Oliver Kamm

Media law

This is merely a footnote and guide to further information (all right, a plug) concerning the issues raised in the post below. That post gives an account of an unfortunately farcical incident in the abuse of the English legal system. When my correspondent Neil Clark started writing to me to threaten legal action in order to cover up his incompetence and misrepresentation of source material, I formed a definite impression of his abilities, and was not disabused of it by anything to come. Some habitually dishonest people are fluent and convincing, but Mr Clark is a danger to himself.

Though he does not perceive and would not appreciate this, I have gone to some lengths to protect him from the consequences of his behaviour. These include most particularly the financial consequences of his abuse of the legal process. They include also a wider knowledge of his lying to and in a newspaper (which I kept back from The Guardian till now) and his practice of faking laudatory comments about himself on third party websites while pretending to be a girl (which I specifically asked my friend Stephen Pollard not to disclose on his blog, as I felt Mr Clark had suffered a surfeit of ridicule). It takes rare stupidity to behave the way Mr Clark has done, and he was not in the league of formidable opponents.

Not everyone who issues threats of libel action will be of this type; in fact I doubt that anyone would be. In the current climate, for bloggers or media professionals, it is time well invested to read an expert account of the current state of law as it affects the media, and especially libel law as it affects the Web. There is, as chance would have it, a new book that I have found especially helpful and (seriously) a joy to read. It is called Media Law, by Peter Carey and others. The authors are all partners of Charles Russell LLP; the extensive chapter on defamation was written by the lawyer who represented me against Mr Clark, and to whom I invariably now refer any other cranks who write to me claiming that I've libelled them. In parts (e.g., when discussing the libel case colloquially known as "Wayne Rooney and the Auld Slapper") it is marked by dry wit that I would not think typical of legal texts.

Those (unthreatening) libel threats

Several weeks ago I wrote about the emerging issue of libel threats against UK bloggers, with particular reference to the case of the former diplomat Craig Murray. I wrote:

As the issue of legal action concerning blogs is now quite a topical one, and I have recently been asked by a news programme about my minor experience in the field, I will return to the matter of the only time I have received a purported and admittedly unthreateningly incompetent writ for libel. I've never published the blizzard of emails sent to me last year by the blogger Neil Clark, author of - sticking to the theme of mass murderers - a piece entitled "Slobodan Milosevic, Prisoner of Conscience", and more recently of various laudatory comments about himself under false names on third-party websites. It may be of value to others of similar inclination if I set out that correspondence as well as the records of the case's peremptory conclusion.

The issue is serious, but the personality concerned is not, and - while not exactly receiving effusive, or indeed any, thanks for this - I held back a few details of his behaviour when previously recounting the case. For the reasons stated in my earlier post, I do propose now to state the issue more fully. There is a problem, for your patience and for mine, in that Mr Clark's emails and letters threatening legal action were highly repetitive. This was largely because he kept asserting that I had one last chance to apologise publicly and delete the material from this blog that he found exceptionable, whereupon his stated deadline would pass and he would write again asserting that I had one last chance to apologise publicly and delete the material from this blog that he found exceptionable. I shall nonetheless give a representative sample of his urgings and a synopsis of the case.

Mr Clark's political opinions are not relevant to this case, but I record incidentally that he regards with equanimity and even a sense of justice the prospect of the sectarian murder of interpreters in Iraq who have been assisting British troops operating under a UN mandate. There is no necessary reason that a fanatic need also evince the characteristics that I shall now describe, but it is moderately pleasing when he does.

Almost two years ago, Mr Clark wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph (irrelevantly, a review of a book by me), whose content surprised me. I believed - and said to the newspaper's Books Editor, who behaved impeccably throughout the ensuing affair - that Mr Clark was an imaginative and proper choice for that task, but unfortunately he proved inadequate to it. I wrote a post on this blog pointing accurately to certain characteristics of the article - such as its addressing arguments that didn't appear in the book at all - that led me to question whether Mr Clark had read the book before reviewing it. More serious, Mr Clark had recounted as fact a plainly dubious claim - a factoid - concerning the Balkans War that was a staple of pro-Serb nationalist propaganda.

Mr Clark sent me an indignant note threatening legal action if I did not apologise to him. Here is that email, sent on 6 January 2006.

Dear Mr Kamm,

You have made a very serious allegation against me in print, namely that I did not read your book which I reviewed for the Daily Telegraph.

You have attempted, through the blogosphere and through a letter to the Books Editor of the Daily Telegraph to discredit me and to exert pressure on those who commission me.

I would like to inform you that unless you retract your allegation by 20th January, and place the following apology on your blog, I will have no option but to seek redress from the law. I will not allow this libel to stand. I already have two witnesses who are prepared to swear on oath that I did read your book and I can assure you that if this case does go to court, it is a dispute you will not win. If you do print the apology enclosed below, I undertake to let the matter rest and to take no further action.

