Alex Callinicos | ukwatch.net

Miliband in Georgia - playing a dangerous game

Alex Doherty — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:20:35 +0000

British politicians love playing Winston Churchill. Tory leader David Cameron was at it last week when he flew to Georgia. According to the Guardian, Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili invited him after he compared the situation there to “the appeasement of Hitler”.

But in fact the famous conflict between Churchill and his great rival and predecessor Neville Chamberlain in the late 1930s was over whom to appease. Britain was confronted by two rising imperialist powers, Germany and the US.

Since it couldn’t take both of them on, the British ruling class had to choose which one to appease and which, if necessary, to fight. Distrusting the US, Chamberlain chose to appease Hitler – thus earning the scorn of posterity.

But in order to defeat Germany, Churchill had to throw himself at the mercy of the US. His grovelling towards the US president Franklin Roosevelt has been repeated by every subsequent British prime minister.

True to form, foreign secretary David Miliband appeared on the Today programme on Wednesday of last week to denounce Russia’s “blatant aggression” against Georgia. “The sight of Russian tanks rolling into parts of a sovereign country on its neighbouring borders will have brought a chill down the spine of many people,” he declared.

Actually the sight of US and British tanks rolling into Iraq in March 2003 sent a chill down the spines of hundreds, if not thousands of millions of people. Listening to Miliband, I wondered whether he was being consciously hypocritical in ignoring such an obvious comparison.

My guess is that he probably wasn’t. The leaders of the Western powers genuinely believe they are the “international community” and are entitled to make up the rules as they go along. Consistency is for other weaker states that must obey their commands.

George Bush displayed the same attitude when he said last Saturday that the Russian-controlled enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia were “part of Georgia” and that they “lie within [Georgia’s] internationally recognised borders”. He added, “Georgia’s borders should command the same respect as every other nation’s.”

Breakaway

But why aren’t Serbia’s borders entitled to “the same respect”? The US and the main European powers have supported the breakaway of Kosovo from Serbia, even though this hasn’t been sanctioned by the United Nations security council.

Nevertheless in the present crisis, the European Union (EU) as a whole has been far less bullish in backing the US against Russia. At the Nato summit in Bucharest last April, France and Germany vetoed Bush’s demand that Ukraine and Georgia be admitted to the alliance.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, brokered last week’s truce between Russia and Georgia. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, flew to meet Dimitri Medvedev, the Russian president. Germany has been relatively muted in its criticisms of Russia and has stated its opposition to US talk of expelling Russia from the G8.

Of course, this attitude is connected with German and French awareness that the EU depends on natural gas imported through Russia.

While it is cynical, the stance of France and Germany is at least rational. By contrast, the debate here in Britain is dominated by a race to see who can be toughest on Russia. Gordon Brown has ordered Miliband off to Georgia in Cameron’s wake. Meanwhile the Tory leader demands that “Russia must pay a price” and that Nato offers Georgia “a clear pathway to membership”.

Miliband, Cameron and company should answer a simple question. Would they be willing to go to war with Russia to defend Georgia’s “internationally recognised borders”? If Georgia was a Nato member it would be entitled to expect this.

Bush has shown that even he isn’t prepared to go this far. As the Washington Post bluntly put it, the US “has neither the wherewithal nor the willingness to enter into a military conflict with Russia on its territorial border”. But the support Saakashvili has been getting may encourage him into more adventures. Georgia’s Western backers are playing a dangerous game.

Anti-War Radicals Have not Gone Away

eddie — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:12:44 +0000

“Where are the students on the rampage?” Polly Toynbee asked plaintively in the Guardian recently. “Compare this inertia with the fury over Vietnam back in the late 1960s, when Britain had no troops in that war.

“Why so little anger over war or climate change? Political activism seems moribund, students voting on cheap beer in their union bars. A gentle camp-out in a field near Heathrow offers signs of life, but looking back on the anti-Vietnam movement, where is the real passion now?”

The real passions that anyone involved in the anti-war movement will have felt upon reading this are a mixture of anger and admiration at Toynbee’s effrontery. Far from exhausting itself, as she claims, in “one great anti-war demonstration”, the Stop the War Coalition has over the past six years organised a series of marches whose number and size are without precedent in British political history.

The demonstration called last summer at very short notice in response to Israel’s assault on Lebanon attracted 100,000 people, a comparable number to those who attended the largest and most famous of the anti-Vietnam war demos in Grosvenor Square in October 1968.

Yet the activities of this immensely important movement have usually been ignored by the Guardian, or at best have received a few scraps of condescending attention.

Moreover, they have been sustained against two very powerful counter-pressures. The first is an immense establishment effort to depoliticise social life and encourage people to identify their well-being with individual consumption. The Guardian and its sister paper the Observer have enthusiastically participated in this, with more and more of their content devoted to lifestyle, celebrity, Big Brother, and yet more degraded rubbish.

Secondly nothing has done more to turn people away from political involvement than the British political system’s utter failure to hold to account those responsible for the criminal and disastrous adventure in Iraq. Instead Tony Blair was allowed to scrape back into office in the 2005 general election.

*Activism*

And who was in the vanguard of efforts to get him re-elected? Why, none other than Polly Toynbee, pleading with disillusioned Labour voters to put clothes pegs on their noses and return to the fold.

Joss Garman of Plane Stupid argues against Toynbee that the Camp for Climate Action represented the beginning of a new form of activism – an alternative to what is dismissed as the failed anti-war movement.

I don’t really see this myself. I have every sympathy with the camp’s cause, especially given the barrage of media, legal, and police intimidation to which its participants were subjected. But in both scale and method it looked more like a return to the anti-road campaigns of the 1990s than a new step forward.

Here Toynbee does have a point. Why, given vast media coverage and official acceptance of the mortal threat posed by climate change, did the camp attract only a couple of thousand participants?

There are major and minor reasons for this. The minor reason is that the camp organisers’ emphasis on specialised forms of direct action for which people had to be trained in advance must have helped keep the numbers down.

The major reason is how climate change is represented by the mainstream media. On the one hand, just about every day there is another story about climate change and its destructive consequences. On the other hand, the solution is presented as individuals changing their lifestyles – recycling, finding greener ways to travel, and so on.

The gap between the scale of the problem and potential solutions is vast and paralysing. The idea that collective political action is essential to addressing climate change doesn’t yet seem relevant to many people.

This will change as people develop greater confidence in their ability to change the world. Here numbers are important. Mass marches, dismissed by Garman as “boring and disempowering”, can give a sense of collective power. The anti-war movement still has a big role to play, no thanks to Polly Toynbee and her kind.

John McDonnell and Questions for the Left

Alex Doherty — Sun, 27 May 2007 14:24:33 +0000

Something historic happened last week. It wasn’t Gordon Brown’s coronation. That – and the inability of the Blairites to mount a serious challenge – was entirely predictable.

No, the historic thing was the inability of John McDonnell, who has been campaigning for a year as the standard bearer of the left, to get enough nominations from Labour MPs to run against Brown.

What this represents is a break in the political cycle running through the history of the Labour Party. Every previous Labour government provoked a major rebellion from the left against its betrayal of the hopes that had led to its election.

The collapse of Ramsay MacDonald’s government in 1931 pushed the entire Labour Party to the left. It also strengthened the forces, inside and outside the party, demanding that the leadership go further.

Before it was electorally defeated in 1951, the postwar Labour government had also descended into crisis.

*Spending*

The leader of the left, Aneurin Bevan, headed a rebellion against the health service cuts imposed by chancellor Hugh Gaitskell to fund a huge increase in military spending.

Once Labour was in opposition, the Bevanites developed into a mass movement fighting for the party leadership. Gaitskell needed the full support of the trade union bureaucracy to beat them and to force Bevan to accept defeat.

Across the two Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s the same pattern repeated itself.

This time it was Tony Benn who became champion of the Labour left.

Disappointment with Harold Wilson’s first government and the great working class insurgency against the Tories in the early 1970s thrust Benn into a top cabinet job when Labour returned to office in 1974.

Though Benn was eventually isolated and demoted, the right wing policies pursued by the Labour government provoked a massive left wing rebellion after Margaret Thatcher’s election victory.

The Bennite movement represented the closest the Labour left has come to winning. Benn came within a hair’s breadth of being elected deputy leader in January 1981.

But the basic power setup of the Labour Party – the ruling alliance between the parliamentary leadership and the trade-union machine – ensured that the left always lost.

Nevertheless, the cycle of betrayal, rebellion, and defeat was an important mechanism through which the party renewed itself.

Pressure from the left pushed the leadership to adopt some of their demands and thereby helped the party to keep up a connection with Labour’s working class base.

And the great moments of hope at the height of the Bevanite and Bennite movements helped to draw into the party fresh generations of activists bringing new energy and talent.

*Mechanism*

But, although Tony Blair’s has been far and away the most right wing Labour government, the mechanism hasn’t worked this time. Contrary to much media chatter, this is not because there are no movements of the left.

On the contrary, with the Seattle protests of November 1999 we saw the emergence of a new generation of activists campaigning against capitalist globalisation.

And the anti-war movement has acted as an enormous generator of militant energy.

But very little of this radical energy has spilled into the Labour Party.

A handful of Labour MPs have campaigned very honourably against the war. But their efforts haven’t been accompanied by a renewal of the left’s base inside the party. The biggest figure on the Labour left is still Tony Benn.

No doubt this has something to do with the way in which Blair has stripped Labour’s decision-making bodies of any power.

In the late 1970s, many of the 1960s generation of revolutionary socialists flooded into the Labour Party because they believed there was a real chance of pushing it permanently to the left.

*Radical*

The party structures have now been drastically re-engineered to prevent that happening. But the membership has also changed.

It has, of course, shrunk drastically under Blair. Moreover a process of selection has taken place.

Thanks above all to Iraq, disillusioned activists – not just from the left but from the old social democratic right – have dropped out, while the suits have stayed.

