The Widgery Report

Everyone is now dismissing the Widgery report (delivered shortly after the event) as a whitewash.

“Whitewash” implies conscious distortion and I doubt if that was the case. Widgery was not just a judge – he was the Lord Chief Justice of England. As such he had lifetime tenure and the power to override government if it behaved without the Law. So how could such a man be leaned on to give a false version of events? I don’t think he was. I think it is a demonstration of the impossibility for human beings of being impartial. In fact, I am not even sure that “impartial” has a meaning – I suspect that there are only “points of view”.

Widgery was an elderly man at the time and he would have been born in the Victorian era. He would have grown up with a belief in the virtues of the English way of doing things that he would have taken in with his mother’s milk. I am guessing that he would have found it impossible to believe that a British Officer could lie and he would have had an inbuilt distrust of anyone who was not English. I am guessing (and we will probably never know) that he conducted what he believed was a detailed and fair review of events but that he was simply inclined to believe the evidence presented by the army and to discount the evidence presented by the “terrorists” and so he arrived at a skewed conclusion without knowing it.

This is not to defend that enquiry. But I do think it is worth asking, “how could it have been so wrong?” and I think the idea that a senior judge woke up one day and decided to fabricate a story that yielded him no personal advantage is too simplistic.

The framers of the Saville enquiry had the great good sense to invite a senior Canadian judge and a senior judge from New Zealand to sit with Lord Saville to counter unconscious bias. I think that was wise.