Ann Talbot | ukwatch.net

UK backs US stance on Russia

Alex Doherty — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:03:57 +0000

In an article in the Times on the day that NATO foreign ministers met in an emergency meeting to discuss their response to the crisis surrounding South Ossetia, Miliband demanded that international monitors be sent to Georgia to oversee the ceasefire and to defend “Georgian sovereignty.”

“The invasion of Georgia was entirely unjustified,” Miliband wrote, “and we will strengthen support for its wish to join Nato.”

“You don’t need to be a student of the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 to find the sight of Russian tanks rolling into a neighbouring country chilling,” Miliband continued, deliberately evoking the language of the Cold War.

“The Georgian crisis is about more than vital issues of humanitarian need and rule of law over rule of force. It raises a fundamental issue of whether, and if so how, Russia can play a full and legitimate part in a rules-based international political system, exercising its rights but respecting those of others.”

Miliband complained of “overwhelming Russian aggression.” Russia, he said, had “provided no evidence of war crimes” and had “violated successive UN Security Council resolutions which they themselves agreed.”

Russia, Miliband went on, had “blatantly violated the sovereignty of a neighbouring (and democratic) country.”

“The British position,” Miliband declared, “is that aggression cannot and will not redraw the map of Russia’s former ‘near abroad’ (or anywhere else).”

NATO foreign ministers must reassert their commitment to Georgia’s territorial integrity, Miliband insisted, and “confirm the commitment made at the Nato summit in April to membership for Ukraine and Georgia and to follow it up with serious co-operation—militarily and politically—as part of a structured route map to eventual membership.”

Miliband struck a high moral tone. But the British government is in no position to criticise others for “overwhelming aggression” and violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states.

The Labour government supported the US-led invasion of Iraq without any UN mandate under the false pretext that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” and assisted in enforcing “regime change” in that country through military aggression.

Only 17 months earlier, it had participated in the invasion of Afghanistan on the spurious grounds that the country was responsible for the 9/11 terror attack. Although the assault on Afghanistan had the backing of other NATO countries, it was no more legitimate for that. NATO forces have repeatedly targeted civilians. The government of Hamid Karzai is a Western puppet regime with little local support even in the capital.

On the same day that Miliband’s article appeared in the Times, it was announced that British Special Forces would take part in a “decapitation” strategy in Afghanistan. Its aim will be to assassinate leading opponents of the Western-backed regime who are thought to be in the tribal territories of Pakistan.

The Independent quoted what they called “senior defence sources” who said that their intelligence pointed to an “implosion of security” in Pakistan, following the resignation of President Pervez Musharraf. It cannot be doubted that the plan is to extend the NATO campaign into Pakistan.

A history of aggression and provocation

In 1999, British forces participated in the bombing of Serbia, which targeted civilians and neutral embassies. Earlier this year, Britain recognised the unilateral breakaway of Kosovo from Serbia.

The UK government had no concern then for the territorial integrity of Serbia. Rather, its support for Kosovo’s independence was justified on exactly the same grounds as those now being claimed by anti-Georgian separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. That step must in itself have contributed to the Russian decision to act as it did in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Britain, in alliance with the US, has adopted an increasingly aggressive attitude in regions that border on Russia and were part of the former USSR.

In April, Britain backed the US call for Georgia to become a NATO member. France and Germany were reluctant to initiate the process that would lead to membership, recognising that the move could only antagonise Moscow. Britain has also backed the US plan to base a ground-based missile interceptor system in Poland and an x-band radar site in the Czech Republic.

Miliband, who is to visit Georgia on Wednesday, called for both economic and political support for Georgia and Ukraine. He said that Britain would play its full part in sending observers to monitor the ceasefire.

He rejected the idea of expelling Russia from the G8, floated in Washington. But he insisted that the other powers must be able to act as the G7 whenever they wished. While the practical implications of being excluded from the G8 may be small, it is a significant diplomatic gesture.

Other European powers have urged a more cautious approach. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walther Steinmeier warned against a “knee-jerk reaction” to the Georgia crisis. He called for the lines of communication to be kept open between the West and Russia.

A reckless bellicosity

The decision to send Miliband to Georgia followed criticism in the British press that the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown had not responded to the Georgian conflict adequately. A front-page headline in the Sun demanded, “Where’s Gord?” It was followed days later by an article written by the Sun’s political editor Trevor Kavanagh headlined “Hello? Gordon? We still can’t hear you.” This response indicates a deep dissatisfaction with Brown’s performance in the key sections of the international financial elite for whom Murdoch’s media empire speaks.

Kavanagh pointed to the Russian warning that Poland’s decision to host the US missile defence system made it a military target.

“This escalation in tension only makes the question more urgent,” Kavanagh wrote: “Where on earth are Gordon Brown and his Foreign Secretary David Miliband?”

Other international leaders were taking a prominent role, but Brown had let Conservative opposition leader David Cameron make the running on Georgia, Kavanagh said. Brown had only issued statements after Cameron appeared on the media. Tony Blair, Kavanagh pointed out, would not have behaved in this way.

Kavanagh’s article appeared on the day that Cameron flew to Tbilisi to meet with President Saakashvili. He had been invited to the capital after he compared the response of the West to the Georgian crisis with the appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1939.

Cameron called for visa restrictions on Russians, “Russian armies can’t march into other countries while Russian shoppers carry on marching into Selfridges.”

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office pointed out that there are already visa restrictions on Russians. But the damage inflicted on the Labour government was real.

Cameron’s intervention followed the outbreak of what was described in the media as warfare in the Labour Party as Miliband challenged Brown’s leadership.

Miliband criticised the performance of the government in a Guardian article at the end of July. Labour could still win the next election, Miliband insisted, even following two by-election defeats. But he did not mention Brown’s name, which was taken as a sign that he was putting himself forward as a potential leader.