So now, in a historic reversal, it’s the unions, which used to be the party leadership’s bulwark against a more radical membership, that are now the main source of pressure for more left wing policies.

In the last few days, union leaders have been trying to justify their failure to support McDonnell and to explain that their project to “reclaim Labour” still has life in it.

They are clinging to the hope that their candidate, Jon Cruddas, can win the deputy leadership.

These are illusions, however well or badly Cruddas does. Labour has never been an instrument of radical change but the left used to provide powerful counter-pressures to its tendency to betray its supporters.

But now that mechanism is broken.

So is the Labour Party – and it can’t be fixed.

Tony Blair - Down and Out

Alex Doherty — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:46:37 +0000

Nothing could be crueller in exposing Tony Blair’s failure as Labour prime minister than the timing of his departure. It invites us to compare May 1997, when he was first elected, with May 2007.

Then Blair was swept into office by the tidal wave that destroyed the Tory government of John Major. Now he is slinking out of Downing Street amid the electoral setback that New Labour suffered last week. He is even more unpopular than Margaret Thatcher when she left office.

During Blair’s premiership Labour’s vote fell by an unprecedented four million between the general elections of 1997 and 2005.

The comparison with Thatcher is crucial in understanding Blair – in both domestic and foreign policy he was her heir.

More fundamentally, without her, he would have been impossible. Without the defeats inflicted by the Thatcher government on key groups of workers in the 1980s and the consequent weakening of organised labour, it is very unlikely that Blair could have become leader of the Labour Party.

Blair continued her policies, but he also took them much further than she dared.

As the Financial Times put it, “New Labour has – across health, education, welfare to work and housing – introduced sweeping changes that are at least as extensive, and arguably more so, than those of the Thatcher years.

“Shifts in the way services are provided that are closer to Conservative than Old Labour ideology have proved far easier for a Labour government to make than a Conservative one.

“In the same way Richard Nixon – as a Republican president and national security hawk – was able to go to China in 1972, so Labour’s credentials singularly allowed it to reshape its own post-war legacy.”

Domestically, Blair and Gordon Brown, the co-architect of New Labour, were initially cautious. They continued the limits on public spending and income tax they had inherited from the Tories.

Their main “innovation” in economic policy, giving the Bank of England independence to set interest rates, was a surrender to neoliberal conventional wisdom. Its effect was to remove key economic decisions from any form of democratic control.

New Labour’s economic record is the big surviving feather in its cap. Brown is stressing with increasing desperation the fact that there has been no significant economic crisis and that unemployment has fallen as he prepares to take over from Blair.

*Regulatory*

But the two have continued Thatcher’s policy of closely aligning the British economy to the US and mimicking its free market policies. This has meant the continued decline of manufacturing industry, and growing dependence on financial markets.

The City of London has flourished under Blair and Brown. Many believe it has now overtaken New York as the world’s biggest financial centre, as the City’s lax regulatory regime has attracted vast amounts of speculative money held by hedge funds and private equity firms.

This makes the entire British economy highly vulnerable to a serious financial crash, which many commentators think can’t be far off.

But even short of that, the negative effects of the way in which New Labour has locked Britain into the neoliberal economic model are evident.

Most obvious is the gap between rich and poor. This increased enormously under Thatcher and her successor John Major.

Since 1997 Brown has, through a complex system of means-tested benefits and tax-credits, targeted quite large amounts of public money on poor families with children.

But, because the neoliberal economy centred on the City has hugely increased the wealth of those at the top, the gap between rich and poor hasn’t narrowed at all under New Labour.

As Mike Brewer of the Institute of Fiscal Studies puts it, Brown has spent billions on redistribution “to achieve nothing”.

Meanwhile the divide between north and south that opened up under Thatcher has continued to widen.While London and the south east of England have boomed thanks to the strength of the City, the rest of Britain has been hit hard by the decline of manufacturing industry and has become more dependent on public spending.

A study by Durham University published last week shows that in the north east of England, where Blair has been an MP for the past 25 years, wages and profits were 81 percent of the British average in 1997 and 79 percent in 2005.

Blair defends his record by saying public services have improved.

It’s true that there was a big increase in social spending, especially on the NHS in Blair’s second term between 2001-5.

But this was largely negated by the market “reforms” that he drove through. The public sector is being steadily privatised.

Meanwhile, the spending boom has ended. Desperate to prove to the financial markets that he isn’t an Old Labour softie, Brown is imposing a much tighter budget, including a limit on public sector pay increases.

*Reform*

This will add to the growing pressure on living standards caused by rising inflation. Real household income is now falling.

The distance the Blair government has travelled from traditional Labourism was summed up by a speech in March by Jim Murphy, the welfare reform minister.

Murphy said, “Benefits do not lift people out of poverty in this country.” The benefits system couldn’t, for example, take a lone parent with two young children over the poverty line, “and I don’t think it should”.

“Work is the only way out of poverty,” Murphy insisted. This is a Gradgrind philosophy in which benefits must be mean enough to force the poor into low-paid jobs.

No wonder that a Unicef report on the wellbeing of children and adolescents published in February put Britain at the bottom of 21 rich countries, lower even than the US.

The extent of New Labour’s domestic failure is that David Cameron, a Tory Old Etonian, can now pose as the defender of the NHS – the one issue that, even in the darkest days of the 1980s, remained Labour’s own.

For the victims of these policies New Labour has nothing to offer but surveillance, Asbos, and appallingly overcrowded prisons.

The longer Blair has been in office, the more he has revealed a horrifyingly Victorian social vision that targets the “undeserving” poor and relies on public coercion and private charity.

Blair has also been Victorian in his foreign policy, where he has carved out a role as the ideological champion of a 19th century style moral imperialism.

Invited by Timothy Garton Ash to define “the essence of Blairism” abroad for the Guardian, Blair replied, “liberal interventionism”.

Liberal imperialism would be a better way of putting it – the imposition of free market capitalism on the world by the Western powers in the name of democracy.

Even before George Bush entered the White House, Blair had outlined what he called this “doctrine of international community” in a speech in Chicago in April 1999.

It was then, apparently, that a politician who had hitherto seemed ambitious but lacking in ideas or focus, bored by the details of domestic policy, discovered a mission in life – to impose Western “values” by force.

The result has been what the journalist John Kampfner called “Blair’s Wars” – Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq.

Blair played a key role in procuring the last of these wars. It would have been politically difficult for Bush to have invaded Iraq without British participation.

Confronted by the lies used to justify the invasion, Blair has insisted he acted “in good faith” – as if meaning well in defiance of the facts and the warnings of many experts could be a justification for going to war.

The truth is he didn’t give a damn about the pros and cons of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. He was determined to go along with Bush in seizing Iraq.

Contemptuous of his critics, Blair is content to await the judgement of history – and of his god.

What will damn him forever in every tribunal is not simply his complicity in real crimes against humanity – a war that is destroying Iraq and that has taken upwards of a million lives – but this complete lack of contrition.

The perpetrators of even greater crimes have sometimes suffered the pangs of conscience. Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary in the administrations that launched the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, has spent the rest of his life trying to atone for his part in the death of millions.

Blair’s supreme vanity will protect him from any second thoughts of this nature.

His fate is more likely to be that of Henry Kissinger, who presided over the last and most bloody acts of the Vietnam War.

Like him, Blair will spend a self?important, well-paid retirement in the world of the global rich.

But like him also, he will in the coming decades be regularly casting an anxious eye over his shoulder in case war crimes investigators are on his track.

His works, alas, will survive Blair politically under his hated but inescapable successor Gordon Brown.

All the same, good riddance to him.

Tory Revival

Alex Doherty — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:21:45 +0000

The Channel 4 fantasy programme The Trial of Tony Blair had the next general election culminate in a photo finish between a tongue-tied, terminally indecisive Gordon Brown and a vacuously trendy David Cameron.

Reality looks like it could turn out worse. According to a recent Guardian/ICM poll, the Tories are on 42 percent, Labour on 29 percent, and the Liberal Democrats on 17 percent.

This was the worst figure for Labour since the disastrous 1983 election. It was the best for the Tories since July 1992, just before their fortunes crashed along with the pound when it was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992.

What can have brought about this reversal in the Tories’ position? Fundamentally, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have only themselves to blame.

As everyone but Blair realises, thanks to his part in procuring the Iraq war, he is stamped with the mark of Cain and will never be forgiven.

Had the parliamentary Labour Party been as ruthless as their Tory counterparts, they would have ditched him the way the latter disposed of Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher.

But Labour backbenchers are a gutless bunch, as they showed again last week when John Reid talked them into voting through the privatisation of the probation service.

Brown has set himself up as master of New Labour’s domestic policy. But this is likely to prove as bitter a legacy as Blair’s imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having kept to tight controls on public spending inherited from the Tories in New Labour’s first term, Brown was much more generous during their second, in 2001-5. The figures show a substantial increase in spending on the NHS.

*Frenzied efforts*

But this is turning to ashes in Brown’s mouth. More money has not led to an improved NHS, largely because of the government’s frenzied efforts to run healthcare on a market basis.

Now his nemesis has arrived. Higher public spending has pushed up government borrowing, making the City anxious. So Brown has to show he can be trusted to clamp down on spending.

Hence the 1.9 percent limit on public sector pay he imposed last week and the NHS crisis – as hospitals are forced to close wards and sack staff to make their budgets balance according to crazy treasury accounting rules.

The results can be seen in a dreadful story in the Independent on Sunday. Deaths among pregnant women in Britain have risen to Eastern European levels, apparently thanks to a shortage of midwives as they are being sacked for financial reasons.

No wonder that opinion polls show that a large majority of the public believe the NHS has got worse under New Labour. The Tories are exploiting this to the hilt.

Cameron’s soft soap and green image have allowed them to position themselves quite effectively – though thoroughly hypocritically – in opposition to healthcare cuts.