Yours sincerely,
Neil Clark

Apology

'In the heat of reading a critical review of my book 'Anti-Totalitarianism' in the Daily Telegraph, I falsely accused the author of the review, Neil Clark of not reading my book. I would like to retract that claim and to apologise to Neil Clark for making such an allegation'.

I naturally declined to do what Mr Clark demanded, as my remarks were fair comment on a matter of public interest. I was willing to accommodate him to the extent, and only to the extent, of adding to my post the information that he had written to me insisting that he had read the book before reviewing it, and that as he had said this, then I believed him. I was not at this stage to know what Mr Clark's word was worth (about which, more below).

Yet Mr Clark's assertions were odd. I had drawn to the attention of the Telegraph the factoid in question. This was a claim that the late Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic had been an SS recruiter in WWII - a patently doubtful assertion given that he had been only 19 years old at the end of the war. I discovered that the newspaper's Books Editor, Sam Leith, had, before publication of the review, specifically asked Mr Clark for his source. Mr Clark had replied to Mr Leith that he was citing the "Institute of Strategic Studies Organisation". A reasonable person would assume (as I did, when I learned of this from Mr Leith) that this meant the famous International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in London. Yet I could find no trace of this claim in the IISS's output.

Eventually I realised that Mr Clark must have given false information - and so he had. His real source was an obscure right-wing American outfit called the International Strategic Studies Association (ISSA). ISSA promulgates "Srebrenica denial": its research director, one Yossef Bodansky, maintains that the true number of dead in the Srebrenica massacre was not the established figure of around 8,000 but only a few hundred. It is not the same type of organisation as the scholarly and impartial IISS. Having made this discovery, I pointed it out to Mr Leith and posted it on this site. The fact that Mr Clark's conduct was due, I'm certain, to political ignorance rather than design does not soften the extraordinary character of the finding.

Mr Clark has never denied that my identification of his source was accurate. I do after all have the evidence of his emailed comments to the newspaper. Yet rather than inform his editor that he had imparted false information he preferred to try to cover it up by complaining of "malice" and "defamation" on my part. This was when the blizzard of emails began to swirl.

Here is a representative one, sent on 21 February 2006:

Dear Mr Kamm, You are persisting in a deliberate campaign to discredit me as a journalist. Unless you publish the following retraction and apology on your blog within seven days, I will be instructing my lawyer to initiate legal proceedings against you on 1st March for defamation.

A RETRACTION AND APOLOGY
'Since his review of my book 'Anti-Totalitarianism' appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 31st December 2005, I have made several allegations against the writer, Neil Clark. I now accept that these allegations were without foundation and would like to apologise unreservedly to Mr Clark'.

No such statement has ever appeared on this blog, of course, or ever will appear. I replied to Mr Clark, as I did in every case, saying that I had no intention of making comments about him that were untruthful but that I could not see that corrective action was required. Mr Clark wrote again on 8 March:

PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dear Mr Kamm,

Thank you for your note of 3rd March.

As you do not seem prepared either to remove the original defamatory postings from your blog- or to post a suitable, mutually agreed apology, I have been left with no alternative but to initiate legal proceedings against you for defamation together with a claim for damages.

I will be commencing my action in the County Court on Friday morning, 10th March, providing you with a further 36 hours in which to reconsider your position.

Yours sincerely,

Neil Clark

Because I was certain of my facts and absolutely immovable concerning Mr Clark's threats, I had long before this stage retained the services of a leading City firm in the practice of libel law, Charles Russell LLP. It was completely obvious that Mr Clark's "lawyer", referenced in his message of 21 February but who never once put in an appearance in this case, was a fictitous personality. We knew this for three reasons. First, Mr Clark - in an earlier very long email - had announced that he had taken legal advice and recounted what that advice had been (unsurprisingly, it was supposedly that I had libelled Mr Clark). If there is one thing you don't do when you've taken legal advice it is to disclose the content of that advice. If you do, you are said to have waived privilege, i.e. the content of the advice received is no longer confidential to you and anyone can ask for a copy. Secondly, if you write "WITHOUT PREJUDICE" on a threat of legal action you demonstrably have no idea what the phrase means; it is not possible to threaten legal action "without prejudice". And thirdly, the County Court (i.e. a court that deals with small claims and most aspects of civil law) does not have jurisdiction to hear libel cases unless the defendant has given written consent beforehand.

