The new Speaker

On the whole, I do not share the dislike and disdain for the new Speaker that seems to be the hallmark of so many Tories or faux-Tories. Here is my take on Your Freedom and Ours.

Interesting observations ...

... on a piece by Timothy Garton Ash.

Yet another triumph

The report that British soldiers have launched a major airborne assault on a Taleban stronghold in southern Afghanistan should, on the face of it, be good news.

The operation, codenamed Panther's Claw, involved more than 350 troops from the Black Watch who were dropped into Babaji, north of Lashkar Gah, just after midnight local time on Friday. Twelve Chinook helicopters were deployed, backed by a formidable array of airpower, including Apaches, a Spectre gunship, Harriers and UAVs.

The aim is to secure a number of canal and river crossings in the area to establish a permanent ISAF presence in what was previously a Taleban stronghold. Royal Engineers are now constructing checkpoints on the main routes in and out of the area, to be occupied by the Afghan National Police, established to hinder movement by insurgents.

More on Defence of the Realm.

Collective suicide

Ann Treneman certainly does not like him, and she is not alone. Regarded as a turncoat, barely tolerated by his own side despised by many outside Parliament who have had dealings with him, John Bercow is the new Speaker, the 157th to hold that office.

Writes Trenemen, "In the end, the most irritating man won. Even in victory, John Ber-Cow, as even he calls himself, provoked disharmony." Ber-Cow had been the anti-Tory Tory and, because of that, he was the one that the Labour Party wanted.

When the result was announced, on the dot of 8.30pm, after six hours and three ballots, Labour MPs erupted in a deafening clatter of applause — a rare sound in the chamber — and an instant standing ovation. Across the way, Tories, the winner in their midst, sat on their hands and bums, we are told (although that is not what the picture shows).

At a time when Parliament is at its lowest ebb, with MPs regarded with contempt by the bulk of the populace, there was a need for a principled, non-partisan figure who could restore the flagging fortunes of the institution. Labour MPs, however, could not lift their aspirations above that of the gutter and they chose Bercow, relying on their inbuilt majority to force through their choice.

Seen as Labour MPs' revenge for ousting Speaker Michael Martin, by installing in his place a maverick Tory hated by his own party, furious Tory backbenchers are now threatening to challenge his right to stay in the chair after the next election.

This is not a man who carried with him the confidence or support of the House. With his campaign run by Labour MPs and backed by senior Cabinet ministers, he is not the man who will restore Parliament. Bolstered by Labour MPs, the institution has, in effect, committed collective suicide.

It is unlikely that it can now find its way back.

COMMENT THREAD

You couldn't make it up Part 5,697

From the Lords Hansard a Written Question by Lord Pearson of Rannoch and HMG's response:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the European Union's Court of Auditors has been able to ratify the European Union's accounts for the past 14 years; and, if not, why the European Union is permitted to propose regulation for the City of London. [HL4086]

The Financial Services Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Myners): The European Court of Auditors (ECA) has regularly given a positive statement of assurance on the reliability of the EC accounts. The UK Government are pleased that, for the first time, the ECA's report on the 2007 EC Budget gives an unqualified positive statement of assurance on these accounts.

It is disappointing that for the 14th year in succession the ECA was unable to give a positive opinion on the legality and regularity of the underlying transactions for the majority of EC Budget expenditure. Nevertheless, it is encouraging that the percentage of Budget expenditure that has been given a positive opinion has been increasing, currently 40 per cent, up from 35 per cent in 2005 and only 6 per cent in 2003.

Under the treaty the Commission proposes draft legislation for the single market in financial services which applies to the City and financial institutions across Europe.

I trust that makes everyone a great deal happier.

COMMENT THREAD

Lies about lies

It was never the case that the MoD was going to take the charge of lying without attempting a comeback and, sure enough, after Stephen Grey's piece in The Guardian that we looked at last week, Nick Gurr, the MoD's Director of Media and Communications, has tried his hand at a rebuttal on the MoD website.

Addressing the issues that the "MOD is restricting access to conflict zones" and that journalists have been "lied to and censored", Gurr deals with each in turn.

The points he makes on the access issue look eminently reasonable, stating the obvious – that air transport to theatre is limited and that there is an increasing demand for media access, which cannot be met. Gurr would have it that the MoD is doing its best, the number of media visits to operational theatres (Iraq and Afghanistan) having increased from 152 in the year to Oct 2007 to 246 in the year to May 2009. For Afghanistan during the same period they rose from 90 to 116 - an increase of more than 25 percent.

What Gurr does not say though is that much of the increase is through a programme of encouraging reporters from regional and local papers to follow their home regiments – ranks of very often inexperienced and compliant journalists, many of whom (not all) who lack specialist knowledge and thus are easy prey for the military propaganda machine.

An example of this comes with a recent piece from Harry Miller of the Surrey Comet, writing about a re-supply mission to a patrol base 2km west of the Musa Qala District Centre.

He travels with the 3 Scots in "some of the newly delivered Jackal armoured vehicles, used for reconnaissance, rapid assault, fire support and convoy protection." These, presumably, are the Jackal 2s, the virtues of which Miller extols, telling us that, "The new design of the vehicles has meant that Improvised Explosive Devices are having less of the desired effect and crews are much more likely to survive the impact with only minimal injuries."

Following on from Harding's piece on 1 June, expressing "safety concerns" about the Jackals, no self-respecting specialist defence correspondent would have written such an uncritical piece.

For the MoD to have got Miller to have written such a glowing testament – which could only have been repeating what he had been told – was, therefore, something of a coup, representing hard core propaganda from an unwitting journalist.

Yet, four days after the piece was published, Major Sean Burchall was killed – the most senior British Army officer to date in Afghanistan – in a Jackal. It may well have been a Jackal 2. Yet, while the MoD is happy to see "puffs" for the Jackal, when it comes to bad publicity for the machine, the MoD website is curiously silent.

Throughout the piece on Burchall's death, there is no mention of the Jackal, reference being made only to "armoured vehicles", a description which would not normally be applied to this equipment.

To favour relatively impressionable reporters, which then justifies restricting more frequent access by experienced journalists, and then to omit details of the Jackal in the press release, cannot be called lying or anything so obvious. But these are nonetheless classic examples of how the MoD seeks to manipulate the message to the public.

Gurr, however, claims that the MoD "wants the media to see first hand the efforts of our forces in Afghanistan", to which effect he argues that "our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are our best advocates," on which basis it is "in our interests to get the media there to see it for themselves." We owe it to our forces to ensure their story is told, adds Gurr.

In fact, though, the MoD's prime concern is to get the media to report the "story" it wants them to report. Those journalists who are compliant find that the MoD cannot be too helpful. Those who question the official line find that all sorts of difficulties arise when they want access to theatre or want to talk to people on the ground.

If this is the subtle – and deniable – end of media control, the plain lie is also a tool of the trade. But, to be credible, the lie must be denied. Thus does Gurr aver, "We don't tell lies. We are not allowed to." Of course, this is a lie.