Guardian columnists Polly Toynbee and Jackie Ashley were quick to offer their support to Miliband. Toynbee was once a firm supporter of Brown in his contest with Blair. But she could barely contain her enthusiasm.

“Suddenly everything changed,” she wrote following Miliband’s article. “The burst of optimism was so startling it dazzled those too long trapped deep in a dungeon. In that one moment it was all over for the old leader who had plunged them into these depths. Suddenly here was the chance of escape everyone was waiting for.”

Ashley was positively adulatory. “A man who has often seemed too fastidious for frontline politics,” Ashley wrote of Miliband, “suddenly looks like a killer.”

Brown’s difficulties did not go unnoticed in Washington. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece by Kyle Wingfield, editorial writer for the paper’s European edition.

“When Gordon Brown returns home from his summer vacation,” it began, “he may find that the locks at 10 Downing Street have been changed.”

This internecine conflict left the Brown government slow to respond to the Georgian crisis. Cameron was able to seize a certain advantage. He is presenting himself as the best candidate to continue the close alliance in foreign policy between London and Washington.

Brown has played his part in creating the circumstances that created the international crisis over Georgia. As chancellor of exchequer, he provided the finances that made it possible for Britain to fight a war on two fronts and act as Washington’s closest ally. But now with the economy on the brink of recession and international tensions sharpening, the question of whether Brown is capable of continuing in a leading role inevitably emerges.

Cameron has raised one of the touchstone issues of British politics. His reference to appeasement was to the policies of the Chamberlain administration at the beginning of the Second World War. He made these remarks in a situation that has been recognised as bearing dangerous similarities to the international crises that preceded previous world wars. Implicitly, Cameron is presenting himself as the better potential war leader.

Brown is not about to concede the point. His response has been to despatch his foreign secretary to the flashpoint. Eager to show his mettle, Miliband took a belligerent line at the NATO summit. The contest among British politicians to demonstrate that none of them are Chamberlains may itself become a factor in escalating international tensions as they compete in bellicosity ever more recklessly.

Zimbabwe election: US and UK move to impose sanctions

tim — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:52:22 +0000

Robert Mugabe was inaugurated for a sixth term as President of Zimbabwe on Sunday, following an election campaign characterised by government backed violence and intimidation.

Mugabe, standing for the ruling ZANU-PF, claimed to have received more than 85 percent of the vote. But his only opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), had withdrawn from the campaign because of the level of violence and intimidation. International observers condemned the elections. “The current atmosphere prevailing in the country did not give rise to the conduct of free, fair and credible elections,” said Marwick Khumalo head of the Pan-African Parliament monitoring team.

Observers from Zimbabwe’s neighbours in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) concurred. “The elections,” the SADC observers concluded, “did not represent the will of the people of Zimbabwe.”

The elections were “worse than those we witnessed in Angola in 1992, after decades of war, and are not credible,” one SADC observer said.

Zimbabwean observers called off their plans to monitor the polls because it was too dangerous.

A government-sponsored campaign of beatings, kidnappings and murders has left 104 people dead and 3,500 injured. Doctors who have been treating the wounded say that this is just the tip of the iceberg. “What we are seeing is probably 10 percent of what has actually happened,” a doctor who wished to remain anonymous told reporters. He said that the violence was the “worst the country has witnessed.”

The injuries he had treated were more serious than those experienced during the liberation war of the 1970s. “This is much, much more severe,” the doctor said, “We are not seeing simple fractures, we are seeing bones smashed into 20 pieces. People being forced to walk on burning coals, having scalding water poured over them and their wounds poisoned.”

Marwick Kumhalo said that monitors had evidence of violence and intimidation all over the country in the run up to the election. The turnout, he said, was low.

In Mashonaland the number of votes announced by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) exceeds the number of registered voters. The ZEC claimed that the turn out was comparable to that in the first round of the elections in March. But some polling stations in Bulawayo reported that they did not receive a single voter.

In Harare, the capital, few voters were seen. Many registered voters said that they did not intend to vote. There were a large number of spoilt ballot papers. Some had obscene language directed at Mugabe.

Turnout was very low in major urban areas. Voters in those areas can expect retribution. Reprisals have already been reported in the working class suburb of Chitungwiza outside Harare.

In the wake of the election the repression is continuing. Anyone who does not have the red ink stained finger that shows they voted is immediately at risk.

The ZEC has handed the details of polling patterns in each electoral ward to the government. Security forces and government-backed militias will be able to target voters in wards that did not endorse Mugabe.

Leaked minutes from the Joint Operations Command (JOC), which has been coordinating the coercion, indicate that the regime has decided to wipe out the opposition MDC.

The UK based Independent has seen sworn affidavits from reserve bank officials who transported money to regional organisers to finance the campaign of violence against the opposition.

There are reports that re-education camps at which opposition voters have been tortured are being re-supplied for a second phase of the campaign. An opposition activist told reporters that local businesses in Chinhoyi in Mashonaland West are being forced to make contributions to fund the repression.

“These camps are now regrouping. They’re going to unleash another terror campaign,” he said.

Mugabe went almost directly from his inauguration to the African Union (AU) summit in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. The response of other African leaders to his presence was muted. They are reluctant to criticise a fellow African leader in public. Many of them have records of repression as bad, or worse than Mugabe’s.

Other African leaders, such as the summit’s host Muhammad Hosni Mubarak, are notoriously corrupt. Mubarak is accused of rigging the 2005 election. These were the first multi-party elections to take place since he came to power in 1981. He has maintained a state of emergency rule for the last 25 years.

Mubarak and his fellow African leaders have no more desire to allow democratic rights to their people than Mugabe. All the African rulers at the Sharm el Sheikh summit have for the most part enriched a tiny elite at the expense of the majority of the population.