What made this fabrication more significant was that Mr Clark had contacted The Guardian to announce that he was going to sue me and had told the same lie. You can see it here. I don't fault the newspaper for having been interested in the story: a serious legal claim against a blogger would have been newsworthy. Unfortunately for the reporter concerned, a case involving Mr Clark was never going to be of that type. (Two aspects of the report might strike you as peculiar. First, my non-commital statement about an entirely unmeritorious claim was deliberate, so as not to risk prejudicing the case. Secondly, the way Mr Clark is described will surprise you, but again I do not fault the reporter for a surfeit of generosity towards an interlocutor.) I commend the newspaper's prudence in having not reproduced this report in the print edition, but to have put it only on the Web. There it stands as testament to the most singular feature of this affair: Mr Clark lied directly to one newspaper, in order to cover up his misrepresentation of source material to another.

The denoument was swift once Mr Clark resolved to strike. He eventually issued a claim - written in a child-like hand, with crossings out, and with no lawyer in sight - at his local County Court. The "writ" didn't even state what the supposed libels were, but it demanded an apology, removal of the material complained of, and damages of up to £5000. I passed the purported writ with some embarrassment to one of the top libel lawyers in London to deal with. He sent Mr Clark a terse letter explaining that the claim was an abuse of the legal process. Immediately on receiving it, Mr Clark wrote to me in a rather different tone from anything that had preceded it: a chastened plea begging "respectfully" that I acquiesce in his abuse of process and allow him to continue wasting my time and money. Oddly he omitted to explain why this course would be of any benefit to me. I passed the letter to my lawyer, who wrote another terse letter to Mr Clark explaining how libel law worked.

The presiding judge immediately struck out Mr Clark's claim on application from my lawyers, and I have never since received a communication from Mr Clark. As my friend Stephen Pollard has noted, Mr Clark has however adopted the idiosyncratic practice of inventing female identities. Under these names, Mr Clark has posted comments on other web sites in order to praise himself in the third person and damn me and Stephen. When pressed on the matter, the lady sock puppets indignantly deny being Neil Clark until the lie is no longer sustainable. I am no admirer of Wikipedia, but I do admire a toughminded Wikipedia administrator who briskly exposed Mr Clark for faking his own entry (since deleted on the grounds that, I fear, he isn't notable enough for an encyclopedia with only 7.5 million entries) by pretending to be a girl and writing encomia to himself.

From this account, I have, in deference to his dignity, held back the letter Mr Clark sent me attempting to bypass my lawyers and pleading with me to let him carry on with his waste of court time. I deliberately never issued a claim for costs - which were not trivial - against Mr Clark for his abuse of the legal process, but bore them myself so as to impress upon him that my only wish in the affair was to insist on my right to fair comment. But Mr Clark has not been gracious in defeat, and I consider it still a matter of public interest to draw attention to his quality of output and standards of probity. He not only tried to cover up, by bizarrely inept legal threats, a serious inaccuracy to a newspaper, and one that I am glad to have exposed. He also lied on third-party web sites, including a supposed reference site, and he lied directly to a Guardian journalist. These are points you may wish to recall if ever reading - let alone ever commissioning - anything by Mr Clark in future.

I have, since this affair, learned that Mr Clark indeed finds it hard to stop himself from crying "libel" when he encounters criticism. (Apparently, one contributor to the comments boxes at Harry's Place described Mr Clark as a "a charlatan and a bounder", and was surprised to receive from Mr Clark in return an indignant email complaining that the remarks were libellous.) Libel has a specific meaning in English law. Fair comment is a defence, and justification (i.e. the defendant can demonstrate that the statements are true) is a complete defence in all cases, bar one very unusual circumstance that isn't relevant here. Another word I'm aware Mr Clark resorts to sooner than acknowledge criticism is "malice". As with his use of the phrase "without prejudice", he appears to have heard of the odd legal term without ever having inquired what it means. "Malice", in the legal sense, does not bear the common meaning of the term, concerning someone's motives. It means that a defendant does not have an honest belief in the opinions expressed. Naturally, I not only believe every part of this post but can prove every part of it as well, as Mr Clark is aware.

I have quoted only a few of Mr Clark's threatening emails, but I have quoted them fully and with reason. I hope it is a useful record to others, and I do not mean it ironically when I say that I hope it is helpful to Mr Clark.

Debate

Incidentally, and still on the same subject, Intelligence Squared is holding a debate on Trident next Tuesday at the Royal Geographical Society. I am speaking in support of Trident, on the same side as Sir Michael Quinlan, former Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former Tory Defence and Secretary and Foreign Secretary. There appear still to be tickets left for the event. If - mirabile dictu - you feel a ticket price of £25 is steep to hear me opine on this or any other subject, you'll be able to hear the debate live on The Spectator's website and thereafter as a podcast.

Trident again

There is a piece in The Times today by Nigel Griffiths MP, formerly Deputy Leader of the House of Commons who resigned from the Government in March on the issue of Trident. He is responding to my article earlier in the week on this subject. His comments are a series of errors and sententious non sequiturs, but I draw your attention to them, not least because they indicate a strain of foreign-policy thinking on the Labour benches that I hope Gordon Brown will counter.