We have far too many examples of outright lies from the MoD to believe otherwise – from the denial that there was major fighting in al Amarah during the height on the Mahdi uprising in 2005, to the false expectations raised on the conduct of Operation Sinbad in late 2007 to the falsehoods perpetrated over the recovery of Musa Qala, pretending that it was an Afghan-led operation.

The strict definition of the lie, however, encompasses more than just the telling of an untruth. It takes in not only the act, but default or sufferance – the processes of allowing untruths to be perpetuated for want of interventions that would correct them.

These are the common fare of the MoD but its tenuous grasp of the meaning of truth leads it further down the path of deception than can be imagined. One classic – and frequently employed stratagem – is to keep quiet about operations which would be of interest to specialists, using its own staff or journalists to cover the events and then only to publish the details if they go to plan – whatever the plan was.

That was the strategy adopted with Operation Sond Chara (Operation Red Dagger), over Christmas last. No embeds were present through the whole operation and only a very carefully sanitised version was released to the public.

The same goes, of course, for the deaths of individual soldiers. Stephen Grey complained that there was less coverage of British deaths than they deserve because the MOD was not getting journalists to the front line. Gurr disagrees, declaring that his organisation produces detailed eulogies "for all our people who are killed in action." That might be the case but, as we have seen with Major Burchall, the releases published by the MoD rarely include any significant operational detail.

For all Gurr's protests, though, he himself is most revealing about the real agenda. "There is a good story to be told in Afghanistan about all the things our forces are achieving in the toughest part of the theatre," he writes. "We want this story told and we want journalists there to help tell it." The journalists are there to tell the "good" story, and it is Gurr's job to make that happen.

COMMENT THREAD

Slaughter them now

Run on the front page of The Daily Express without apparently an online link, is the "shock-horror" story that household energy bills are set to soar to more than £5,000 a year within the next decade, up from an average of £1,243 currently – a figure which has doubled over five years.

The story also finds its way into The Daily Mail and others, where we find that this quadrupling of costs arises "as Britain increasingly relies on outdated infrastructure and green energy policies."

Here we see writ large the failure of the energy policy and the consequences of the obsession with global warming but, unsurprisingly, we see no broadside against the cumulative stupidity that is to bring this massive price-hike about. Instead, we see the anodyne comment that " … we are entering a new era of high-cost energy and households will have to adapt their behaviour accordingly."

Indeed though, we will have to adapt behaviour and, for many people that will mean using less energy. Summing this up is Michelle Mitchell, charity director for Age Concern and Help the Aged. She says, "With more than one in three pensioner households already in fuel poverty, any further price rises could have serious consequences."

What is not conveyed is any sense that this increase is entirely artificial, created to a very great extent by top-loading electricity bills with the EU emission trading scheme, carbon capture, the renewables obligation and all the other crazy imposts, devised in the name of reducing global temperatures.

On top of that is the dash for gas, the industry's answer to the failure of successive governments to get their acts together on nuclear power.

Built in to this hike also is the cost of providing the so-called "smart meters", the real agenda there being to provide the utility companies with a means of rationing electricity without having to suffer the embarrassment of highly visible power outages.

Those unable to pay the inflated bills can also be cut off without having to send an official to do the dirty work, which avoids the even greater embarrassment of having to explain why so many people cannot pay for their electricity.

That this is going to kill people was rehearsed on this blog in January, but a silent epidemic of hypothermia is of no matter to the greenies, who would have us all die to save the planet.

To put the matter in context, our revered and highly respected MPs cost us about £4 per year, for each household. They had – and have – the power to stop this mass stupidity on global warming. But, of course, they have bought into the scare and support the government in its determination to drive up costs.

That, amongst other things, is a measure of the failure of our political system but, in ten years time, it will be too late to slaughter the MPs - to say nothing of those buffoons in Brussels - who made this happen. We should do it now while we still have the opportunity.

COMMENT THREAD

A lack of focus

Today, the domestic political focus will be on the election of the Speaker in the House of Commons, an event that will absorb much time and energy both of the media and the political classes.

That this election should be necessary and that so much attention is being devoted to it, however, demonstrates how inwards-looking our politicians have become – all at a time when great events should be demanding theirs and the nation's attention.

Not least is the violence in Iran following the rigged election but, of direct and immediate importance is the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan where there is a sense that events are coming to a head. And with so little reporting in the British MSM of actual events, there is also a sense that we are sleepwalking into another disaster, the effects of which are incalculable.

What is particularly remarkable though is that after the flurry of publicity over the weekend and the urgent and important issue of inadequate vehicles supplied to our troops, but politicians and the media had slipped back into their normal torpor, ignoring what seems set to become a major crisis.

That is not the case with the US media, where the Washington Post devoted a lengthy article to the situation in Now Zad, which we recorded in one of our Sunday pieces.

Today we also see Associated Press reporting on the same area, with an account of some of the ongoing fighting, all under the headline, "Afghan firefight shows challenge for US troops".



Written by Chris Brummitt, he offers an eyewitness account of an operation where, "Missiles, machine guns and strafing runs from fighter jets destroyed much of a Taliban compound," but he then records that "the insurgents had a final surprise for a pair of US Marines who pushed into the smouldering building just before nightfall."

As the two men walked up an alley, we are told, the Taleban opened fire from less than 15 yards, sending bullets and tracer fire crackling inches past them. They fled under covering fire from their comrades, who hurled grenades at the enemy position before sprinting to their armoured vehicles.

We then learn that the assault capped a day of fighting Saturday in the poppy fields, orchards and walled compounds of southern Afghanistan between newly arrived US Marines and well dug-in Taleban fighters. It was a foretaste, writes Brummitt, of what will likely be a bloody summer as Washington tries to turn around a bogged-down, eight-year-old war with a surge of 21,000 troops.

Significantly, though, Brummitt also agues that the fighting was on the outskirts of Now Zad, "a town that in many ways symbolises what went wrong in Afghanistan and the enormous challenges facing the United States. It is in Helmand province, a centre of the insurgency and the opium poppy trade that helps fund it."

The point, of course is that, in 2006, the town of Now Zad was a British responsibility yet, as Brummitt records, British and Estonian troops, then garrisoned there, were unable to defeat the insurgents. They were replaced last year by a company of about 300 US Marines, who lived in a base in the centre of the deserted town and on two hills overlooking it.

Even now, a year later, the Taleban hold much of the northern outskirts and the orchards beyond, where they have entrenched defensive positions, tunnels and bunkers. The Marines outnumber the Taleban in the area by at least 3-to-1 and have vastly superior weapons but avoid offensive operations because they lack the manpower to hold territory once they take it. There are no Afghan police or troops here to help.

"We don't have the people to backfill us. Why clear something that we cannot hold?" said Lt-Col Patrick Cashman, commanding the battalion occupying Now Zad and other districts in Helmand and Farah provinces, where some 10,000 Marines are slowly spreading out in the first wave of the troop surge.

