Daily Mail, April 28 2003.

Local democracy is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, we haven’t got it. What we’ve got instead is a constitutional porridge, and millions of implacably hacked-off voters.

On Thursday, England’s voters outside London go to the polls to elect their local councillors. The usual auction of advance excuses is under way. So we are told the Iraq war may temporarily obstruct otherwise slavish devotees of government policy from casting their vote for Labour councils; while the Tories have announced ridiculously low expectations, so that anything above total meltdown can be talked up as a stunning advance.

The real winner, however, may once again be the abstention party as voters stay away. They feel their vote counts for nothing. It is not merely that the quality of council services such as schools or road repairs gets progressively worse, even though council tax bills have almost doubled over the past ten years.

More fundamentally, local democracy is not really local at all. Central government has long pulled local authorities’ strings by providing most of their money and calling the tunes the council pipers have to play.

As a result, each side blames the other for the inadequacy of council services. The total absence of transparency has made it all but impossible for the ordinary voter to determine where the real responsibility lies.

A prime example is the current school funding debacle. A survey by head teachers is expected to claim this week that three quarters of schools are suffering a budget crisis. They are being forced to cut classes and lay off teachers; timetables may be reduced, and children may be sent home.

The Education Secretary Charles Clarke insists that councils have failed to allocate £500 million to their schools, diverting the money instead into other pet projects. He claims that even allowing for rises in salaries and pension and NI contributions, schools in England have been given an extra £250 million this year. Now Mr Clarke is threatening not only to name and shame tight-fisted councils, but even to cut out their ‘postman’ function altogether and fund schools directly from Whitehall.

But the councils furiously reject Mr Clarke’s claims. We was robbed, they cry. Billions are being batted back and forth in this war of words with more ferocity than at the Wimbledon men’s singles final. Kent, the biggest education authority, says it’s only received half of what the government says it gave it. The Local Government Association claims councils have actually spent £4.3 billion more on education than the government allowed for and yet have still run out of money.

Perhaps most intriguingly Fiona Millar, the partner of Alistair Campbell, long-term confidante of Cherie Blair and chairman of governors at her children’s primary school in the London borough of Camden, has blamed the government directly for the school’s £127,000 cash shortfall. She has urged parents to write protest letters, and is actively spreading her campaign to other schools.

So who is actually to blame, central or local government? Almost certainly, it’s a combination of both. Mr Clarke has changed the funding formula in order to redistribute cash from schools in the so-called wealthy south to the impoverished north. The result is that a number of authorities have lost out heavily.

The added odour of pork-barrel politics has steamed upwards from the extra funds suddenly provided to schools in Mr Clarke’s own Norwich constituency – including the school attended by his son – giving them an estimated fifteen times as much money as neighbouring areas.

But local councils are not blameless. For years, they have indeed salted away some 15 per cent of the government’s schools allocation into other departments, dubious schemes or their own empire building bureaucracies.

On top of all that, the government has made councils the cutting edge of education reform. So every new initiative produced by the Education Department results in fresh armies of officials employed by local education authorities.

Still worse, there are now dozens of different sources of money for schools. Not surprisingly, some of these funds disappear down the cracks. Legend has it that only one man in the country understands local government finance, and he went screaming mad years ago.

Thus incompetence, maladministration and waste on an epic scale pass unremarked in the total fog that passes for education policy, enabling ministers and council leaders to scream abuse at each other to the general bafflement of the citizenry.

The essence of the problem – and this applies to central government, too -- is that the people paying for public services have no control over how their money is spent. That control is entrusted instead to bureaucrats and politicians in local and central government. These pursue a variety of agendas – social engineering, enforcing uniformity – which have nothing to do with people’s needs and everything to do with increasing their own power.

The Education Department’s own budget has risen by 60 per cent in five years. And to what end? To produce one daft and destructive wheeze after another; to preside over rampant grade inflation and declining standards; to tie up teachers in red tape and to curtail their professional independence so that they are driven out of the profession altogether.

The same is true of public services run by central government, such as the NHS.

The only way to stop public money being sucked into the black hole of Whitehall is to revolutionise the whole basis of these services.

The old model – where the voter pays and central or local government squanders the money -- has to go. Instead, there should be radical decentralisation and a transfer of power and leverage to the people, so that the professionals delivering services become answerable to their users rather than to bureaucrats and politicians.