At the same time, the tabloids are working hard to reconstruct the popular base of Thatcherism around issues such as defending the family and opposing road charges and Brown’s “stealth taxes”.

The Tory revival has put Brown on the defensive. Until recently the Blair camp seemed to have become resigned to his succeeding their master as prime minister.

But last week there were stories that David Miliband was thinking of challenging Brown as the Blairite candidate in the leadership election. Two old foes, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn, have surfaced to demand a “debate” that is clearly intended to portray Brown as an Old Labour loser.

I doubt if any of this will stop Brown succeeding. Apart from anything else, the trade union leaders seem masochistically resigned to backing him.

But the skirmishing will push Brown ever more slavishly to continue Blair’s agenda of public sector “reform”. He is endorsing the Freud report that demands more attacks on single parents.

It’s fortunate then, as the Guardian reported, that the ICM poll “shows voters remain interested in smaller parties”.

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Breeding Violence

Tim Holmes — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 15:14:50 +0000

The political tide has turned decisively against the war in Iraq. Yet George Bush and Tony Blair show absolutely no sign of bowing to mass pressure. On the contrary, they are redeploying their arguments.

This became very clear when senior US commanders gave evidence to a top Congressional committee last week. The New York Times summed up the shift: In the fall of 2005, the generals running the Iraq war told the Senate Armed Services Committee that a gradual withdrawal of American troops from Iraq was imperative.

The American troop presence, Gen John P Abizaid and Gen George W Casey Jr said at the time, was stoking the insurgency, fostering dependency among the Iraqi security forces and proving counterproductive This week, General Abizaid, chief of United States Central Command, told the same committee that American forces may be all that is preventing full-scale civil in Iraq, so a phased troop withdrawal would be a mistake.

The reasons for the shift are political. A year ago the Bush administration was hoping to cut US troop numbers by pushing Iraqi policemen and soldiers into the frontline.

Now, confronted with the failure of this policy of Iraqification and demands by the new Democratic majority in Congress for a timetable for phased withdrawal from Iraq, Bush and his generals are desperately trying to justify continuing the occupation.

Their argument must, however, be taken seriously. The idea that, even if the original invasion was wrong, US and British troops are all that stand between Iraq and chaos has widespread appeal.

There are three main kinds of violence in Iraq today. The first is the guerrilla war between the occupation forces and resistance fighters that has been going on ever since the invasion. This violence continues to rage and indeed to escalate. According to the US Defence Intelligence Agency, attacks on occupation troops rose from 70 a day in January to 170 a day in September. If the occupation ended, so would this war.

Second, there are various kinds of criminal violence robberies, kidnappings, murders. They are a consequence of the breakdown in elementary political order following the invasion. If a stable Iraqi state were restored, this too would end.

*Insurgency*

Finally, there is sectarian violence, which has escalated since the bombing of the Askariya mosque in Samarra in February. This has produced quite large population movements in the Baghdad region, as Sunni and Shia have fled mixed neighbourhoods.

CIA director general Michael Hayden said last week that Iraq is currently witnessing mostly an inter-Arab struggle to determine how power and authority will be distributed. But the US and Britain arent neutral umpires in this struggle.

Yes, Iraqi parties and their armed wings are vying for power, but the occupiers played a decisive role in unleashing this conflict. Faced with the eruption of the insurgency in 2003-4, the US adopted a policy of divide and rule, allying itself to the Shia political establishment.

US-trained death squads, often based in one apparatus or other of the client regime, are the initiators of sectarian violence. Thus last week it was interior ministry police, a major power base for one Shia party, who kidnapped hundreds of workers at the ministry of higher education, which was headed by a Sunni.

The occupiers also distort Iraqi politics. The slow formation of the al-Maliki government last spring was largely a result of an unsuccessful US campaign to exclude supporters of the most radical and anti-occupation Shia leader, Moqtada al-Sadr. And indigenous political forces compete for US patronage in their manoeuvres against each other.

There is no guarantee that the civil war gripping parts of Iraq would not escalate if the US and Britain withdrew their troops. But the removal of the occupiers would force the different forces in Iraqi society to come to terms with each other, free from the hope or fear that some could tilt the balance their way by appealing to Washington. Having inflicted chaos on Iraq, Bush and Blair have nothing to contribute to its future.

A Career of Opportunism

Alex Doherty — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 11:54:29 +0000

When better than the week of the Labour Party conference to talk of low, crawling things? I mean, of course, John Reid, the home secretary.

Last week he was lecturing Muslims about the need for them to help the police in exiling extremism from our country - and our communities. He appealed to Muslim parents to look for changes in your teenage sons - odd hours, dropping out of school or college, strange new friends.

The Nazis got children to spy on their parents. New Labour wants Muslim parents to spy on their children. Not, of course, that Reid is a fascist. Hes a clownish, authoritarian bully whose rise to such political prominence is a sign of the decline of the Labour Party under Tony Blairs leadership.

Reid was challenged when he spoke to Muslims in Leytonstone, east London, last week by Abu Izzadeen, a radical Islamist. Abu Izzadeen is an eloquent guy, but his sectarian politics prevented him from making a really effective case against Reid.

Reid should never be allowed to forget that it was he, as defence secretary, who sent the present British military mission to Afghanistan. At the time he said the British force might leave Afghanistan without firing a shot.

Last week a team from ITV News filmed British soldiers huddled under siege in ancient, crumbling buildings, under relentless pressure from a well motivated enemy. Their plight is a product of Reids folly and Blairs vanity.

Yet there Reid was last week, still holding high office, warning Muslims not to let their children hang out with extremists. If he had the smallest sliver of honesty, reflection on his own career might have given him pause.

Reid joined the Communist Party in the 1970s, when it dominated student politics north of the border. He was a student at Stirling University when it exploded in protest after the queen visited the campus in 1972. With the radical left in the ascendant, Reid decided to run for union president.

According to Tom Bower, writing in the Guardian Weekend magazine last Saturday, success depended upon support not only from Labour students but also from the Communists. Approaching Jim White, the secretary of the Young Communist League, Reid professed to be a convert seeking membership.

*Suspicious transition*

He told us he was a Leninist and Stalinist, White recalls. Although I was suspicious about his transition, we couldnt tell if he was acting. We let him join. With Whites support and Reids good organisation, he won the vote. John Reids political career was launched.

With hindsight, White condemns Reid as an opportunist. You can say that again. He has tacked and turned as it has suited his career - from Stalinist to Kinnockite and now ultra-Blairite.

How dare this shop soiled careerist lecture Muslims about values and extremism? His real policy towards Muslims has been to create a climate of fear in order to intimidate them campaigning against George Bushs wars.

We got a glimpse of what this means at the weekend. Last Sunday in Manchester the Stop the War Coalition followed up its demonstration with an alternative conference. Several hundred people, many of them Muslim, crowded into sessions devoted to a wide variety of subjects.

Outside the conference several police vans stuffed full of cops in riot gear filmed people as they entered the conference. A couple of policemen even tried to force their way into the main lecture theatre to see who was there. They were sent away with a flea in their ears, and after protests the police presence outside the conference was drastically cut back.

But this kind of bullying and intimidation is at the heart of the present governments policies. Blair and Reid may talk about defending freedom and democracy but in practice what they are doing is undermining the real liberties that we enjoy.

Those liberties were won through struggle over hundreds of years. We are going to have to fight hard to defend them from Reid and his ilk.

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Crises Bring Down Blair

jo — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:43:44 +0000

This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper, wrote the poet TS Eliot. And that was how Tony Blairs premiership in effect came to an end - at a north London school amid a press scrimmage and the jeers of anti-war students.

The tumultuous events of last week represented the convergence and fusion of two distinct but related crises - those of New Labour and of the war on terror launched by George Bush five years ago after 11 September 2001.

To understand the first of these crises we have to recognise the extent to which Blair is a child of Margaret Thatcher, in two senses.

First of all, without the terrible defeats inflicted on the working class movement by the Tories in the 1980s it is inconceivable that the Labour Party would have chosen as leader a public school barrister travelling as ideologically light as Blair was.

Secondly, the essence of Blairism consisted in accepting the Thatcher revolution and in particular what we now call neo-liberalism - the freemarket version of capitalism that has become dominant worldwide since the 1980s.

But the New Labour project wasnt Blairs personal affair. He benefited from the huge effort to shift Labour to the right made by Neil Kinnock as party leader between 1983 and 1992.

Moreover, the detailed programme implemented after Labour came to office in 1997 was devised not by Blair, but by Gordon Brown, for a long time the senior figure among party modernisers.

It was he who coined the slogan that first made Blair famous - Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

The famous Granita pact, struck by the two men when Blair stood for the party leadership after John Smith died in 1994, gave Brown, as chancellor of the exchequer, effective control over domestic policy once Labour came to government.

The essential promise of New Labour was that, in Blairs words, enterprise and justice can live together.

In other words, Thatcherite economics could be combined with traditional social democratic policies aimed at reducing inequality.

In reality, from the start, Blair and Brown both gave priority to enterprise over justice. They eagerly courted big business.

Both men were implicated in the shady affair at the very beginning of the government.

Backtracked

This occurred when Labour accepted £1 million from Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone - and, coincidentally, backtracked from a promise to ban tobacco advertising in motor racing.

It was Brown who proclaimed Labour the party of enterprise.

The New Labour governments first action was to give the power to fix interest rates to the Bank of England - in effect abandoning economic control to the financial markets.

It is true that Brown has pursued what has been called redistribution by stealth, devising a system of complex tax credits aimed at increasing the income of poor households with children.

But this system was based on a vast extension of means testing, which allowed many of those entitled to these credits to fall outside the net.

Because the government left free market capitalism to go its own way, the gap between rich and poor, which hugely increased under Thatcher, has continued to grow under New Labour.

So disillusionment with the Blair government began to develop quite early in its life, especially among party activists and core Labour supporters.

The pattern we saw in last years general election, when Labour won by default, because the mass of voters still hated and despised the Tories, was already set in the 2001 election.