But these regimes value their relationship with the United States and are coming under intense pressure to isolate and condemn Mugabe.

Egyptian prisons, for example, have proved invaluable in providing a secret base for the torture of US detainees in the so-called war on terror. The Italian authorities are currently investigating the “extraordinary rendition” of Abu Omar, an Egyptian cleric living as a refugee in Italy. He was seized by the CIA from the street in Milan in 2003. He was then taken to the US airbase at Brescia and flown to Ramstein in Germany from where he was taken to an Egyptian prison and tortured.

Even the Sudanese government, which is regularly condemned in the US press, has proved useful in intelligence matters to the US government. Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya was recruited to the US “war on terror” in 2004.

The African states may well acquiesce to US demands on Mugabe, if they want to maintain their favoured status as allies in the war on terror.

Zimbabwe has become something of test case for US power in Africa, which has suffered a serious setback following the military debacle in Iraq and the emergence of China as a major player on the continent.

“I would suggest that one not take from the soft words in an open plenary as a reflection of the deep concern of leaders here of the situation in Zimbabwe,” said US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Fraser. “I would expect them to have very, very strong words for him.”

Her remarks were as much an instruction to the African leaders as a comment for journalists. The US, Britain and the European Union have made it clear that they will not recognise Mugabe as president of Zimbabwe.

Visiting Beijing, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for China to support an arms embargo against Zimbabwe. But Chinese Foreign Secretary Yang Jiechi insisted that the only way forward was for the government of Zimbabwe to enter into talks with the opposition.

It seems that a call for a negotiated settlement and a power-sharing government like that established in Kenya following the disputed election earlier this year may emerge from the AU summit. On the second day of the summit the South African paper Business Day reported that President Thabo Mbeki was close to brokering a deal between Mugabe and Tsvangirai.

Even if Thabo Mbeki succeeds in establishing a government of national unity, that is unlikely to be the end of the matter. The US and UK seem to have already rejected this option.

An article in the Financial Times on 25 June posed a somewhat different scenario. The article’s authors reflected on the recent pronouncements by a series of African leaders and former leaders denouncing Mugabe.

Rising commodity prices and economic liberalisation has ensured that growth rates across much of Africa remain at 5 percent, the article said. But food prices and transport costs are rising fast, it warned. Under these circumstances, Mugabe’s intransigence may have unforeseen effects.

“Not only has Robert Mugabe put southern Africa in jeopardy. Like ripples on a pond, which can drown a man already up to his nose in water, his actions can strain an uneasy peace in Kenya, affect food shipments to refugees in east Africa and add to the trials of Britain’s beleaguered government.”

The article was written by former Africa editor of the Financial Times Michael Holman and Dr Gregg Mills, director of the Brenthurst Foundation, a think tank founded by the Oppenheimer family to further the economic development of Africa. These two old Africa hands proceeded to imagine a scenario in which attacks on whites might lead the UK to attempt an evacuation of its nationals and a convoy to the South African border might be attacked.

Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo, the article suggests, might become a centre of resistance and railway connections might be severed. Mbeki might offer Mugabe sanctuary in South Africa, but President of the ANC Jacob Zuma and the South African trade unions might respond by organising “countrywide protests.”

In the midst of all that, Holman and Mills imagine, “Somali-based terrorists bomb a tourist hotel” while in Kenya further ethnic riots disrupt the power-sharing government and hamper relief to refuges in central Africa.

This could be the plot of a political thriller rather than an article in a sober financial journal. But the fact that it appears in the Financial Times and is the work of two senior commentators on Africa gives it a certain weight.

Such is the fragility of the world situation following the credit crunch and the still expanding speculative bubble in commodity prices that Mugabe’s attempt to hang on to power threatens to destabilise not only southern Africa, but the entire continent. In recognising that threat, Holman and Mills evince a desire to seize the moment and precipitate a crisis that they envisage to be already on the horizon.

How far the US and UK intelligence agencies would be behind the disastrous scenarios that Holman and Mills draft out, we may never know. But it is revealing that such influential commentators assume only a bloody outcome is possible in Zimbabwe.

The article is an indication of the extent to which the attitude of the US and UK towards Zimbabwe has shifted. At present it is accepted that the US and UK cannot intervene openly in Zimbabwe. As the Economist recently said, “other methods, with Africans to the fore, must be tried first.” But the scenario drafted out by Mills and Holman would provide a pretext for American and British intervention.

An editorial in the Financial Times expressed the western powers’ dissatisfaction with Mbeki’s attempts to establish a government of national unity in Zimbabwe.

“Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president, who has sought to resolve the crisis with a Kenyan-style national unity government, should accept he has failed. There is no way any western nation will send international aid to a regime that has Mr. Mugabe or ZANU-PF at the helm. An MDC government that included a small ZANU-PF contingent would be an acceptable price for ending the violence, but is unlikely to happen.”

The Financial Times called for tighter sanctions and demanded that “Western financial institutions should be debarred from operating in Harare.”

US and UK policy is moving rapidly in this direction. President George Bush announced that he had instructed Condoleezza Rice and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to “develop sanctions against this illegitimate Government of Zimbabwe and those who support it.”

The giant mining company Anglo-American has come under intense pressure to abandon its planned investment in a Zimbabwe platinum mine. Barclays bank is coming under pressure to cease business in Zimbabwe after more than a century. The UK-based supermarket chain Tesco has announced that it has stopped sourcing goods from Zimbabwe.

These economic measures and the proposed sanctions will inevitably have more impact on the population of Zimbabwe than on the ruling elite, who have long since established their own secret channels for funding. Tesco, Barclays and Anglo-American are major employers in what is left of the formal economy in Zimbabwe.

