Andrew Murray | ukwatch.net

We Didn't Stop that War...

Ellie Keen — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:10:42 +0000

...but may have stopped the next

Five years ago this week most readers of this newspaper were making plans to go on a demonstration. More surprisingly, just as many Daily Telegraph readers were getting ready for the same event. For most of those who marched against the Iraq war on February 15 2003 it was the first time they had ever demonstrated for or against anything in their lives. It was a protest such as Britain had never seen before, all-embracing in its diversity and imposing in its unity of purpose.

While there are always arguments over the size of demonstrations (the 2 million-or-so figure we claim is supported by considerable polling and photographic evidence), there is no dispute that this was not merely the country’s biggest political protest, but the biggest by a substantial order of magnitude.

Two things are obvious about the demonstration to “stop the war”. First, the millions on the march were right. Not just right on balance, but right on every single aspect of the question. There were no weapons of mass destruction, Iraq did turn into a bloodbath, the invasion did not help resolve the crisis in the Middle East, and it did damage the cohesion of our own society and imperil our civil liberties while not making us one whit safer from terrorism. So the people were smarter than the politicians.

Second the demonstration did not stop the war. Our hope had been that mass protest could drive the British government out of its aggressive alliance with Bush and that the latter, isolated internationally as a result, would come under intensified domestic pressure. We came very close, as Donald Rumsfeld made clear. In the wake of February 15, Washington told Blair he could stand down our army if he wanted to.

The prime minister ignored that offer and the people he represents alike. However, failing is not the same thing as making no difference. February 15 has cast a long shadow over British politics since, and contributed to Blair’s departure from office under circumstances – in public odium and with an exasperated party – scarcely of his choosing. What war have we stopped? The next one, perhaps.

The demonstration was the apex of a broader movement which touched almost every part of society in 2003. This included the greatest-ever engagement of British Muslims in active politics, thousands of school student walkouts, peaceful civil disruption in towns across the country, local authorities coming out against the war, and train drivers declining to move munitions for the invasion.

It was a movement entirely outside the established structures which normally mediate the relationship between people and power. It was organised by the Stop the War Coalition (with CND and the Muslim Association of Britain as our partners), a campaign not 18 months old and run on a shoestring.

Hundreds of thousands of trade unionists joined the demonstration, while the TUC – its eyes on its ministerial connections, not its members – maintained a frigid indifference. Labour and Tory party members protested against their leaders, while Liberal Democrats dragged their hierarchy to the demonstration behind them. Marching at the head of the demonstration, I missed what may have been the most telling sight of the day – Piccadilly blocked by people without a single banner among them. This was the march of the unmobilised.

It was also a march against Murdoch and his mendacious press, exploding the myth of his political omnipotence. Rupert said war, the people said no. All Alastair Campbell’s strategy of controlling opinion through appeasing the Sun in vain!

The demonstration, and the movement around it, exploded the notion that society is slumped in a consumer-sodden apathy, and incapable of political engagement. The country’s biggest mass movement followed a general election with the lowest turnout in modern times, and preceded one in which participation was scarcely improved. The problem is the system, not the people.

So perhaps the biggest lesson of February 15 is that it embodied the failure of representative democracy. It highlighted a gap between the electorate and the elected, a gap several hundred thousand lives have slipped down as a result.

The anti-war movement has lived under the shadow of that immense mobilisation too. But it was followed the next month by the biggest demonstration against a war British troops were actually fighting, by the biggest-ever weekday march (against the Bush visit to London later in 2003), by an unprecedented movement of military families against the war, and by a dozen further marches – including one which will mark the fifth anniversary of the war itself, on March 15. Opposition to empire has been put at the heart of politics as never before.

Emily Churchill, a Birmingham school student at the time, described the experience as “trying to steer the course of our country with our own hands”. Of course in 2003 other, American, hands were on the wheel. But the lesson of February 15 is that we can and we will.

Andrew Murray has been chair of the Stop the War Coalition since 2001

Marching for Peace and Freedom

Tim Holmes — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:49:54 +0000

The Stop the War Coalition has organised 19 demonstrations against the Bush “war on terror” since the autumn of 2001. Among them have been the largest political protests this country has ever seen. All of them have passed off without disorder or violent incident.

Today our protest has been banned. Three meetings were held with the Metropolitan police at which no objection was raised to our proposal to rally in Trafalgar Square and then march past parliament before dispersing (allowing marchers to lobby their own MPs).

At the fourth meeting – a week ago – the police suddenly advised us we could not go ahead. It would seem clear that this shift in attitude was the result of political intervention, from the Home Office perhaps but more likely, in this tightly controlled administration, from Downing Street.

The legal pretext is ancient laws designed to stop riots aimed at preventing MPs making their way to the House of Commons – laws that were not deployed against the Countryside Alliance, for example. Obstructing MPs is not, of course our intention. Rather, it is to galvanise our representatives into doing something useful about the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the looming menace of an attack on Iran, once they get there.

We chose today for the protest because it is MPs first day back after their prolonged summer break. MPs have, with well-known honourable exceptions, been the weak link of our anti-war movement. Pressure from parliament on the government to end the Iraq occupation or even account for the decision to go to war in 2003 has been feeble, even by comparison with the US Congress.

The government’s decision to attempt to wall itself off from this message today seems an odd one. It is only a fortnight since Gordon Brown promised the Labour party conference: “change to make the executive more accountable … Change to strengthen our liberties to uphold the freedom of speech, freedom of information and the freedom to protest.”

My own assumption is that in the frenzied pre-election spin of the last 10 days, someone felt that pictures of an anti-war march outside the Commons might cut across the prime minister’s cynical Basra photo opportunity with the troops, in the great game of electoral iconography.

Whether for that reason or another, this assault on the right to demonstrate has certainly had the effect of boosting the size of today’s march. People are never so keen to exercise their rights as when they feel they are under threat. That even goes for people who may not agree with everything the Stop the War Coalition has to say. So we are going ahead in a few hours’ time, now making a point about freedom as well as about war.

And if the government wants to risk pictures going round the world of British citizens being violently prevented from protesting against a criminal and unpopular war outside the seat of parliamentary democracy – well, those pictures will still be out there in spring 2008, 2009, or whenever.

Greenspan's Shock Revelation

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:24:37 +0000

Alan Greenspan – perhaps the single most pivotal figure in the US establishment over the last generation – has acknowledged that the Iraq war was about oil supplies.

The former boss of the US Federal Reserve is thus far in step with world opinion. However, he breaks with almost everyone else (notable exceptions: Melanie Phillips and the editor of the Observer) in believing that the war was nevertheless a good thing.

Indeed, his complaint, outlined in his just-published memoirs, is more that the prevailing political climate makes it impossible to sing it out loud and proud – we went to war to get the oil.

Nevertheless, Greenspan has done us a service. Not because he tells us anything that isn’t obvious – witness the anger in Washington over its puppet Iraqi government’s failure to pass the required law opening up its oil industry to untrammelled foreign exploitation. This is just one of the many benchmarks the Baghdad government is failing to meet, but it seems to be the one that grieves Bush and Cheney the most.

Nor simply because it gives the anti-war movement a chance to say “we told you so”. Since everything opponents of the war warned about in 2002 and 2003 has long since come to pass (tragically) there is no longer much point in that. I mean, I wouldn’t want to provoke my mates in the comment boxes beyond endurance.

But Greenspan’s uncharacteristic glasnost is helpful at a time when the campaign for a further war against Iran appears to be gathering significant momentum. Dick Cheney is reported to be determined to go out with a bang, even if Republican Party prospects in 2008 form part of the collateral damage.

So we are already in the midst of a prolonged propaganda campaign to soften us up for war. It differs only in its specifics, rather than its intent and its mendacity, to the similar campaign directed against the Saddam regime prior to the invasion.

So we are warned of Tehran’s intent to become a nuclear-armed state, which is entirely unproved and no more a legitimate cause for war than, say, Pakistan’s entirely proved possession of the same. And we are invited to dwell on its “interference” in Iraq, by General Petraeus, the last best Great White Hope of the war party, no less. This latter allegation, coming as it does from people who have crossed oceans not so much to interference in Iraq’s affairs as to take them over altogether, shows that satire is not dead.

Gordon Brown has fallen for it, however – the troops being withdrawn from Basra are being sent to the Iranian border, presumably preparatory to some provocation or other. But we shouldn’t. Every time a politician tries to convince you that the next war in the US campaign to run the Middle East is unavoidable for this reason or that, just remember Alan Greenspan. Let’s not wait five years for some other ruling class Grand Vizier to reveal the blindingly obvious. It’s about the oil, stupid, and it should be stopped before it starts.