It's a small point but Griffiths begins with a straight misrepresentation: "On Tuesday Oliver Kamm defended the Trident programme as our badge to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot." No, I didn't. My article was an explication of the shifting arguments that have been used in support of an independent deterrent; it was not an avowal of all and any such argument, and it was particularly not an avowal of that one. The reference to the Royal Enclosure was a quotation - a quotation, Mr Griffiths - from Winston Churchill. Churchill's argument from national prestige seems to me an almost entirely worthless justification for the independent deterrent, and is to be distinguished from the wiser arguments presented by Clement Attlee and Tony Blair, whom I did cite favourably.

I concede that were we not a nuclear-armed power now, it is highly unlikely that we should wish to develop an independent deterrent. The best arguments (which I nonetheless reject) against the independent deterrent are that it's redundant owing to our membership of Nato, a collective defence organisation which is founded on the extension of US nuclear deterrence to Nato's member states. But - as Attlee himself explained in retrospect - there was no Nato when we took the decision to develop a nuclear programme, and it was not clear that the US would retain a commitment to the defence of Western Europe. One aspect of the transatlantic relationship that has only become clearer with hindsight is that the US was, in the late 1940s, militarily an empty shell. There was no way that it would have been able to withstand a Soviet invasion of Western Europe or mount a credible nuclear deterrent to it even as the world's only nuclear-armed power. (These statements may be surprising to some readers. I promise to do a post justifying these statements, with reference to recent historical research, at some point but the justification is incidental to the subject of this post.) Even though the UK's economy had been devastated by the war, the postwar Labour Government took the right decision on the nuclear deterrent, as well of course in being instrumental in the establishment of Nato in 1949. We have much to be thankful for in the foreign policies pursued by Attlee and Bevin.

I also concede that the argument for an independent deterrent was, during the Cold War and after the repeal of the McMahon Act in Congress (which prohibited the sharing of nuclear information with any other power, even us), a marginal case. I still think it was the right one, on the grounds that it was a cost-effective way of reinforcing deterrence to Soviet nuclear blackmail. But, unlike some other commentators, I believe the case for an independent deterrent is stronger now, in our "second nuclear age" of potential nuclear-armed rogue states, than it was during the Cold War. I advanced this case in an article here, in response to an anti-Trident argument by the former Defence Secretary Michael Portillo, and won't reprise the arguments.

But let's deal with the question of costs. Griffiths comments:

One sentence encapsulated Oliver Kamm's blind faith in Trident: “There is no reason to suppose that costs will run out of control.” The Public Accounts Committee has lost count of the number of large MoD projects whose cost overruns soar above the funds allocated. The National Audit Office highlighted a near-£3 billion overspend on four projects alone — from the Eurofighter Typhoon to the Astute Class submarines.

The reason for my remark was not faith but experience. UK political debate in the 1980s was characterised by numerous claims from anti-nuclear campaigners and opposition politicians that Trident was an open-ended drain on resources that would far exceed budget. (Few speeches from a Labour politician would pass without reference to some cause that was more deserving of some totally fanciful figure than Trident. Public works programmes to tackle unemployment were the cause du jour, much as Griffiths now cites climate change - not that I dispute the evidence for man-made climate change; it just doesn't belong in a debate about nuclear defence.) Even some serious academics said the same: David Greenwood of Aberdeen University went into print in 1982 to claim that Trident's costs would exceed the original estimate by up to 25 per cent. They were all wrong. Trident came into service on time and well within budget. The original estimated cost in 1982 was £7.5 billion over 20 years at September 1981 prices, which amounted to £13.5 billion in September 1992 prices and allowing for exchange rate movements. The exact outcome is difficult to calculate, as official figures don't include cost overruns of building projects not exclusively attributable to Trident, but it would be in the order of £2 billion below budget. (I've used figures here from Lawrence Freedman, The Politics of British Defence, 1979-98, 1999, p. 149.)

Admittedly much of this saving was due to the American side of the agreement rather than to us: the cost of the missiles fell appreciably. Yet you can't withhold all credit from Mrs Thatcher's government (and indeed from James Callaghan, who first raised with President Carter the matter of a replacement for our deterrent). The decision for Trident reflected partly an economic benefit of "commonality" (sorry: that's the jargon term) with US systems. Trident was, and is, a cost-effective choice. I take no pleasure in saying this, but in the 1980s only the Conservatives got this right (and, again, Jim Callaghan, who said in his 1987 memoirs that he too would have chosen Trident had Labour won the 1979 election). As one of my friends was at that time an adviser to David Owen, the voice of sense on defence matters within the Liberal/SDP alliance, I should cordially point out that Owen's own preference - when he was Labour Foreign Secretary from 1977-9 and and not only in the 1980s - for putting cruise missiles on attack submarines had little economic or strategic merit.

