Inquiries Ancient and Modern

Not everyone agrees that Bob Diamond did not do well at yesterday's Special Committee meeting. Peter Botting of The Commentator blog for one as you can see by reading his post here. Not everyone likes Osborne's Libor fixing attack on Labour either but despite wishing he'd spend the bulk of his time cutting spending at an urgent pace and cutting taxes too I think he's right to keep in the forefront of all our minds the disaster for this country that the Blair and Brown administrations proved to be. All politicians are to a degree conmen but Blair was not only up amongst the best of them he was also only there for one reason - his self aggrandisement. How could anyone who felt the hand of destiny on his shoulder be otherwise. It may be that the general public would prefer to have a judicial inquiry into the Libor scandal but on this the Government is right. We need a speedy inquiry and the proposal that a QC is employed to question witnesses at the hearings is a good one although from memory it would not be a new process. It is a process which has been used before to good effect. Such an inquiry would be as thorough and far reaching as a judicial one but have the merit of speed. It will certainly be able to identify the wrongdoers and lead to prosecutions where sufficient evidence becomes available either during the inquiry or afterwards as a result of further police investigations. It is absolutely disgraceful that only now are the police looking at prosecuting those who took part in the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings. The length of time the Saville Inquiry took, 12 years, was scandalous and its result in my mind is as unsatisfactory as the original Widgery Tribunal.

UPDATE: The House of Commons has voted to set up a Parliamentary Inquiry with a barrister to lead the questioning of witnesses. It seems the Inquiry will have to work itself around likely criminal proceedings if it wants to avoid those proceedings being prejudiced. Hannan has a good idea about who should sit on the Inquiry which you can read here.