Richard Robinson: Three reasons why Jeremy Hunt should be promoted

Richard Robinson is a Masters student in European Politics at Birkbeck College. He was a candidate for European Parliament 2004 and 2009.  Follow Richard on Twitter.

If there is to be a cabinet reshuffle this autumn there are three good reasons why Jeremy Hunt should be promoted.

Firstly, he has shown himself to be an able administrator, getting to grips with his department’s budget, renegotiating the BBC’s licence fee and shepherding the Olympic Games home within the budget he inherited.

Soon after the general election, we heard squeals of protest from the arts establishment as Hunt cut his own staff by 50% and the budgets of arts organisations by 30%. The great conductor, Zubin Mehta, was quoted in the New Statesman last month as saying, "We were told earlier this month to cut €4m from this season's budget at the Florence Opera. It's blasphemous. We are living in very dangerous times."

He faced down similar hyperbole with his decision to scrap the Film Council, the body that “invested” in the British film industry.  Film Director Mike Leigh said, 'It's like if they suddenly said: 'We're abolishing the NHS' ... It's totally out of order.''

Richard Robinson: Saddam's execution is a blatant case of victors' justice

Richard Robinson is Chairman of Surrey Conservatives and Deputy Chairman for the SE Region. He was a candidate in 2004 European Elections.

I have always felt somewhat uncomfortable about the Nuremberg war crimes trials. I don’t wish to minimise the degradation of the Nazi State or the atrocities committed in its name, but the whole enterprise seemed to me too much a case of “Victors’ Justice” or, as US Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone so eloquently put it, “a high-grade lynching party”.

I am not a lawyer, but the thread of international law that derives from Nuremburg, through the International Court at the Hague and the prosecution at Arusha of those responsible for mass murder in Rwanda seems to me somewhat suspect. In the absence of a general International Criminal Court, however, courts set up to try participants in specific conflicts may be the best we can do: rough justice to be sure, but justice none the less.

The case of Saddam Hussein, however, is different and should give us all pause for reflection and some shame. Unlike Milosovic, Saddam was not tried at an International Tribunal. He was tried under Iraqi jurisdiction, in a court that was the creature of the occupying forces (including Britain): a blatant case of Victors’ Justice.

To judge the extent to which this court is in the pocket of the occupying powers, consider the history of the judges appointed to preside over it. We can perhaps be exonerated from any responsibility for the murder of the first, Barawiz Mahomed Mahmoud al-Merani, but when the second, Rizgar Armin, resigned under western pressure, the Americans vetoed his deputy, Sayeed al-Hammashi, because he was a former member of the Ba’ath Party. The next, Abdullah al-Amiri, was found to be too sympathetic to Saddam and removed by the government in Baghdad. So at the sixth attempt we have found a judge, Rauf Abdel Rahman, willing and able to pronounce the death sentence on Saddam, which was always the only permissible outcome.