The killer question

Thursday, April 27, 2006

My hero of the week is Bob Wareing, the Liverpool MP who asked Tony Blair a question he couldn't answer. He got up at prime minister's question time and asked whether, since Blair is so fulsome in his praise of soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq, he could spare five or ten minutes to come upstairs to committee room 16 where 50 relatives of dead servicemen were gathered.

As Bob told the assembled crowd in committee room 16 an hour later, 'he didn't say yes and he didn't say no'. But he never put in an appearance. How could he? He simply would not be able to face the families, who have had their fill of spin and emollient phrases. The grief at their loss and anger at the government were apparent in the room and for once the MPs who turned up didn't dominate the proceedings.

Instead, we heard a series of contributions from people, mainly women, who have lost husbands, sons and brothers in an illegal war and who want some answers. They were better informed than many MPs in the House of Commons and spoke from the heart _ again a rare quality in Westminster.

MPs from all parties attended and then joined a procession to the Cenotaph to lay wreaths and to Downing Street to demand a meeting with Tony Blair.

There was not much in the press about the visit. Obviously concerned about really important issues like John Prescott's affair.

The day before that I got a taste of the furore which has hit the government over the NHS when I spoke at a Stop the War meeting at the Unison Health conference in Gateshead. The shiny new conference centre, not to mention the Hilton hotel where we had the meeting (never thought I'd be speaking at the Gateshead Hilton)are part of the new 'regenerated' Britain. You would never know from these buildings that our hospitals are in crisis, shedding thousands of jobs.

Our meeting was extremely good, a serious discussion by trade unionists about how we raise the anti war movement.Anger at the government was exactly the same as the military families expressed in Westminster. And our platform got more applause there than the whole conference gave Patricia Hewitt the day before.

Admittedly that wasn't too hard.

4/27/2006 01:29:00 PM | Permalink