Schools cost on average nearly £5000 per pupil every year. Scandalously, getting on for a quarter of pupils leave school functionally illiterate or innumerate. Yet for that money, parents could send their children to private schools. Surely it would be far better for parents to be given a voucher for this sum so they can buy education in a school of their choice, whether state or independent.

The argument that this would create inequality is fraudulent. There is no equality now for the child abandoned to educational neglect and incompetence in a sink school. This is well understood in countries more egalitarian than ours which provide large public subsidies for private education.

In Sweden, councils have to provide 75% of the fees for any school of a parent’s choice. In the Netherlands some 70% of children are in private schools; as in Denmark, groups of parents can apply to open schools, and the resulting competition has improved standards overall.

The truth is that the fiction of equality is merely a device for exercising control, and its principal victims are the most disadvantaged in our society.

The other casualty is democracy itself. The paradox is that only if politics is taken out of the public services and diversity and freedom allowed to flourish will the political process become transparent, and voting will become a worthwhile activity once again.

Daily Mail, April 14 2003.

Completely unabashed, the people who got this war so totally wrong at every turn are still making a rotten call.

The liberation of Iraq has brought anarchy and disorder in its wake. For the last few days, there have been awful scenes of looting, intimidation and violence in Baghdad, Basra and other cities. How can anyone be surprised? It is entirely predictable that the vacuum left by the overthrow of the existing power – and before the war has even ended -- will produce disorder.

Now, the Americans and British are responding by flying in civilian and military police to impose calm. It was always going to be difficult to build the institutions of law and order in Iraq after thirty years of Saddam’s police state.

Yet extraordinarily, it seems that for the anti-war lobby the police state would actually have been preferable. The current civil disorder is merely the latest stick with which to beat the Americans. At every stage of the war, these armchair appeasers predicted disaster; at every stage, they were proved wrong. Now, with military victory almost complete, they are willing the peace to fail.

Yes, of course there are huge dangers of civil war or a slide into another tyranny. But to lose no opportunity to oppose or undermine the liberation of people who have suffered so grievously under one of the world’s most disgusting regimes is nothing short of moral bankruptcy.

The fact is that if the appeasement tendency had had its way, the Iraqi people would still be living in terror of torture, oppression, murder and genocide. How can so many sentient people in the west so comprehensively lose the plot like this?

But of course, this is hardly the first time. Left wing intellectuals have been lending their support to terror ever since the French Revolution. From Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot, the left has supported or made excuses for the oppression and slaughter of its fellow citizens whose fate was dismissed as the necessary sacrifice for the fantasies of revolutionary socialism.

In the forties George Orwell, that implacable left-wing enemy of all tyrannies, devastatingly analysed the support of the ‘enlightened’ intellectual classes for Stalinism, as well as their extreme reluctance to grasp the threat of fascism until Hitler was well on the way to world domination.

The intellectuals’ blindness, wrote Orwell, was due to a combination of factors: an innate defeatism, a disaffection with Britain which made them side with its enemies -- and most disturbing of all, a worship of crude power which actually made them admire the cruelty and demonic energy of both Stalinism and Fascism.

This analysis holds true today. Insufferably, the left claims the moral high ground for such loathsome attitudes. But the really bad mistake it has now made in appeasing Saddam’s regime has illuminated a startling reversal of political roles.

Traditionally, the left has been associated with progressive change and the optimism that derives from wanting to make the world a better place. The right, by contrast, has been associated with a pessimistic resistance to change, a belief that because man is a fallen creature reform is pointless. One might say it was a division between naïve idealists and hatchet-faced reactionaries.

But over Iraq, these positions have been swapped. It is the left which has been resistant to regime change in Iraq, choosing to back dictatorship over freedom and arguing against upsetting the ‘stability’ of other Arab terror regimes. It is the American right which wants to ‘de-fang’ and bring democracy to states that threaten terror not just against their own populations but against the world.

Extraordinarily, it is the left which is now accusing the right of naivety. But the idealism of the American conservatives has a hard edge. However elusive democracy may be, they believe other Arab sponsors of terror will now have got the message: ‘You next’.

And indeed, the confounding spectacle of the Americans actually removing a regime of mass destruction, and showing they were prepared to take casualties among their own troops on the ground and were equally determined to avoid needless civilian casualties among the Iraqis, has stunned other Arab despotisms.