Cashman says the Marines did not intend to allow the Taleban free rein in parts of Now Zad, but was unable to give any specific plans or time frame for addressing what he acknowledged is "a bad situation."

For all their better equipment ands resources, therefore, the US Marines – who have now been in-place for over a year – do not seem to be making much more headway than the British before them, with the same limitations on "Clear, Hold, Build" that the British Army is experiencing – the subject of some criticism.

The trouble is that, in a country the size of France, with Helmand roughly the size of Wales, there are never going to be enough troops to hold the territory. That suggests that the basic approach being adopted by both the US and British is flawed. Although it might be fine in theory, on practice it is never going to happen, in which case we really should be looking at an alternative strategy – or admitting defeat and getting out altogether.

This makes Afghanistan a highly political issue yet, where there is any attention being given to foreign adventures, our politicos are looking at pre-war Iraq. But, as Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail remarks, "Who needs an inquiry into the Iraq War? It's over. Nobody will be brought to justice. Isn't it time Parliament debated our dubious involvement in Afghanistan, and sought to end it?"

Despite this, we all know this is not going to happen. The Speaker's election will get a hundred-fold more time and attention, and the Iraq inquiry has already had far more attention than current operation in Helmand. This lack of focus is dangerous – to the troops on the ground and to us as a nation. For our neglect, there will be a price to pay.

COMMENT THREAD

A vile creature

More than a few eyebrows were raised when, after the sudden departure of Caroline Flint, Glenys Kinnock was appointed Europe minister.

Open Europe was then quick to report that, for their 10 years on the EU gravy train, she and her husband were rewarded with more than £10 million in salaries, expenses and pension rights.

But, writes Christopher Booker, little attention has been paid to what Baroness Kinnock was actually doing for our money during her 10 years as an MEP. From his account of some of her activities as an MEP, there emerges some detail of quite how vile a creature this woman really is.

In various roles, Booker writes, she was much occupied with Africa, and thus became involved in two lengthy and very nasty sagas, which were scarcely reported in the British media.

The first was the tragic story of how, since 1996, the Botswanan government has used every means, including shooting and torture, to force the few hundred remaining bushmen off the Kalahari Central Game Reserve (which was constitutionally guaranteed them in perpetuity when Botswana won independence from Britain in 1966). Claiming that the bushmen needed access to modern educational and health facilities, the government herded them into a hellish settlement at New Xade, dubbed by the bushmen "the place of death".

In 2002, Mrs Kinnock made a regal visit to New Xade as "EU spokesman" though to local ears it seemed she simply retailed the propaganda of the Botswanan officials accompanying her. When the bushmen's dignified leader, Roy Sesana, rose to give the other side of the story, the microphone was snatched off him. He said later: "She wasted money coming from London. I am crying when she says these things. She should pay the money back."

The other horrible story concerns the catastrophe which befell a large rural community outside Nairobi, when in 1989 an Italian company embarked on an EU-funded motorway scheme. Carving right through the settlement was bad enough, but a barrier in the middle of the highway caused dozens of deaths, as villagers tried to jump over it to reach schools, shops, friends and relatives. But much worse was the appalling damage done by the blasting and crushing of a million tons of rock for road building materials, creating a 97ft-deep crater right in the middle of Rungiri village.

Homes and schools were damaged by flying rocks. I spoke last week with Francis Gautugata, a Kikuyu elder, and his niece Rosemary Wambui, recalling how the whole area was carpeted for five years in dense, choking dust, killing animals and crops and leaving some 2,000 villagers with serious health damage. Blasting destroyed the area water table and the quarry filled with water, in which, to date, more than 40 villagers have drowned, many falling from steep rocks while trying to wash their clothes in the only filthy water left to them.

When, with the aid of Ann Usher, a Nairobi-based British nurse, the villagers began to plead for help, Glenys Kinnock, as a new MEP in 1994, expressed concern at what had happened and wrote: "I will pursue it". In 1995, a letter to the British government from a senior Brussels official claimed there had been only "minor damage" to a few houses. All who suffered had been "duly compensated"; the villagers had been provided with drinking water; the quarry was now safely fenced off; and a dead boy, Mr Gautugata's nephew, only drowned through "lack of swimming practice".

This was all so blatantly untrue that it prompted a storming response from six MEPs, including Mrs Kinnock. They pointed out that the project had clearly been "fundamentally flawed", and that, under the Treaty of Rome, the EU was liable for damage caused by "its servants". It must "accept responsibility" for a "series of failings" which had led to "human misery" and "material harm".

Help was pledged by the head of the EU delegation to Kenya, but the promised aid never arrived. In 2002, after I reported this story, the case was taken up by another Labour MEP, Philip Whitehead. Brussels offered to provide two boreholes, which were finally installed in 2006. When Mrs Usher wrote again to Mrs Kinnock, setting out the story in harrowing detail – health problems were worse, villagers were still drowning and being killed on the road – the new head of the local EU delegation, Eric van der Linden, drafted an extraordinary reply.

The EU had done all it could to help, he said, implying (in the face of a mass of medical evidence) that most of the compensation claims were bogus. He ended: "There is nothing more to be done on this matter". Mrs Kinnock sent on this chillingly contemptuous letter to Mrs Usher and the Kikuyu community, noting: "I hope this response is helpful." In May, this year Mrs Usher wrote yet again to Mrs Kinnock but received no reply.

Now that Baroness Kinnock is our Europe minister, Booker suggests, the least she can do is ensure that justice is very belatedly done to those thousands of Africans whose health and livelihood has been destroyed by this disaster which, 13 years ago, Lady Kinnock readily acknowledged the EU had a responsibility, under the Treaty, to make good.

COMMENT THREAD

UK strategy "failing" in Afghanistan

This time the indictment comes from an Army intelligence officer writing in the British Army Review, publicised via The Sunday Telegraph.

Readers may recall that in April and again in May, Booker ran articles in his column on precisely this theme. In the first article he asserted that, "Our military humiliation in Afghanistan is a scandal - and the cover-up is an even greater one" and in the next that there was "...a fierce conflict between the MoD, determined to conceal how far its strategy is failing in Afghanistan, and other Government players who realise our policy must be completely rethought."

At the time, there was a robust defence in the comments column from military types - which we followed up on the blog - much of the discussion focused on the town of Now Zad, which we asserted had been abandoned by the British. Coincidentally, today, there is a long article in the Washington Post written by Kristin Henderson who had been embedded with the 2nd Battalion of the 7th US Marine Regiment, describing the "retaking" of Now Zad by the USMC.

Henderson starts by describing Now Zad as a "ghost town", then telling us that the Afghans who had lived there, more than 10,000, had been gone for several years, "their abandoned mud-brick homes slowly melting into the dusty valley." Insurgents were using the place for R&R.

The lengthy eye-witness account is so much at variance with the narrative offered in the comments to Booker's second piece that we seem to be entirely justified in describing the commentators as in a "delusional bubble".

However, we now gain support of Maj S N Miller, who has described the British presence in Helmand as an "unmitigated disaster" fuelled by "lamentable" government spin and naïvety. He states: "Lets not kid ourselves. To date Operation Herrick has been a failure".