Sanctions will mean that it will become even more difficult for hospitals to source medicines and for ordinary people unconnected with the regime to buy fuel. As the West tightens the screws on the Zimbabwean economy, more people will flock across the country’s borders to escape poverty and malnutrition.

The experience of the recent election has demonstrated that Morgan Tsvangirai’s opposition offers no alternative to Mugabe or to Western domination. From the outset, Tsvangirai’s party has been a pliant tool of the West and the international financial institutions.

Tsvangirai’s pusillanimous performance in the second round of the presidential elections seems to have convinced any potential backers in the West that he is useless for their purposes. He announced his withdrawal from the election last week with a letter to the Guardian in which he appealed for international military intervention. Within days he had denied that he ever sent that article to the paper. On its part the Guardian, while loath to discredit Tsvangirai, had to point out that they had received the article from the usual sources.

The “usual sources” turned out to be a “media consultant” who had provided 400 pieces under Tsvangirai’s byline for the Guardian, the Melbourne Age and the Washington Post. Inadvertently, Tsvangirai had admitted far more than he intended about the nature of his campaign and the extent to which it is run by big business interests and is far removed from the interests of the people who are being beaten and killed in Zimbabwe.

Northern Rock crisis deepens

Tim Holmes — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 09:54:18 +0000

What began as a crisis of liquidity for one bank has become a major political crisis for the British government. The failure of the attempt to bail out Northern Rock has led to serious political recriminations and conflicts among the political and financial elite as the Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown finds itself pouring money into a bottomless pit.

Northern Rock is the UK’s eighth largest bank. It has specialised in mortgage lending based on the availability of cheap credit. The credit crunch that followed the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market meant that Northern Rock was unable to raise loans. The Bank of England stepped in to provide loans when depositors scrambled to withdraw their money in the first run on a British bank since Overend and Gurney in 1866. Even Wall Street shuddered at the spectacle. The threat of contagion was felt internationally, and the Bank of England was forced to act.

That was in September. Now, three months later, the Bank’s action has not only not failed to resolve the crisis, but it has deepened it as it transformed bank deposits into public debt. The obligation shows no sign of lessening. In October, the Bank was lending £2 billion a week to Northern Rock. Its commitment to guarantee the depositors’ savings amounted to an estimated £24 billion—the equivalent of the entire annual transport budget.

Even that huge sum has been dwarfed by the Treasury’s announcement on Tuesday, December 18, that it will guarantee all wholesale deposits and borrowing that do not require collateral. It is estimated that the government’s exposure will increase to £100 billion, three times the annual defence budget or the equivalent of the National Health Service budget. The sum amounts to more than 16 percent of total public spending—all of which has been committed to one bank.

The Treasury’s announcement means that the fate of millions of ordinary working people is being pitted directly against the interests of a few wealthy finance capitalists. For this plutocratic layer, even the present credit crisis offers a means of making money. The immediate response of Northern Rock’s largest shareholder, the hedge fund SRM, was to increase its stake in the company. Northern Rock shares rose by 2.2 percent on the announcement of extra government funding.

The Treasury’s decision follows the attempt by central banks to stimulate the flow of credit by injecting funds into the international market. But tens of billions of dollars and a coordinated cut in interest rates have failed to restore confidence and have only confirmed the seriousness of the crisis facing the international banking system.

What had manifested itself initially as a crisis of liquidity is proving to be something else—a crisis of solvency. In guaranteeing Northern Rock’s wholesale debt, the Treasury has tacitly admitted that.

The problem is not a contingent one of liquidity caused by temporary market conditions, but a systemic one of solvency produced by the creation of massive amounts of fictitious capital. Northern Rock was able to maintain its business model because of the development of what has been termed ‘the shadow banking system.”

“A plethora of opaque institutions and vehicles have sprung up in American and European markets this decade,” according to the Financial Times, “and they have come to play an important role in providing credit across the financial system.” Their dealings never appear on the balance sheets of the “real” banks that use them. The full extent of this system is only becoming apparent now that it is imploding.

In the United States, the shadow banking system may have accounted for half of all new credit created in the last two years. Northern Rock was entirely dependent on the boom in cheap short-term credit that this market produced. The market in Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) and Collaterialised Debt Obligations (CDOs), in which the shadow banking system deals, is closely linked to the hedge funds that provide the equity that underpins the system. Both the hedge funds and the shadow banking vehicles rely on highly geared ratios of debt.

In one case “just $10m of real, unlevered hedge fund money supports an $850m mortgage-backed deal.” Satyajit Das, expert in derivatives, told the Financial Times, “This means $1 of real money is being used to create $85 of mortgage lending—credit creation far beyond the wildest dreams of high-street bankers.”

As investors withdraw their money from this shadow banking sector, something like a super-bank run is taking place. But it is not one that produces television footage like that at Northern Rock. The SIV sector is thought to have seen its value shrink by US$150 billion this year from its peak of US$400 billion with another US$400 billion lost from the CDOs. What has been termed the “Vehicular Finance Sector” is running into a multi-vehicle smash.

The pile-up leads back to the major banks, which are ultimately responsible for lines of credit they never thought they would have to realise. Nor do they have the assets to do so. Banks used to have the capital to cover their liabilities. But regulatory reform has allowed them to package their loans into bonds, which they have sold to other institutions. It is this process that lies behind the ballooning of credit in recent years.

Northern Rock created SIVs through what was supposedly a charity. It raised £71 billion through a trust called Granite, registered on the Channel Island tax-haven of Jersey. The trust’s prospectus says that profits “will be paid for the benefit of the Down’s Syndrome North East Association (UK) and for other charitable purposes.” However, the small charity Down’s Syndrome North East knew nothing about the trust and has so far received no donations.

