This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 9:23 am and is filed under It's War! It's Legal! It's Lovely!.


Dan Hardie – Iraqi Employees: Maintain the pressure: Gordon Brown may apparently be making a statement on Iraq to the House of Commons tomorrow afternoon, sometime after 2pm. He may or may not mention Britain’s Iraqi employees and the need of some of them for asylum. The Times article of Saturday promises nothing but gave the Government a big, positive headline: classic spin. I have always said, when writing to Jacqui Smith and other Ministers, that to pre-announce asylum for Iraqi employees before they’d actually been taken to safety would increase the risks to them and to the British soldiers who would have to evacuate them. I hope desperately that this won’t happen. I also hope that we will see a genuine promise of resettlement for all who are identified as being seriously at risk for having worked for the British in Iraq.

Blog it, please. You may also want to bring attention to this small correction.

I’ll be PFB until then, but hope to see a lot of bloggers and MPs on deck on Tuesday night, regardless of whatever spoiler(s) Brown might be cooking up.

UPDATE – The meeting on Iraqi Employees will take place on the same day (Tuesday 9th October) at the same time (7-9pm) with the same speakers in a changed venue very close to the original one: the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House.