Soon after, the incipient crisis of New Labour began to interweave with the global offensive launched by the Bush administration after 9/11.

Blair had already shown a taste for high-minded imperialism during the 1999 war waged by Nato against Yugoslavia.

But the war on terror offered him an opportunity to strut the global stage alongside Bush.

The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux let us re-order this world around us, Blair told the Labour Party conference in October 2001.

Labour and Tory governments alike have, since the Second World War, sought to maintain a global role for British capitalism by aligning themselves as closely as possible to the US.

But Blair took this much further than any of his predecessors, even Thatcher.

Invasion

It is, of course, this vainglorious gamble that destroyed his premiership. It has never recovered from the exposure, after the invasion of Iraq, of the lies the government told to get Britain into the war in the first place.

Blair survived in office thanks to the cowardice of the other Labour leaders, Brown above all.

But the spreading catastrophe in Iraq, to which now is added John Reids folly - the besieged British military mission to Afghanistan - has steadily eroded the governments popularity.

Desperate efforts to use last years London bombings, and other more doubtful terrorist attempts, to rally support for the war have been quite ineffective.

The emergence of an invigorated Tory opposition under David Cameron means Labour can no longer win elections by default. Its standing in opinion polls has dropped to levels last seen in the 1980s.

But it was Blairs outspoken support for Israels destruction of Lebanon this summer that finally broke him.

As Andrew Rawnsley, a journalist close to 10 Downing Street, put it in last Sundays Observer, Lebanon was the tipping point for many mainstream MPs. [Blairs] stance reaggravated all the anger about the Iraq war and its searing aftermath.

Ferocious

It was the resulting broad based revolt against Blairs attempts to hang on rather than the plotting by the Brown camp that forced last weeks announcement from him.

The ferocious personal assault mounted by Charles Clarke and Blair loyalists is unlikely to prevent Brown from succeeding.

But, despite the deep hatreds that now divide the Blair and Brown camps, there is little of substance that divides them.

Robert Peston revealed last year in Browns Britain that a major reason why Brown has held back from bringing Blair down before now was fear that this would make him beholden to the Labour left.

Brown has solidly supported Blair over Iraq. In his BBC interview with Andrew Marr last Sunday he reaffirmed that terrorist suspects should be held without charge for longer than the current 28 days.

Gordon Browns Private Finance Initiative opened the door to Blairs campaign to privatise schools and health provision. Initially Brown resisted the latter, but he seems to have given up, telling Marr that he wants to intensify the privatisation of public services.

In the very unlikely event that Brown wanted to move leftwards as prime minister he will be boxed in by the Blairites within the Labour Party, and the Tories under Cameron without, both eager to denounce him as an Old Labour throwback.

So Labour under Brown will continue to be New Labour. It will continue to offer nothing to the millions of working class people who used to look to it. It will continue to participate in the USs imperial wars.

Those millions will be left without a political voice. A huge space remains to the left of Labour.

And so it is essential that Respect starts filling that space, offering a real alternative to the disintegrating edifice that Blair and Brown built.

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Polish Migrants

jo — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 10:47:27 +0000

No one knows how many people from the new central and eastern member states of the European Union (EU) have moved to Britain since they joined in May 2004. Estimates vary between 300,000 and 500,000, mainly Polish workers. Certainly in London, they seem to have fitted in very quickly.

But now the Tories and the bosses are beginning to make a fuss about them. Britain was one of the few existing EU members to allow citizens of the new member states free entry.

Last week the CBI employers organisation called for a pause in this open door policy when Bulgaria and Romania join the EU next year. Damien Green, Tory shadow immigration minister, has backed this call.

They are receiving a sympathetic hearing from New Labour, which always refuses to be out-bigoted by the Tories. Trade and industry secretary Alastair Darling said last Sunday that there will no open door for Bulgarians and Romanians.

This isnt an easy issue for the government. Eastern Europeans are filling many of the low paid jobs on which a neo-liberal economy depends. The British Hospitality Association estimates that four out of five workers employed by central Londons top 25 hotels are migrant workers.

The bosses are split. The National Farmers Union (NFU) and the Fresh Produce Consortium, which represent packers, producers, and wholesalers, all heavily reliant on migrant workers, want the open door to be extended to Bulgarians and Romanians.

David Frost of the British Chambers of Commerce disagrees. He told the Financial Times he was concerned about possible tension if we have increasing numbers of migrants employed, but at the same time the indigenous population is unable to find work.

Threat

This is absolutely typical of the divide and rule policies that capitalism has always used to control the working class, playing supposed native workers off against migrants. Now the children of Asian and African-Caribbean immigrants are being encouraged to see Poles as a threat - no doubt soon it will be Polish insiders versus Bulgarian and Romanian newcomers.

Economic competition could nevertheless be used to divide different groups of workers. It is a striking fact about the British economy at the minute that both unemployment and employment are rising. In the three months to May the number of people claiming unemployment benefit increased by 90,000, but the number of people in employment rose by 59,000.

The increase in the size of the workforce reflects the influx of migrant workers, which coexists with rising unemployment. Nazis and racists complain that native British people are losing jobs to immigrants, though they must be confused by the fact that Muslim Asians suffer from high levels of unemployment, while the latest immigrants are blond, white and Christian.

Unemployment is certainly one of the failures that has been brushed under the carpet by New Labour. According to the International Labour Organisations definitions, there were 1.677 million unemployed people in Britain in the three months to June, 5.5 percent of the workforce.

They are particularly concentrated in the inner cities, in the north of England and in Wales. Those who suffer are victims of neo-liberal capitalism, which flourishes thanks to the destruction of whole industries and regions.

But the east European migrant workers are victims too, exploited thanks to neo-liberalisms appetite for cheap labour. The FT reports, The NFU says there have been signs that some workers from eastern European states are becoming more reluctant to accept the low paid seasonal work offered by the agricultural and horticultural industries.

This is excellent news. Like the strike by Polish strawberry pickers earlier in the summer, it suggests that east European workers are beginning to resist their exploitation. Struggle against the bosses is the best way to defend the interests of all workers, whether they have lived here for six months or 60 years.

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The True Terrorists

jo — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 09:27:05 +0000

The political fallout from the alleged plot against airliners is a sign of how far the wider debate over the war on terrorism has shifted against the government.

That the authorities are talking about an alleged plot shows how badly they got their fingers burned, with media collusion, by proclaiming the innocent guilty in the case of the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting and the Forest Gate raid.

Even more striking is the way in which British foreign policy has been at the centre of the debate over what might lead young British Muslims to engage in terrorist attacks. After the 7 July bombings last year, Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone were very quick to deny that the attacks had anything to do with Iraq.

This time discussion has been dominated by a letter by leading British Muslims saying current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad.

Blair responded by repeating the mantra that 11 September 2001 preceded the invasion of Iraq. We should always remember that the terrorism affecting the West today has blighted Muslim countries for decades, he said.

If were trying to understand what might motivate young British Muslims to engage in terrorist acts now, then Iraq is relevant. We know, from an interview given by one of those arrested in connection with the attempted bombings in London on 21 July last year, that he and his friends constantly watched videos of US atrocities in Iraq.

The 11 September argument assumes everything was hunky dory in the Middle East before that sunny morning near five years ago. This is nonsense.

Grievance

The biggest grievance felt by Arabs and Muslims dates from 1948, when the state of Israel was founded through the mass expulsion of Palestinians, a grievance renewed by the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, and by endless injustices committed by Israel in the following four decades.

Israel has been allowed to get away with all this because of its strategic importance to the US as a trusted ally in securing US domination of the Middle East. It was to maintain that domination that George Bushs father sent US troops to Saudi Arabia in 1990, precipitating Osama bin Ladens rebellion and the formation of Al Qaida.

Far from acknowledging the role that their policies have played in fuelling terrorism, Bush and Blair offer more of the same. They show absolutely no comprehension of how Israels demolition of Lebanon, carried out with their complicity, is fuelling hatred of the West all over the world.

Moreover, the language that they use seems calculated to insult Muslims everywhere. Blair made a speech in Los Angeles a few weeks ago in which he lumped together terrorist campaigns, from Chechnya to Kashmir, as evidence of the threat posed to Western values by Reactionary Islam.

Bush reacted to the alleged airline plot by denouncing Islamic fascists. Is it any wonder that some young Muslims, members of what is in any case the most economically and socially disadvantaged group in Britain, should respond with the thought that maybe bin Laden has a point?

Roy Hattersley, in Mondays Guardian, criticised the Muslim leaders letter for implying that foreign policy should be changed because of the threat it caused, when the reason why policy should be changed is the simple fact that the policy is wrong.

But remember that the invasion of Iraq was sold as a way of reducing the terrorist threat. Its therefore perfectly reasonable for critics to point out that it has instead increased that threat.

This is, after, all what the Joint Intelligence Committee predicted on the eve of the Iraq War: Al Qaida and associated groups continue to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq.

The only way to stop Islamist terrorism is to end the domination of the Middle East by Western imperialism. This wont happen overnight. But by continuing to build a united and dynamic mass movement against the war on terrorism, we can show that there is a better way of opposing the crimes committed by our government.

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Made Poverty History?

jo — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 15:26:09 +0000

A year ago many of us were gearing up for the protests at the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland. We were doing so in a climate of great optimism that the summit would achieve real improvements for the poor of the world, especially in Africa.

These expectations were raised partly by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But they were also encouraged by Make Poverty History (MPH), the coalition of anti-poverty NGOs fronted by Bob Geldof and Bono.

Barely had the summit ended when this alliance began to break up. Oxfam, the most powerful and normally the most conservative of the NGOs in MPH, was roundly denounced by Geldof for complaining about how paltry the promises to emerge from the summit were.

Moreover, within weeks of the summit the major powers had started backtracking even on these limited commitments.