Miller then goes on to claim that hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has been wasted on a war which had failed to deliver any real reconstruction, governance or security. Rather than "winning hearts and minds", he says, the British presence had had the opposite effect.

The British government, he argues, "sleepwalked" into Helmand in 2006 "without any meaningful reconstruction plan, without the resources to undertake-nation building tasks, and, critically, without any desire to fight a major insurgency". It was only thanks to the tenacity of the common soldier and the paratrooper that British embarrassment was saved.

The reference to "spin and naïvety" is interesting as on Monday we were reporting on the article by Stephen Gray in The Guardian about the treatment of journalists in theatre, retailing the comments of Thomas Harding complaining that, "We have constantly been told that everything is fluffy and good ... when we and the public have been lied to. "

Booker, in fact, picks up on that piece today in his column and its attack on "the Government’s ruthless news management over the increasing failure of our military presence in Afghanistan."

Returning to Miller, not only does he attack the Department For International Development (DFID) for pumping millions of pounds of taxpayers money into a government where he claims "corruption, inefficiency and incompetence" are "endemic", he also castigates senior officers for the strategy of "Clear, Hold, Build", which he stated had become a "parody of itself".

"We are really only clearing the immediate vicinity of the security force bases, we are only holding the major settlements, and we are not building," he says, adding: "Self-protection has become the main tactic, reinforced by air strikes that can backfire and undermine the campaign." Thus writes Miller:

Even as the Army renders itself more and more immobile with heavier vehicles and infantrymen weighing as much as a medieval knight, still the fantasy of the "manoeuvrist approach is peddled in staff courses.

There is nothing manoeuvrist about weeks of petty, attritional fire fights within a few kilometres radius of a Forward Operating Base. The reason for all this is clear – zero casualties has become the tacit assumption behind operations.

The Taliban are not being "coerced", "deterred", or "destabilised". They simply disperse, knowing that the British cannot sustain pressure, and they return like the tide when the British troops withdraw, after a short period, back to their bases.

Miller thus concludes:

British Army must believe that it can win wars again. ... Politics needs to be squeezed out of the military campaign. The point of going to war is not to then save ministerial discomfort by avoiding casualties and buttering the media.

Wars cost lives and the media better get used to it. The British people understand this. They are far tougher than a worried government PR man imagines. We need to win a war, not spin one.

So much of this gels with what we have been writing for over a year now that much of it needs little further comment from us. The comment from Miller about the Army having to believe it can win wars again, though, is especially interesting. On the very last page of my book, I write about the Army needing to "regain the habit of winning".

This, actually, is the main problem. There is a leadership crisis in the Army. Maj Miller reports the effects, which we have seen from afar. It must be addressed. We cannot afford another Iraq.

COMMENT THREAD

Road rage

Covered only briefly by the British media was an incident on Wednesday when three Danish soldiers were killed by an IED in Afghanistan.

More on Defence of the Realm.

Getting interesting

The Irish referendum drama took another lurch towards a conclusion today, with the European Council agreeing to offer to the Irish government "legal guarantees on national sovereignty" as an incentive which they hope will attract a "yes" vote in October when a re-run is planned.

That much is according to Reuters which refers to the guarantees being given the status of a treaty "protocol". This, as opposed to the declarations which were originally proposed, give them legal status, but this also means that they must be ratified unanimously by all 27 member states.

The Irish Times, unsurprisingly, has following the drama, earlier reporting that the deal followed an early morning meeting between Irish prime minister Brian Cowen (pictured) and Gordon Brown - the latter having blocked the idea of a protocol. It is understood that, as the meeting, Brown withdrew his objections.

Protocols do not actually change the constitutional Lisbon treaty. They are described as providing a "common interpretation" of it. Specifically, they pledge that nothing in the treaty will affect Ireland's constitutional provisions on abortion and the family, its right to determine its own tax regime, or force the state to sign up to European defence co-operation.

Bruno Waterfield suggests that this move could see a future Conservative government plunged into fraught negotiations over the EU's powers. The process could require the opening of full-blown treaty negotiations next year, possibly allowing a new Conservative government to renegotiate the power balance between Britain and Brussels.

To support this we get an unnamed official cited, saying that, "Some people see this as a Pandora's box," adding: "It could be used by Conservatives to reopen the question of EU powers over [Britain's] social affairs." Bruno adds that a fresh debate in the Commons soon after returning to power could open up old wounds in a party historically split between europhiles and euro-sceptics.

This is amplified by the BBC's Mark Mardell, who remarks that there could be a campaign in Britain for a referendum on the protocols. Either that or someone will pop up and ask for their own reassurances, or the Czech or Polish president will find a new reason for not signing off Lisbon, or there'll be some other democratic diversions.

However, Mardell also notes that the protocols could simply be tagged onto the next accession treaty – perhaps either Croatia or Iceland – which was always an option. That would require no further discussions at EU level, unless of course a new Cameron administration made it an issue.

Here, Dave could make agreement conditional on the EU agreeing to new British opt-outs or, writes Mardell, "even a new relationship with the EU," then leading to a British protocol being attached to the accession treaty, on the back of a UK referendum.

Back in Ireland though, there is a mixed reaction to the deal. Newly-elected Socialist MEP for Dublin, Joe Higgins, is insisting that the protocols are an "elaborate charade" meant to distract attention away from the key issues.

"The debate on the Lisbon Treaty has yet to be held because we've been dealing with side issues," he says. "The fundamentals have still to be debated." Higgins thus maintains that the protocols (which will not be in force by October) will not mean that the treaty will be ratified.

This "take" on the treaty is, of course, spot on – the protocols do deal with side-issues, leaving the substance of the treaty unchallenged. But that aside, one wonders whether the Irish will even accept the assurances so far given, bearing in mind that any member state could refuse to ratify them after the next referendum, thus negating the whole deal after it is too late to block the treaty.

What would be interesting, therefore, is whether the Irish would be prepared to refuse to agree to Lisbon until after the protocols have been ratified – which could be some years hence. That would certainly put Cameron in the frame as his new administration would have no excuse whatsoever for refusing a UK referendum.

All of a sudden, EU politics are getting interesting again.

COMMENT THREAD

Brown Thursday

"Regulation of City may be handed to Brussels" writes Bruno Waterfield.

Hopes that Gordon Brown would make a stand against the European Commission's financial regulatory proposals, which could see control over the City transfer from London to Brussels, appear to be fading, he tells us.

In The Times, however, we get a little more detail. Brown, it appears, has agreed common EU rules for financial supervision but has refused to accept the new EU financial regulators should have the power to order governments to bail out struggling banks and other bodies.

This still represents a substantial transfer of power to Brussels as there will now be "a single rulebook" of standards for all European financial institutions. And, while the regulators lack the "nuclear option" – for now – they will have powers to oversee and investigate the cross-border banking, insurance and pensions, and securities sectors, and to mediate in disputes between member states.