Bring the Basra Garrison Home

eddie — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:58:01 +0000

The blood price keeps on rising. Four British soldiers (at time of writing) have died in and around Basra this week – some of them very young. No one can any longer even pretend there was a reason for their deaths. US security officials believe the British army in southern Iraq has been defeated, and even the army itself claims no better than “neither success nor failure”.

They are not preventing violence in the region, since fully 90% of the attacks (again, according to the army’s own figures) are directed against British soldiers themselves. Nor are they “holding the ring” for a local political settlement. The politics of Basra will be no different in a year to what they are today; they are no different today to what they were four years ago, and can anyway hardly be influenced by a garrison holed up at Basra airport that enjoys no confidence at all from local people.

The situation can only get worse. After all the lurid tales of Iranian gun-running, it now appears, in another revelation of the staggering incompetence and, doubtless, corruption that has attended the Bush occupation of Iraq, that almost every Iraqi who wants a weapon can find one, courtesy of the US itself. This new twist on “friendly fire” will be no consolation to its victims.

Nor are the troops helping to sustain a successful US “surge” strategy. There are contradictory reports on the military “achievements” of the surge. Overall violence has not diminished, though clearly the US army is able to score tactical successes on the ground when it concentrates its forces. However, the aim of the “surge” was to buy time for a political settlement. That seems no closer, and the Maliki government appears, in fact, to be disintegrating as both Sunni and Shia parties pull out.

The Iraqi parliament, the election for which was trumpeted as the greatest achievement of US-imposed democratisation, has sputtered to a virtual halt. Those neocolonialists who live by divide-and-rule will perish when the divide becomes too deep to any longer sustain the rule. And such unity as there is, is based on opposition to the rulers.

So the deaths of British soldiers in Basra are for one thing only: they are paying Tony Blair’s famous “blood price” for the special relationship with Washington. More prosaically, they are our contribution to saving George Bush’s political face at a time when even conservative newspapers in the states are urging that their troops be brought home.

Gordon Brown appears to be trying to walk a very fine tightrope here, balancing between a public opinion in Britain that wants troops out as rapidly as possible and pressure from the US to keep in line. That may work for a bit. But events in Basra are running ahead of him.

This rate of attrition in a hopeless cause is not politically sustainable, so the time for nudges and winks – a Malloch-Brown here, a coded speech there – is passing already.

It is time for the new prime minister to face facts. The occupation has been the catastrophe the anti-war movement always warned it would be and the hapless Basra garrison is on the way out, defeated. Bring it back now.

That would, of course, require facing down George Bush, Rupert Murdoch (is he still calling three times a week?) and British Aerospace (doing very nicely, thank you). But what better way to signal a real change in the way Britain is led?

Fighting The Long War

Tim Holmes — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 18:43:54 +0000

The political landscape is starting to change around the anti-war movement. The departure of Tony Blair from office much earlier than he would have preferred – itself the result of the catastrophe in Iraq and the consistent campaigning of the movement – creates a new situation.

The British government is already committed to a gradual military withdrawal from Iraq, where the troops now seem to be serving no conceivable purpose even in the government’s own terms. Gordon Brown may decide to accelerate this process. Likewise, he may announce a clear intention to set up an inquiry into the circumstances under which the country went to war in 2003.

While Brown cannot be seen as anything other than entirely complicit in all the decisions around the war, he will not immediately become a subject of the same degree of public opprobrium as Blair. It is the latter’s lies, and consistent contempt for the British public, expressed in his willingness to back George Bush time and again over the views of those to whom a British prime minister is nominally accountable, that has enraged millions.

One danger is that this could breed an element of political complacency – a feeling that, after getting on for six years, the work of the Stop the War Coalition is in sight of completion. In fact, there is little sign that the “long war” launched by the US in 2001 (arguably in 1991, with the first Gulf War) is coming to an end. Instead targets and priorities are shifting.

Three issues require particular attention. The first is a genuine and complete end to the occupation of Iraq. British troops may be on the way out, although doubtless not before many more have died in vain. It would also seem that the US “surge” in and around Baghdad is failing – both militarily in breaking the insurgency, and politically, in creating the space for a stable pro-US governing alliance to emerge.

Under these circumstances, political pressure in the US for troop withdrawal will surely intensify. However, this will not mean an end to the occupation, but rather its concentration on several mega-bases presently under construction across Iraq to provide a permanent US military presence geared towards domination over the entire region.

That, of course, would be a sign of further wars. An end to the occupation must mean the total withdrawal of all US and British forces and bases.

Second, the occupation of Afghanistan should come under sharper focus. If anything, the government in Kabul is even more politically bankrupt and US-dependent than the one in Baghdad, and the military position of British troops even less promising. While an occupation of Afghanistan cannot have the global strategic significance of the seizure of Iraq, it is failing by every measure – indeed, it seems to be allowing the Taliban to recover political support it might otherwise have lost.

And, of course, it is evidently unwelcome to the great mass of the Afghan people, who should enjoy the same right to self-determination as peoples everywhere. A cursory reading of history shows that they are firm in asserting this right. The British general staff appear to imagine that it can be fourth time lucky for an occupation of Afghanistan. The anti-war movement needs to tell them they are wrong before many more lives, Afghan and British, are needlessly lost.

Finally, the danger of the war being extended to Iran needs to be highlighted. How realistic is this, in light of the huge setbacks to US strategy in Iraq? Certainly, the Washington elite is now divided on the question and the “realist” wing appears to be ascendant.

However, detailed reports in the New York Times and elsewhere make it clear that US vice-president Dick Cheney is still pushing for an attack on Iran before their term of office elapses – perhaps as early as next spring. So far Cheney appears to have won most of the foreign policy battles within the administration.

Furthermore, influential senator Joe Lieberman has called for military raids against Iran as reprisals for alleged Iranian support for Iraqi insurgents, and all the main candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination are falling over themselves to take a tough “all options on the table” line with Iran, to balance their quit-Iraq rhetoric.

There is a logic in this. A categorical defeat in Iraq would leave the US in a dreadful strategic position in the Middle East, not least because it would leave Iran ascendant. It would not be much of an overstatement to say that the whole post-1991 drive to impose a US-dominated world order would be in ruins. So regime change in Iran, by force if necessary, may seem like a pre-requisite for leaving Iraq.

So these are the tests Gordon Brown will face-genuine independence for Iraq; an end to the Afghan adventure; and no support (political or military) for aggression against Iran. The Stop the War Coalition’s test is to ensure that he gives the right answers.

Andrew Murray is national chair of the Stop the War Coalition.

The Real Tragedy of Iraq?

Alex Doherty — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:29:55 +0000

“The Iraq war is a tragedy, above all, because of the damage it is inflicting on that cause of liberal interventionism,” writes John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday.

An interesting formulation, from the moral point of view. Imagine, for example that he had made a similar comment on the second world war, describing it as “a tragedy, above all, because of the damage it inflicted on the cause of nationalism”.

Many of you might believe that the death of 650,000 civilians in Iraq (a figure acknowledged as plausible by the government’s own experts) would rank as a greater tragedy than the puncturing of Rentoul’s Gladstonian fantasies.

Or the failure of the war to resolve a single political problem in the Middle East – indeed, its exacerbation of them. Or the incitement of sectarian divisions in Iraq. Or the economic dereliction which persists after more than four years of occupation. Or the pointless deaths of British soldiers, accompanied by an evident demoralisation throughout the armed forces. Or the view of most people in Britain that our democracy was violated by the circumstances surrounding the decision to go to war.

But no, it is the passing of the ideology of “liberal interventionism” which we have most cause to regret, according to the Rentoul worldview.

Of course, Rentoul himself does not see it like that. He boldly asserts that “after Blair goes, the idea of a humanitarian, interventionist foreign policy will revive”.

This may be doubted for a number of reasons. One is that the advocacy of interventionism, if it is to secure popular support, depends on more than simply the position of the prime minister. It also requires plausible propagandists in the press.

And who in the world is ever going to buy a case for war advanced by John Rentoul, Nick Cohen or David Aaronovitch again?

No, if Rentoul is serious about wanting to see the ideology of liberal imperialism rise like a phoenix from the ashes of Iraq he should do the decent thing and emulate Tony Blair by resigning, ceding his place in the commentariat to someone who may be believed in a future crisis.

Personally, I am happy for him to stay exactly where he is. In political argument, an already discredited opponent is a rare blessing.

No Alternative?