What I particularly find ominous in Griffiths's piece, however, is his remark: "For all the posturing of the US against Iran and North Korea, not even George Bush is suggesting that a nuclear weapon will be used against those regimes or their people." Griffiths plainly hasn't noticed, but the Bush administration has largely outsourced diplomacy with Iran to the EU-3, whose incentives to Iran to abide by its own commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty have been consistently rebuffed. The US has been no more assertive in its approach to North Korea. Compare and contrast with President Kennedy's insistence during the Cuba Missile Crisis that any nuclear weapon launched from Cuba would invite US retaliation on the source of that military threat, i.e. Moscow. There will on current evidence be a grave problem, in years to come, of bellicose rogue states with a nuclear capability (and in Iran's case, with a direct threat to the existence of a member state of the UN, namely Israel). I'm disturbed that a senior Labour MP doesn't perceive its importance.

Livingstone sees "Islamophobia"

Just the other day I commented that what some commentators perceive as political bias within the communications media is more often mere helplessness. But it does matter. At a minimum it infantilises policy debate. Here's a nice example from the BBC:

Muslims are being "demonised" by the British media, with 91% of reports being negative, research commissioned by London's mayor has found.

Ken Livingstone said the survey, by consultancy firm Insted, studied a week's news reports and found Islam was portrayed as a "threat to the West".... Mr Livingstone said the research by Insted - a consultancy firm which deals with issues of diversity and equality - found the national media had a "hostile and scaremongering attitude" towards the community.

Mr Livingstone said: "The overall picture presented by the media is that Islam is profoundly different from and a threat to the West.

"I think there is a demonisation of Islam going on which damages community relations and creates alarm among Muslims," he said.

Mr Livingstone urged editors to be balanced in their coverage saying out of 352 articles studied by researchers last year just 4% were positive.

The word that ought properly to conclude the first sentence is of course not "found" but "opined". The report was announced at the Mayor's press conference yesterday, and may be downloaded here. Livingstone writes in his foreword:

One of the most startling findings of this report is that in one typical week in 2006, over 90 per cent of the media articles that referred to Islam and Muslims were negative. The overall picture presented by the media was that Islam is profoundly different from and a threat to the west.

The reasoning is elusive and the document is material of a type whose conclusions might have been - and I believe were - prefabricated by its authors. These include Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, with whom I have debated before, and a Professor of Film and Television at Brunel who is chairman of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom is one of that select class of institution - like, say, Truth in Science, which calls for “critical examination of Darwinism in schools” - whose identity and purpose are exactly opposite to what is stated in the name. The only part of the report that's worth waiting for is the suppressed indignation satisfyingly implict in a remark on page 74: "The MCB [Muslim Council of Britain] seeks to engage with all mainstream political parties and until recently has enjoyed a close association with the current Government."

The conference webcast may be viewed here; it is a painful experience. The first five or six minutes are taken up with the Mayor's comments on hydrogen buses. He then hands over to a hapless fellow called Robin Richardson to introduce the report. Richardson hasn't got the report and appears to be flummoxed that Comrades Bright and Cohen, along with John Ware of the BBC, wish to ask him questions about it.

This farcical episode was brought to you at London council taxpayers' expense.

UPDATE: Nick, in The Standard, recounts his experience of that bizarre press conference:

Although Livingstone had sat on the report for weeks no copies were available to study before the conference – “problems with couriers,” apparently. It arrived while Livingstone was speaking and as we skim read we learned that it was giving Islam “negative associations” to report that the Iranian regime was holding a conference of Holocaust deniers. Muslim democrats in Iran opposed it. Livingstone and his “leading academics” could not. Meanwhile, journalists – including me – conveyed “negative associations” when we wrote that Jack Straw was standing up for the rights of women when he criticised the full veil. Muslim feminists oppose the veil. Mr Livingstone and his “leading academics and experts” cannot.

The worst of it was that a large chunk of the report was a devious attack on a Panorama expose of the Muslim Council of Britain by John Ware of the BBC. As luck would have it, Ware was at the press conference and able to point out that all the criticisms of the MCB he broadcast came from liberal-minded British Muslims. Were they like Iranian democrats and Arab feminists Islamophobes as well?

Then Ware looked at the press release and noticed that one of Livingstone’s nine “leading academics and experts” wasn’t an academic or expert at all but Inayat Bungawala of the MCB. Later I found out that the two other Muslims on the panel were from the MCB as well. At a cost of £30,000 to the taxpayer, Livingstone was allowing the MCB and its friends to rubbish a well-sourced and balanced documentary and dressing up the results as an impartial study.

We still need our nuclear badge

This article appears in The Times today.