Now Oxfam itself has confirmed this critique. A briefing note published last week looking at Gleneagles G8 One Year On is careful to praise the programme of cancelling the debt of the poorest countries that the G8 agreed to implement last July.

But Oxfam goes on to point out, much more debt cancellation is needed; massively indebted countries such as Bangladesh and Kenya remained excluded. The Jubilee Debt Campaign calculates that over 60 countries will fail to reach the Millennium Development Goals unless their debts are fully cancelled. Even when the 2005 deal is fully implemented it will only stretch to 40 countries.

Moreover, Oxfam argues that the debt cancellation is being used artificially to boost the official figures for development aid to the Global South. Aid from the G8 has increased massively, by $21 billion, or 37 percent over its 2004 levels.

However, the overwhelming majority of the increase (80 percent) is made up of one-off debt cancellation deals for Iraq and Nigeria it is not actually new money in the fight against poverty. Together these two deals add up to $17 billion of the $21 billion increase.

Development

This double-counting is very important. The G8 promised at Gleneagles to boost development aid by $50 billion annually by 2010. According to Oxfam, this is only half of what the UN calculates is required by 2010 to reach the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to halve extreme poverty, introduce universal primary education, and so on by 2015.

Now we discover that the G8 is seeking to meet this already inadequate commitment by including the Third World debt it is writing off. Its pretending that ceasing to take money from poor countries in the form of debt repayments is the same as giving them more aid.

This is particularly ridiculous in the case of Iraq. Cancelling its debt has nothing to do with reducing the desperate poverty there. Its about propping up the US client regime.

Oxfam points out that including the debt cancellations will massively boost the G8 aid budget in the next couple of years, but any benefits the poor countries get will be spread over a much longer period. It calculates that, once the Nigeria and Iraq deals are deducted, overall aid from the G8 rose by 9 percent in 2005.

Once debt cancellation is excluded, British development aid actually fell by 2 percent in 2005. This is a particularly damning given how Brown has been parading around Africa proclaiming the virtues of his policies for the worlds poor.

Brown is a notorious massager of figures. So its not surprising that the Guardian reported last week that the circulation of a draft version of the Oxfam report provoked a row in Whitehall.

Under pressure from the treasury and the Department for International Development, Oxfam dropped a plan to name and shame Britain, France and Germany, whose aid fell in 2005, and added a footnote explaining away the cut in British aid.

None of this alters the fact that the little that was promised the worlds poor at Gleneagles is gradually being withdrawn. It seems more inexplicable than ever that Oxfam and its partners should have disbanded Make Poverty History.

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Euston Manifesto

jo — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 10:53:05 +0000

Over the past few weeks much attention in the media and on the web has been devoted to a document called the Euston Manifesto, which was finally launched on Thursday of last week.

The manifesto proclaims a new democratic progressive alliance. Much of its content is unexceptionable. It is for democracy, human rights, equality, development for freedom, a new internationalism and so on.

But there are more puzzling bits. For example, one section, headed Opposing Anti-Americanism, declares: The United States of America is a great country and nation. It is the home of a strong democracy with a noble tradition behind it and lasting constitutional and social achievements behind it.

The manifesto furthermore repeatedly equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Thus: Anti-Zionism has now developed to a point where supposed organisations of the left are willing to entertain openly anti-Semitic speakers and to form alliances with anti-Semitic organisations.

The suspicion therefore grows that this is a pro-war programme. This suspicion is confirmed when one discovers that its main author is the ex-Marxist philosopher Norman Geras, and that its signatories include the philosopher Michael Walzer and Observer journalist Nick Cohen all of them well known apologists for the conquest of Iraq.

The manifesto nevertheless leaves the issue of the war open: The founding authors of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against. We recognise that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for successful implementation of democratic change.

But this generous concession is undermined by the lengthy denunciation that follows of everyone who insists on belly-aching about the bloody disaster George Bush and Tony Blair have inflicted on Iraq, instead of helping to establish a stable Western client regime in that country.

Real agenda

Geras confirms his real agenda in a Guardian article that is supposed to refute the common misbelief that the Euston Manifesto is a pro-war document. He says that there is a problem with the anti-war movement, and he singles out the Socialist Workers Party and Respect.

This problem is shown by the numbers on the left unwilling to allow, many indeed unable to comprehend, why others of us supported a regime change war and, most seriously of all, in the perceptible lack of interest in initiatives of solidarity with the forces in Iraq battling for a democratic transformation of their country, part of a wider lack of enthusiasm for the success of this enterprise given its origins in a war led by George Bush.

In other words, its OK to have opposed the war as long as you arent too nasty to those who supported it and accept Tony Blairs injunction to move on and back the occupation.

This position is a reflection of how isolated apologists for the invasion of Iraq are. If Geras and his allies had the courage simply to say that they were right to support the war and that everything in Iraq is going splendidly, they would be laughed out of court.

So they have to muddy the issue by saying that the problem isnt so much the war as the values of the large majority of the left that opposed the war.

If I allowed myself to think about it too much I could get very angry with people who accuse me of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism when I have spent my adult life fighting racism and fascism.

But anger is wasted on people of the moral calibre of Norman Geras. The intellectual dishonesty of the Euston Manifesto its evasions over the war is evidence of its authors political weakness.

Unintentionally they have confirmed the opposite of what they sought out to achieve. What the Bush administration now calls the long war is the central issue in world politics. We certainly need a new democratic and progressive left but it will be founded on opposition to this war.

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France vs Britain

jo — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:51:56 +0000

Why are Britain and France so different? This question is back in the air. Trade union officials have been complaining that Britains flexible labour laws made it easier for Peugeot bosses to shut down their car plant at Ryton rather than any of its French counterparts.

Meanwhile activists have been comparing, sometimes despairingly, the successful struggle by French students and trade unionists against the CPE law that would have made it easier to sack young workers with the shameful cave-in of British union leaders over local government pensions.

There are real differences, though they shouldnt be exaggerated. The most important economic difference is that Margaret Thatchers government in the 1980s abandoned any systematic attempt to shore up the international competitiveness of British industrial firms.

This policy continued by Tony Blair marked a break with the strategy still pursued by other leading capitalist states, that of ensuring they have locally controlled producers in key industrial sectors. This helps explain why car production in Britain is now controlled by foreign multinationals.

It has meant that Britain has gone further than other advanced economies in reducing the share of output devoted to producing goods compared to the share taken by services.

This economic difference probably has some effect on British workers confidence in their ability to resist plant closures. They must be aware of successive governments record of letting manufacturing industry go to the wall. All the same, French trade unionists would be quick to point out the closures they have suffered at the hands of both local and foreign firms.

But the bigger question concerns workers combativity. Trade union membership is actually a lot lower in France. In 2003 the proportion of trade union members in the workforce was 29.3 percent in Britain and only 8.3 percent in France.

Collective bargaining

These figures can be misleading, since French unions bargain for 95 percent of the workforce, while in Britain union agreements only cover 35 percent. This is related to the fact that collective bargaining is much more centralised in France.

One effect is that trade unions in France act as the public representatives of workers, organised and unorganised, far more than they do in Britain. The general secretaries of the three main union federations are much better known in France than the anonymous Brendan Barber of the TUC is here.

But the similarities are important as well. In both countries, the defeats workers have suffered since the 1980s have increased the power of the full time union officials over rank and file trade unionists.

The last real burst of industrial militancy in France, in defence of pensions in May-June 2003, was dissipated by the leadership, especially of the most left wing federation, the CGT, into a series of one-day strikes that wore workers down.

But if the French unions are led by sell out merchants little different from their British counterparts, the relative weakness of union organisation makes it easier to bypass them. Small radical unions such as the SUD organisations have been able to act as ginger groups.

More important in the case of the revolt against the CPE was the fact that it was started by students occupying their campuses. The student movement acted as a militant driving force that made it hard for union leaders to take control and sell the struggle out as they did in 2003.

Neither breakaway unions nor student militancy can in the long term substitute for the hard task, in both countries, of building within the existing unions rank and file organisations that can act independently of the full time officials.

But the most important lesson of the struggle against the CPE was that it developed as a visceral revolt against neo-liberalism, beginning among university students but spreading both to organised workers and to the unemployed youth of the suburbs.

This kind of political impulse, welling from a revulsion against the way in which free market capitalism is changing our lives for the worse, is likely to play an essential role in rebuilding workers confidence in their ability to fight, not just in Britain and France, but right around the world.

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Poverty Made History?

Alex Doherty — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 10:18:18 +0000

You may not have noticed it, but poverty has become history. Or so one has to presume, since at the end of last month the campaigning coalition Make Poverty History (MPH) decided to wind itself up.

The same impression that we have turned a corner in the struggle to eradicate global poverty is conveyed by a book published last November called Youre History! In it a collection of notables headed by Bob Geldof explain how individuals can change the world.

Adding to this chorus, the Guardian last week carried a supplement devoted to what it called the verdict on last years G8 summit in Gleneagles. Its conclusion? A steady first step forward. The G8 is given 7 out of 10 for its decisions on aid and debt, 6 out of 10 for health, and only in the area of trade is it marked 2 out of 10.

Oddly enough, one has to go to the MPH website to find a dissonant voice in this general hubbub of self congratulation. Under latest news, we read a report from the World Trade Organisation summit in Hong Kong headlined No End to Poverty as Rich Nations Refuse to Deliver Trade Justice.

And its not only in trade that has little been offered the poor. As George Monbiot pointed out back in September, no sooner was the summit over than the G8 started to backtrack.

Germany and Italy almost immediately announced that they might not be able to fulfil their commitments because of budgetary constraints. Less than two weeks after the summit Gordon Brown admitted that, contrary to previous promises, the $20 billion increase in aid included the debt relief the G8 had agreed to give to 18 of the poorest countries.

*Economic inequalities*

From a broader point of view, even if the G8 had kept their word, they were offering the Global South chickenfeed. Its been estimated that economic inequalities are now so great that 1 percent of global national income would be sufficient to eliminate extreme poverty. Its this extreme poverty that kills 18 million people a year.

