The New Year Quote by Clare Short

Deception is doing a lot of work here, and Clare Short knows it. She’s not simply correcting the historical record; she’s re-litigating the moral premises of the Iraq War by narrowing in on a procedural lie that had enormous consequences. The line is built like an unraveling: “if you remember” pulls the listener into a shared memory, “we were then all deceived” spreads culpability across the political class, and the dagger lands with “which wasn’t true, we now know.” It’s less confession than indictment, delivered in the careful grammar of someone who sat inside the machine.

The specific intent is to relocate blame from a tragic miscalculation to an organized narrative management operation. By emphasizing the claim that France would veto a second UN resolution, Short highlights how the government framed diplomacy as futile, making war feel like the only viable path. The subtext is brutal: consent was engineered. Parliament wasn’t merely persuaded; it was handled.

Context matters because this is a politician speaking after the fact, when “we now know” has become a kind of political aftertaste. That phrase carries a double message: truth eventually surfaces, but only after the decisions are irreversible. Short’s use of passive construction (“were deceived,” “told”) is also strategic. It implies an active deceiver without naming names, a way to accuse a system - Downing Street spin, intelligence cherry-picking, allied coordination - while remaining legally and politically precise.

It works because it treats process as policy. The lie isn’t a footnote; it’s the mechanism by which legitimacy was manufactured.