Earlier this month one of the most significant figures in human history, Paul Tibbets, died aged 92. Tibbets flew the plane that dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. Ever since, political leaders have faced the immanent risk of the destruction of civilisation through design or miscalculation. In response, every British government has supported the development and maintenance of an independent nuclear deterrent. What were the reasons, how far were they were justified and are they applicable to policymaking now?

A book published last week, Cabinets and the Bomb, by the historian Peter Hennessy, provides a remarkable documentary record of these deliberations. The story is told through declassified Cabinet and Cabinet committee papers, and is supplemented by expert annotations and references to other contemporary sources. It makes clear that, while underlying policy has been consistent, the arguments deployed to support an independent deterrent have shifted markedly. They comprise, in the words of the former MoD official Sir Michael Quinlan, “a set of rationales to clothe that gut decision”.

But the initial gut decision to develop a deterrent was far from irrational. In August 1945 the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, wrote a terse memorandum in which he noted: “We recognise, or some of us did before this war, that bombing could only be answered by counter bombing... The answer to an atomic bomb on London is an atomic bomb on another great city.” Coupled with his conviction that “this invention has made it essential to end wars”, Attlee had encapsulated the notion of mutual deterrence by counter-city targeting. There was no necessary reason that postwar Britain, with its enfeebled economy, should then have sought an independent nuclear deterrent. But Nato had not yet been formed, and America's continued commitment to Europe's defence was uncertain. In 1946 Congress prohibited the sharing of nuclear information with any other country. In Cabinet, the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin insisted — apparently after a long lunch — that, with regard to the A-bomb, “we've got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it”.

Considering the party's later temporary aversion to nuclear defence, it is worth recalling that the independent deterrent was Labour's creation.

When he took office again in 1951, Winston Churchill was astonished to discover the extent of his predecessor's atomic programme, kept secret from the full Cabinet as well as Parliament. (“I thought that some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind,” Attlee later explained.) Churchill's principal adviser on atomic energy, Lord Cherwell, archly wrote: “I am agreeably surprised that the socialist Government was sufficiently imaginative and patriotic to risk the parliamentary criticism to which this might expose them.” Churchill's Government took the momentous decision to develop an H-bomb programme. The PM's own metaphor in expounding that proposal to his Cabinet colleagues is a piece of social history in itself. The H-bomb was, said Churchill, the “Badge to the Royal Enclosure [at Ascot]”.

Britain had — in Dean Acheson's astute formulation — lost an empire and not yet found a role. But the bomb might confer some prestige.

The independent deterrent has its origins in uncertainty over the transatlantic relationship. The Nassau agreement between President Kennedy and Harold Macmillan, under which Britain bought Polaris submarines from the US, ameliorated (though did not dispel) those concerns. While the Cold War persisted, the case for an independent deterrent thus emphasised the marginal benefits of the UK being a “second centre of decision-making” within Nato, lest an aggressor were tempted to test the US commitment to Europe.

Yet the present Government's case for upgrading Trident appears more geared to national than collective security. Trident provides (in Tony Blair's words) “the necessary assurance that no aggressor can escalate a crisis beyond UK control”. The subtle shift is perhaps surprising, given the recent warmth of transatlantic relations. Mr Blair's formulation is nonetheless probably the best justification for the independent deterrent in our “second nuclear age” — the age that succeeds the relatively stable superpower relationship of the Cold War.

Trident will be operational until around the middle of this century. We cannot know the threats that this country will face over those decades. We ought prudently to expect, however, that nuclear weapons will become the property of the worst of states. We have scant information on the totalitarian nightmare-state and nuclear aspirant, North Korea. We know far more about Iran's nuclear programme, most particularly the sheer unlikelihood of its being intended purely for the generation of electricity. (Enrichment facilities at Natanz and a heavy water plant at Arak — before a single reactor has come into service — make little sense for a purely civil nuclear capability.)

If we give up our independent deterrent, our decision will have no effect on states such as these. They will carry on building. The capital cost of renewing Trident will amount to about 3 per cent of the defence budget, and there is no reason to suppose that the costs will run out of control. The only way to deter a nuclear attack is, as Attlee instinctively perceived at the start of the nuclear age, and as his successors have all agreed, to possess nuclear weapons.

It is the uncertainty of an anarchic international order that has persuaded British governments to maintain the deterrent. That is the gut decision at the heart of this debate. It remains the right one.

A melancholy, long, withdrawing roar

I should not have seen this but for Daniel Finkelstein. It appears that some bow-tied Daily Express columnist called Neil Hamilton believes - and I am as somnolent as Daniel at the news - that "Enoch was right". Here, if you must, is Hamilton's conclusion:

On current trends, ethnic Britons will cease to be the majority group in Britain sometime in the next century.

Would you vote for that? Don’t worry, the politicians won’t ask you to.

