We've been asked to talk about what they didn't tell you about the war in Iraq. I'm going to ask, and try and answer, three questions.

The first question is 'why is the reporting so bad?'

I want to talk particularly about the BBC, because the people in West London will have seen all the excitement that happened in the BBC after the Hutton report, and might find it rather confusing. The second question therefore is 'if the BBC's reporting is so bad, why does the government complain about it so much?'

And the third one is 'if the BBC's reporting is so bad, why should we (I'm from the National Union of Journalists) be asking people to support the BBC in its position of independence?'

For the journalists covering the war in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq, things were even worse than Shaista has described about her own work. It's not just being in a war zone itself, but the pressures - the political pressures - on the journalists, both from their own managers, their own bosses, from the military and from the politicians, are very intense - in this war, more than any other recently, because of a system that was introduced which is called "embedding."

In the invasion of Iraq there were 800 journalists who were embedded with military units. In other words, they were travelling with specific military units with whom they spent the whole war, and with whose assistance they were able to film events as they were happening and transmit them almost instantaneously back to wherever they came from for transmission. The demand for such material in the era of 24 hour TV news is incessant and the military produced this system, which suits absolutely everybody except the viewers!

There were 138 British journalists who were embedded with British units. As Shaista said some of them wore military uniforms - they were actually discouraged from doing that - and some tried to keep their independence. But it is very difficult to do that when you're totally dependent on a military unit that you're moving around with - you've got to go with them everywhere, you can't go out, you can't make your own independent enquiries, your material is seen by them (even if not formally censored) when you're transmitting it. And if anyone has any doubt about the pressures that journalists are under, I can actually give you evidence from a very authoritative source - and that's Geoffrey Hoon. Now in the invasion of Iraq, or in the fighting in Iraq over the last 12 months, there have so far been 31 journalists killed: 9 of them Iraqis, 22 working for western media of one sort or another, of various nationalities. 9 of them, incidentally, killed directly by coalition forces. And the NUJ has protested to the Ministry of Defence about the lack of protection given to journalists. And earlier this week, we actually got, after nearly a year of pressure, a meeting with Geoff Hoon. 3 days ago I was sitting in Geoff Hoon's office. And this is what he said, on the question of embedding: "The journalists [who were embedded] know they had to write the truth in return for the protection they were given." You must bear in mind his conception of truth, and ours, is different! "If they write rubbish, they might find themselves less well looked after." He said this, perfectly openly, to a delegation from the journalists' union, so obviously he had a message he wanted to get across!

Now, not all the journalists - there were 3000 journalists altogether covering the whole business - not all of them were embedded: others were what are called "unilaterals." And most of the journalists who were killed were the unilaterals. Quite extraordinarily, by an amazing coincidence, the unilaterals - who had been warned by the coalition commanders before the invasion that they were placing themselves in extreme danger and nobody was going to protect them, and they were all going to be killed - on the first morning after the invasion, Terry Lloyd, an ITV reporter, was indeed killed. Near Basra, crossing the border with his two 4x4s, with his camera crew, they ran into Iraqi traffic coming the other way, turned round to come back, and American tanks fired on them. Terry Lloyd was killed, a camera operator and translator with him disappeared and have never been seen since - no-one knows what happened to them. They were the first people killed, and it's extraordinary coincidence that on the very first day of the invasion, the first journalist who crosses the border from Kuwait into Iraq, having been warned that if he did so he was putting his life at risk, somehow managed to get killed. And amazingly, the Ministry of Defence has been extremely obstructive, and so have the Americans, in all attempts to get an inquiry. So apart from the fact that most of the media are owned by big companies who have got political reasons for collaboration with the government, and the BBC has its own political reasons and structure in control of the BBC for doing so, the journalists themselves are under these fantastic pressures.