Remarkably, this practice is entirely legal. Investigations by the Guardian have revealed that the business model employed by Northern Rock is far from unusual. Other major British banks have adopted the same strategy of bundling mortgages together and then using the package to raise loans through off-balance sheet trusts with charitable status. The trusts are not obliged to (and in practice rarely do) give anything to charity.

Twelve major banks have used the same technique to raise money on £234 billion of home loans. So complex is the structure created by this method that the full liabilities of the banks are unknown. In the case of Northern Rock, the £30 billion lent by the government may not be actually covered by the value of the home mortgages on their books.

Even if £30 billion is an accurate figure, it was based on the inflated house prices of recent years. House prices are now falling, and since Northern Rock often lent 90 percent or more of property value, it will not be long before the asset value no longer covers the Bank of England loan.

The Treasury stressed that its wholesale debt guarantee does not underwrite the liabilities of Granite. But it is difficult to see how the government can protect itself from this largely hidden mountain of debt. Nobody knows just how highly geared Northern Rock’s vehicular investment may be.

The government’s aim in guaranteeing Northern Rock’s wholesale debt was to make the company more attractive to a buyer. Two potential buyers exist—the Virgin group of Richard Branson and Olivant, a private equity company—but neither has been able to raise the finance necessary. No bank is willing to underwrite such a large deal and agree to repay the massive Bank of England loan when the credit markets are frozen. The result is that the government has been forced to make even more money available in an attempt to sugar the pill.

It is increasingly being recognised that the only alternative the government has is to nationalise Northern Rock. The government is said to have already drawn up proposals to do so.

Even so, significant interests remain wary of nationalisation. Robert Parker, head of asset management at Credit Suisse, assured the BBC that the Treasury guarantee does not make nationalisation more likely. The government is gambling that the central banks’ injection of funds into the international credit markets will eventually pay off in the New Year and allow a buyer to raise sufficient money. It will then avoid having to make a policy u-turn. But that scenario is looking increasingly unlikely.

Vince Cable, the caretaker leader of the Liberal Democrats, is one of the strongest advocates of nationalisation. He has been highly critical of the government. It “now seems to have got the worst of all possible worlds,” he told the BBC on Tuesday. “It’s effectively nationalised the liabilities of the bank while at the same time it doesn’t control it—it doesn’t own it, and if it is sold then all of the upside—all of the capital gains—will accrue to speculative investors and not to the taxpayers.”

The only practical option, Cable argues, is for the government to take Northern Rock over in the short term and sell it when market conditions improve. A broad consensus of opinion seems to favour that option. The Guardian and the Financial Times have both argued for nationalisation. They point to the precedent of the Long Term Credit Bank in Japan, which was nationalised in 1998 and then sold to a US private equity firm. The Bank of England stepped in to rescue the National Mortgage Bank in 1994, and the US government effectively nationalised Continental Illinois before selling it.

Even the shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has called for “the authorities to intervene and seize control of a financial institution when it is close to failing.” He warned in the Financial Times that the damage to the City of London continues every week that the future of Northern Rock hangs in the balance.

“We must stop the ugly sight of shareholders who have come in since September holding the taxpayer to ransom, when those shares would be worthless without the Bank’s support,” he said.

From a potential Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer this is remarkable language. But it reflects the scale of the crisis and the extent to which existing political formations and their economic programmes have been challenged by the collapse of the credit market.

Brown prides himself on having engineered the longest period of sustained economic growth since records began. He has been thrown into a political crisis by the sea-change that is taken place. His whole political perspective is based on the period of credit-fuelled economic growth. The credit crunch has destroyed the illusion of his financial competence and left his government seemingly paralysed.

Powerful figures are concerned at this situation. Rupert Murdoch’s economic adviser, Irwin Stelzer, took the unusual step of using the front page of the Times to attack Brown’s government at the weekend. Stelzer reports a Bank of England senior official saying that Gordon Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling are now “unable to focus because morale throughout the government is so low.”

For a government that has relied on Murdoch’s approval since the Blair administration came to power in 1997, Stelzer’s very public criticism is devastating. Murdoch wields this kind of power because he speaks, not just for himself and his media empire, but for the financial oligarchy on which the Labour government relies and to which it answers. The plutocratic elite want decisive action, even nationalisation, provided it is envisaged as a temporary measure and the prelude to selling Northern Rock back into the market once conditions allow.

In reality, there is no guarantee of any future recovery in the financial sector, but quite the reverse. Most analysts are predicting a major economic downturn in the New Year, in Britain and internationally. Nationalising Northern Rock under these conditions will have an “upside” only as far as its major investors are concerned, with the state paying them billions for shares that are worthless.

Ever since Labour came to power in 1997, it has set its face against nationalisations and has been committed to privatisation of public assets. For it to be forced to resort to such a measure—and to do so only in order to guarantee the investments of the supposedly superior private sector finance institutions—is more than merely an exposure of its free-market propaganda. It will be a grotesque example of its continued readiness to pick the pockets of working people in order to feather the nests of the major corporations and banks.

The Amis-Eagleton controversy: The British literary elite and the “war on terror”

JamieSW — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:25:26 +0000

The novelist Martin Amis appeared in the Guardian on Saturday to rebut the charge of racism that novelist and screen writer Ronan Bennett levelled against him the previous week in the same paper. Amis denied being a racist, professed himself disgusted by Islamophobia and praised the “beautiful reality” of Britain’s multi-racial society.

Amis then makes a switchback twist and declares that the issue is not one of racism, but ideology. In a liberal democracy, he argues, creed or colour does not matter unless some of its citizens believe in Sharia or the Caliphate or carry out acts of terrorism. Then, he declares, “numbers start to matter.”

Amis then proceeds to claim that the indigenous populations of Italy and Spain are set to halve over the next 35 years and that “this entails certain consequences.”

His remarks have a definite historical resonance—one with a far longer and even more sinister pedigree than when Margaret Thatcher said that Britain was being “swamped by an alien culture” in 1979.