It takes either impertinence or gall to praise Enoch Powell's supposed plain speaking and then use a euphemism such as "ethnic Britons". It is perfectly obvious what Mr Hamilton means by this, and we may be thankful that his "political career" (a term he used to bandy around a lot, evidently unfamiliar with the concept of parliamentary office as a public service rather than a lifestyle choice) was brought to a merciful end some years ago. I have a vague recollection that in the last election campaign he ever fought his unsuccessful slogan was "Martin Who?" - which provoked an unkind response of "Neil How Much?", though I'm sure this never appeared in any campaign literature. When I saw Daniel's reference to Mr Hamilton, I swear I had to think for a moment before I was able to place the name.

Justice's fragility

There are many reasons that I'm opposed in principle to capital punishment - even in the case of Saddam Hussein; even in the case of Adolf Eichmann (though see here for quoted examples of some of the worst arguments for that position). This terrible story reported by BBC News contains enough information to indicate a powerful, and in my view incontrovertible, additional pragmatic objection to the death penalty:

A 54-year-old man has been found guilty of the murder of schoolgirl Lesley Molseed more than 30 years ago. Ronald Castree, of Brandon Crescent, Oldham, Greater Manchester, had denied the killing but was convicted by a jury at Bradford Crown Court.

Lesley, 11, vanished from her Rochdale home in October 1975. Her body was later found on moors in West Yorkshire. She was stabbed and sexually assaulted. Castree was arrested after his DNA was matched to semen found on her clothing.

Stefan Kiszko spent 16 years in prison after being wrongly convicted in 1976 for the murder and died soon after his release.

UPDATE: A correspondent points out additional relevant information that I'd forgotten about the case of Stefan Kizko. The defence QC was David Waddington, who proved incompetent to the task. A crucial piece of evidence establishing Stefan Kizko's innocence was that Mr Kizko was unable to produce sperm. That evidence was available at the time of his trial, yet Mr Kizko spent 16 years in prison as a reputed child killer - with all that that implies for his treatment by fellow inmates - for a crime he didn't commit. David Waddington later represented a footnote in British political history by being the last Home Secretary to support the reintroduction of capital punishment.

The Guardian recalls with understatement a scandalous state of affairs:

[The miscarriage of justice] damaged the reputation of those involved but did not prevent their promotion; the prosecutor Peter Taylor QC was made Lord Chief Justice the day after Kiszko's acquittal and the defence counsel, David Waddington, who made a series of tactical errors, became home secretary and continued to hold pro-capital punishment views.

Dissecting media "bias": the case of Eric Alterman

When taking his leave of The Nation in 2002, its longstanding columnist Christopher Hitchens remarked that the magazine was "becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden". This was altogether too kind, I feel: the magazine has nothing like so reasoned a message.

Take The Nation's "Liberal Media" columnist, Eric Alterman, a professor of English and of Journalism. Readers of The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site can sometimes find Alterman commenting on American politics, as in his judgement a few months ago that:

Well, I think you have be some combination of crazy, ignorant, dishonest or ideologically obsessed to believe that Islamic fundamentalists want to kill us because of "who we are" rather than "what we do", but on their lists of grievances, the never-ending presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, coupled with US support for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank would rank one and two.

The never-ending presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia ended (barring a few training personnel) in 2003. The US continues to press for the creation of a sovereign Palestine. Osama bin Laden has hardly kept secret his assurance that "every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hate toward Americans, Jew, and Christians: this is part of our ideology" ('Interview with Usama bin Laden’, December 1998, included in Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East: A Documentary Reader, eds. Barry Rubin & Judith Colp Rubin, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 156). And, by the way, "fundamentalism" is a term used properly only when discussing movements within Protestantism.

But Alterman outdoes himself when writing for a domestic audience. In his current Nation column he adduces, as an instance of media bias, a subject I fear I need to return to:

When Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets died November 1, the New York Times repeated Tibbets's contention that "It would have been morally wrong if we'd have had [the atomic bomb] and not used it and let a million more people die." That virtually no reputable historian would put the casualty figure for a US invasion of Japan anywhere near that high (leaving aside the question of whether an invasion would have been necessary) was not mentioned in the story.

What can you say? The most charitable explanation I can give is that Alterman is (unlike the late General Tibbets) sufficiently ethnocentric not to take into account the deaths of Japanese civilians that would have resulted from a conventional invasion and blockade of the home islands, sufficiently casual not to distinguish between deaths and casualties, and entirely unaware of research by American and Japanese historians published in the last 20 years concerning the conclusion of the Pacific War. I can name off the top of my head at least a dozen leading historians in this field who would concur with Tibbets's judgement, owing to their knowledge of Japanese military preparations on Kyushu, the Americans' experience of battle at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the casualty estimates used by the Truman administration, the number of American medals struck in anticipation of the appalling costs of a conventional invasion, and other factors.

