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The admirable Mr Dingemans

29 September 2003

British politics is drowning in a culture of confrontation where reason and objectivity have little place. The Hutton enquiry shows that there can be another way.

A comparison of the two parts of the Hutton Enquiry hearings, now more-or-less concluded, reveals a weakness that goes to the heart of British political and judicial structures. It has a direct bearing on the flawed culture of decision-making that the information placed before the enquiry has so vividly exposed.

The counsel to the enquiry, Mr Dingemans, acting on behalf of his "client" Lord Hutton, had the job not of proving or disproving anything but only of finding out what happened. In questioning his witnesses, therefore, he did not attempt to cast doubt of the veracity of their statements or steer their answers in a particular direction. He pursued inconsistencies or lacunae in the evidence only to the extent that witnesses were willing or able to assist him, and if they were not willing or able he allowed the fact to speak for itself.

Compare that with the confrontational grandstanding that characterised the second stage of the enquiry, with the cream of the Bar (appearing for the government, the BBC and the Kelly family) pursuing their individual agendas against witnesses (mostly high civil servants or senior BBC officials) who effectively stonewalled any suggestive line of questioning while returning innuendo with supercilious disdain. It made great material for the sketch-writers, but it is highly questionable whether any of the cross-examinations by these star legal teams shed much new light on the truth of the story.

It, made, in the circumstances, for a rather tasteless display, since it was getting enmeshed in the adversarial culture of politics that did for Dr Kelly in the first place. He came from a world of intelligence-based science that is, of its nature, politically neutral. The government's determination to politicise such neutral material in the interests of "making a case" dragged it into an adversarial arena in which it has no place.

News, too, is adversarial in its nature, since the idea runs deep that a journalist is only doing his job if he constantly tests and challenges the official line. Whether Dr Kelly knew quite how adversarial the news environment could be is open to question. Having seen intelligence material politicised, he doubtless thought that a "politicised" response (of feeding a story to a journalist) was both appropriate and, in some sense, acceptable, since it was just part of the great game that everyone else was merrily playing.

In this context, the public, official, yet neutral voice epitomised by the admirable Mr Dingemans is both attractive in itself and salutary for the political hothouse. It is also remarkably rare. Britain has a civil service traditionally celebrated for its neutrality, but it is almost invisible to the public eye. Where neutral public scrutiny has been granted, the office has been hedged about with partisan political controls that reduce its effectiveness. That is why the parliamentary ombudsman has been prevented by ministers from investigating ministers' conflicts of interest and the Security and Intelligence Committee is controlled by MPs of the ruling party and reports directly to the Prime Minister.

The absence of an effective but neutral voice means that policy- and decision-making proceed on the basis of a dialectic of power. The "right to disagree" means that all sides of an argument can indeed be heard, but the weight of these arguments depends less upon their rightness than upon the loudness with which they are presented and the political strength of the position from which they emanate.

So, a government may adjust its policy in the face of a noisy and powerful opposition, but it is the noisiness and power of the threat rather than the validity of the counter-argument that is likely to impress them. This situation is analogous to that which has occurred, even in capital cases, in courts in the United States, where poor quality or inexperienced state-appointed attorneys have failed to represent effectively their innocent clients. The quality or otherwise of his lawyer does not change the guilt or innocence of the defendant one bit, but it may well effect the outcome of his trial. In an adversarial environment the search for truth is a by-product of the argument. The outcome may or may not be truthful, but if each side has been given the chance to make their case, neither can complain.

British justice is better than that, and it is improving, with rules of procedure in both civil and criminal cases requiring more extensive exchanges of evidence and greater co-operation between the opposing legal teams. In the civil courts there is a strong expectation upon the parties to agree everything possible before submitting their differences to the courts. In criminal cases, the prosecution cannot rely upon evidence the details of which it has not previously shown to the defendant. All this serves to remind those involved that they share responsibility for a just and equitable outcome; they are not just engaged in a procedural game. It becomes possible to uphold such values under the direction of the powerful but neutral voice personified by the judge.

The world of politics has been slow to catch up with these developments. Decisions of state are far too much a matter of political expediency, forced through without regard for objective overview or balanced consideration. Since parliament, the media and the many public bodies that could provide these necessary controls are substantially disregarded they develop, naturally, an oppositional tendency - a tendency to disagree on principle as a counter weight to the tendency of government to dominate the political agenda.

As a consequence, politics has become a battlefield, a test of strength in which the commonplace language is of war (on drugs, terrorism, poverty - you name it), determination, resolution, fighting ("for what is right"), challenge, confrontation, victory, defeat and any other oppositional term or metaphor you can think of. As with the big guns of the Hutton enquiry, this confrontational approach begets resistance, or, at best, a stone wall. It is not a way at getting at the truth, and nor is it a way of accessing wisdom in policy. What is needed for that is objectivity, and at least a degree of detachment. So step forward, Mr Dingemans, with your polite, reasoned questioning, and measured tones....