As you would expect, though, The Independent put a positive spin on this expected defeat, proclaiming: "Brown wins EU battle to keep crisis-hit banks under UK control".

This paper is telling exactly the same story as the others but is typical of the Europhile tendency, talking up a temporary interruption in the torrent of EU measures and playing down the substantial erosions of power that have taken place.

In The Guardian, we see exactly the same trick being played, this time the headline reading: "Brown wins independence from European banking regulator". He has done nothing of the sort, of course – simply warded off the assumption of EU-wide emergency power – but the headline looks reassuring enough for the readers to go back to sleep.

In a few days time, this will be history as far as the media are concerned, leading the commission free to work up its detailed legislation without scrutiny or interference.

The full effects, however, will not be felt for many years but when the City has noticeably slid into obscurity at least we can say we knew when it started and who was at the helm. After Black Wednesday, we now have Brown Thursday.

COMMENT THREAD

Do they know what is coming?

Out in the big bad world, a million miles from the venal world of MPs' expenses, The Independent is getting terribly excited over the prospect of Gordon Brown "doing a startling U-turn over the official inquiry into the Iraq war", leading to an expectation that evidence could be given in public.

This follows the announcement that there will be a Commons debate on the issue next Wednesday and a vote that could see a rebellion by Labour MPs. The prospect of a humiliating defeat is, apparently, concentrating minds.

Other public figures are also weighing into the debate, including two peers who chaired previous inquiries into aspects of the Iraq conflict, Lord Hutton and Lord Butler of Brockwell. They both support the bulk of the evidence to be heard in public.

Dannatt has also broken cover, declaring that the government had not consulted him, offering the view that holding some hearings is public "...is an option that has got a lot of merit to it."

Added to that is Ed Ball who is hinting that he wants at least part of the proceedings to be held in public, as well as Maj-Gen Tim Cross. He was intimately involved in the planning and military operation, and appointed deputy to the US General Jay Garner to head the authority running Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Cross maintains that the inquiry should be in public as much as possible, and then, if necessary, go into private sessions to hear sensitive intelligence-related testimonies. He sees no reason at all why he cannot give evidence in public.

At least this man seems to be focusing on the essentials, stating that an inquiry "... would be of enormous benefit not only to the military, but other government departments as well... [and] in planning current and future operations in Afghanistan and military missions in which we may become involved."

Strong support for public hearings then comes from the Commons Public Administration Select Committee, with chairman Tony Wright calling for a public inquiry. He accepts there are parts that need to be taken in secret, but argues for a presumption that much of it should be in public.

One would like to think that this great interest in public hearings was motivated by yearning to learn the truth about the war and the subsequent occupation. But, given the enthusiasm of the military for public disclosure, it would appear that this is neither wanted nor expected.

In the final analysis, neither the politicians nor the military come well out of the adventure and, while Blair and his cronies are definitely in the frame, the military performance left a great deal to be desired.

Forensic examination of that aspect of the occupation could be a painful experience for those in command, which suggests that those advocating more openness could get more than they bargained for. This applies to Dannatt in particular, whose obsession with "future wars" and his reluctance to address the needs of the Army during the occupation phase had a very significant effect on the overall failure of the operation.

We have remarked before how the Army appears to be in denial over its performance and it could well be that the high command is making the tactical mistake of believing its own propaganda. If that is the case, and this inquiry is in any way searching, the military bods could very well end up regretting their current statements. They should be careful what they wish for.

COMMENT THREAD

Economic illiteracy

Ed Miliband, the boy wonder of the climate change industry, laughably named the "energy secretary", is pursuing his madcap scheme for carbon capture and storage, announcing yesterday that the trials of the system would eventually add 2 percent to bills through a levy on electricity suppliers.

In keeping with the fatuous, ill-conceived nature of this scheme, he tells us it is "too early to estimate the total cost of the project" but adds that the government hopes it could create 60,000 jobs and boost the economy by £4bn.

This is a scheme which will add anything up to 40 percent to our energy consumption for the plants so fitted which, when added to the huge capital investment required, adds to our costs of living and to the expenses carried by the economy. Far from being a boost, it is a massive additional drag, not least in funding the 60,000 additional useless mouths which Miliband believes could be employed.

If ever there was a scheme that should be killed at birth, this is it, yet not only are we to be faced with this massive unnecessary bill, we have the ultimate insult to our intelligence with Miliband calling it a boost to our economy.

Needless to say, if we had any intelligent MPs, they would have shot this scheme down in flames but, as we recorded earlier, all we get is bleats of approval from the opposition. That, as Booker pointed out, is the ultimate evidence of a decaying political system.

When our own MPs, far from interceding to save us from this madness, embrace it wholeheartedly, we know that the body that is supposed to represent us is past its sell-by date. On the other hand, why do we allow this stupidity, North junior asks. "Britain is a sick society and its institutions are rotten to the core," he observed. Are our MPs the cause, or the symptom?

COMMENT THREAD

How can we help

Yesterday evening Dr Anthony Coughlan a long-term campaigner in Ireland, the man who is responsible for the fact that referendums are called in that country before treaties are ratified and also for the fact that two of them, Nice and Lisbon, were given a NO before the Irish were forced to vote again, gave a talk to the Bruges Group about the Constitutional Lisbon Treaty and the situation in Ireland.

Afterwards I managed to sit down and have a long chat on what we can do to help on this side of the Irish Sea. It is very limited because there is legislation about funding from abroad during electoral and referendum campaigns. Naturally, this does not apply to the EU or the Commission as they do not campaign, merely produce information (mostly descriptions of feats of flying by the Porcine Air Force).

Nor would it be a good idea to have speakers from Britain, which rather upset me as I was looking forward to a possible visit to Dublin, a city I love dearly. The Irish government, astonishingly enough, plays the nationalist card while campaigning for the final destruction of the Irish Free State.

However, if the NO campaign provides information that is rather a different affair. Their aim is to publish a newsprint version of the annotated Consolidated Treaties, showing how the Lisbon Treaty changes the existing situation. It is complete with a detailed glossary and index and would be an excellent weapon in the fight if it went out to every household with a neutral letter that called attention to the need to understand what people are voting about.

The other issue is President Klaus's pen, which is, at present in the air as he stubbornly refuses to sign the treaty's ratification in the Czech Republic. He can, in fact, keep that pen in the air indefinitely but if the Irish vote YES in October the pressure on him to sign will be huge.

His office has been hinting heavily that it would be easier for him to resist that pressure if he could say that he had had numerous letters and requests from Britain, particularly from the British Conservatives, asking him to hold back the signature until the General Election after which the latter are likely to form the new government with the intention of giving the British people the referendum that they had been denied previously.

To be fair to President Klaus, he sounds rather doubtful about the Conservatives and their intentions in connection with the Constitutional Lisbon Treaty. But it is possible that he could use letters from British MEPs, MPs and peers as well as various organizations to bolster his own argument for not signing. A letter from the Shadow Foreign Secretary, of course, would be ideal. But that would presuppose that the Shadow Foreign Secretary actually cared one way or another about the subject.