Whether it is enough of a jolt to persuade them to abandon their lethal practices remains to be seen. But surely it is better to try than to wait for yet more terror strikes against the west to add to a list that has been lengthening for more than thirty years?

The Middle East conflict has been fuelled by Arab states using the Palestinians as proxies. The overthrow of Saddam offers the best chance in years to break that lethal stalemate, which can only finally be resolved if other state sponsors of terror like Syria and Iran are also de-fanged.

Yet this idealism now driving the American right is excoriated by the left. Blinkered by its governing obsession with American imperialism, it is simply incapable of grasping the change that has come over the U.S as a result of 9/11.

That seismic catastrophe meant that the traditional reactionary and insular inertia of American conservatives was no longer an option. Trying to change the world for the better was the country’s only defence.

The British left simply cannot understand this. It believes that the U.S. can never be morally right and that the third world – America’s victims -- can never be in the wrong. Consequently, it has uncritically swallowed the fantasy at the core of the jihad against the west.

At root, this is a refusal by the Islamic world to admit that the reason its civilisation has lost out to western modernity lies within itself. Instead, it blames the west for this calamity through the ‘imperialism’ of its ideas. As a result, any attempt by the west to defend itself against violence is seen as an imperialist attack, and any civilian casualties inflicted as an unfortunate consequence of this defence are seen as malevolent atrocities.

By echoing these grotesque distortions – in western newspaper articles and broadcasts which have been widely distributed throughout the Arab world – the left has not only aided the enemies of the west but has also helped deepen the destructive fantasies that keep Arab and Moslem peoples in oppression and servitude.

Those peoples now have a unique chance to grasp the opportunities for freedom America is showing them. But the left will doubtless continue to support every tyrannical Arab regime against the interests of its own people and the security of the world.

Once again, Orwell’s words are uncannily prophetic. For the intellectuals’ power worship, he wrote, warped their political judgment by creating the unavoidable belief that ‘present trends will continue’. The reason today’s left-wing intellectuals are now so spectacularly on the wrong side of the argument is that they are similarly arguing present tyrannies should continue.

Why should we take these people seriously ever again? What have they got to offer the tyrannised and threatened of the earth, except more of the same?

It is the left who are now the pessimistic, inertia-prone reactionaries, while the right have become the (still hatchet faced) idealists who are trying to repair the world.

Daily Mail, April 7 2003

Millions of people will have woken up this morning feeling distinctly poorer. Yesterday, the long-threatened rise in national insurance kicked in. This comes on top of swingeing increases in council tax bills up and down the country, not to mention assorted other financial penalties which disproportionately raid the pockets of the middle classes.

In two days’ time, Gordon Brown will present his latest Budget. The burden of his remarks is unlikely to restore the good temper of the public. The fact that the nation’s attention is distracted by the war in Iraq cannot disguise the unhappy prospect that the Chancellor’s estrangement from his long-abused better half, Prudence, will almost certainly be confirmed on Wednesday as an unequivocal divorce.

For UK plc is plunging into the red. A widening gap has yawned between tax revenues and the Chancellor’s hugely ambitious public spending plans. Mr Brown is expected to cover his embarrassment not by raising taxes but by substantially increasing public borrowing.

He is likely to blame this shortfall on everything but himself – maybe on the European downturn, or the falls on the stock market, or even the war. He will brush aside these difficulties as a temporary blip, insisting that the basic economy is sound.

But any such excuses will ring hollow. After all, he has bored us all rigid with the obsessive mantra that all his calculations were based on prudence, allowing specifically for unforeseen acts of fate. He cannot now turn round and blame those very same acts of fate without provoking a hollow guffaw.

Moreover, he was amply warned that his enormous rises in public spending -- particularly on health and education -- were a reckless gamble since they made assumptions which might well not be borne out.

The reason he has got into these difficulties is because he is presiding over a political philosophy that has simply crumbled into pieces. Not only is he refusing to admit he is clinging to the wreckage, but he is proposing to add yet more piles of debris to the ruins – and make us pay through the nose for the privilege.

His massive expansion of public spending was predicated on the belief that the public had suddenly learned to love tax rises (not enough to raise taxes honestly, mind you; it all had to be done through sleights of hand like National Insurance, but that’s another story). This was because, it was thought, voters had finally realised that good public services had to be paid for.