The second and the interesting question is why you've got this business of Alastair Campbell constantly attacking the BBC for coverage that you and I, and everybody watching, knows is just propaganda. Two tiny examples - it's not just the wording of reports and so on, it's the tone and the image that they give. There was a broadcast done by a BBC reporter, Ben Brown, right at the start - about the second day - about SCUD attacks on Kuwait. I don't know if you saw that, and I haven't counted it, but I know a man who has: that Ben Brown used the word 'SCUD' 29 times in a 3 minute report about the imminence of the Iraqis launching SCUD missiles. And he had a bunker they called a "SCUD bunker" he kept running into! The next day, they had Caroline Wyatt, who is a BBC reporter, and a very good reporter, much better than Ben Brown normally, who was doing this story about weapons of mass destruction and attacks by poison gas, and she did a most memorable report wearing a gas mask. I don't know whether you noticed that behind her, people were walking around with no gas masks on at all! Obviously the BBC producers missed this, that she was supposed to be in imminent threat of death, and nobody else was taking any notice!

Anyway, that's the sort of thing. So while the BBC isn't a state broadcaster, it feels it has a patriotic duty to be one - the phrase we use is that "in wartime, the BBC becomes the ministry of information." And our view is that actually, there is an elaborate game that is played between government, and government propaganda supremos, and the BBC, to create a myth that the BBC is independent. So even though it has been proved statistically, in terms of minutes and seconds devoted to particular representatives, that the BBC was the most pro-government of any channel, you still have all these complaints, and the reason is because the government wants to make it look, particularly abroad, that this propaganda is actually independent. In other words, that it's being produced free of government control - it is so independent that the government is complaining about it! And they do this in every war, if you think about it - there was a famous case of Kate Adie's reports from Libya in 1986, perfectly innocuous reports about the bombing of Libya, there was John Simpson in Serbia in 1991. Every single war, the government makes vociferous complaints about BBC coverage - almost that the more slavish the coverage is, the more the government complains!

The third question is 'why should we support the BBC?' Well, the BBC, as I said, is not a state-owned institution, it is owned by you and me, it is owned by the licence fee payers. And going through parliament over the next couple of years is a process of reviewing the BBC's charter of independence. That is under terrific pressure from not just right-wing, and obviously commercial, Tory interests, but also from New Labour interests. A New Labour MP actually stood up and said a couple of weeks ago, "the time has come to privatise the BBC" - so that is on the agenda. And if the BBC was privatised it would be just the same as other media, it would be commercial media, and we would lose what little leverage on it we have. And we do have leverage on it, and that's what I wanted to come back to - the extraordinary protests that we had from BBC staff on the publication of the Hutton report. Now I don't know if anybody saw the interview with Lord Hutton in the Guardian last week in which he expressed great surprise at the consequences of his report, that Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke had resigned. And I believe him, I think he genuinely was surprised by just how cowardly, and supine, and pathetic the BBC managers were. I think he probably thought (he's a Northern Ireland military man, you know) that they'd have a bit more backbone in them. Well they haven't! Because the charter ensures that politically the BBC is controlled by government nominees - who are the great and the good, people whose political interest is actually with government, not the BBC itself - and in the process of the discussion about the renewal of the BBC's charter, we are calling for, and we hope that everybody would support, a more democratic foundation for the governance of the BBC, with the BBC governors, or whoever is going to be controlling it/supervising it, selected by a more democratic means and representing much wider elements of the community, including the people who work for the BBC.

Finally, I just wanted to say something, if I may, about the atrocity in Spain. Because one of the mysteries of the last two years has been why there has not been a terrorist atrocity in our country. This is probably another puzzle for people, considering the heroic, Herculean efforts of our government to try and goad or entice Jihadists to attack us with all the weapons at their disposal! And it does seem to me that it is to do with this movement and the people in this room. If you think about it, Blair is still under terrific pressure. As John says, he keeps trying to draw this line and everybody rubs it out. Nobody is going to let the issue, the war, fade away. As long as this is still an issue, Blair is in trouble. There is only one thing that could rescue Blair, and that would be a terrorist atrocity, which would allow him to say "I told you so," just like Mr Aznar is now doing in Spain. Therefore it seems to me that for all Mr Blunkett's restrictions of freedom, and security measures, the thing that is protecting our country from Jihadist attack, or one of the things, is the fact that everybody can see that to do so would be politically catastrophic, given how unpopular the government is. But that is only true as long as we maintain the critical movement, the Stop the War movement, and all the movements against the Blair government. So that seems to me to be a pretty good reason to support our movement.