Alex Doherty — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 13:22:15 +0000

For nearly two decades, the Thatcherite dictum that “there is no alternative” has been used to stifle serious challenge to the way the world is run, and right now there seems to be an increasingly urgent insistence that there is only one possible social and economic future for us all. It isn’t just the hard men of the moneyed right asserting that capitalism is the only way to order human affairs. Liberals are also now unshakeably convinced that there can be no alternative to capitalism – unless perhaps it is a collapse into some variety of barbarism.

Timothy Garton Ash recently declared here that “global capitalism now has no serious rivals – but it could destroy itself” while Martin Kettle pronounced socialism incontrovertibly dead with no prospect of a second coming. And the latest issue of Prospect magazine polls 35 intellectual movers-and-shakers on “what’s next” for a world moving beyond left and right. Only the historian Eric Hobsbawm and US academic Andrew Moravcsik believe that left and right will remain “plainly central”, in Hobsbawm’s words in the new century. From the rest, we get dystopian warnings of technocracy defeating democracy, new forms of terrorism, random use of nuclear weapons, more God, even something dubbed by Michael Lind the “war of Patria vs Plutopia”. The philosopher Jonathan Rée summed it up best: “We are now facing a crisis both of hope and of serious collective argument.”
That is certainly true of many intellectuals – though, judging by opinion polls, less so of the wider public – but perhaps they have buried left and right and embraced the new world order too soon. As in most of the rest of the world, the gap between rich and poor in Britain has grown under a Labour government. Privatised industries have turned out to be ramshackle rip-offs. Women are still paid far less than men, Britain’s children are the most deprived in the western world, fascists are winning council seats and workers can get sacked in a canteen by megaphone. And that’s before we get on to the neo-colonialism which is making a catastrophic comeback, amid bloodshed and racism.

But our opinion-forming and governing classes have evidently convinced themselves that no form of socialism has anything to do with solving the problems of the world today. A litany of crises like these would once have had Blairite stalwarts like Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn condemning the system that generated them. But we can be confident that there will be no discussion of any alternative to the private ownership and control of our resources or of a transfer of economic and political power to the majority in the phoney Clarke-Milburn “debate” on Labour’s future. This silencing of the S-word might make sense if capitalism, having been given the whole world to itself to do its worst with for the last generation, was delivering the economic, social, moral and environmental goods. Maybe not, the post-socialist would say, but the economics have been settled, with capitalism leaving socialism a distant second in the prosperity race. And anyway, even to the extent that socialism once had something useful to say, the world has now changed out of all recognition.

This is dodgy history and worse futurology. The Britain of the 1960s and 1970s was only socialist in the nightmares of capitalists, but it had some of the elements which made for a better society. Public ownership and full, stable, employment underpinned not merely high levels of economic growth, but also a radical improvement in the lives of the working class, protected by a strong trade unionism which, while far from as mighty as subsequent myth-making has suggested, did at least prevent those at the bottom being pushed around at will by those at the top.

Even the Soviet Union’s place in history looks different depending where you stand. Russians today miss its relative egalitarianism, welfare and public economic control, not to mention the more stable inter-ethnic relations, if not the one-party authoritarianism. Meanwhile in Venezuela, for the first time in a generation, there is a government committed to establishing socialism. Of course, the movie can’t be rewound. Twenty-first century socialism in Britain or elsewhere cannot look east for inspiration, nor will it be the work of coal-miners and shipyard workers. But what could it offer?

For a start, socialism makes possible the re-establishment of democracy whether at national, multinational or global level. Capitalist globalisation has become synonymous with democratic powerlessness as all important decisions are taken further away from the people affected and concentrated in the hands of ever fewer corporate bosses, private equity and publicly traded alike, for whom the common weal cannot be their priority. It also raises the prospect of a more peaceful world. The idea that unchallenged capitalism meant universal peace – quite popular in the early 1990s – hardly takes much debunking now. A system that replaced fighting for scarce resources with the global management of them offers the chance both of sparing lives and of the decisive action necessary to save the planet.

And there is social justice. There is little sign of gender or race inequality within countries, or between the rich world and the poor, being eroded, much less eliminated, despite recent global growth. Rather the opposite. If you think greater inequality is fine, then you’d better get back to your hedge fund desk. But there are far more people in trade unions and the anti-war movement than there are selling guns to despots or trading oil futures. And of course there is an alternative.

Andrew Murray is chair of the Stop the War Coalition and communications director of the TGWU adpmurray@hotmail.com

Show Us the Money

Alex Doherty — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:43:27 +0000

Panic. Pay is rising at an average of 3.5% a year.

This is good news or bad news depending on your class. If you are among the well-to-do, who generally hold a monopoly on commenting on such profound matters as the economic effects of rising wages, this is not a welcome development. It raises the spectre of inflation and, even worse, militant trade unionism.

In fact, this rise in earnings is, in a very modest way, a good thing, if it allows millions of families to maintain their standard of living. It would be an even better thing if this heralded the start of a real move towards a narrowing of the chasm – “gap” would be much too modest a term – between fat-cat pay and rewards for the rest.

That may be over-optimistic at this stage. But we are well overdue for a move towards bigger pay packets for the “ordinary hard-working families” who are such favourites of political rhetoric until and unless they start demanding a bigger share of the wealth they create.

Three facts are indisputable:

First, over the last decade or so, we have seen a major shift towards US-style pay inequality. I do not pretend that we were an egalitarian society before, but the gap between rewards at the top and those for the rest of us has grown exponentially. On the other side of the Atlantic, where the “flexible” labour market is much admired by our PM-in-waiting, real wages for most workers stagnate for years on end while boardroom rewards reach for the stratosphere. Here in Britain, bosses’ pay is increasing 17 times as fast as wages for those they employ. Grotesque City bonuses – another thing Gordon Brown won’t touch – are only the tip of the iceberg, albeit a gold-encrusted one.

Second, productivity is also increasing faster than wages, especially in manufacturing, where output overall holds roughly steady even as employment numbers tumble and downward wage pressure is relentless (pay deals in manufacturing have fallen, according to the engineering employers). Profitability is also increasingly much more rapidly across the economy. You don’t need to be Karl Marx, or even Robert Tressell, to work out what is going on here. People are working harder yet getting a smaller slice of the cake.

Third, even a 3.5% increase means barely holding the value of your income. The headline RPI rate is held down at present by the static or even falling price of things which are not essential – white goods and foreign holidays, for example. The price of fuel, on the other hand, has been rising at more than 20%. Housing and travel costs have likewise gone up by more than RPI, in London and the south-east in particular. These are not costs that can be avoided or deferred for the average family.

Food costs, too, are rising faster than inflation – the costs of both a full English breakfast or, if you prefer, your five recommended portions of fruit and vegetables, will both have gone up by as much as twice the 3.5% rate.

Trade unions happily still make a difference. A union member in the public sector will, according to the Office of National Statistics, be earning 22% more than a non-union member, as of the end of 2005. Even in the private sector, where union density is less, the “union premium” is 8%.

As Tony Woodley, the general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (my employer) said on Friday morning: “The simple truth is this: we are in the third or fourth richest economy in the world and yet the rich are getting richer and the workers are certainly not being rewarded. That’s why the T&G has told its officers now to fight back with wage rises that should really reflect the productivity and the profitability of companies, and not just this cap on RPI plus half a per cent at best.”

So if workers getting 3.5% has you waking up in sweats, prepare for worse.

Sidestep the Place-People

Alex Doherty — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 09:38:17 +0000

We won’t be fooled again. The allegation that Iranian explosives were behind the deaths of about 5% of the US soldiers killed during the occupation of Iraq is the latest instalment of a determined endeavour by the world’s most practised liars to whip up a fresh war psychosis. It is not in the least surprising that Iranian weaponry should turn up in Iraq, given that much of the present government in Baghdad spent the Saddam years in exile in Tehran. Iranian merchandise does not, in this case, require the involvement of Iranian ministers, as US generals have now conceded.

Many sensible people seem inclined to dismiss the possibility of any attack on Tehran as too mad to contemplate. Even President Ahmadinejad seems to doubt the Bush bluster is serious. We should not be so complacent. If the Washington neocons have any attractive feature, it may be their transparency about intentions. So perhaps we should assume that the Cheney crew will do their best to deliver on their stated programme, World Domination or Bust, while they still have the power to do so.

Will Gordon Brown sign up to this latest twist? There is at least this difference between the present prime minister and his successor. Brown very much wants to win the next election, while Tony Blair couldn’t care less. And the last thing Brown wants is to have to face the electorate to secure an already difficult fourth term with British soldiers still dying in Iraq on a weekly basis.

Still less would he want to have to explain away Britain getting caught up in an extension of the war to Iran, an eventuality that would, among other catastrophes, dwarf the present military mortality rate around Basra. And what with David Cameron, not obviously stoned at the time, declaring that British foreign policy should no longer be based on slavish support for Washington, it should at least be possible for a Labour prime minister to say no less.