This was to underestimate the public’s ability -- so mysterious to Labour politicians --to actually see what is really going on. Yes, people want better public services; and yes, they know that these require higher spending. But they can also see that despite the unparalleled largesse Mr Brown has been pouring into these services, they are scarcely improving; indeed, in many respects, the more money going in, the worse the outcomes.

Opinion polls show that, presented with the claim that yet more billions of their money will do the trick -- along with the related idea that Mr Brown’s policies will improve the state of the economy -- people tend to remark on pink objects with trotters and curly tails whizzing through the upper hemisphere.

What the public has twigged is that the old model of public service delivery -- by which taxes are raised and money dished out on public services by central government – has failed. The root of this failure lies in the centralised control of these services for political purposes. The incessant meddling and manipulation by politicians of both main parties has destroyed education and the health service, driven out in despair many fine teachers, lecturers, doctors and nurses, and all but paralysed the police.

Mr Brown has now tested this philosophy of central control to destruction. Through his barrage of targets and performance indicators, he has effectively tried to run the public services from the Treasury. Any attempt to wrest some of this control away – as in the very limited experiment of foundation hospitals – is ferociously resisted.

The results are shocking. Roughly one in five children leaves school functionally illiterate or innumerate. Britain has some of the worst cancer survival rates and longest treatment waiting lists in Europe. It also suffers more violent crime than Europe, and six times as many people are mugged in London as in New York.

Even worse, the stock of information has been corrupted by a culture of propaganda and bamboozlement to enable ministers to lie to the public that things are getting better. So now the crime statistics have become all but unintelligible, hospital waiting lists distorted beyond recognition, and educational achievement made increasingly meaningless by exam grade inflation and fiddled school test results.

It’s no better in local government, where council tax bills are not matched by corresponding improvements in services. More and more is being spent on wages, self-serving bureaucracies and ever more grotesque and useless posts.

Voting thus becomes an act of self-flagellation. No wonder there is now such a dangerous democratic deficit, with such widespread cynicism and political inertia.

To restore faith in democracy, what’s needed – paradoxically -- is to take politics out of the public services, radically decentralise them and give their users leverage and choice.

A report issued today by the think-tank Reform – which is holding a conference to discuss it -- is on the right lines. On education, it suggests vouchers to allow parents to buy into the school of their choice in both public and private sectors. On health, it says at the very least patients should be able to select their treatment, and maybe there should be a new system of funding through compulsory insurance. And police forces should be made accountable to police chiefs and to the public rather than to central government.

The Tories are treading cautiously in this direction. But the Labour party can’t go down this route. At least while Mr Brown is Chancellor, it is giving full rein to its illiberal desire to reshape society, nationalise the family and trap more and more in dependency on the state.

The party remains hung up on ‘equality’ and on redistributing wealth from the better off to the poor. The result is that real people are sacrificed to an impossible idea. So health service money is redistributed from the ‘rich’ south to the ‘poor’ north, thus grotesquely penalising the poor of the south who are forced to subsidise both the poor and [ital] the better-off of the north.

Labour party reactionaries who defend this approach know full well that those who can afford to do so will increasingly opt out, thus offering yet further opportunities to penalise them, confiscate their money and destroy the life chances of their children, while doing absolutely nothing to alleviate the abandonment and misery of the people at the bottom of the heap.

Mr Brown’s redistributive agenda has nothing to do with social justice and everything to do with controlling people’s lives. This week’s Budget will provide further evidence of how he has bet the whole shop to do so.

Jewish Chronicle, April 4 2003.

It was disturbing -- to put it mildly -- to learn from the boasts of a Fatah official that hundreds of Palestinians had gone to swell Saddam Hussein’s war arsenal as a supply of human bombs.

So one might expect Britain - America’s staunchest ally in the war against terror -- to be making tough noises towards the Palestinians. But instead, Mr Blair has been pressing President Bush to publish the ‘road map’ which would set up a Palestinian state by 2005. Instead of drawing the correct lesson of equivalence – to show towards Palestinian terror the same resolve being shown to Iraq – Mr Blair intends to reward mass murder by giving it a state of its own.

In similar vein, the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw beat his breast over the west’s ‘double standards’ in insisting Saddam honour UN resolutions while failing to make the same requirement of Israel. But the disputed resolutions concerning Israel are not binding Security Council resolutions of the kind Saddam has broken. And the UN has made it clear that Israel is entitled to defend itself.