COMMENT THREAD

The last vestiges of power

A cruel farce is about to play out today and tomorrow as Gordon Brown goes through the motions at the European Council of trying to rescue the City of London from destructive EU financial regulations … and fails.

Nevertheless, The Guardian is keeping up the pretence that our prime minister still has any power, telling us that he is "to resist European attempts to exert greater controls over the City of London."

However, even this europhile newspaper acknowledges the scale of the forces up against him, noting that the other big European states – namely France – are backing the EU moves. Particularly damaging is the plan to establishing a new system of pan-European regulators and supervisors, with last-resort authority to dictate bank bailout orders to national governments.

Already though, as we reported recently the writing was on the wall and now Ambrose Evans-Pritchard cuts through the cant and tells it as it is.

The UK is "powerless" to stop EU regulation, his piece is headed, revealing that a "senior French official" has confirmed Gordon Brown is "almost powerless" to stop the creation of EU financial regulatory machinery – a move that will open the way for a transfer of control over the City from London to Brussels.

The senior French official turns out to be a key aide to president Sarkozy who is predicting that: "There will be a pincer movement on Britain." To aid them in their endeavours, the "colleagues" are citing Obama's recent "financial reforms", which bear an uncanny resemblance to the EU moves.

The French in particular believes that Obama has undermined British resistance and will argue that the EU must come into line with the Americans, otherwise – in the terms of the favourite mantra Britain will be "isolated within Europe".

All this of course is largely for show. Britain cannot veto the proposals because EU they are framed under single market provisions which only need QMV to get through. It is reckoned that the UK will struggle to put together a blocking minority.

Thus, Britain will cave in – not that it has any option – leaving only a face-saving formula to be paraded by the likes of The Guardian as the last vestiges of power dribble away.

COMMENT THREAD

Burning issues

If General Sir Mike Jackson is really serious about having "no problem at all" in giving evidence in public to the Iraq inquiry then he must have something in common with the archetypal boy who stood upon the burning deck. He like the boy, in the ironic version of the tale, simply did not know what was going on.

More likely, in common with many commentators, Jackson is focusing on the lead-up to the war rather than the period afterwards, thus glossing over his own important role in the failure of the occupation. It was, after all, Jackson who was obsessed with FRES and the restructuring of the Army to fit with its role in the European Rapid Reaction Force, thereby ensuring that it was ill-equipped and structured to fight a counter-insurgency.

This we rehearsed in a piece written in December 2006 and more fully in Ministry of Defeat, where we record that it was on Jackson's watch that Snatch Land Rovers were deployed to Iraq when more robust equipment was needed.

Unsurprisingly though, Jackson is joined by General Lord Guthrie, Chief of the Defence Staff between 1997 and 2001. He dismisses the inquiry on Iraq war claiming that fewer British soldiers would have been killed in Iraq if Gordon Brown had paid for proper equipment when he had been Chancellor.

Guthrie is casting doubt on the credibility of the Iraq war inquiry because it is, he suggests, unlikely to examine Mr Brown’s role in the failure to supply the Armed Forces properly, claiming that the former Chancellor had been "unsympathetic" to appeals for more money for the troops when the campaign had begun in 2003.

To the extent to which this was or might have been the case is certainly something which should be explored in great depth by the inquiry. But Guthrie is not confident that such issues will be raised in the absence of a military representative on the inquiry committee.

According to The Times report, Tony Blair, when Prime Minister, said that the troops would have whatever they wanted. This was the famous occasion on 6 October 2006 when Blair stated: "If the Commanders on the ground want more equipment, armoured vehicles for example, more helicopters, that will be provided. Whatever package they want, we will do." However, Guthrie's memory seems to be somewhat faulty - Blair's comments at the time referred only to Afghanistan.

Guthrie, by then, was no longer in any official position but he asserts that the equipment was not supplied because of the approach by Brown. But, he maintains, the government started to spend freely on equipment, using Treasury reserve funds, when soldiers began dying, normally when travelling in lightly armoured Snatch Land Rovers, sent from Northern Ireland for patrolling.

Huge, heavily armoured Mastiffs were bought and sent to Basra. "But it was all too late," Guthrie states. He adds, "Although the equipment is excellent now, initially and subsequently in Iraq, it was very poor, and if Gordon Brown as Chancellor had been more sympathetic, it would have kept people alive."

Guthrie has been ploughing this furrow for some time, but this is the man who also now has defence contract interests. He has also been strong supporter of European defence integration and the expeditionary warfare concept, the combination of which, to say the very least, muddied the waters on Iraq.

Those waters become even muddier from the report in The Independent which seems to conflate the pre-war procurement delays with the equipment problems later in the occupation.

Whether a military representative on the inquiry would help sort this out is moot - one rather feels that the collective might seek to confuse issues even further. But this does make clarity in the terms of reference for the inquiry – which we have yet to see – crucially important. Further, we need a proper structure which separates the two very distinct issues of the war and the occupation. Moreover, it makes it important that, even if the inquiry is held in private, we must be given a very clear idea of what it intends to consider. There are burning issues here, which cannot be ignored.

COMMENT THREAD

Who cares … spins

Our government will be meeting in full plenary session tomorrow and Friday, in a meeting which will agree policy directions over a wide range of issues that will directly affect our prosperity and freedoms.

We refer, as always, to the European Council meeting in Brussels, this one being the last major event of the Czech EU presidency.

High on the agenda will be the stitch-up on the constitutional Lisbon treaty, when the "colleagues" will be agreeing a form of words which will give the appearance of addressing the concerns of the Irish over the treaty without in any way changing the legal substance.

The strategy follows much the same format as the 1992 Edinbugh Agreement, masterminded by John Major and his gifted Foreign Office officials, then used as a mechanism for overcoming the Danish resistance to the Maastricht treaty.

As outlined by the veteran (now ex) Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde, what are now being called the "Irish assurances" will alter not one single comma in the Lisbon document. They will simply form an annex to the treaty which will have no legal status whatsoever. They can and will be ignored by the "colleagues" and – especially – by the ECJ.

The "assurances", however, will be spun furiously, invested with a meaning and importance which far transcends their actual substance, in the hope that the Irish people will roll over in October when a second referendum is held, thus clearing the way for a final ratification of the treaty.

With the current furore continuing in Iran over the presidential election there, it is easy to draw parallels. But the situations are not the same. In Iran, they rig the election to get the "right" result. In the EU they do things differently. They ignore the result and re-stage the "election" until the people get so weary – and bored - that they roll over and deliver what is required of them.

The ultimate difference though is that in Iran, the ruling élites steal the election. Here, they hold the elections and steal our governments. The one other difference, of course, is that we have not taken to the streets (yet), ready to rip the throats from the despicable bunch of thieves who are now our rulers.

COMMENT THREAD

A mountain to climb

Sometimes you get the feeling there is no hope. No sooner do we record Dannatt's plea to protect defence spending then up pops the answer to a parliamentary question from Ann Winterton on defence spending.