Brown has been leading the charge for spending about £70bn on a new nuclear deterrent. Bang goes Prudence, ravished by Trident, although that may be just part of a cunning plan to make Blair relaxed about quitting No 10. In any event, public opinion must surely soon start to percolate past the impenetrable object that a mute and cowed parliament of place-people has represented these last four years – few questions, fewer debates, and certainly no votes.

The bleak contrast this presents alongside the timorous efforts of the Democratic-led US Congress to get a handle on the situation is striking. The new regime on Capitol Hill may not have screwed up its nerve to do what the people want and cut off further funding for the occupation, but it has at least started probing the conduct of this continuing calamity. Who knew, for instance, that Del Boy of Trotter’s Independent Trading was in charge of reconstruction in Iraq until a House of Representatives committee unearthed the facts about truckloads of dollars being whizzed around Baghdad and beyond, with not a receipt in sight? Not a peep from our backbenches. Perhaps the whips have worked out you could buy a job lot of peerages this way with no paper trail for Yates of the Yard to trip over.

So it is past time to bridge the gulf between parliament and people that the Iraq war has opened up. The people will be on the streets once more next Saturday, demanding that our troops come home from Iraq, that we abandon our nuclear weapons folly and disengage from George Bush’s rolling war. Since no MP seems to have a better idea, let the people’s will prevail.

Andrew Murray is chair of the Stop the War Coalition. A national demonstration, No Trident/Troops Out of Iraq, will be held on February 24 in London

adpmurray@hotmail.com

Demand an End to the Bloodshed

Alex Doherty — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 22:04:51 +0000

A tidal wave of anger is rolling across British politics in the wake of the continuing Israeli aggression against Lebanon and the Blair government’s evident complicity in the assault.

This anger – reflected in a surge of support for the anti-war movement not seen since the dramatic days of 2003 – is built around three elements:

First, shock at the carnage of civilians in Lebanon, with children prominent among the victims of the Israeli bombardment, and the sheer scale of the destruction in Beirut and other Lebanese cities.

Second, an understanding that this aggression, while carried out by Israel’s US-equipped and financed armed forces, is actually part of George Bush’s disastrous “war on terror” which has already caused such suffering across the Middle East.

And third, the all-out support given to Bush and the Israeli government by Blair who, having learned nothing from the bloody disaster in Iraq, is once more acting as Washington’s mouthpiece in a global crisis.

Blair, indeed, seems hell-bent on making what would in any case be a bad situation for the government much worse. Not content with taking the Labour government into what must by now feel like a familiar posture of international isolation, he then aggravates the offence by flying off to prostrate himself at the court of King Rupert while 56 civilians are slaughtered at Qana in the course of the aggression he continues to support.

Presumably, the prime minister had based his travel plans around the assumption of a quick and overpowering Israeli victory in southern Lebanon. Not for the first time in the course of the “war on terror”, the best laid plans of Anglo-American imperialism are going spectacularly awry.

Indeed, the US Congress could be ruefully reflecting that it is not getting much for its money with the Israeli war machine. Undoubtedly efficient at causing destruction and terrorising civilian populations from the air its faltering performance against Hizbullah already looks like leaving the latter the political victor in the current crisis.

So Blair and Condoleezza Rice continue doing a diplomatic half-step around the issue of an immediate ceasefire, already universally supported elsewhere. They spin and brief that they are on the point of one; they insinuate that they really, really want one; they embrace its desirability in general – but never actually call for one.

And they have been rumbled. They don’t want one because it would be an obstacle to the “new Middle east” of neo-con fantasy which they believe is on the threshold of emerging from the blood and destruction of this latest war.

In fact, the attack on Lebanon is sending the process into reverse. Even Bush’s bought-and-paid-for satraps are running for cover. Lebanese premier Siniora and Iraq’s Malaki, two leaders who owe their positions to US machinations, have spoken out against Israel. The former has stood up Dr Rice while the latter even put at risk his address to the US Congress with his failure to parrot the Washington line.

If this is the end of the “new Middle east” then so much the better. In its name Iraq has been reduced to ruin, destitution and now apparently the brink of civil war. The Palestinian people have been bombed, bullied and humiliated without even the most rudimentary outlines of a genuine independent state being permitted to appear.

Reactionary pro-western dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have been propped up – in the last case in the teeth of a growing mass movement for democracy.

And in its name Syria and Iran are now targeted for regime change – by violence if needs be. If they want to see their future in a remade region, they need only look at Iraq today.

Does Blair care about his isolation? I would guess not – if his future does indeed lie on the board of News Corp, whose central organ, The Sun, relegated news of the Qana massacre to page eight, what would he have to gain by breaking with the Bush-Murdoch consensus that he has served for so long at this stage? He is following the money.

But there can be little doubt that most of the British people fully back the demand for an immediate unconditional ceasefire in Lebanon, and want the British government to join the rest of the world in pressing for it.

It is the job of the anti-war movement, led by the Stop the War Coalition, to mobilise and articulate that opinion and use all available means to impose it on the government.

Already a mass demonstration has been held in London, a large and noisy picket staged outside Downing Street, and a rally with a number of artists raising their voices against the war organised in Trafalgar Square. More than thirteen thousand people have, in a matter of days, signed the StWC letter demanding that Blair back a ceasefire.

Now we need a vast turnout for the first national demonstration in the present crisis, taking place in London on Saturday, organised by the StWC together with CND, Palestine Solidarity and the British Muslim Initiative.

The signs are that we will get it. The Muslim Council of Britain is urging all mosques to turn out for the march. The StWC mailing list has been growing at over 1,000 people a day and we have raised thousands of pounds to fund the protest in a matter of hours (more still needed!).

The slogans for the demonstration are: Unconditional Ceasefire Now; Stop Israel’s Attacks on Lebanon and Gaza; and Stop Blair Backing Bush’s Wars.

These slogans both express the main demands we should make on our own government and correspond to the deepest feelings of most British people at the present time. The first is obviously the most critical.

At a time when passions are running very high, it is imperative to avoid slogans or postures which could divide this broad anti-war opinion and give the beleaguered pro-war elements in government political wriggle-room.

Calls for the destruction of Israel or any suggestion of welcoming the deaths of Israeli civilians in the present conflict are, of course, unacceptable. Not only wrong in principle, they also entirely miss the point that the authors of the present catastrophe are to be found in Washington and London above all.

Likewise, there can be no question of this rapidly-extending movement developing as a support group for Hizbullah. Such a position would be a diversion from our own political responsibilities, of which winning the demand for a ceasefire is the most important, and do nothing to offer real assistance to those suffering from the Israeli aggression.

Of course, it would be absolutely wrong to suggest that there is a political equivalence between Israel’s Bush-inspired war in Lebanon and the resistance against it. Those resisting aggression have a right to do so.

But our duty here in Britain is to mount a broad and militant political challenge to those who create the conditions for the oppression and aggression in the Middle East and, incidentally, are making an international pariah out of our country. The biggest possible turn-out on Saturday is the vital next step – it is time the people had their say.

We Are the Mainstream

Alex Doherty — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 10:13:01 +0000

Congratulations to Julian Glover and Ewan Macaskill on noticing that “the anti-war movement has a base of support well beyond student groups and the left.” But they should not really have needed an opinion poll to draw attention to one of the central realities in British politics today – that the anti-war movement has now spread to almost all parts of society and is as active and mobilised as ever.

Reflecting on just the meetings I have attended over the last month or so gives some idea of the breadth and militancy of the domestic opposition to British foreign policy, even if much of it flies beneath the Westminster radar.

I spoke at a rally in Forest Gate called by the local Muslim community in the aftermath of the botched police raid there. There was plenty of criticism of the cops, of course, but the loudest cheers were for speakers who linked the harassment British Muslims are facing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I attended a fringe meeting at the annual conference of Unison, Britain’s biggest trade union. Between 300 and 400 delegates turned up – a huge part of the whole conference and the biggest anti-war fringe meeting we have ever held at a union event.

The coalition held a benefit night for Malcolm Kendall-Smith, the brave RAF officer who went to prison for his refusal to serve in the Iraq war on grounds of conscience. A host of celebrities, including David Edgar and Vivienne Westwood, turned up to perform in the beautiful setting of St James’s Church in Piccadilly before a sell-out audience. We raised over £10,000 to help Malcolm with his legal costs.

