Machiavelli and British Justice for IRA victims

The 500th anniversary of Nicholo Machiavelli’s The Prince fell in February, and Alan Yentob of the BBC made a splendid documentary on the book and its author. It quickly emerged that Machiavelli is regarded very differently in Italy than in the UK, where his name is synonymous with amoral cynical deception in public policy making. In Italy he is assessed as simply a realist, a politician who saw how power actually worked in human political life and advocated pragmatic government. We must learn how not to be good, is a core slogan found in The Prince. Likewise ‘it is better to be feared than to be loved’ for any politician. Tony Blair’s right-hand man, Jonathan Powell, wrote a book commending The Prince and sought to rehabilitate Machiavelli somewhat in terms of distinguishing private and public morality – you can’t run a state on purely personal values and behaviour, was his argument.

A few weeks after that documentary this very issue has hit the headlines as an IRA suspect, John Downey, who allegedly killed four people in the 1982 Hyde Park bombing, walked free from prosecution. Tony Blair’s government had secretly made a deal with the IRA, during the peace process towards the Good Friday Agreement, to exonerate IRA ‘on the run’ killers by ‘letters of comfort’. New Labour sent over a hundred such letters, the Coalition more than 30 under David Cameron’s premiership. Although these letters did not amount to exoneration, the deal unnerved Nationalists in N Ireland.

And this was in the context of Tony Blair agreeing to Irish Republican demands for a major inquiry into Bloody Sunday, under the liberal judge Lord Saville, who duly produced a massive report which concluded that ‘on balance’ he thought the soldiers fired first and so should be blamed for the shootings – a conclusion that could have gone either way on the evidence gathered. David Cameron instantly accepted Saville in full, having had little time to read it, thus opening the way for the prosecution of UK soldiers by the UK government of the day.

So we have the situation where a secret deal, hidden from the public, hidden from the Protestants and from the First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly, was done for terrorists, while an over-zealous prosecution of troops was implemented, on the basis of a highly contestible judge’s decision, at the instigation of the Irish Republicans. Was this not the height of what Machiavelli taught? Jonathan Powell must be quite proud of the outcome, but not at the fact of its being uncovered.

For the Christian, the question of private and public morality being very different has to be a difficulty. Jesus speaks of being wise as serpents, innocent as doves, but is he advocating deceit and chicanery? Jesus himself died, humanly speaking, out of ‘expediency’ to keep the peace and prevent riot: it suited the authorities to shut him up, to kill the Word of truth. Justice cannot be a matter of administrative decision by the government, it has to reflect truth and integrity – alas virtues apparently in short supply today.