EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

 

7/7 bombings: A summing up

Conclusions from the 7/7 verdict suggest the institutions guarding people's safety are not as good as they could be

London is one of the great cities of the world, an ethnic and cultural hub, a tourist magnet. In 15 months' time, it will host the Olympics, attracting hundreds of thousands more visitors in a glare of global publicity. The institutions that guard the safety and well-being of the capital have to be world-class too. Yesterday's conclusions of the long and careful inquest into the 7 July bombings suggest they are not as good as they should be. Worse, they suggest a reluctance in MI5 either to acknowledge or to address the weaknesses the terrorists exposed.

Lady Justice Hallett has proved a compassionate and feisty coroner, allowing survivors and witnesses the space to recall their experiences in a way that may, perhaps, have helped them and certainly allowed the rest of us to honour the extraordinary courage of ordinary people on an ordinary day caught up in extraordinary and unforgivable events. She has illuminated shortcomings in the emergency services' response. Even more significantly, she has brought a senior MI5 officer to the witness box and exposed what has been at best a shameful negligence of the truth, at worst a deliberate intention to mislead members of Westminster's intelligence and security committee. Not surprisingly, some of the victims' families believe a public inquiry might uncover more MI5 lapses. A long history of inadequate (and until recently non-existent) scrutiny has fostered a dangerous culture of arrogance.

The coroner believes the bombings could not have been prevented. But her inquest was restricted by rule 43, under which she could only make recommendations aimed at preventing further deaths. It is not a substitute for a fuller probe into the competence of the intelligence agencies. While seven of her nine recommendations relate to the emergency response, on the central issue of whether the bombings might have been prevented Lady Justice Hallett is able to demand just two reforms. All the same, although she acknowledges the scale of the complex challenges facing the security services and recognises that the clarity of hindsight can be misleading, there is no mistaking that she is deeply concerned about MI5's conduct in the years leading up to July 2005, even in the truncated narrative she allows herself.

Her call for the best available photographs to be shown to witnesses for possible identification and her proposal for proper recording of the reasons for not putting an individual under surveillance seem elementary. That either point needs to be made suggests the security services were overwhelmed in the face of mounting evidence of home-grown terrorism. Indeed there is a litany of weekly resource allocation meetings that hint at the struggle for the necessary share of an inadequate pot. Surveillance is costly, time-consuming and labour-intensive but it is also indispensible. Much has changed in the past five years: MI5 is both much bigger and much better-resourced. But that only increases the need for proper accountability.

From Iraq to torture allegations to the London bombings, intelligence failings have been a recurrent part of the story that is matched by a reluctance to accept accountability. It has taken successive inquiries to extract an accurate picture. Lady Justice Hallett details the discrepancies between what she learned in evidence and what the ISC was told in its two earlier inquiries – most significantly that far from believing two of the bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, to be "small time fraudsters", desk officers knew they were in contact with others against whom there was more compelling evidence. Given the opportunity to correct the ISC's misapprehension, MI5 ignored it. Others also went unchallenged. "Unfortunate," Lady Justice Hallett remarks – all the more so since, when she began, she was assured there was nothing new to learn. The ISC had already conducted an exhaustive inquiry. Yesterday's report should embarrass MI5. It is mortifying for the ISC.

Despite the shortcomings, the coroner concludes MI5 could not have prevented the attacks. The 52 innocent lives could not have been saved. But if the same mistakes are not to be made again the security services must be properly held to account for their failures. If a public inquiry is what it takes to change the culture, then a public inquiry must be held.

 

Elections and referendum: All shook up

The single most important consequence of Thursday's voting is the sheer bloodiness of the bloody nose delivered to the Liberal Democrats

So many of the most potent themes of British politics came together for a few hours in Thursday's elections that the contests, and the simultaneous AV referendum, seemed as important as a mini-general election. Except that a general election has only one overridingly large story to tell – the new government. This week's Super Thursday, by contrast, produced such a bulging goody-bag of resonant local and national stories – the defeat of electoral reform, the nationalist triumph in Scotland, the nationalist setback in Wales, excellent news for the Conservatives, grim news for the Liberal Democrats, something in between for Labour – that it is hard to know where to start.

On any other day, the triumph of the Scottish National Party in winning an outright majority in the Holyrood parliament – the very outcome that the devolved electoral system was expressly designed to prevent – would take the palm. While the United Kingdom survives, however, the single most important consequence of Thursday's voting is the sheer bloodiness of the bloody nose delivered to the Liberal Democrats. The damage is truly shocking. One in three Lib Dem voters from 2010 abandoned the party. At least 550 councillors were lost and the party was bundled from power in cities like Newcastle and Sheffield. The Lib Dem presence at Holyrood was decimated and in the Welsh assembly is now vestigial. The writing is on the wall for many of the party's biggest names in the House of Commons. And the AV referendum, so central to the party's hopes of having something distinctive to show for the coalition, was swept away by two-to-one.

There is something for the Lib Dems to cling on to all the same: the 15% share of the poll is grim not catastrophic; council victories in Burnley, Eastbourne, Watford and elsewhere serve notice that this was not an all-out rout, while in Eastleigh (the seat of Chris Huhne) there was even some Lib Dem advance. Yet Nick Clegg now presides over the rubble of his party's 20-year incremental forward march through British politics. This defeat is the all but inescapable price to be paid for an all but inescapable decision to enter government a year ago. Much the same may happen next year too. The bottom-line is that a large swathe of liberal Britain, more than this party can afford to lose, feels abandoned by Lib Dem membership of a coalition which is overwhelmingly defined by the slashing of public services, the overturning of the health service and the about-face on tuition fees. Mr Clegg and his party must confront this or face a decade of marginalisation.

The contrast with the fate of the Conservatives makes this all the more dismaying. If liberal Britain feels abandoned, conservative Britain feels vindicated. The Tory vote held up. There were even some council gains. And AV was crushed. True, there were Scottish and Welsh setbacks yet again. But the party of David Cameron, George Osborne, Andrew Lansley and Michael Gove – the real architects of the coalition's core policies – went not merely unpunished but has been majorly rewarded. In some ways, the Conservatives have more to cheer than Labour, who should have done better, not just in Scotland, but everywhere outside its traditional heartlands. For Labour, feeling good about winning well in Wales and about attracting back voters who should never have been lost in the first place are the easy bits – Labour's eight-point boost since 2010 and its nearly 700 new councillors are in one sense the Gordon Brown departure dividend. The larger point is that Labour's electoral counter-attack against the Tories is still almost non-existent. Yet without a credible strategy for turning some Tory votes into Labour ones, Labour's hopes of governing again may remain stillborn.

Both Scotland and electoral reform also remain crucial to any future centre-left advance of any kind. Yet Alex Salmond's stunning SNP win – amazing under a proportional system as well as the biggest personal electoral triumph for any party leader since Tony Blair's 1997 Labour landslide – poses a double challenge to Labour aspirations: it threatens Labour's future Westminster election chances and if – big if – the SNP win their way on independence, it may mean the end of any Scottish MPs at Westminster at all. In the wake of the abject failure of AV to win public backing, meanwhile, many will conclude that electoral reform is off the agenda for a generation. Yet if British voters go on producing general election outcomes with which the two-party Westminster system cannot cope, electoral reform may get back on the agenda sooner than now seems likely.