In Cambridge I shared a platform with Rose Gentle and Sarah Chapman, two women who have lost loved ones in Iraq. The dignity and passion of the members of Military Families Against the War reaches parts of society the rest of us can’t very easily. In Hackney, I spoke to a large crowd at the Day-Mer festival, organised annually by the Turkish and Kurdish communities in north London, strong supporters of the anti-war movement from the outset.

And I spoke – on the same evening, as it happens – at two festivals in London: Islam Expo and Marxism 2006, each attended by thousands of people. Of all these engagements, only the last could really come within the “students and the left” category. It is a sustained national progressive movement without any real precedent.

And all this was before the Israeli attack on the Lebanon, which has brought the concern about British foreign policy to boiling point once more.

Today’s opinion poll shows that the arguments of the anti-war movement now command majority support on every point – backing for the Iraq war and occupation is at record lows, and more people are convinced that the British Army is doing no good in Afghanistan than believe the opposite ( a position the top brass may well share).

And, of course, 63 per cent of people want an end to the uncritical support for George Bush’s wars and a stop to the foreign policy alignment with Washington that reached a nadir of sorts with Blair’s accidentally-overheard offer to be Bush’s deputy assistant secretary of state “just talking” his way around the Middle East on behalf of the President before Condi arrived to do the real business.

Why does Blair carry on with this abasement on behalf of the country he leads? Perhaps there is a parallel with the conduct of Israel itself. As one analyst – Yediot Aharonot journalist Sima Kadmon – is reported as saying today:

“Make no mistake: Condi isn’t coming here to pressure Israel into a ceasefire. She’s coming to check up that we’re not getting this war wrong and not messing up the opportunity to be the long, strong arm of the US, just as Hizbullah is the long arm of Iran.”

As argued here last week, Israel is acting as Washington’s surrogate in the Middle East. This is a war made in the White House. Just as Israel exists as Bush’s “long, strong arm”, Blair seeks to be his supple tongue.

Even in Israel people are staring to wonder whether this “arm of Bush” business is really sensible for them. General Yissi Ben-Ari, a former intelligence officer, has written an article warning that Israel should avoid being drawn by the US into a “honey trap” in which it is used as a proxy to attack Syria and Iran against its own interests.

Blair seems to have no such doubts. He is swimming against a sea-change in British opinion of the greatest significance. The almost reflexive pro-US attitudes which dominated public opinion from right to fairly deep into the left for 50 years are now disappearing. The view that US imperialism (or however you chose to define it) is one of the greatest problems in the world today and no part of the solution in the Middle East and elsewhere is becoming the common sense of our times. Likewise, “liberal interventionism”, the racist and imperialist assumptions of which were well dissected by Simon Jenkins today, is on the rocks.

On this, as on much else, there is a gap between rulers and ruled. The two front-benches cling to the tired cold war consensus that the rest of country is leaving behind. On this, David Cameron’s “modernising” Tories remain stuck in a transatlantic traditionalism, in spite of the widespread yearning among conservatives for a more independent British foreign policy (I have the letters).

Since 2001 the anti-war movement’s strength on the streets and in the conference halls, has been in large measure driven by the fact that it is representing a policy that receives very little mainstream parliamentary support. Blair and Cameron continue to ignore the message at their own peril – if one channel is blocked, a torrent will find another.

Closing the Door on Reason

Tim Holmes — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 13:08:14 +0000

Robert Rowthorn (in his Communist party days, he was plain Bob) has returned to his role as immigration Cassandra. In a comment:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?menuId=1592&menuItemId=-1&view=SUMMARY&grid=P8&targetRule=0 piece in the Sunday Telegraph, he warns of the problems caused by foreigners arriving in Britain.

More specifically, he portentously announces that “as an academic economist” he believes there are no economic benefits to be derived from large-scale immigration; that on the contrary, many immigrants have “no skills” and clog up doctors’ surgeries. They also apparently threaten the existence of the countryside in the south-east of England, and will “completely change the culture and complexion of many cities”.

There are a number of oddities in Rowthorn’s economic analysis. One might have expected him to address the issue of where, in a globalised economy (he suggests no restraint on the movement of goods or capital), labour would be most productive. Nor does he grapple with the issue of resolving the global inequalities that drive much economic migration.

And his dismissal of the argument that immigration could help solve the pensions crisis is absurd. He suggests that this has no validity because migrants get old too. Where would we be without the insights of academic economists?

Does the professor not think that the question of the economically active proportion of migrant households – ie more people paying into the system for longer, relative to the rest of the population – may have some bearing on the question? But then, I am no academic.

Professor Rowthorn’s main argument, however, is that immigrants work too hard for too little money and put up with worse working conditions. In a touch of demagogy – let no-one say that “academic economists” are above that kind of thing – he alleges that this only benefits the “nanny- and house cleaner-using classes”. When he was a Marxist, he might have said it only benefits the bourgeoisie, but I suppose that wouldn’t do for the Sunday Telegraph.

To that extent, he would be right. Many migrant workers do suffer the most rapacious exploitation. One could address that in a variety of ways: by raising the minimum wage (and properly enforcing it) or by restoring a proper system of workplace inspection; by regularising the position of migrant workers – living in a legal grey area makes them doubly vulnerable; or by supporting the trade union effort to organise all workers so that one group does not undercut the other.

But the professor does not advocate any of these things. His implied message is clear: stop them coming here. I assume he has always cleaned his own house. If so, that, rather than his reactionary opinions, would make him unique among Cambridge dons.

His central argument is, of course, exactly the same as that deployed against the Irish in the 19th century, against Jewish workers early in the 20th and against black and Asian workers after the second world war. In each case, the trade union movement responded (invariably belatedly) by extending protection and organisation to migrant workers so that unscrupulous capitalists could not take advantage of divisions in the working-class.

The answer to exploitation is trade union organisation and legal improvements, not strengthening an already oppressive system of coercion that should scandalise any civilised country.

Rowthorn would once have understood this. Now he prefers to close the door. Perhaps he would prefer it if our green and pleasant land had never been polluted by Irish, Jewish and Afro-Caribbean workers. I do not know. But that would be the logic of his argument. (Sunday Telegraph readers are attuned to nudges and winks on matters like this.)

At any event, the good professor asserts that there is something called an “immigration lobby” – undefined, very sloppy – that brands arguments like his “racist”. Why would that be? Let the debate begin.

The Realm of the Senseless

Alex Doherty — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 15:38:03 +0000

Johann Hari has performed a tremendous service to the worldwide antiwar movement.

Those are not words I would have expected to write, nor ones I would imagine he would particularly want to read. But his exposure of the top televangelist of the British Empire, Niall Ferguson, in the Independent nevertheless deserves a big hand.

Ferguson’s response is replete with logical inconsistencies, academic sleight of hand and personal abuse, but Hari offers a rejoinder. Those who can take a large measure of ad hominen drivel with their debate can also peruse peruse Ferguson’s camp follower Lawrence James’s contribution, but it adds little to the consideration of the issues.

As you can read, Hari is perfectly capable of defending himself, and makes most of the points required. His central theme, that those who defend the British Empire are defending some of the worst crimes against humanity, is a vital argument, which he makes well. I only want to add a few observations.

First, this double counting undertaken by historians such as Ferguson on the subject of famines needs nailing. Why are the deaths attributed to the Soviet famines of the early 1930s or the Chinese of the late 1950s invariably added to the death tolls laid at the door of Stalin or Mao while those in India in the mid and late 19th century and 1942-3 are not attributed to Disraeli, Salisbury and Churchill?

Is it because famines where free-market principles apply must be held to be an unavoidable tragedy, while under developing socialist countries they are crimes? Or because it would be too embarrassing to admit that the three great pre-Thatcher icons of British Toryism are guilty of monstrous crimes against humanity?

Second, why can Ferguson and James cite no African or Asian historians in support of their empire-was-a-good-thing thesis? And why should they be given any academic respectability until they can?

In fact, given James’s assertion that the end of the British Empire was “largely good-natured and involved little bloodshed” (completely true if you ignore India/Pakistan, Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Palestine, Iraq and Egypt), why should he be taken seriously at all?

Third, Lawrence James attacks Caroline Elkins, whose excellent book, Britain’s Gulag, on the subject of the barbarous British response to the Mau-Mau uprising for land and freedom is cited by Hari, on the grounds of her background. Why is this relevant, if Ferguson’s own past, as a scion of the white settler community in Kenya, is not?

Perhaps this is why Ferguson describes the Mau-Mau as a “violent insurrection” and later as a “civil war” waged by “rebels” without the slightest suggestion that it might have been legitimate for Kenyans to seek “land and freedom” from the colonialists. This is the language – mostly technically accurate but loaded in its assumptions – used more recently by the apartheid apologists to condemn the ANC, to take one example.