On the latest figures available from the World Bank, for 2003, that 1 percent would amount to $346 billion. That sounds like a lot until one notices that last week George Bush asked the US Congress to vote the Pentagon $439 billion for the next financial year, plus an additional $70 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan.

No wonder that even the Guardians Larry Elliott, who is close to Gordon Brown, is reduced to mumbling that the Gleneagles deal was oversold and that the promises will mean little unless they are put into practice.

So why, given this failure, did MPH decide to disband itself? Even the most moderate of its constituent organisations, such as Oxfam, denounced the summits feeble promises at the time earning themselves some media slaps from Geldof for their trouble.

The MPH website offers no explanation, simply listing campaigns that supporters might want to get involved in. According to the Guardians report of the assembly that decided to wind MPH up, comparisons were made with Live Aid, which, it was said, was effective because it only occurred once every 20 years. This is a puzzling argument. Live Aid was so effective that 20 years later Africa was even worse off than it had been in 1985.

I suspect that the disbanding of MPH has a lot to do with the interests of the big NGOs that dominated it. A permanent coalition would have got in the way of their own fundraising and recruitment activities. Off the back of MPH, Oxfam has launched a campaign for a million pledges to help end poverty once and for all.

I hope people do sign up to Oxfams campaign. But its a pity Oxfam doesnt have the democratic internal procedures that would give its supporters a say in major policy decisions such as this one.

For the truth is that scrapping MPH was an utterly shameful decision. It can only promote the belief that those who currently dominate the world are benevolent figures who will, with a few pushes from below, continue to take small steady steps forwards. But this is a lie that helps to kill millions every year.

Iraq Withdrawal

Alex Doherty — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:23:48 +0000

The debate over Iraq has shifted significantly over the past few months. The central issue has become the withdrawal of the occupation forces in Iraq.

Even the US Pentagon is desperate to drastically cut down the number of troops the US has in Iraq. Having 150,000 combat troops tied down in Iraq is seriously restricting the USs ability to project power elsewhere in the world.

The problem is that reducing the US military commitment in Iraq is dependent on the puppet army taking on a frontline role. United Press International reported last week:

There is now a widespread recognition shared among senior uniformed US military officers and foreign policy analysts that plans to rapidly build up the Iraqi army as a new, independent effective fighting force have failed disastrously.

The senate heard testimony last week from some of Americas top generals that the war in Iraq is going worse than ever and that only one out of 119 Iraqi army and security battalions can operate by itself in combat.

The report goes on to describe the growing political crisis: Just as hawkish Republicans like senator [John] McCain are now openly criticising administration policy on Iraq, Democratic groups are taking much stronger positions in advocating major or even full withdrawals of US troops.

Yet many on the left are reluctant to call for an end to the occupation.

Most of these are not neo-con turncoats such as Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen who delude themselves that the Iraqi government that is trying to rig next weeks constitutional referendum is really made up of heroic democrats.

More common is the idea that Iraq would descend into sectarian chaos if the troops were withdrawn. People who believe this often argue that if the US and Britain pulled out, a force controlled by the United Nations (UN) should take over.

*Bloodshed*

There are two things wrong with this argument. The first is that bloody and increasingly sectarian chaos is already engulfing Iraq.

This chaos is a direct consequence of the invasion and conquest of Iraq. Before 20 March 2003 Iraq was ruled by a cruel dictator and was being starved by sanctions imposed by the same UN that some want to see take over.

But people were not being bombed and shot every day. They also enjoyed better public services than they now receive. People are dying in Iraq now because the occupiers are trying to hold onto what they seized by armed force and because Iraqis are trying to drive them out.

It is simple logic that the best way to end the bloodshed is to remove its cause the occupation.

Ah, defenders of the occupation object, but how do you know that, if we did withdraw, the bloodshed would stop? Of course, no one can be absolutely certain of what would happen.

But the second flaw in the argument for continued foreign control of Iraq is that it assumes that the Iraqi people are incapable of ruling themselves.

Iraq is a country where, despite its very complex ethnic and religious composition, different political movements have been able to mount powerful and united mobilisations.

Why shouldnt Iraqi people of different identities be able to cooperate and reach agreement on how to govern themselves? The assumption that they cant without foreign guidance is at best anti-democratic and at worst racist.

The longer the occupation goes on, the more likely it is that it will end in sectarian bloodshed. This is because, the stronger the resistance, the more the occupiers try to divide Iraqis along religious and ethnic lines.

The only reliable units in the puppet security forces are Kurdish and Shia Muslim militias. Faced with defeat in Iraq, the US and Israel would probably encourage the northern Kurdish protectorate to break away.

So people are right to fear that sectarian bloodshed may be Iraqs future, but they fail to see that the cause is the US occupation. The quicker foreign troops get out, the greater the Iraqi peoples chance of having a different and better future.

German Blow To Neoliberals

jo — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 14:49:05 +0000

The hung parliament that emerged from the German federal elections is a serious setback for the forces seeking to impose yet more free market reforms on us all.

Angela Merkel, leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), was built up by the British media as another Margaret Thatcher who would shake up a stultified and stagnant Germany. The BBC effectively declared her elected weeks ago.

Downing Street didnt bother to conceal Tony Blairs hope that Merkel would displace Gerhard Schröder as German chancellor despite the fact that Schröders Social Democrats (SPD) are the counterpart of the British Labour Party.

Both German and international big business were longing for a CDU victory.

When SPD chief Franz Müntefering announced early elections in May Merkel was 21 points ahead in the opinion polls. Yet the CDUs share in last Sundays elections of 35 percent was worse than its score last time, in 2002, and only just ahead of the SPD at 34.3 percent.

According to the Financial Times, The confused result is bound to cause consternation in London, which had hoped a solid Merkel majority would give a push for economic reform in Europe, and in Washington, which had banked on a change of government to help mend the damaged relationship with Berlin.

Behind the decision to hold early elections was the anger provoked by the ruling Red-Green coalitions Agenda 2010 of neo-liberal reforms. The Hartz IV programme slashing unemployment benefits provoked mass protests in eastern Germany a year ago.

Voodoo

The final straw came when huge numbers of working class voters deserted the SPD in elections in the key state of North Rhine Westphalia. Schröder and Münterfering gambled on clawing back many of these votes during the election campaign. To some degree, this strategy worked.

It was greatly helped by Merkels right wing ineptitude. She nominated a tax lawyer Paul Kirchhof as finance minister.

An exponent of free-market voodoo economics, Kirchhof unveiled plans for a 25 percent flat tax. Flat taxes are currently flavour of the month among the right internationally, since they would massively cut taxes for the rich.

Schröder ruthlessly exploited Kirchhofs plans to portray Merkel as about to dismantle the welfare state. Meanwhile, Münterfering tacked left, denouncing financial speculators as locusts and posing next to a bust of Karl Marx.

These efforts were aimed at stemming a haemorrhage of votes leftwards. Last year, trade unionists broke away from the SPD to form the Election Alternative for Social Justice (WASG).

In the past few months the WASG has come together with the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in the Left Party. The PDS, the rump of the old Stalinist ruling party in East Germany, is now a moderately reformist party.

The new Left Party is headed by one of Germanys leading politicians, Oskar Lafontaine. Lafontaine, former chairman of the SPD, resigned as finance minister during the early months of the Red-Green coalition when his plans for redistribution from rich to poor were blocked by Schröder.

The Left Party won 8.7 percent on Sunday, coming just ahead of the Greens who have been in government for the last seven years.

The result is one more advance for the radical left in Europe. It follows the performances in recent elections by Respect in Britain, the Left Bloc in Portugal, and the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark, and the defeat of the European constitution in the French and Dutch referendums.

Behind the rise of this new left is a rebellion against the neo-liberal consensus that reigns at the top of European society. The election photo-finish has set the scene for intense manoeuvring over the coalition needed to form a government that will ram through more attacks on the welfare state. Left of centre parties the SPD, Greens, and Left actually have a majority in the new parliament.

Interestingly, however, both Schröder and Merkel have ruled out talking to the Left Party. It should take this as a compliment.

Alex Callinicos is an advisor to UK Watch

Cook, Iraq and New Labour

Alex Doherty — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 11:09:53 +0000

The sudden death of Robin Cook is a major blow to the Labour Party as it was traditionally conceived, as a party of progressive social reform.

Since his death, Cook has been rightly praised for the principled stand he took against the Iraq war. On 17 March 2003, having resigned from the Cabinet, he made a powerful speech to the House of Commons warning against the military adventure that was then only days away.

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction, he said. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?

History has certainly vindicated Cook. Tony Blair, with his endless lies and evasions, looks very shabby in comparison.

All the same, Cook was more a maker of New Labour than its enemy. First elected to parliament in 1974 at the age of 28, he was one of the clever and ambitious Scottish politicians who helped rescue Labour after its disastrous defeats in 1983 and 1987.

Though on the left of the party, Cook was close to Neil Kinnock, and helped him to move Labour rightwards. On BBC Radio 4s World at One programme last Sunday, Kinnock paid tribute to the help Cook gave him in getting Labour to drop its commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament.

The logical outcome of this bonfire of distinctively Labour policies was Blair and New Labour. But Cook did not belong to the inner circle of modernisers, in part because of his obscure feud with Gordon Brown.

In the run-up to Labours electoral triumph in May 1997 Cook made a number of speeches in which he sought to take his distance from Blair and Brown. Labour must speak for the poor, he told the Scottish TUC in April 1996.

*Weak start*

But very little of this survived his appointment as foreign secretary in 1997. He was weakened almost from the start by the messy break-up of his first marriage. This made him dependent on the Downing Street spin machine for protection against the media.

Cook announced there would be an ethical dimension to New Labours foreign policy, but failed to stop British arms sales to Indonesia. He became embroiled in an even murkier affair in Sierra Leone, where the British high commissioner helped to arm one side in a civil war, in defiance of a United Nations embargo.