Specifically, this was a follow-up to our piece in late May when it was revealed that an additional £20 million had been spent on preparing the Panther command vehicle (pictured above) for operations in Afghanistan.

What we did not know then – but have now found out – is that this £20 million has been spent on a mere 67 of the fleet of 401 vehicles, equivalent to £298,507 for each vehicle.

That of course is the additional expenditure for a vehicle which, in the first instance, cost a ridiculous £413,000 each. That means that supplying 67 four-seater armoured patrol vehicles is costing nearly £50 million, or just over £710,000 each.

Readers will recall that, in May 2005 the Swedish Army bought the near-equivalent RG-32M for a cost of approximately £152,000 each. More recently, the Irish Army bought a batch, the price having increased to about £210,000 each for battle-ready vehicles.

Even at the higher rate, therefore, this vehicle costs less to buy than the cost of converting the Panther to operational status, each Panther costing in total more than three RG-32Ms.

If this profligacy was an exception, then it would be remarkable enough in itself but it is just another example of the most extraordinary wastefulness of the MoD, a ministry that has recently committed to spending over £93,000 each on the Springer "beach buggy" and over £600,000 each on the converted SUV called the Husky.

Time and time again we hear the mantra of how the armed forces are deprived of resources, the government accused of "underspending". But again and again we see these examples of egregious waste. Clearly, whatever problems the MoD and the military might have, cash is not one of them. All the evidence points to the singular fact that, the more they are given, the more they will waste.

To get anywhere near efficient operations, we have a huge mountain to climb. And mountaineers there are none.

COMMENT THREAD

A litmus test

Spending cuts have very much been in the news of late, and could become a defining issue in the general election. Arguably, though, the debate will be considerably enhanced if two factors are more fully explored.

The first is the concept of "value for money" and the second is the idea that "cuts" per se do not necessarily reduce long-term public spending. Something more imaginative is required.

These factors are brought particularly into focus by a plea published today in The Daily Telegraph, where outgoing Chief of the General Staff (CGS) Sir Richard Dannatt urges the government not to cut defence budget.

Given that defence is competing with more populist causes such as the health and education budget – in the broader context where savage reductions in public spending are inevitable – expenditure on the military can hardly escape scrutiny.

Not for nothing, therefore, does Dannatt articulate very the very real concerns of the military community when he says: "My biggest fear now is in the time of recession, with a real squeeze on government spending, that the extra money that has been put in will now be raided out of those programmes."

This could be the plea of every public sector chief, making their case for keeping their own funding streams going when all about them are falling on their swords, but so drearily familiar is the refrain that it is unlikely to have much traction.

Not least, as this blog has pointed out with weary consistency, there is enormous waste and miss-spending in the military establishment, as indeed there is in every branch of public sector activity.

A new CGS could, therefore, gain a much more sympathetic hearing if he argued for expenditure reductions, based on an intelligent review of spending commitments, aimed at rooting out waste and on focusing expenditure on achieving results.

This leads naturally to the second factor – the need to avoid across-the-board cuts. Such cuts are a common strategy, where a magic figure is announced and every section is required to meet its quota. However, work – and value – is very rarely spread evenly across a department. Some sections are over-resourced and under-worked, or their very existence is unnecessary. Other sections are actually overworked and need more resources.

Across-the-board spending cuts, therefore, tend to create stresses and greater inefficiencies in the system which, over term, build up pressure for restoration of spending, simply to address the problems created by the cuts in the first place. Such cuts, therefore, tend to be self-defeating and solve nothing in the longer term.

Therefore, with defence as with every other branch of public spending, the scalpel rather than the axe should be used. To that extent, defence is the litmus test for the whole of the public sector establishment. If expenditure there could be more intelligently managed, it could serve as an example for the rest.

However, as long as all we see are cries - in the Dannatt mould - for all-round protection of spending plans, we will know that there is no real commitment to bringing public finances under control.

COMMENT THREAD

It's started

Already, the media is second-guessing the Iraq inquiry, with The Times leading the fray.

Of four questions posed by defence editor Michael Evans, however, only one relates to the occupation, confirming that the media is going to be obsessed with the run-up to the war, rather than the occupation. And even then, the single question directed at the occupation is so limited in scope that it indicates nothing more than the narrowness of the perspective. Thus does Evans ask:

Why was the size of the British force in Iraq progressively reduced even though the troops there were coming under daily attack by an increasingly well-armed and well-trained extremist militia?

During 2005, 2006 and 2007 there were never enough troops to protect the Iraqi citizens living in Basra, and control of the city began to fall into the hands of the Iranian-backed Shia hardliners. By September 2007, the 500 remaining troops based inside the city were under such pressure that there was little alternative but to withdraw them to the relative safety of the airbase northwest of the city, leaving Basra to the mercy of the extremists.

What debate was going on in Whitehall at this time? Who, if anyone, was arguing that more, not fewer, troops were needed to safeguard the lives of Iraqis living in Basra, let alone the British soldiers themselves? Was anyone warning that the withdrawal of the last troops inside Basra might lead to a take-over by the Shia extremists and that this would be interpreted — by the Americans and by historians — as a defeatist move by the British, one which did no favours for the reputation of the British Army?

The questions, superficially, look sound enough, but they miss the point. In common with most of his contemporaries, Evans focuses unduly on Basra. Yet, any careful analysis of the campaign will suggest that the rot started not in Basra but with the desertion of al Amarah in August 2006. Arguably, had the base at Abu Naji been held, and the training and support of the 12th Division continued, Iraqi forces backed by the British could eventually have recovered the city.

For the British to have retained their foothold in the Abu Naji, however, two things were needed: the Army had to restore tactical mobility and then had to acquire the capability to deal with the indirect fire which was making that base untenable. Both were essentially equipment issues, reflecting procurement failures and High Command decisions rather than a lack of troops.

In this context, it is germane to note that, when the Iraqi Army subsequently recovered al Amarah in the operation called "promise of peace", starting in May 2008, it was heavily supported by US troops, without which the operation would not have been possible. The total commitment of US troops to Maysan province, however, never exceeded 2,500 – a fraction of the number of troops available to the British.

This demonstrates that troop numbers, although an issue in the early stages of the occupation, was not the decisive factor. What mattered was the equipment, the tactics and the timing, particularly in respect of the political developments which enabled prime minister Maliki to take on the Mahdi Army and defeat it.

You can, of course read the full story in Ministry of Defeat, without waiting for the outcome of the inquiry. This is the book that the media and the military are determined to bury.

Our publicist, appointed by the publisher and highly experienced in marketing books, has never before known such resistance to a book. And before committing his time an effort to the book, he made his own enquiries, sending copies to "senior ministry persons" for comment.

One told us that the book should be "compulsory reading" for all students at Sandhurst. They should be invited to state their reasons why the book was wrong, our source said, but they would find it very difficult to do. Most Army officers, he said, would agree in private with the thesis of the book, but none would admit it publicly. "There is a major cover-up going on," he added.

