This sounds like an oblique reference to the Iraq war, which Ed Miliband said
led to "a catastrophic loss of trust" and Ed Balls condemned as "wrong."
Asked directly about those remarks, he says: "The purpose of these
elections is how we build a better tomorrow, not how we debate a better
yesterday." Is that a rebuke to his brother? "No, it's just my
position."
But I suspect that David Miliband, who – unlike the two Eds – had a vote in
2003, still agonises over Iraq. Nor, with the Chilcot inquiry reconvened,
and the war raised at every hustings and meeting, can it easily be consigned
to history. "I've done Chilcot. I've said if I knew then what I know
now, I wouldn't have [backed] it."
Is he saying the war should never have been fought? "The way I put it is
that if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a war. I've
set out that if we knew there were no WMD, there would have been no UN
resolutions and no war.
"The toll in British and Iraqi life, never mind the toll in trust, has
been very, very high. It's a war we didn't need to fight," he says
before reverting to his previous formula, saying he is mindful of the dead
and doesn't want to "rewrite my own history."
He pauses, conscious that he has gone further than he intended. But his
regrets and reservations over Iraq sound at least equal to those of his
brother and Mr Balls? "Of course. People are dead. I voted in good
faith." Did his brother ever express his misgivings to him? "I'm
not getting into opening up private discussions," he says. "He was
in America at the time."
The other lingering issue of his old brief will surface shortly, with the
Government expected to announce a judge-led inquiry into claims that British
intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture of terrorism suspects.
Mr Miliband hotly denies any policy of collusion. "I would not be sitting
here if I thought there was the slightest suspicion of a doubt that a Labour
government had any entanglement in torture." On last week's High Court
order that M15 and M16 release guidelines alleged to tell British agents to
turn a blind eye to the treatment of terrorism suspects abroad, he says. "After
2001, there was insufficient training and guidelines. That has been
superseded and new guidelines put in place."
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Conor Foley: Jacqui Smith should review her conscience | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - 0 views
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No one needs to explain to Jacqui Smith why it is wrong to give the police extended detention powers because she already knows the arguments. Many years ago when we were both activists in the Labour party's student wing, she was in the office of Sally Morgan, the party's student officer, when the police told her they were holding me under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. She knows what happened to me and she must know that she will be inflicting this on other innocent people.
Photography is our right, our freedom | Henry Porter | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - 0 views
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"But there is a deeper struggle at the base of this issue - the ownership of public space, which the state is consciously laying claim to in these actions. Photographers are stopped in the name of protecting us all from terrorism but actually this can also be seen to be a territorial incursion. What used to be public space is rapidly becoming "state space", the area owned, patrolled and policed by various agencies of the state, which establish their ownership by totemic tribal markers. I am of course referring to the CCTV camera."
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From the bungled arrest of the ricin plotters to the shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, the failure to investigate the ringleader of the July 21st suicide bomb plot, the arrest of Damian Green, the admission that not one of its 100,000 stop and searches under Terrorism Act had led to a terror-related arrest, and finally the ‘Hackgate’ scandal, the Met has stumbled from one blunder to another.