Worst of all, Cook was an enthusiast for Natos disastrous war on Yugoslavia in 1999. He worked closely with the wars architect, the dreadful Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state under president Bill Clinton.

The war was supposed to protect Kosovos Albanian majority against the Serbian dominated Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milosevic. Instead it precipitated the wholesale ethnic cleansing of the Albanians.

Massive bombing directed at Yugoslavias civilian infrastructure forced Milosevic to withdraw his army from Kosovo. Today the province is a Nato protectorate where many of the Serbian minority have been ethnically cleansed.

Cook therefore shared with Blair the idea that the Western powers can intervene militarily in countries that they deem to be violating human rights. He simply opposed applying this principle to the case of Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

This stand was greatly to Cooks credit. But it is important to see that it was quite narrowly based. During the last general election, Cook used the moral capital he had built with opponents of the war to persuade them to vote Labour. Old Labour sympathisers can back this government not through gritted teeth but with enthusiasm, he wrote.

Cook wasnt motivated by loyalty to Blair, who had humiliatingly demoted him from the foreign office after the 2001 election. He was trying to save the Labour Party.

But in trying to stem the haemorrhage of votes from Labour, he helped to keep Blair in office with the results we see today. In this, as in his entire career, Robin Cook showed what little space is now left for those seeking to pursue traditional Labour politics within the Labour Party.

The Fear Factor

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 09:41:42 +0000

There are many reasons for condemning the London bombings. One is that the attacks have, temporarily at least, politically strengthened Tony Blair.

This is despite the fact that the government has failed in its efforts to deny any connection between the bombings and the war in Iraq. No less than 85 percent in a Daily Mirror/GMTV poll blamed the bombings on the invasion of Iraq.

The final nail in the coffin of the governments case came at the weekend. Details of the police interrogation of Hussain Osman, arrested in Rome on suspicion of being one of the 21 July attempted suicide bombers, were leaked to the Italian press.

According to La Repubblica, Osman said, More than praying we discussed work, politics, the war in Iraq. We always had films about the war in Iraq in which you could see Iraqi women and children who had been killed by US and UK soldiers.

It is interesting that at his press conference on Tuesday of last week Blair himself began to backtrack. He said, I read occasionally that I am supposed to have said it is nothing to do with Iraq, in inverted commas. I havent said that.

Blair then went on to try and confuse the issue by saying that those who traced the bombings to the Iraq war were trying to justify them. This is nonsense. Nevertheless, the governments
total failure to isolate the bombings from the war doesnt mean that Blair is on the ropes politically.

Commentator Andrew Rawnsley pointed to the paradox that the prime minister who took Britain into Iraq is also enjoying the best approval ratings he has had since before the war. They judge him to be good in a crisis even when they think he has some responsibility for that crisis.

*Sentiments*

We shouldnt overstate this change. According to Mori, 44 percent of people polled in mid-July said they were satisfied with Blairs performance, compared to 39 percent a month earlier hardly a popular earthquake.

There are several reasons for the shift that has nevertheless taken place. One is that Blair and his ministers behaved much more intelligently and cautiously than the Aznar government did after the Madrid bombings in Spain in March 2004.

They didnt, as Aznar did, launch a media campaign designed to deceive people about who placed the bombs and they didnt try to stir up a hue and cry against all Muslims.

But the most important factor playing into the governments hands is fear. People are scared, particularly in London. The careful official response encouraged people to look to the state for protection.

Fear, however, wont necessarily continue to work to Blairs advantage. The Financial Times reports that Labour MPs are worried that anti-government sentiments could develop over the next weeks and months if there are more attacks.

Blair himself is a liability for the government, as his petulant press conference performance showed. 11 September was for me a wake up call, he said. Do you know what I think the problem is? That a lot of the world woke up for a short time and then turned over and went back to sleep again.

This kind of self-righteous John the Baptist stuff isnt going to go down very well with people who have to commute every day on vulnerable public transport while Blair is swept everywhere in an armoured limousine protected by a police convoy.

The other thing the press conference made clear is that the governments priority is further attacks on civil liberties in the guise of anti-terrorist legislation. The public mood is fragile and contradictory. The government is trying to use the bombings to create a pro-war consensus.

The combination of new anti-terrorist legislation and calls on Muslim leaders to root out the evil ideology of radical Islamism is intended to isolate Muslims in Britain and intimidate them from involvement in the anti-war movement.

There is no reason why these efforts should succeed. The connection between Iraq and the bombings can very easily turn against the government. But to help bring this change about the anti-war movement needs to oppose the assault on civil liberties that is now at the cutting edge of government policy.

The Left "No"

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 15:36:07 +0000

'Europe In Crisis' has been a regular fallback for headline writers over the decades. But now, after the referendums in France and the Netherlands, the European Union really is in crisis. Various factors have gone into the making of this crisis, some of which have been in the foreground of the debate on the proposed European Constitution - for example, the implications for the EU of enlargement to incorporate East and Central Europe.

*Revolt against the elites*

But the decisive factor lies much deeper. In France above all, the victory of the No camp marked a further stage in the long term crisis of political representation that is increasingly hollowing out all the advanced capitalist democracies. This crisis, in Europe at any rate, is driven by the profound commitment of the European ruling classes to neo-liberalism - that is, to the policies of the Washington consensus.

In France the conversion of the elites to neo-liberalism began on the right during the presidency of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the late 1970s and on the reformist left under François Mitterrand in the early 1980s (ironically, Mitterrand appointed Laurent Fabius, now the leader of the No camp in the Socialist Party, as prime minister to implement his government's turn to the market).

The result has been to open up an increasing gap between the establishment, deeply wedded to what the French call the pensée unique (roughly, the single ideology) of neo-liberalism, and the mass of working class people whose lives have been increasingly destroyed by the implementation of these policies. Popular reaction has taken the form of, on the one hand, withdrawal from official politics and, on the other, massive social revolts.

Stage One in this process came with the mass public sector strikes of November-December 1995. Provoked by a package of free market 'reforms' imposed by the newly elected president, Jacques Chirac, and his prime minister, Alain Juppé (recently convicted on corruption charges), the strikes forced Chirac to retreat.

The 'plural left' coalition headed by Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin won a surprise victory in the legislative elections of May-June 1997 thanks to the political radicalisation produced by the 1995 strikes, which was also one of the sources of the contemporary anti-capitalist (or, as it is called in France, altermondialiste) movement. Brought to office by a revolt against neo-liberalism, the Jospin government proceeded to implement yet more neo-liberalism, privatising more than the preceding six governments combined. Its punishment came on 21 April 2002, the first round of the presidential elections and Stage Two of the crisis of representation. Amid massive abstentions, with one in ten voters backing the candidates of the far left, Jospin was beaten by the Nazi leader Jean Marie Le Pen, who went into the second round against Chirac.

Re-elected by default, Chirac appointed Jean-Pierre Raffarin prime minister with a mandate to drive through neo-liberal 'reforms'. This provoked another social revolt - the mass teachers' strikes of May-June 2003. Thanks to the trade union bureaucracy (particularly the leaders of the 'left' CGT federation), the strikes were beaten, but the social malaise produced by long term mass unemployment and the progressive erosion of the welfare state continued to feed tremendous bitterness and discontent.

*The victory of the left No...*

29 May 2005, when the European Constitution was defeated in France by a decisive 55:45 percent margin, marked Stage Three of the crisis of representation. Commentators have puzzled over the fact that France, an original signatory of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, was turned against its own creation. But it is important to understand that for the past 20 years at least the process of European integration has centrally involved hard-wiring neo-liberalism into Community institutions. This started with the Single European Act of 1985, strongly supported by Margaret Thatcher as a means of creating more competition on a European scale.

Then came the Maastricht Treaty of 1991, which laid the basis for European monetary union (EMU) and the launch of the euro in January 1999. The terms on which EMU was agreed required governments participating in the single currency to adhere to strict spending and borrowing targets and handed over control of interest rates to a democratically unaccountable European Central Bank modelled on the ultra-monetarist Bundesbank. This setup, and the strength of the euro against the dollar have been largely responsible for the economic stagnation and high employment endemic in much of the eurozone.

The European Constitution was supposed to be about giving the EU the effective decision-making processes required for a union now composed of 25 states and expected to incorporate more. But in two critical respects it marked an intensification of the competitive pressures to which European societies are now exposed.

The first arises from enlargement. Petty nationalist fears about Polish plumbers aside, there is not the slightest doubt that East and Central Europe are seen by the European multinationals as a reservoir of cheap and often skilled labour that can facilitate their efforts to restructure and remain competitive. An interesting American study of outsourcing by K Bronfenbrenner and S Luce, called The Changing Nature of Corporate Global Restructuring, notes that US companies tend to move production at the same time 'near-shore', usually to Mexico, and 'off-shore', typically to China. The study continues, 'We found several cases where European countries simultaneously shifted production to Eastern Europe and China. This most likely occurred for the same reasons that a US company would shift to Mexico and China: to keep some production cross-border but not off-shore, so it still can be quickly, cheaply, and easily accessed through ground transportation.'

The European Commission's Bolkestein draft directive on services proposed allowing companies based in East and Central Europe to compete in west European countries with relatively high levels of labour protection for the provision of public services by workers receiving the inferior wages and conditions prevailing in their home states.

Secondly, the constitution itself would reinforce the neo-liberal trend. The Financial Times (24 May 2005) conceded just before the French referendum, 'At the heart of the French predicament is that Europe itself is tilting towards a free-market approach, epitomised by José Manuel Barroso's European Commission.

'To the extent that the European Constitution makes EU decision-making easier, and harder for countries to block initiatives, there are perhaps grounds for concern for a country that wants to hold back the advancing liberal tide.'

