A decade-and-a-half of institutional pigheadedness at the MoD

Many years ago, Sir John Day and Sir William Wratten, the two RAF Reviewing Officers who found the deceased pilots of the Mull of Kintyre crash guilty of gross negligence, appeared before a House of Lords committee that was inquiring into the affair. Barely had the chairman managed to finish uttering his first question before Day and Wratten's astonishing arrogance was on full display. The question was irrelevant, they insisted, because it was about safety issues relating to the Chinook fleet, which had nothing to do with their rationale for finding the pilots guilty. All that mattered was that the pilots had been flying dangerously low in their approach to the Mull of Kintyre - no-one need trouble themselves with any details beyond that. And if anyone took issue with that proposition, it was because they lacked the Reviewing Officers' immense expertise.

The irony, of course, as yesterday's report makes abundantly clear, is that there was a key factor that the Reviewing Officers themselves should never have looked beyond, that should have utterly precluded them from finding the pilots guilty, and that was only set aside because of their own lack of expertise in the relevant area. That factor was the incredibly high standard of proof required to find deceased pilots guilty of gross negligence, ie. "absolutely no doubt whatsoever". You only need to look at the difference between that and the standard criminal test of "beyond reasonable doubt" to understand the implications - even an "unreasonable doubt" may be sufficient reason to acquit. OK, perhaps not the possibility that the aircraft was hijacked by pixies, but just about any other conceivable doubt you might care to raise. As it happens, the report lists so many potential grounds for doubt that the Reviewing Officers chose to ignore that it's hard to see how even the "beyond reasonable doubt" test could be said to have been satisfied.

The real disgrace, though, is not the original verdict, but the way that the MoD have pig-headedly attempted to defend it to the death over the last decade-and-a-half, in spite of the obvious flaws in the Reviewing Officers' reasoning. It's also been incredibly telling that every single Defence Secretary (and indeed every junior Defence minister) over that period has "gone native" and obediently defended the verdict, rather than engaging their own brain cells and examining the issues objectively. The worst offender (unsurprisingly) was John Reid, that obsequious loyalist to "the British way" and venerable British institutions like the MoD, who we learned on Channel 4 News acted like a petulant "two-year-old" when two aviation experts had the audacity to raise concerns with him - he apparently sat in his chair with his finger to his mouth, refusing to acknowledge or engage with anything that was being said.

Given her known views about Mr Reid, it's a rather delicious irony that Helen Liddell, of all people, sat on the panel that finally cleared the pilots, and savaged the MoD's conduct over the years.

Does Miss Nash cut a dash?

In his Saturday post over at Political Betting, David Herdson has pointed out that the new 'Baby of the House' Pamela Nash achieved almost exactly the same share of the vote in Airdrie and Shotts that her predecessor John Reid managed in 2005 as a senior Cabinet minister. Herdson's suggestion is that if the public are demonstrably prepared to put their faith in such an untried young candidate, perhaps political parties should do so more often as well. Now, I have no particular axe to grind against Ms Nash (yet) as I literally know nothing about her other than what she looks like, and it may well be that the public would have every reason to put their faith in her. But one thing I'm almost certain of is that they didn't, or at least not in any meaningful sense. It's the classic 'monkey in a red rosette' scenario - if anything, the result told us more about John Reid's lack of a distinctively personal vote.

The feeble 41?

Before the election, the SNP pointed out the fatal hole in Labour's argument that the only way to prevent a Tory government was to vote Labour - namely that if the Conservatives won a majority across the UK as a whole, the Labour majority in Scotland would indirectly legitimise Tory rule here by virtue of its commitment to the constitutional status quo. But little could anyone have realised that hosts of Labour figures, both north and south of the border, would be queueing up to legitimise Tory rule in circumstances where there was actually no parliamentary majority. John Reid and Tom Harris in particular seem hellbent on co-ordinating a bizarre Labour effort to smooth the way for the Tories to take office, by undermining (it seems successfully) the coalition negotiations at every turn. Even more extraordinarily, they are openly admitting that a key reason for doing so is their distaste for ceding even the most minor influence to nationalist parties in Wales and Scotland.

On Newsnight Scotland last night, Ken MacDonald raised the spectre of a 'feeble 41' Scottish Labour MPs who failed to prevent Tory rule in Scotland in a rather more direct way than the 'feeble 50' failed to do in 1987, and suggested that the SNP might benefit electorally from such a scenario. Of course, it's not quite so clear-cut as that, as many Labour MPs up to and including the Prime Minister seem to have entered into coalition discussions in good faith. But it remains the case that the SNP have been moving heaven and earth to assist a progressive Labour-led coalition to take office, while the likes of John Reid and Tom Harris have been eagerly acting as Dave's little helpers, on the pathetic grounds of a grudge against nationalist parties, and an unwillingness to budge an inch on reforming our antiquated voting system. If the worst happens and a Tory-led government takes office in the next few hours or days, I think we can safely say the ghost of 1979 has been well and truly laid to rest - the people of Scotland will know who the guilty men are.