Amis’s Guardian article was the latest salvo in a dispute that began after literary theorist Professor Terry Eagleton of the University of Manchester took issue with remarks Amis made in an interview in the Times last year. Shortly after the transatlantic terror alert of that year, Amis was reported to have said:

“What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational. It’s their own past they’re pissed off about; their great decline. It’s also masculinity, isn’t it?” (Interview with Ginny Dougary, Times, September 9, 2006)

Eagleton likened these remarks to “the ramblings of a British National Party thug,” located them in the context of the “War on Terror” and grouped Amis with other liberals and one-time leftist intellectuals who have moved sharply to the right. One year on, and only after being challenged by Eagleton, Amis claims to have been misquoted. His denial carries little weight. If Dougary did so, then Amis has had plenty of time to demand a correction, but he did not. Moreover, his reported remarks are perfectly consistent with his written remarks on the subject.

Eagleton even made the error of ascribing the offending passage to an essay by Amis published at the same time as the interview. His elementary mistake only serves to underline the symmetry of views expressed in the Times interview and the 12,000 word essay, “The Age of Horrorism,” published in the Observer.

In it Amis wrote, “Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam. That’s what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it.”

As far as Amis is concerned there is a clash of civilisations in which the enemy camp consists of all Moslems, who are equally tainted by the suicide bombings of Al Qaeda. They bear, according to Amis’s disjointed logic, a collective guilt for the crimes of their co-religionists.

He even reveals the context that gave rise to the words attributed to him in the Times, describing how he was held up at airport security for half an hour while his six-year-old daughter’s hand luggage was searched. He writes, “I wanted to say something like, ‘Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on aeroplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick to people who look like they’re from the Middle East.’”

Amis has insisted that there is a clear distinction between Islamophobia and his own anti-Islamism, as there is also a distinction between Islam and Islamism. But his writings make clear he does not believe that such a distinction counts for very much in practice. Rather “The Age of Horrorism” offers a series of sweeping and entirely unfounded judgements about Islam in general.

He writes of “the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture” which, he claims, was so resistant to Western influence that it refused to employ the wheel. This assertion is so bizarre that it ranks with the claims that the Nazis made about the Jews. The only Western influences to which the Islamic world was open, he then asserts, were those of Hitler and Stalin.

It would be painful to list the outstanding figures from Moslem backgrounds that have made contributions to world culture in answer to this filth. Nor would it be appropriate to refer to the many professionals on whom we rely for health care, legal advice and education to counter Amis’s assertions. And the caring neighbours, school friends and colleagues certainly have no place here.

Christopher Hitchens defended Amis by comparing him to Jonathan Swift and arguing that “the harshness Amis was canvassing was not in the least a recommendation, but rather an experiment in the limits of permissible thought.”

There is a truth to this assertion. But while Swift was testing the limits imposed on progressive thought by the conservative establishment, Amis is testing the limits once imposed on reactionary declamations within an academic and literary milieu previously known for its progressive liberalism. His interviews, essays and articles are pushing at the limits of a democratic ideology that has been shaped by the experience of the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century.

His methods and those of his supporters exemplify the cowardly way that large swathes of the liberal intelligentsia are making make their peace with the right. At one moment they lash out with a racist statement, the next they back off denying they ever said it, until emboldened by the support of their peers they attempt another attack. Feeling their way and testing all the time just how far they will be permitted to go, they move inexorably to the right.

The publication of “The Age of Horrorism” by the Observer is not the first time that this nominally liberal newspaper—and its week-day sister publication, the Guardian—has sought to legitimise the anti-democratic measures introduced by the Labour government by whipping up Islamophobia and fears over immigration. We can trace this editorial policy back to the Guardian’s publication of a three-part essay by David Goodhart, which claimed that the welfare state was untenable in an ethnically mixed society with a large immigrant population. The extent to which both publications speak for a social layer was evident from the fact that no prominent figure criticised Amis when his remarks were first published.

It was only once Eagleton had the courage to break ranks that it became difficult for journalists who had remained silent to any longer avoid commenting on his racist views. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in the Independent, categorized Amis as one “with the beasts pounding the back door, the Muslim-baiters and haters,” making the observation that such figures “these days are as likely to come from the Groucho and Garrick clubs as the nasty, secret venues used by Neo Fascists.”

The Groucho club is associated with the media and the Garrick club with the dramatic arts.

Equally tellingly, Amis responded with an attempt to invoke social solidarity, noting that only last summer, long after his remarks were published, he and Alibhai-Brown had enjoyed drinks together at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

Amis and Alibhai-Brown began their careers on the New Statesman. Amis has gone from being the cynical young man playing with left-wing ideas we see in his autobiographical Experience—when he liked to refer to the family home as the “fascist mansion”—to a man of the right. It is a journey that his friend from the New Statesman days Christopher Hitchens has also made.

Alibhai-Brown’s admission that Amis’s views are prevalent amongst the British literary elite is an important one. Always a privileged group, members of the literati were once marked out by their educational and cultural attributes rather than their wealth. But increasingly its representatives have been drawn into the orbit of, or even absorbed into, the plutocratic layer that has benefited from the plundering of the welfare state and the pillaging of the world’s resources by a renewed wave of imperialism. Vast sums of money have accumulated in the hands of a tiny oligarchy, which now sets the standards for the rest of society. The measure of intellectual and literary success has become the extent to which writers and intellectuals can be distinguished from the mass of the population by their bank accounts and real estate portfolios. Amis’s hate-filled essay expresses the deepest social interests of this group, because it gives voice to the sharpening class polarisation that has taken place on a global scale.