But 'the advancing liberal tide' in Europe didn't represent a 'predicament' for Chirac and Raffarin, or for the leadership of the French Socialist Party. They, along with big business and the bulk of the media, backed the constitution. The astonishing achievement of the campaign for a left No - a coalition of Socialist Party dissidents, the Communist Party, altermondialistes and the revolutionary left - was that they made neo-liberalism the central issue in the referendum.

The No's could not have won in France without a massive rebellion against their leaders by the rank and file of the Socialist and Green Parties and the CGT. Large majorities of manual and white collar voters, along with the young, voted against the constitution. This was a continuation of the rebellions against the elites of November-December 1995 and 21 April 2002. One French Marxist told me it was the first real victory for the left in more than 20 years.

The crushing defeat of the ruling Red-Green coalition in Germany in the state elections in North Rhine Westphalia, a week before the French referendum, falls into the same pattern. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder effectively acknowledged this, calling for new parliamentary elections to give him a mandate to continue with his programme of 'reforms' aimed at drastically weakening the welfare state.

It was anger at these measures - particularly the Hartz IV attack on unemployment benefits - that led working class voters to desert the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD leadership sought to appease them by, in the weeks before the poll, adopting an anti-capitalist rhetoric portraying speculators as locusts, but this didn't fool anyone.

*...or of the American Empire?*

The left's victory in France was achieved despite the intervention of one of the most influential contemporary radical intellectuals, Toni Negri. He called for a Yes vote in Paris on a platform with the Socialist Party leader Julien Dray and Dany Cohn-Bendit, once a leader of May 1968, now a right wing Green MEP. Negri explained in Libération, 13 May 2005 that he was a 'revolutionary realist', who had taken a 'pragmatic' decision to support the constitution as the lesser evil: 'The constitution is a means of fighting Empire, this new globalised capitalist society. Europe has the chance of being a barrier against the pensée unique of economic unilateralism: capitalist, conservative, reactionary. But Europe can also construct a counter-power against American unilateralism, its imperial domination, its crusade in Iraq to dominate petrol. The United States has understood this well, and has, since the 1950s, fought like a madman against European construction.'

The idea of the EU as a counterweight to US hegemony is, of course, defended by many mainstream European politicians such as Chirac and the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer. Negri's own version of the argument seems particularly confused. In Empire and Multitude, his books with Michael Hardt, Negri presented Empire as a new transnational form of capitalist power, but here he seems to equate it with American imperialism, which he normally presents as a kind of reactionary throwback.

Muddles of this sort aside, Negri's assertion that the US opposed European construction from the start is quite simply nonsense. Studies such as Alan Milward's The European Rescue of the Nation State have confirmed beyond serious dispute that the US, from the 1940s onwards, promoted European integration in order to establish a secure and reliable junior partner in the second major zone of advanced capitalism.

It is true that George W Bush's administration has showed signs of shifting towards a policy of divide and rule, playing 'New' against 'Old' Europe. But this move does not have universal support even within the administration (which, since Bush's re-election, has seriously courted the EU), let alone within the US ruling class as a whole. The majority position is probably that well expressed by Philip Gordon, a leading US policy intellectual based at the Brookings Institution in Washington, in an article in the Financial Times (17 May 2005) directed at elements in the Bush administration who might welcome the defeat of the constitution: 'At a time when the US desperately needs a strong united and outward-looking European partner, a French No would produce the opposite. It would seriously undermine prospects for EU enlargement to include key American friends such as Turkey and Ukraine. It could lead to divisive, unworkable proposals for an EU "core group" that would exclude US allies in Britain and Europe. And it would be a significant victory for the anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation activists who form a core part of the rejectionist camp.'

*Euro crisis looming?*

From this perspective, then, the No victory is a significant defeat, not just for the neo-liberal agenda in Europe, but also for American imperialism. Immediate reaction to the French and Dutch referendums has concentrated on the complex political game of musical chairs as European governments manoeuvre to shift the blame onto each other and squabble over the EU budget. But potentially much more serious is the crisis that may develop around the euro.

The launch of the euro was one of the great success stories in the recent history of the EU. It took place despite the near-collapse of EMU's predecessor, the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), in 1992. Essentially what happened was that the financial markets recognised the strength of the political determination on the part of the big European players - above all, France and Germany - to make the euro work, and allowed the single currency to be introduced without significant disruption.

More than six years after the euro was launched, things don't look so good. The eurozone has stagnated economically. As a result France and Germany have successfully defied the limits on public spending and borrowing laid down in the 1996 Growth and Stability Pact. Strike one against the credibility of the euro.

A potential strike two could be produced by a fault-line that has been largely hidden up to now. In the run-up to the euro launch interest rates across Europe converged. This means that governments in relatively weak economies like Greece pay almost the same interest on their borrowing as do those in the strongest economy, Germany. This reflected the financial markets' belief that the debts of all the eurozone economies were being underwritten, in effect, by the EU.

But, if the crisis over the constitution leads to political paralysis and division right across Europe, this could change. Spreads - the extra interest that a debtor that isn't rated highly by the markets has to pay - on government debt in the weaker EU states could suddenly widen. The differences between European economies could once again become targets of the kind of financial speculation by hedge funds that drove the pound and the lira out of the ERM in 1992.

Strike three could come if a country actually withdrew from the euro. This is supposed to be impossible, but there is now serious speculation that Italy might pull out. The Italian economy is struggling under a burden of recession, rising inflation, and high government debt. In the past Italian governments got out of this kind of fix by devaluing the lira to stimulate exports and growth, but this option is closed by membership of the euro. Now the Northern League, a major coalition partner in Silvio Berlusconi's government, has started a campaign to bring back the lira.

*The radical left's chance*

The British media have had much fun with the initial reaction of EU leaders to the French and Dutch referendums, which was to insist that the process of ratifying the constitution should continue. This attitude of course typifies the arrogance of European elites that helped to provoke the No votes in the first place.

But the response of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is just as contemptuous of democracy. They see the crisis over the constitution as an opportunity to press ahead with their own agenda - affirmed by the EU summit in Lisbon in March 2000 and strongly supported by the European Commission - of neo-liberal 'reform'. The Blair court have been spinning that the leaders of 'Old Europe' - Chirac and Schröder - are on the way, and are most likely to be replaced by younger centre-right politicians - Nicolas Sarkozy in France, Angela Merkel in Germany - who share this agenda.

In other words, the cure offered by New Labour for a revolt against neo-liberalism is yet more neo-liberalism. This is a recipe for yet more revolts in the future. The critical question is, who will benefit politically?

Will it be the racist right - relatively marginal in the French referendum, but a political force with real social roots not just in France but right across Europe? Or will it be the radical left that gives voice to the growing rebellion against the elites? The British elections and French referendum offer hope that this second alternative can prevail, but nothing can be taken for granted. We have an enormous challenge ahead.

__ALex Callinicos is an advisor to UK Watch__

Left On the Rise in Europe

Alex Doherty — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 10:24:37 +0000

The past fortnight has been a very significant one for the radical left in Europe. The most obvious reason for this is the defeat of the European consitution in France.

British coverage of the referendum has been a disgrace, especially on the BBC. The no camp has been consistently described as a motley alliance one reporter even compared it to a coalition between the Socialist Workers Party and the Nazi BNP.

Lets get the facts straight. Philippe de Villiers the French counterpart of Tories John Redwood and Bill Cash and the Nazi leader Jean Marie Le Pen were a sideshow in the referendum.

The decisive factor in the no victory was provided by the divisions that developed within the reformist left. First, key leaders of the Socialist Party, which is similar to Britains Labour Party, notably Laurent Fabius and Henri Emmanuelli, came out against the constitution.

Then activists in the biggest left trade union federation, the CGT, rebelled against their leadership by backing the no campaign.

An important role was played by the anti-capitalist movement in France, these days known as the altermondialistes. Attac, which campaigns against financial speculation, targeted the constitution from the start.

Leading figures in Attac such as Bernard Cassen and Jacques Nikonoff tended to do this in a one-sided way, counterposing campaigning against the constitution to opposing the occupation of Iraq. All the same, they deserve credit for their efforts.

The European Social Forum in London last October decided to make 19-20 March a weekend of action against neo-liberalism and war. This embraced the protests against the invasion of Iraq and a demonstration in Brussels. Tens of thousands of trade unionists and altermondialistes from France went to Brussels, outnumbering the Belgian participants. One of the key issues that brought them there was the Bolkenstein directive.

This measure by the free-market European Commission proposed to allow public services to be undercut by private firms employing workers on worse wages and conditions. The protests helped to force the French president, Jacques Chirac, and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, to get the directive watered down.

*Consequences*

The referendum result was a victory for the left no campaign fighting on issues like this. A majority of Socialist Party supporters voted no, as did nearly four fifths of manual workers and two thirds of white collar workers.

And dont let anyone kid you that this was a nationalist no. I remember being in Paris during the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, when the Communist Partys no posters carried pictures of Hitler to evoke the menace of German domination. That was a nationalist campaign.

This time the Communist Party, which has made a turn towards the altermondialistes, initiated a European appeal explaining why a no vote would be good for Europe.

One of the immediate consequences of the referendum result will be a profound crisis for the French Socialist Party. Its leaders campaigned for a yes vote, but were repudiated by their rank and file.

This is a big opportunity for the radical left in France, and especially the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, to help draw substantial sections of the reformist left into a political realignment that breaks decisively with neo-liberalism.

This process has begun in Germany. In the state elections in North Rhine and Westphalia the new left party Wahlalternative won 2.2 percent of the vote. Oskar Lafontaine, former SPD chairman and ex-finance minister, has said that he will join the Wahlaternative if it forms a joint slate with the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in the federal elections that will probably take place this autumn.

Between them the Wahlalternative and the PDS could probably break the 5 percent barrier required to win representation in the German parliament.

John Prescott famously said that the tectonic plates were moving in politics in Britain. The French and German votes show this is true right across Europe.

_Alex Callinicos is an advisor to UKWatch_