Fourth – and this is my only difference with Hari’s treatment of Ferguson – I would dispute the suggestion that the latter’s aberrant views might be merely a “quest for contrarianism” in the manner of that other song-and-dance man for the military-industrial complex, Christopher Hitchens.

In fact, Ferguson and co. are providing the pseudo-academic patina to a serious political campaign to rehabilitate imperialism in the world today. If his first popular work, Empire, was concerned to rehabilitate the record of British colonialism, his second, Colossus, was an appeal to the US to take up the white man’s burden (albeit with fretting that it might not have the economic or political stamina to do so).

This has made headway at the political level. Tony Blair wanted to praise the empire in the 1997 general election campaign and had to be talked out of it by Robin Cook, according to John Kampfner in his book Blair’s Wars.

More recently, Gordon Brown has said it is time Britain “stopped apologising” for the empire – as if the apologising had ever started. This earned the Chancellor a rebuke from South African president, Thabo Mbeki, among others.

This tendency has gone in in parallel with the advocacy of “liberal imperialism” (to be executed in practice by the strikingly illiberal Bush administration) as the basis for the 21st century world order. In practice, Ferguson’s is a campaign that is not so much about the past as the present and future of the world.

Finally, is there not scope for a scholarly book on the connections between the theory and practice of the British Empire and the subsequent conduct of Nazi Germany, which was ultimately imperialism with the brakes taken off? The number of ideas the Nazis took from the empire and stripped of all restraint or scruple, from concentration camps to eugenics, racial superiority and the cynical disregard of international agreements and law, suggests an uncomfortable overlap.

I don’t suppose our present crop of court historians busy praising the empire on which the sun never set and the blood never dried will attempt it. Niall Ferguson is back on the telly tonight. Disbelieve everything he says.

To Socialism - and Back

Alex Doherty — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 15:55:55 +0000

“The right wing of the party is politically bankrupt,” while the government is “increasingly given over to the worst of petty bourgeois sentiments”, among them “rigid populism”.

You can’t fault Tony Blair’s political antennae, and the revelation of his views in this week’s New Statesman is testament once more to his insight.

Alas, these pearls of wisdom were not addressed to the cabinet last week – which might have had an edifying effect – but to Michael Foot back in 1982, in correspondence that has emerged from the Labour party archives in Manchester.

Foot, being an avid reader, may even have got to the end of the young barrister’s 22-page handwritten letter – sent from his chambers in the Temple – offering the then Labour leader his views on almost everything.

The Foot correspondence invokes a simpler world. Can one imagine any party leader reading a 22-page anything today unless there was a cheque stapled to the back? And a more leftwing Labour world: “I came to socialism through Marxism,” Blair writes, in confirmation of Dick Cheney’s worst suspicions. The prime minister does not identify through which door he left socialism, but he clearly did not take much time to look around on his way through.

More than that, thanks to Marx, Blair’s “perception of the relationship between people and the society in which they live was irreversibly altered”, Foot was advised.

Marx’s view was that people and society could only be reunited through the medium of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Even in 1982, this would have been an unwelcome development in the Middle Temple, but the future prime minister did underline his belief that you could not easily lead the party if you were “too closely intertwined with the establishment”.

Today it would take the full weight of the 101st Airborne – Blair’s social instrument of choice – to disentwine the premier from the establishment.

And much else has changed: in 1982 the “bankrupt” right wing of Labour was dominated by the likes of Denis Healey and Roy Hattersley, who now look like Jacobins by comparison with the New Labour dispensation, without actually changing their opinions about anything very much. In 2006 they are more likely to commend the “radical, socialist policies” that Blair was urging on Foot.

But not everything changes. Blair’s purpose in writing to Foot may have been an early exercise in reinvention to impress those in authority.

There is a breathless overcompensation running through the letter, as if its author, already regarded as a bit of a rightwinger after his political debut at the 1982 Beaconsfield by-election, was urgently trying to reposition himself as Blair the Radical, with William Hazlitt, Thomas Paine and even – this was really daring in 1982 – Tony Benn coming in for pats on the back..

Who can seriously doubt that there is a similarly lengthy letter of more recent provenance that will one day turn up in the George Bush Mission Accomplished Memorial Archive? It will explain how his good friend Tony came to neoconservatism through the Bible – or perhaps the other way round – and was ever on his guard against those too closely intertwined with the evildoer. And Ann Coulter and Paul Wolfowitz may have replaced Paine and Hazlitt.

But let’s not mock. As Blair wrote, “socialism must ultimately appeal to the better minds of the people. You cannot do that if you are tainted overmuch with a pragmatic period in power.” How much more overmuch can tainting get?

Andrew Murray is the author of A New Labour Nightmare: Return of the Awkward Squad and a co-author of Stop the War

apdmurray@hotmail.com

100 Invisible Hunger Strikers

Tim Holmes — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:56:29 +0000

While ministers are assuring us that the whole civil liberties debate is a lot of unnecessary fuss, it may be worth mentioning that 100 people are reported to be on hunger strike in Britain at this moment.

According to today’s Evening Standard (no link available) they claim to have been subjected to “violence and racist abuse by guards”. One says that “we are on hunger strike because of how we are treated. They slap you, strip your clothes off and watch you having a shower.”

They are asylum seekers in one of the state’s network of detention camps, so not a lot of notice is paid to this situation. White prisoners in a regular jail would attract more attention if they went on hunger strike against brutal treatment.

And these are not criminals. They are refugees from some of the most deprived and war-torn countries in the world. Those quoted above do not wish to be returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Their treatment intersects with a wider campaign to spread fear amongst the migrant community. In my work for the T&G we regularly receive reports of poorly-paid workers being arrested and threatened with deportation – the result of collusion between employers and the Home Office usually. No doubt such behaviour is part of the price we must pay for keeping our famously flexible labour market flexible. Employees with the threat of imprisonment and deportation hanging over them are unlikely to stand up for their rights at work.

I would suggest that of all the threats to the freedom of people in Britain today, the monstrous apparatus of coercion, monitoring, harassment, detention and deportation trading as the immigration service is the most serious. Its depredations are not a cloud across our future, but actual in the here-and-now, and the source of untold (literally) misery.

Since its victims are foreign and mostly black there is not a snowball’s chance in hell of either government or opposition taking this seriously, at least while heading off BNP votes is the issue of the moment. But since Charles Clarke is ultimately responsible for the fate of the detainees presently starving themselves, it would seem to me good if those taking part in the civil liberties discussion here contacted him at the Home Office to demand that he lift the threat of deportation from the detainees and, if he will not scrap the whole wretched system immediately, at least ensure that the service is purged of racist and violent misanthropes.

Euston, You Have a Problem

Alex Doherty — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 16:56:35 +0000

British troops have been revealed as taking part in war games for a US-led attack on Iran, while over the weekend 10 soldiers have been wounded (one killed) in the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Coincidentally, tens of thousands of people turned out in Dublin to remember the “terrorists” of 1916, as they were dubbed by contemporary Labour and Liberal leaders, whose sacrifice was such a mortal blow to British rule in Ireland.

Meanwhile, John Lloyd announces that the left in Britain must face a parting of the ways on the issue of imperialism or anti-imperialism. The occasion for this sensational development is the publication of the Euston manifesto , about which a good deal has already been said on this site from one point of view or another.

My own reading of the manifesto is that it is less a call to arms than an instrument of surrender. Three elements inspire this reflection:

First, the non-position taken on the Iraq war. Others see this as either a crippling weakness in the manifesto, or even as a point of ridicule. I take the embarrassed silence on this point as a sign of the political collapse of the liberal shock-and-awe party. If even the cream of pro-war punditry and academia can no longer agree to make the case for the Iraq war then, as I have argued previously, that case is as dead as the proverbial parrot. While the E Team may still make the case for “interventionism” in the abstract, they can no longer unite to defend it in the particular.

Second, 20 people meeting in a central London pub is a split? In the Fourth International, perhaps, as one or two of the signatories may recall. But in the left in Britain as a whole? I don’t think so. Of course, the choice of licensed premises as the intellectual hothouse may have been a smart move in shaking off Muslims, but it has not in my experience been an insuperable barrier to attendance by prominent trade unionists, for example. None seem to have made it, however, something which cannot entirely be attributed to the unpopular front the Islam-hostile left has recently formed with the union-busting Freedom Association.

Think back to 1999 and the Nato attack on Yugoslavia. That was a split – with any number of institutions, organs and icons of the left on the pro-war side, from the Scottish TUC to Tribune to Michael Foot. Today, the socialist, green, trade union, revolutionary and liberal lefts are actually more united than ever before in the wake of the Iraq war. The shrivelled line up of the E Team today is a measure of how far the imperialist tide has gone out in opinion on the left – and among the public at large for that matter – as a result of Iraq.