To call the literary princeling Amis a racist as Eagleton did is regarded by his peers as tantamount to an act of lèse majesté. In lining up to defend him, the literary elite were revealing their own social and, let us be frank, economic interests. That was clear from the rapidity with which the controversy focused on an attack on Eagleton for breaking ranks and on the question of Marxism. John Sutherland, professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, denounced Eagleton for making a public stand against his fellow Manchester University lecturer Amis—who Sutherland insisted might threaten Amis’s career—so that he could sell more copies of “a Marxist primer” that was “arguably, outdated.”

Michael Henderson in the Daily Telegraph wrote, “Neither Amis, nor anybody else, needs lectures on tolerance from old-style Marxists.” In the Observer, Jasper Gerrard wrote, “Quite why we still employ academics whose main qualification is their Marxism is a mystery.”

Amis himself condemned Eagleton in the Financial Times as “a marooned ideologue who can’t get out of bed in the morning without guidance from God and Karl Marx. This makes him very unstaunch in the struggle against Islamism because part of him is a believer.”

Here we see something of the deeper significance of this dispute. It is an attack on the accumulated social consciousness of centuries that have been illuminated by the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment and which culminated in Marxism and the great struggles of the working class for social equality. Amis and his defenders are guilty of an attempt to eradicate all that is humane and progressive in the Western intellectual tradition so that an eviscerated caricature can be held up as something that must be defended—by force if necessary—against the barbarism that supposedly emanates from the East and is embodied in Islamism.

Eagleton is no Marxist, but the fact that he refers favourably to Marx in his lectures and books is enough to condemn him in the eyes of Amis and his friends. The campaign they have launched is a considered attempt to outlaw Marxism and all progressive thought from the universities and wider intellectual circles. An association with Marxism, it appears, renders an internationally known academic unsuitable for employment in a university. Hence Sutherland closing his October 4 comment in the Guardian by asking, “Is Eagleton too big a beast on campus to be reprimanded for uncollegial conduct—if that is felt necessary by the university authorities? Or perhaps they agree with their professor of cultural theory.”

In giving Eagleton a kicking, the British literary elite are sending a message to younger and less well-established academics, to aspiring writers and to students that Marxism is not acceptable and that they had better adopt the same degenerate stance as Amis if they expect to be published, get promoted or be awarded any grade above a gamma minus.

The full extent of Amis’s project is clear when one considers the trajectory of his development from his days as literary editor of the reformist New Statesman to the publication of Koba the Dread in 2002. Koba purported to be an examination of the phenomenon of Stalinism.

There is a place for the skills of a novelist in such a project. It might even be argued that only novelists can provide us with the textural quality of history and that their work is as necessary as that of the historian to our understanding of the past. The ability of the novelist to reveal the emotional content of social relations is a skill particular to their craft that depends upon the development of their own subjective faculties and the linguistic technique with which to express their vision. That subjectivity which is so essential to their work demands, however, a basis in objectivity. A novel without that objective basis provides a display of technique alone. It may flash before us the images of a lurid fantasy, but the emotional response it elicits is akin to the way a commercial disturbs our emotions in order to deflect our critical faculties.

Koba has all the appearance of an adolescent, ill-informed, derivative and emotionally immature work although it is written by a man nearer 60 than 16. The appearance does not lie. In essence that is what the book is. Yet those negative qualities have been harnessed in a project as sophisticated as a piece of advertising. The product that Amis is selling us is the conception that Stalinism was the inevitable and necessary outcome of Marxism, that Stalin was the heir of Lenin and Trotsky and that the Soviet Union was the equivalent of Nazi Germany.

The aim of culture is to raise us to a truly human level, but a novel without objectivity degrades our humanity. Amis devotes page after page to the accounts of survivors of Stalin’s terror, to descriptions of the interrogations, the tortures and the camps. Yet there is no light of humanity in his account. He examines the monstrous crimes of Stalinism as though he were poking a dead cat with a stick. We emerge from the experience of reading with no sense of why these horrors happened or how they might have been prevented. Lenin and Trotsky, we are told, created a police state for Stalin’s use. But if that was the case, why was it necessary for Stalin to murder Trotsky and any one associated with him?

Trotsky, despite the title of the book which would lead a reader to suppose that it was about Stalin, emerges as the real subject of the Koba the Dread. Amis cannot help himself spitting venom on the page every time he writes the name. “Trotsky was never a contender for the leadership,” he writes. “In that struggle he was a mere poseur (reading French novels during meetings of the Central Committee): a Congress election result of 1921 put Trotsky tenth (and he didn’t come tenth because he was more humane). More basically Trotsky was a murdering bastard and a fucking liar. And he did it with gusto. He was a nun-killer—they all were.”

Amis has asserted that the British left’s “rampant” affinity with Hezbollah and hostility to Israel is the only real expression of racism—Anti-Semitism. It is revealing then that when he discusses the murder of Trotsky and his family he cannot prevent himself from using the name Bronstein—A name that Trotsky never used and by which his children, who took their mother’s name, were never known, but which was assiduously promulgated by Stalin when he wanted to cultivate an anti-Semitic hatred of Trotsky. Amis unwittingly reveals that at the heart of the Zionism he has espoused sits a deep revulsion towards a particular layer of Jewish intellectuals and workers whose cultivated and progressive ideas both Stalin and Hitler wanted to eradicate from the heart of European culture.

For Amis, the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. But whereas he has an aesthetic aversion to Bush, he dreads an American defeat. He fears that the “coalition adventure has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation.” His fear makes him willing to sign up for the war against terror and urges him to recruit others to the cause. His books draw on the ideologues of neo-conservatism and White House advisers such as Bernard Lewis. Transmuted through his books, views that would be abhorrent to Guardian readers are repackaged to become acceptable in literary circles that would despise Bush and his Christian fundamentalism.

