Well… so what? I’m not impugning Hutton’s character. But this inquiry is a sideshow and a distraction and always has been. There should have been an inquiry into why we went to war (IMO, to protect the Bush family’s interests and their battle with the house of Saud for control of the world’s oil).
And Hutton is dressed up to look like it does do that… but it doesn’t. So Blair can be cleared of a minor charge, absolved of a side issue, without even being questioned about the central issue. It’s a masterful display of spin and was from the get go. Nobody even gets to debate why we really went to war — not in a political context.
Similarly the manufactured crisis of university tuition fees, which isn’t a crisis at all. Yes, fees will dissuade working class people from going to university.
But that doesn’t matter.
Because the real class issue in equality of access to education isn’t about three grand here and there for tuition fees (which BTW in a world without fair taxation of the rich is pretty easy to justify). No, equality of access goes much further back in the education cycle. I’ve heard and can well believe that the funding argument should be about nursery places for poor kids (especially black kids) and better teacher-student ratios in primary schools in poor areas.
In other words, the reducation in equality of access to education that is created by university tuition fees makes fuck all difference to poor people getting education because there’s fuck all poor people going to college anyway.
But to frame the discussion in that way would bring out into the open the crushing inequality of our society — and that, like why we went to war, or why we tax payers fund people like British Sugar or the Duke of Westminster to impoverish black people in poor countries, would be just a bit too uncomfortable for the ruling classes.
What a bunch of cunts.