Apparently, this is because “our own segment of the left was significantly under-represented in the mainstream media” in the words of Norman Geras and Nick Cohen. This would, presumably, be the Nick Cohen of the Observer, New Statesman and Evening Standard, demand for whose original thoughts, among editors at least, has long since outstripped their supply. Sitting with your mates in the boozer grumbling that no one’s paying attention to you is one thing, but launching a political project on that basis begs a question once you stumble out of the saloon bar. What if actually everyone is all too aware of your views and their consequences? It would seem to me that between Cohen, Lloyd (FT, Evening Standard), Aaronovitch (Times, previously Guardian and Observer), Hitchens (Mirror), pre-apology Hari (Independent), they have hardly been denied the oxygen of publicity. Indeed, the anti-war media was far more generous in giving space to columnists who took a differing view than the pro-war press was to its opponents.

Yet – and this is my third point – it is those who are more usually confined to the estimable columns of the Morning Star who have prevailed in the argument and, as a result, the E manifesto reads like a letter of resignation from the left, rather than a platform for its renewal. Every paragraph breathes hatred for the anti-war movement and its major components, to the extent that even points that would genuinely secure common consent across the left are followed by peevish attacks against those who have been proved right about the Iraq war. At the same time, there is an explicit opening to liberal and even conservative opinion, linked quite clearly to a rejection of the socialist left.

And this is to be a “new political alignment”. Will it stand in elections? Will it have a membership and democratic conferences? Of course not. Organise a demonstration? Ha ha. Since Multiplex could build a football stadium faster than the E Team produced its manifesto, we should not bank on a big propaganda offensive either.

The E Team will have a certain importance as long as Blair remains in Downing Street because it provides some intellectual ballast for his foreign policy agenda. It is not inconceivable that the E Team could provide the same service to David Cameron, if the latter ever gets to No 10. Some of the pro-war left have already hooked up with Cameron’s advisers through the Henry Jackson Society. But they will neither split the left, nor set up a viable “political alignment” in opposition to it.

The reason for this failure, it seems to me, is that so much in the world turns today on the question of imperialism and anti-imperialism. This is not just a matter of the Iraq war or even foreign policy as a whole, but something that touches on many aspects of domestic politics as well, from community cohesion to civil liberties to economic priorities.

Yet the concept has vanished from the lexicon of the E Team, leaving them in the absurd position of, for example, denouncing the outrages at Abu Ghraib as a shocking aberration as if such abuse had not had its equivalent in every neo-colonial war for the past century.

Likewise, this myopia leads John Lloyd to condemn, without a trace of irony, the anti-war movement for allegedly forming “alliances with fundamentalist Islamic groups, whose policies on civil and human rights, including equal rights for women and gays, are deeply reactionary” while standing strong for his own pro-war alliance with George Bush, whose policies on civil rights and equality for women and gays are … er, what exactly? And they are surprised to be dubbed Islamophobic.

How the politics of anti-imperialism develop in a democratic and inclusive form, building on the real, actual unity of socialists, liberals, greens, trade unionists and democrats of all faiths and none achieved in the anti-war movement – that is a debate of consequence. But for those who portentously declaim that “America is a great country” while having nothing to say on the “economic forms of equality”, the best response is in the vernacular: Losers. Double losers. Whatever.

Time For Accounting

Alex Doherty — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 13:31:35 +0000

Tony Blair’s announcement that he will henceforward account only to God for the Iraq war makes perfect sense. Every secular reason he has concocted for the catastrophe has turned out to be the reverse of the truth: there were no weapons of mass destruction, we are less safe from terrorism, the Iraqi people themselves do not want us in their country. No more of his excuses for this epic man-made disaster stand an earthly chance of being believed.

As the third anniversary of the calamity draws close, the final argument used by what little remains of the brave army of pro-war punditry that set out with the prime minister in 2003 has gone belly up. Far from preventing a civil war, the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is provoking one. It is doing so through its divide-and-rule strategy, which has entrenched and inflamed the Sunni-Shia divide beyond anything in Iraq’s history, and through its refusal to afford Iraqis the unfettered exercise of national sovereignty, which is the only framework for overcoming such differences.

There is scarcely even a pretence that Iraq is permitted such sovereignty at present. Both Jack Straw and the US ambassador to Baghdad have recently been instructing the Iraqis as to what sort of government they must form – three months after the supposedly decisive national elections took place.

And all this to the accompaniment of unabated violence. Reliable estimates for violent civilian deaths under the occupation range well over 100,000. Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue, has had to flee the country after revealing that more than 7,000 people had been killed, often after torture, by officers of the US-supervised interior ministry. The carnage continues: more families will be burying their dead this morning after yesterday’s 50-warplane assault on Samarra by the US – the biggest yet and clearest possible demonstration of the occupation’s brutality and failure.

It defies common sense to suppose that the only torture and degradation of civilians carried out by US and British troops has been that caught on camera at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. No wonder Iraqi local authorities now refuse to deal with the British army in the south.

The pledge that all this suffering would at least assist a solution to the Palestinian question has proved painfully hollow, with the Israelis ram-raiding a Palestinian prison in Jericho – just like British troops in Basra. But still the war junkies seem to believe one more hit – this time against Iran – will lead to the breakthrough to the docile Middle East they desire. Straw’s assertion that it is “inconceivable” has found no echo in Washington or Jerusalem. Almost every Iranian agrees that aggression will consolidate support for the regime in Tehran. It will certainly cost many more lives and inflame Muslims everywhere.

None of this was unavoidable. The anti-war movement around the world has been vindicated both in its estimation of the unjustified nature of the war and the consequences of an occupation of Iraq. And Britain has reaped the consequences. Most people understand that the terrorist threat “over here” is in large measure a consequence of what we are doing “over there”. The denial of that connection has damaged civil liberties and community cohesion in Britain.

This was not a war the British people wanted. This weekend protests against the prolongation of the Iraq war and its threatened extension to Iran will take place across the globe, including in Iraq. To put it in language the prime minister understands: vox populi vox dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God). The time for accounting is now.

Andrew Murray is the chair of the Stop the War Coalition, which is organising a demonstration in London tomorrow.

apdmurray@hotmail.com

www.stopwar.org.uk

The Unloved System

Alex Doherty — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:32:37 +0000

Let no one say David Cameron lacks a big idea. Amid his triumphant but content-free campaign for the Conservative leadership, our would-be Blairite premier stepped outside the image-spinners’ cocoon just once with a daring proposal. What Britain needs, he told the Confederation of British Industry, is a “campaign for capitalism”. Whatever the mountain of opinion polling, focus grouping, position papering and brainstorming being undertaken by Team Cameron to generate a Tory future, the leader’s clarion call is taken straight from the greatest hits of Toryism past.

Trying no doubt to make his audience’s flesh creep, Cameron warned the fat cats that “profit” and “free trade” had become dirty words for many. Who was the first Conservative leader to complain that “profit has become a dirty word”? My guess is Lord Liverpool.

However, let us not ridicule daring David. He has – almost certainly unintentionally – said something very interesting that deserves to be taken from the obscurity of the now mercifully concluded Tory leadership race to the heart of political debate.

Cameron’s call to arms is less a crusade than a confession that many people are apparently unreconciled to capitalism. What an extraordinary thing to find oneself writing. After 26 years of Thatcherite and Thatcher-lite governments, which have not only practised capitalism but also preached it without stint, “far too many people”, according to the man who would be prime minister, are yet to get it. This is not for want of opportunity to appreciate the virtues of capitalism, profit and the rest. One thing that the past generation in Britain has not lacked is an unabashed campaign for capitalism.

In its name, public services have been privatised, taxes on the rich and on business slashed, working-class communities crushed and fat cats plumped up with public money. It couldn’t be said that we haven’t had the campaign – the casualties are everywhere.

And at the end of it, the leader of the Tory party is left with the same complaint his predecessors had in the 1970s: profiteers are unhonoured and the bracing rigours of the free market shunned. It seems we are not, in spite of Peter Mandelson’s entreaties, seriously relaxed about the filthy rich. Thirty years of confining polite debate within the assumption that free enterprise, the market economy and profit are very good words indeed, and everything else an obscenity, have gone to waste.

Now why would that be? Maybe it is because capitalism apparently expects us to work until we are older than it did in the 1970s. Or that the already unequal society of Heath and Wilson has become more deeply divided still between rich and poor, even to the point of exercising chief Cameron brainbox Oliver Letwin.

