No sooner is the Hutton Report finished, presented, condemned and then ignored by the British people, then we're off on another pointless inquiry, probably to distract attention from the last one.

We're to have an inquiry into what went wrong with the intelligence about Weapons of Mass Destruction (answer: government wanted a "yes" answer, put so-called "subconscious" pressure onto the intelligence services who scrabbled around until they could piece together a bunch of uncorroborated rumour from people set to gain from an invasion of Iraq).

It is to be run by one of the most establishment figures the government could find and half of the members of the inquiry will come from the main political parties who all supported the war in Iraq. The man in charge produced a report on the Falklands war which was widely condemned as a whitewash (sounding familiar yet?) Furthermore, its remit will be only to look at the way intelligence was gathered, processed and presented. It is designed so that, once again, it can't or won't blame the government.

What we really need is an inquiry that looks completely and unrestrictedly at why we went to war with Iraq. It should be run by someone totally independent, appointed independently. Not by a government insider or member of the House of Lords. It should be held completely in public and it should be able to get any evidence from anyone or anywhere it chooses. It should look at all the information put out by government. It should look at whether international law was violated. It should look at everything.

That way, maybe people would believe it when it came out. As it is, the current inquiry will just put off the awkward questions for another six months. But the questions won't go away and they won't be answered.