In his attempt to appease the Arab world, Mr Blair appears to want to ‘even up’ the score in the Middle East by balancing pressure on Saddam with pressure on Israel. But Saddam is an architect of terror; Israel is a victim of terror, sponsored in part by Saddam himself. To equate Saddam’s defiance of the UN with Israel’s beleaguerment is grotesque.

At such a time, the very idea of this road map is sickening. It is not that the notion of a Palestinian state is wrong; but it has to be a state which is not being created specifically to bring about Israel’s destruction.

President Bush said last June that the US would not support such a state until the Palestinians had new leaders not compromised by terror. Mr Bush and Mr Blair have hailed the new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas as evidence of a reformed administration. But this ‘reform’ is a charade.

Since Yasser Arafat remains in control of security and the ‘peace process’, Dr Abbas has no real power. And in any event, his own profile is hardly encouraging. He told the Arab daily al-Sharq al-Awsat last month: ‘We don’t talk about a break in the armed struggle… The intifada must continue; it is the right of the Palestinian people to resist and use all possible means’. His only ‘concession’ was that the violence should be confined to the territories.

Nor is this in the least surprising given his doctoral thesis, in which he reportedly concluded that the Holocaust (which was much exaggerated) was a Zionist Nazi conspiracy to bring about the foundation of Israel. Yet this is the man praised by Jack Straw as ‘a fine politician and statesman…committed to a peaceful path’.

President Bush appears to be far less keen on the road map, Mr Blair’s pet project. Now, aware that Palestinian support for Saddam might scupper the plan altogether, the British are proposing some weaselly ‘confidence-boosting’ security gloss. But the Prime Minister’s analysis remains frighteningly flawed.

He thinks the failure to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict is a major reason for Arab terror. Wrong: Arab terror is a major reason why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinians. He thinks the absence of a Palestinian state is a cause of Arab bitterness and fury. Wrong: the presence of a Jewish state is the cause.

I happen to think the settlements are indefensible and stupid. But the idea that Arab terror would end if they were all dismantled tomorrow is simply fatuous. The Camp David/Taba debacle showed all too clearly that the real Palestinian agenda is a one-state solution and the end of Israel.

Mr Blair goes to great lengths to profess his deep affection and support for Israel. No doubt that’s genuine enough. But as in so many other areas, he appears incapable of thinking it all through properly.

The message of the war on Iraq is that the old order -- in which the west either looked the other way from terror or even rewarded it by treating its aims with exaggerated respect -- is supposed to be over. Everywhere except, it seems, in Israel.

Mr Blair appears to be prepared to use Israel as a bone to throw to the Arabs to pacify them. If so, that would also display culpable naivety. For the Arab states do not want peace in Israel. On the contrary, the conflict there serves a vital purpose for them: to distract the seething masses they subjugate, and prevent them from turning on their corrupt Arab rulers.

Mr Blair is surrounded by Foreign Office Arabists on one side, and on the other by people whose visceral hatred of Ariel Sharon blinds them to any analysis that does not cast him as sole villain in the Middle East tragedy. Someone needs to open our Prime Minister’s eyes, and quickly.

Daily Mail, April 4 2003.

As the coalition prepares for the battle for Baghdad and the war in Iraq enters its most dangerous phase, the real quagmire has developed over who should run Iraq after the war has been won.

Tony Blair has been pressing for the United Nations to take a central role. The U.S. says ‘over our dead bodies’ after the debacle over the second UN resolution and the perfidious behaviour of the French. The Americans want instead to run Iraq themselves for an interim period under a retired general, with Iraqi assistance.

This poses huge problems for Mr Blair in trying to hose down his apoplectic party, for whom the UN is the sole kite mark of international legitimacy. As ever, he is convinced he can bridge the gap.

In the Commons this week, he let slip the difference with the Americans by saying that the coalition should work ‘in close consultation and partnership with the UN’. But he tried to fudge the issue by adding that government would be handed over to the Iraqis themselves as fast as possible.

This last point is itself a source of fierce argument within President Bush’s administration. The Pentagon wants to unload the burden of government onto the Iraqis at the earliest opportunity, while the State Department, fearful that Iraq might turn into a second Lebanon, wants the firm stamp of US and maybe UN governance instead.

The prospect of the US running Iraq is being seized upon by the left as confirmation of their darkest suspicions that this war is – in the slogan of the anti-war placards – ‘blood for oil’.