It could be that we don’t love a lifetime of job insecurity, beating back competition from China, as much as we should. Maybe it’s the official determination to maintain those privatisations, such as the railways, universally regarded as epic failures. That’s all guesswork – the opinion pollsters don’t ever ask if people like capitalism, or if not, why not. But if it is as unpopular as David Cameron fears, it’s certainly not because anyone has been running a very noticeable campaign for socialism. The term has been exterminated from New Labour’s political vocabulary, and even the much-loved English socialist bible The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is now branded as the anteroom to totalitarianism by repentant radicals writing on these pages.

Perhaps this abandonment of the S-word has been premature. The leader of the opposition now feels the urgency of a campaign for capitalism. Surely those whose business it is to oppose the opposition should offer a clear alternative to the Tory leader – even at the risk of more than 60% of the voters feeling strongly enough to take part in the next election.

But Cameron should not be discouraged from launching his campaign. It will serve to underline how rightwing his agenda really is behind the “modernising” chatter.

And perhaps this could be the “clause four moment” that his advisers are urging on him. Do a Blair in reverse – formally commit the Tories to secure for private industry the full fruits of others’ labour under the best obtainable form of capitalist ownership. It might even help local Conservative parties swallow women-only shortlists and gay marriages.

Andrew Murray is director of campaigns and communications for the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and author of A New Labour Nightmare: Return of the Awkward Squad

apdmurray@hotmail.com

Cause and Consequence

Alex Doherty — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 09:55:59 +0000

Tony Blair appears to be on the brink of a Brechtian moment, in which he will need to dissolve the people who have lost his confidence and elect another.
Certainly, if he claims that anyone who believes there is a connection between the government’s foreign policy – above all, Iraq – and the July 7 massacre in London is a “fellow traveller of terrorism”, then he has his work cut out. Fully 85% of the public do, according to a Daily Mirror/GMTV poll.

The government’s refusal to associate cause and consequence, which would be child-like were it not so obviously self-serving, is sustained only by hysterical warnings against the new evil of “root-causism” from the residual pro-empire liberals.
This attempt to close down debate as to why Britain – London above all – is now fighting the misbegotten “war on terror” on its own streets, is doubly dangerous. Not only does it block the necessary re-evaluation of foreign policy, it also places the onus for preventing any repetition of July 7 on the “Muslim community”, which – in a form of collective responsibility – is accused of breeding an “evil ideology” in its midst.

This approach risks reaping a different whirlwind in anti-Muslim attacks, physical and verbal. It also creates the climate in which Brazilians allegedly wearing coats on a hot day can become targets for a shoot-to-kill policy imported from Israel.

“Iraq” is shorthand for describing the problem. As well as the occupation of Iraq, it encompasses the faltering occupation of Afghanistan, the misery of the Palestinians, Guantánamo Bay and the carefully photographed torture at Abu Ghraib and Camp Breadbasket.

The British government bears less responsibility for some of these policies than for others. But if the British ambassador to Washington is briefed by Downing Street that his job is to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there”, as has been reported, then it is small surprise that nuances of difference get overlooked.

Of course, al-Qaida and its reactionary ideologists may have broader objectives than ending the occupation of Iraq. But no one is going to bomb Britain because of Chechnya. All roads lead back to the government’s uncritical identification with the US neoconservative agenda. The first step in a realignment must be ending the occupation of Iraq. This is not “appeasing terrorism”: that would only be the case if the occupation had been wildly popular, and producing results before July 7, and a U-turn was urged as a result of the carnage in London.

In fact, the occupation was wrong, and failing, before July 7 and it is wrong afterwards. It was opposed by most of the people before it began, and by most people most of the time to this day.

The main argument for ending it is not what has happened, or is threatened, in London but what is happening in Iraq daily. Every day is July 7 in occupied Iraq, where Britain has, along with the US, arbitrarily, violently and unlawfully constituted itself the de facto authority.

Whether one talks of 25,000 violent deaths, as claimed by Iraq Occupation Focus, the 39,000 counted by the Swiss-based Graduate Institute of International Studies, or the 100,000 “excess civilian deaths”, including nonviolent casualties of occupation, identified by the Lancet, this is a massacre of innocent people that the government apparently believes is a price worth ignoring for its Iraq policy.

Whether these killings are directly attributable to the occupying force, or caused by the terrorism that has flourished on the occupiers’ watch along with economic and social chaos, they are the best reason for bringing the troops home. It should be done for the Iraqis, not just for ourselves.

This demand has near-unanimous support among Britain’s trade unions. It is the Liberal Democrats’ policy. Bringing the troops home no later than Christmas would surely command overwhelming public backing.

Such a move would not necessarily end the threat of terrorism overnight – but it would be right. It would send a signal, not to al-Qaida but to the British people, that a disastrous foreign policy can be changed by means of democratic pressure.

Two million people, including a vast number of British Muslims, took to the streets against the invasion of Iraq. Blair preferred the warmth of the White House’s embrace. Ignore the marchers and you risk igniting the murderers. If the alternative to terrorism is democracy, then it is time the people of Britain and Iraq alike were listened to and the occupation ended.

Andrew Murray is chair of the Stop the War Coalition and co-author of Stop the War: the story of Britain’s biggest mass movement

No Escape from the War

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 09:35:13 +0000

The front benches of both main parties would like to fight the forthcoming election on the Basil Fawlty principle of “don’t mention the war”. They will not be so lucky. The invasion and occupation of Iraq – and the British public’s sustained opposition to it – continues to cast a long shadow over British politics. Some are so anxious to “draw a line and move on” that they simply court ridicule. A correspondent to this paper from South Shields called for an end to “carping” about the “Iraq misadventure”. Carping? Misadventure? The Iraq war is a huge crime which has led to up to 100,000 civilian deaths, the deaths of 1,600 US and British soldiers, the ruination of a country, and the trashing of international law and the authority of the UN.

It also involved, it is now clear, the deception of the British parliament and people, from the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the content of the attorney general’s legal green light for the war. To suggest it is somehow unreasonable or obsessive to dwell on these matters or hold those responsible to account is to negate the essence of democracy. One must hope that if any power were ever to do to South Shields what was done to Falluja, we would do more than carp about it.

There are four reasons why the Iraq war and the issues raised by it – the focus of this Saturday’s anti-war march in London – deserve to remain at the top of the political agenda. First, we must bear witness to the fact that on every point, the 2 million people who demonstrated against aggression on February 15 2003 have been shown to be correct, while those making the case for the war have been proved disastrously mistaken at best, reckless liars at worst. Whether it was WMD, the legality of the war or the consequences for Iraq of foreign military occupation, those who marched knew better than our rulers. That is a democratic lesson that bears repetition.

Second, we must demand that the occupation is brought to a speedy end, our troops brought home, and full sovereignty restored to the Iraqi people. If you needed any further argument as to why the British and US military are utterly unfit to exercise control over Iraqis, surely the abuse of prisoners, photographed for posterity by their tormentors, provides it. The US-manipulated elections have done nothing to weaken the case for an end to occupation or Iraqis’ overwhelming desire for thewithdrawal of British and American troops. If anything, the opposite is true.

Third, the “war on terror” is cutting closer to home than ever, with centuries-old civil rights being scrapped on grounds which closely resemble those used to promote the war against Iraq. The anti-war movement adopted defence of civil liberties as a key objective from the outset. We can neither place all our faith in peers, nor on ministers who believe it is acceptable for British Muslims to be targeted for stop-and-searches. We are proud that human rights campaigners like Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti and the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, are now sharing our platforms.

Fourth, the threat of new wars, including an extension of conflict in the Middle East to Syria or Iran has to be taken extremely seriously. The Washington neo-conservatives are brutally frank about their objectives and we must assume they will try to attain as many as possible, by force if necessary, over the next four years.

When George Bush demands Syrian troops leave Lebanon “because you cannot hold free and fair elections under foreign military occupation”, it might be tempting to think he is indulging in self-parody. But experience suggests this administration is never so dangerous as when it sounds most absurd.

Already, the repeated mobilisation of British “people power” over the past three years has made it extraordinarily difficult for a British government to support any further wars. The war party has comprehensively lost the argument – that is presumably why, in recent months, it has turned to increasingly desperate attacks on the anti-war movement.

Some of the charges against us are true: we are proud to work with Muslims, many of whom have been brought into active politics for the first time. We recognise that an invaded people will resist occupation and has the right to do so. Many of our organisers are of the left, and defend its traditions against those who would prostitute them in the service of US power.

The anti-war movement has spoken the truth on behalf of millions of citizens – there should not be a single parliamentary candidate in the forthcoming election able to hide from it.