Although some details may be wrong, the book tells the substantive and hitherto untold story of the Iraqi occupation. That it should be told by an outsider is intolerable to the media, which comprehensively called it wrong, just as Evans is doing now. The inquiry is faced with a difficult job as there are many vested interests keen to see it get the wrong answers.

It will be interesting to see whether they prevail.

COMMENT THREAD

There may be trouble ahead

Last Thursday the Latvian government has announced that it would escape bankruptcy by cutting pensions and other public spending. In principle that sounds like a good idea but somehow it does not seem likely to produce the necessary results, apart from bringing the trade unions out on strike and, probably, fierce rioting on the part of pensioners who do not have particularly large savings.

One assumes that the Latvian government has not been having second thoughts about pegging the currency to the euro as the desire to join the single currency is still strong.

In the European election just gone the pro-Russian candidates did quite well. These included the former leader of the Communist Party who has expressed his dismay at the collapse of the Soviet Union. Being able to manipulate matters in the Toy Parliament should be child's play to people like that. Whether they can help their country and its economy is a separate and rather worrying issue.

We have been lied to

It is rather ironic that, on the day an inquiry into the Iraq war is announced, a gaggle of defence correspondents should go into print in The Guardian complaining about how the MoD is controlling the reporting of the war in Afghanistan.

Fronted by Stephen Grey, the piece observes that thirteen British soldiers died last month in Helmand province, but their deaths were reported, for the most part, in small paragraphs on the inside pages of newspapers.

The reason for this, according to Grey is because journalists find it almost impossible to reach and report from the frontline of the conflict. For instance, when the Royal Marines launched a fierce hand-to-hand battle last Christmas in the muddy poppy fields of central Helmand, four soldiers died - but the only news that escaped was a press release from the Ministry of Defence.

Thomas Harding, defence correspondent for The Daily Telegraph is then quoted, telling us that there has been a devastating breakdown of relations "Dealing with the Ministry of Defence is genuinely more stressful than coming under fire," says Harding. "We have been lied to and we have been censored."

This is an issue about which we reported back in April, putting us once again ahead of the game – for what good it does us, as there is an almost universal lack of concern about what quite clearly is a deliberate and concerted programme of news management by the MoD, the depth of which is quite remarkable and pervasive.

This has got to the state now where journalists are taking the risk of being blacklisted and refused access to report from the frontline, and at last speaking out about the government's attempt to control the news agenda.

It is "lamentable", says one Fleet Street foreign editor; The Times correspondent Anthony Loyd describes it as "outrageous" and Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times calls "indefensible". Even the fearless Tom Newton Dunn of The Sun joins in, branding the MoD's actions "redolent of Comical Ali", although why he should be complaining is anyone's guess as even when he is given a red hot story he does not publish it.

Nevertheless, we do get a little insight into how controls are exercised, with Grey noting that almost all journalists travelling with British forces are ordered to email their copy to the military's press officers in Helmand before publication. Many fear that negative coverage could mean trips back to the frontline are cancelled or delayed.

At the root of tensions between media and the MoD, we are told, is the nature of the conflict in southern Afghanistan. The war in Helmand is so intense, so dangerous and so rural that covering it independently is almost impossible for any white western journalist. Most reporters travel as "embeds" (there are only four or five slots available a month for national newspaper journalists); the way these trips are allocated, and the conditions imposed, contribute to fraught relations.

Harding – who speaks from personal experience – gives us more background: "They manipulate the parcelling-out of embeds to suit their own ends … They use it as a form of punishment to journalists who are off-message or critical of strategy or tactics."

Earlier this year, a trip of Harding's to Helmand was cancelled, he said, because of "helicopter shortages". He later heard privately from a press officer that it had more to do with his campaign against the army's continued use of the Snatch Land Rover, and his tough questions to the chief of joint operations. Another reporter had a trip blocked after writing a critical feature about conditions for army soldiers.

Newton Dunn does, however, add to our knowledge, telling us that the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and Cabinet Office - who all have members sitting on a committee called the Media Management Group, which regulates who gets what trips out to the battlegrounds - all "want coverage of (non-existent) reconstruction and tree-hugging", according to. "Downing Street and the Foreign Office are incredibly restrictive about what comes out of Afghanistan," he adds.

It goes without saying that Nick Gurr, the MoD's director of media and communications, denies there are penalties on journalists who write anything critical. "You only have to look at who we bring out to see how determined we are to engage with everyone," he says.

Grey concedes he has something of a point - critics of army tactics including Harding, Loyd and even himself do get asked back. Even Al-Jazeera is offered occasional embeds. However, when a journalist manages to reach the war zone, many describe their frustration at the low priority given to getting them out to the frontline, as well as sometimes relentless control by "minders".

Christina Lamb was one of the first to report close-up on fighting in Helmand, when she was caught in an ambush in the summer of 2006. She was "effectively blacked" for two years, only returning in September 2008. The new slot she was given meant she saw no frontline action. "I was told quite candidly the main priority was Tom Newton Dunn of the Sun, not me."

The Guardian's James Meek, embedded in Helmand in 2006, says he was allowed to speak freely, and had no problems with minders. However, he was sent to a relatively quiet zone, and his requests to visit bases where soldiers were engaged in combat were refused. "I was told quite candidly that the priority was the tabloids and television because it was important for recruitment," he says.

Grey cites a Fleet Street foreign editor who argues that the government's media strategy seems to be based mainly around "the Sun and an EastEnders actor". He is referring to Ross Kemp, who made two TV series in Helmand. Newton Dunn, however, says he is equally frustrated: "I can get out only once a year, and only through kicking and screaming."

If reporters do get a story, they are still controlled by the MoD, thanks to the Green Book - a contract drawn up jointly by the ministry and media organisations' editors, supposedly designed to give maximum press freedom while preserving operational security ("Opsec"). Its application, however, angers some reporters. In practice, they say, the Green Book is sometimes used to pressure them into removing facts that are merely embarrassing or politically inconvenient.

In Helmand, journalists say embeds are required to email their copy to the ministry's press information centre before sending it on to their own newsdesks, though Gurr insists there is no Green Book requirement that copy be sent to the centre; it could also, he says, be vetted by people in charge on the frontline. "There are no hard and fast rules here," Gurr adds.

You would expect an amount of self-justification from Gurr but, whatever he might claim, it is entirely true that the MoD is controlling jornalists in order to convey what senior officers refer to as the "official narrative" of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This gets so bad that, in the absence of sufficient independent access to Helmand, news organisations are often willing to use interviews with soldiers gathered by army press officers, or video shot by the MoD's Combat Camera Team. Thus, while you read what might appear to be newspaper generated copy, some of the stories you see have been generated by MoD journalists.

The result, says Harding, is clear. "We have constantly been told that everything is fluffy and good - and we, and the public, have been lied to."

COMMENT THREAD

Helping yourself

We've mentioned that wonderful paragon of virtue, Tory (ex) MEP Den Dover once or twice. Now, Bruno Waterfield has an update. Compared with the Kinnocks, though, he is a rank amateur.

COMMENT THREAD