To my eternal regret two years ago I did not buy Chris Mullin's first edition of his diaries 'The View From The Foothills' and have the opportunity to have it signed at the Hay festival.
This morning I have so far spent a relatively lazy morning, clearing up two dead rabbits that one of the cats has decided to supplement his diet with, yesterday it was only one headless on the the kitchen tiles. However I was able to listen to Chris Mullin's new diary extracts on Radio 4 called Decline & Fall 2005-10. A deliberate title parody of Gibbon's Roman Empire or the last days in the Reichs bunker.
Chris Mullin has always struck me as one of the few Labour men that I can have time for because of his principled stance on Civil Liberties.
Listening to the extracts this morning which dealt with the vote on ninety days detention under the Terrorism Act that Mullin opposed it was clear that the vast majority of Labour MP's would not recognise principle if it stood up and hit them in the face.
Blair made an impassioned speech to the PLP to support ninety days on the basis that it would wrong foot the Tories, not dealing with terrorists. Blair the operator clearly knew the sheep he was dealing with. As with driving the sheep into the lobby over Iraq, Blair was on sparkling form.
As a well know dissenter, he was called into to see the whip, then the 'man' himself, who urged him to vote with the Government. Mullin said he would love to, if he had not spent most of the seventies and eighties fighting the very people that Blair was preparing to give extended powers to.
(As with most episodes of Police malpractice, nobody was ever bought to book, Supt Reade and others though charged with Perjury and perverting the course of Justice were never prosecuted)
In the event the sheep were defeated by the wolves, the first ever nu-labour defeat. As Mullin said, 'The Rubicon had been crossed'.
Mullin exposes the sham of naked and dangerous power play that is 'Representative Parliamentary Democracy' as practiced in this country. Without men and women of princple, a small cabal of 'like minded friends' tend to run the country. The publication of 'The Journey' by one T.Blair will show that largely that the small cabal around Blair were acting in the interests of a foreign power, namely the United States, not the the United Kingdom.
If the quality of the flock of sheep that was the PLP was anything to go by we desperately need a written Constitution to hold the Executive in check, when having a pop at the Tories is seen as more important than national security.
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