According to your comments, any inquiry is a complete and waste of taxpayers money, as it will convince nobody - the Government just can't win:
- Refuse an inquiry and they are covering things up.
- Set up an inquiry which finds in their favour and its a "whitewash"
- Set up an Inquiry which finds in their favour and its terms of reference were "fixed".

Not at all. I think an inquiry is a good idea but it must include the issues 'the general populus' think are important and must be seen to be independent. That's not easy, but here are a few ideas that might help.

1) Follow the Appeal court procedure where a number of Lords sit in judgement and do not have to take the same line.

2) How about adding an ordinary jury to confirm they agree the report is an accurate representation of the evidence? No need for that to be unanimous either.

3) Have some people outside Parliament and big business who are trusted as part of it. A few years back, Martin Bell would have been a good candidate, before he stood as an independant. (I don't know if people still see him as an 'honest broker' as they did then. They may do. I simply don't know.) Richard Fenniman did this on some US committees, if I recall correctly, though nothing of this scale.


Things that don't help include:
i) Keeping things private. One thing everyone seems to agree on about Hutton was that the publication of all the transcripts as things went along was excellent.

ii) The government picking the members of the inquiry. How to avoid that? Give each party a number of places and let the the parties pick the people. Maybe that was done: if so, make it public.

iii) The government picking the chairman. Have the inquiry panel elect is own chairman, rather than it being appointed.