One of my regular correspondents, the military historian D.M. Giangreco, wrote a definitive paper on the administration's casualty estimates, published as "'A Score of Bloody Okinawas and Iwo Jimas': President Truman and Casualty Estimates for the Invasion of Japan", in Pacific Historical Review, Feb 2003, and reprinted in Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, ed. Robert J. Maddox, 2007, pp. 76-115. From his scrutiny of primary sources, he observed: "Truman's much-derided accounts of massive casualties projected for the two-phase invasion of Japan are richly supported by US Army, White House, Selective Service and War Department documents produced before the use of nuclear weapons against Japan and stretching back through the last nine months of the Roosevelt administration."

In his paper, Dennis quotes from a letter to him by George F. Kennan, the most significant figure in US diplomacy in the past century and chief of policy planning to General George Marshall immediately after the War. Writing in 1997, Kennan concurred: "I have no doubt that our leaders, General Marshall among them, had good reason to anticipate a casualty rate of dreadful and sickening proportions in any invasion of Japan." After the publication of his paper, Dennis also received the views of Arthur Schlesinger Jnr (quoted in a letter by Dennis published in The Journal of Military History, January 2004): "The Pacific Historical Review paper is a masterful job of historical research and argument.... You have demolished the claim that President Truman's high casualty estimates were a postwar invention."

Previously I've offered to debate publicly with anyone who dissents from the heroism of General Tibbets in the European and Pacific theatres of WWII, but Alterman makes it much easier for me. I challenge him to debate publicly the proposition, which I infer from his article he must be advancing, that Arthur Schlesinger Jnr and George F. Kennan were not "reputable historians". (How fortunate, from Alterman's point of view, that he introduced the weasel word "virtually" to cover himself. It certainly has a huge amount of work to do.)

That, I fear, is not all. Alterman goes on to remark (emphasis added):

Similarly, the obituary [of Paul Tibbets in the NYT] recounted the furor over the 1995 Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian--in which veterans' groups pressured the museum into censoring the exhibition's relatively fair-minded historical presentation of Harry Truman's decision to drop the bomb on two civilian cities--but failed even to refer to the fact that the veracity of the Smithsonian's original presentation was never seriously questioned by historians.

I invite Alterman to read, as he plainly hasn't, the study of this dispiriting affair by another of my correspondents, Robert P. Newman, Enola Gay and the Court of History, 2004. Professor Newman took the trouble to examine the entire museum archive about the controversy. He concluded that (p. 133), in the dispute between the museum and protesting veterans' groups, the museum had "offered not facts, but a fraudulent account of Japan's willingness to surrender. In any unbiased historiographic evaluation, the veterans win hands down."

The mother of ironies is that Alterman's article purports to dissect media bias. I've often argued with reference to the BBC that the greatest source of media "bias" is not design but ignorance. I couldn't wish for a more convincing demonstration of the point than Alterman. There is collateral evidence that nothing in the way of questions, let alone independent thought, will deflect him from the answer he first thought of. He begins his piece by quoting a character in Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll:

"The propaganda paper and the capitalist press arrive at the same relation to the truth.... Because 'all systems are blood brothers'.... Giving new meanings to words is how systems lie to themselves, beginning with the word for themselves--socialism, democracy.... An invasion becomes fraternal assistance."

Alterman comments: "Whether Stoppard had the US media and the invasion of Iraq in mind I cannot say, as he did not grant my interview request."

The notion that the Czech-born Stoppard might possibly have been writing about the Soviet invasion of Czecholslovakia in 1968 is clearly impossibly reductionist for a certain type of media commentator, for whom Iraq is the prism through which all art and politics are to be interpreted. No wonder Stoppard declined the interview request.

Shut up, he explained

The BBC reports:

Spain's King Juan Carlos told Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to "shut up" as the Ibero-American summit drew to a close in Santiago, Chile. The outburst came after Mr Chavez called former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar a "fascist".

Mr Chavez then interrupted Spanish PM Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's calls for him to be more diplomatic, prompting the king's outburst.

It is a justly well known story that King Juan Carlos ensured the defeat of a military coup in Spain in 1981, six years after the death of Franco, by calling on the armed forces to respect the constitution. As one author, Francisco Medina, put it on the 25th anniversary of the coup:

"If the king had decided to support the coup, the coup would clearly have succeeded," Medina said. "Those members of the military who moved against the coup moved in support not of democracy but of the king, who was the heir" to General Francisco Franco.

The King had earlier presided over the final extirpation of fascism in the Spanish polity by officially dissolving Franco's party, the Falange Española Tradicionalista, in April 1977. The groupuscules claiming the mantle of Francoism have, ever since the restoration of democratic elections, been able to muster barely one per cent of the vote between them.

The altercation between the King and President Chavez is thus quite fitting when you consider their respective histories. One of them thwarted a military coup; the other tried to launch one.