They think the UN is the only guarantee against this kind of corrupt carve-up. But to believe that, you need to be wearing the heaviest of ideological blinkers.

Yes, the big oil companies are certainly manoeuvring for a share of the post-war spoils. And there are indeed questions to be asked about Halliburton, the company once headed by US Vice-President Dick Cheney, whose subsidiary was awarded a contract last week – with no competitive tender -- to put out the oil well fires in Iraq.

But the US has guaranteed that Iraq’s oil revenues will be entrusted to a UN protectorate. And anyway, the idea that only America may be compromised by its commercial interests in Iraq is simply fatuous.

The French oil company Total/Fina/Elf has exclusive rights to develop two huge oilfields in Iraq. Similarly, Russia has signed oil exploration deals with Iraq worth around $40 billion. When the UN was thrashing around over the second resolution, Iraq unsubtly cancelled one of these contracts, only to restore it again when -- by an amazing coincidence -- Russia started opposing military action.

If anyone was trading blood for oil, therefore, it was France and Russia. Yet their unsavoury motives are never questioned. On the contrary, Mr Blair appears to want to reward them for their repellent role in this crisis by restoring their power over Iraq through the UN.

Now concerns are being expressed that the Americans are stitching up Iraqi reconstruction contracts and Britain isn’t getting a look in. But whose fault is that? Mr Blair hasn’t been pitching for British firms to gain these contracts because he is fixated by the idea that the UN -- rather than the US and the UK -- should run post-Saddam Iraq.

As our business leaders are rightly complaining, it simply hasn’t occurred to our government that British interests need to be represented in the reconstruction of Iraq. The only interest that crosses their mind is aid. So in Mr Blair’s vision, it seems, we would be relegated to merely doling out the charity while the tyranny-traders France and Russia once again clean up.

But of course, they can do no wrong under the aegis of the sainted UN, which is beyond reproach because it represents the will of the ‘international community’ and is thus the only guarantor of peace and stability.

What a sick joke. It’s not merely that the UN has been revealed by this crisis as a busted flush, incapable of enforcing its own resolutions.

It has utterly failed as an instrument of collective security. It has shored up dictators like Saddam, ignoring his multiple atrocities; it didn’t lift a finger over genocide in Rwanda, or tyranny and oppression in Turkey, Sudan or myriad Arab states; and if had its way, the Balkans would still be the killing fields of Europe.

Its dealings are utterly corrupt. Who could possibly say that bribing banana republics to vote for either the French or American positions on Iraq is a desirable way to run the world? Who can take the UN seriously as an arbiter of peace and stability when it puts Syria on the Security Council, Libya in charge of human rights and Iraq in charge of disarmament?

If the UN ran post-war Iraq it would be a disaster. It would re-empower the French and Russians, allow corrupt dictatorships to auction off Iraq’s future, and seek revenge on the US.

Why should a body that fought to preserve Saddam in power have any say in reconstructing a free Iraq? As Colin Powell said, the US didn’t take on the huge burden of the coalition to have no significant control over how Iraq develops in the future.

Of course the Iraqis must run their own country. But this cannot be done overnight. After 30 years under one ruthless dictator, they need a period of tutelage to set up the institutions of freedom: an independent judiciary and police force, a free press and so on. And the country needs to be systematically ‘de-Ba’athised’ – stripped of Saddam’s political party and its vice-like grip -- just like Germany was de-Nazified after World War Two.

Many Iraqis want this, too. They are only too aware of the tribal nature of their country. They fear hugely civil war. It would be a dereliction of duty to abandon an untried person like opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi to be engulfed by chaos, or to deliver the Iraqis from Saddam’s tyranny only for them to be engulfed by another.

This kind of interim administration may take several years. And it should be run neither by the UN nor the Americans alone. The model should be the commission that reconstructed post-war Germany. The British should be involved, along with other members of the coalition such as the Australians. These should work with Iraqis drawn from the broadest possible spectrum.

The Arab world may not like it; but then the Arab world stood by and did nothing to stop Saddam’s world-threatening tyranny. What is vital is to show the Arab world that the west is determined to follow through to help make the world a safer place, and that it will not give up.

As for the UN, it also needs to be reconstructed. We need a forum restricted to those democracies prepared to fight for freedom -- a United Democratic Nations. There is a choice now, between corrupt Europe and the UN on the one hand, and a new order that will uphold democratic values on the other. Mr Blair must make that choice, or fall through the gap.