which US backhanders and the misleading of parliament are established facts. Even William Hague is not trying to deny it all; his more modest – but still audacious – ambition is to get the courts to pretend that they have never seen a devastating memo that emerged as part of the 2010 US embassy cables.

It records Colin Roberts – a mandarin now set for installation as the governor of the Falklands – allegedly explaining that a purportedly environmental scheme to create a "marine conservation park" including the islands will in fact "put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago's former residents", breathtaking evidence of a gulf between public policy and private motivation.

Faced with litigation concerning the lawfulness of the conservation policy, at the start of this week the Foreign Office was following its customary tactic of refusing to engage on the basis that it never confirms or denies leaks. Suddenly, however – and apparently without written argument – it switched strategies and announced that the memo could not be considered without violating the Vienna convention, which protects diplomatic correspondence.

We await the court's written ruling, but the judges have already indicated they may accept an argument, which in effect recognises that the memo is authentic. That is only one bizarre implication of what could prove a very British cover-up. For if the law requires that this newly authenticated document be put back under wraps, where does that leave the likes of the Guardian, which has already released it? Must it now be "unpublished", and taken down from the web?

It is of course a ridiculous prospect, but then fear of ridicule never gets in the way of a good English scramble to pretend unfortunate things have never been seen.

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