Amis is one of the darlings of the British literary establishment, rarely out of the quality papers since he published his first novel at the age of 24 and long expected to fulfil the literary promise expected of Kingsley Amis’s son. His prominence has made him a suitable figure to engineer a shift in the social consciousness of wider layers of educated people who look to novelists and journalists as a source of cultural guidance. We are witnessing a concerted effort to make the “War on Terror” respectable and to create an acceptable face for neo-imperialism in the Middle East.

Wilson Coup - Part Two

Alex Doherty — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 23:24:54 +0000

This is the conclusion of a two-part article reviewing the BBC 2 documentary The Plot against Harold Wilson. Part 1 was posted on April 19.

The media have always dismissed the formation of private armies in the 1970s as the work of a few retired military men, disgruntled with the modern world, who were little more than figures of fun. The reference to Lord Mountbatten immediately links them into a wider pattern of conspiracy that stretched over a longer period and gives them a greater significance than they would have as isolated acts.

The fact that the hostility towards Labour leader Harold Wilson was only a specific expression of more general political fears of the danger of social revolution played itself out in the events following the election of the Conservative government of Edward Heath, which replaced the Wilson government in 1970.

In the next years Heaths attempts to crush the power of the organised working class met with fierce resistance that eventually brought his government down in 1974. During this period and that of the incoming Labour government, again led by Wilson, the threat of a military coup was at its most advanced.

Retired senior military officers such as General Sir Walter Walker, NATO Commander of Northern Europe in 1969-72, and Major Alexander Greenwood began to organize private armies. They feared that the cuts which Labour and Conservative governments had imposed on military spending made it impossible for the armed forces to respond to a revolutionary upheaval without support from unofficial support.

Greenwood explained to the documentary team how the situation had seemed to people of his background. I came back from a cruise down the Rhine to discover to my horror that interest rates were 15 percent for one month certain, I discovered that the unions were striking again, the IRA were dropping bombs around. It was no longer a green and pleasant land, England. I thought the BBC would break down for one thing. I thought the trains would fail to run. London airport would not function anymore. The ports would be stagnant. There would be complete chaos in the land. You know the people who work in the City of London were not liking it and people who work as stockbrokers usually come from the best schools and a lot of them have titles and they werent liking it at all.

I know the Queenshe wasnt very happy with Mr. Harold Wilsonbut there wasnt much she could do about it at that time. And Lord Mountbatten rang up Sir Walter Walker one evening and said, If you want any help from me will you let me know. Sir Walter Walker had prepared a sort of speech, which the Queen might read out on the BBC that asked the people to stand behind the armed forces as there was a breakdown of law and order and the government could not keep the unions in control.

Official preparations were also being made for that situation. In a brief shot the programme showed a previously unseen government document which confirmed that the Conservative government of Edward Heath had been making plans for emergency rule. It listed measures including the requisitioning of television and radio stations and the post office, the call-up of a volunteer labour force, the requisition of transport and the preparation of food depots with supplies for four weeks and the stockpiling of fuel.

Heath was prime minister for just four years, but in that time he declared five states of emergency. [3] When we consider that emergency powers were only invoked 12 times during the whole period between 1920 and 1982 the intensity of the crisis is evident. Workers leaders were imprisoned for defying the anti-trade union laws. The government ordered industry on to a three-day week to conserve fuel when power workers went on strike. Unemployment reached record levels. In Northern Ireland paratroopers shot dead unarmed civilians. In January 1974, when the Heath government was in dispute with the miners, the army was deployed at Heathrow.

Marcia Williams recalled this incident in her interview with Courtiour and Penrose. I still believe that operation they mounted at the airportthe one where everyone was so secretly briefedwhich was this how you deal with terroriststhat wasnt an operation to deal with terrorists. She went on, It was a rehearsal, nothing more. There was all the terrific mobilisation, the alert was on, there wasall through Whitehallalong the airport road, up and down, landing and getting out.

There were a number of troop mobilisations that year under the most fraught political conditions. It is still not known who authorised them. Wilson knew nothing about them in advance. Nobody had warned him the manoeuvres were about to take place.

Williams described how she and Wilson had speculated that this might be the beginning of a coup. At one point she joked grimly about how they would discuss it often in the stateroom at the back [of No. 10] that the guns would be trained on us from Horse Guards Parade.

Operation Clockwork Orange

There is now evidence that the military was preparing a coup in 1974. In February, Heath called an election believing he could win a mandate to crush the miners. He failed to win a majority, but did not concede defeat. He remained in Downing Street for four days. Lord Carver, the former chief of the defence staff, later admitted that discussion of military intervention took place. He told the Cambridge Union on March 3, 1980 that he had taken action to make certain that nobody was so stupid as to go around saying those things. The discussions had taken place, he claimed, among not very senior, but fairly senior officers.

Lord Carver was a very political general who was acutely aware of the danger of a confrontation with the working class. He also revealed before he died in 2001 that Quinton Hogg, Lord Chancellor under Heath, suggested that it was legal for the army to shoot unarmed civilians. In a Channel 4 interview in 1994 Carver said, It was being suggested that it was perfectly legal for the army to shoot somebody, whether or not they thought that they were being shot at. Because anybody who obstructed or got in the way of the armed forces of the queen was, by that very act, the queens enemy, and this was being put forward by a legal luminary in the cabinet. And I said to the prime minister that I could not, under any circumstances, order a Britishor allow a British soldierto be ordered to do such a thing, because it would not be lawful. [4]

Carver presented himself as a moderate voice in an atmosphere of growing hysteria. He was probably being more than a little disingenuous. One his protégés was Major General Frank Kitson, who wrote the book Low Intensity Operations in which he advocated the use of the army in a civil war situation in Britain. Carver wrote a glowing foreword to the book. It is more likely that he opposed the turn to violent confrontation because Heath did not have the whole of the ruling class fully behind him. The prospect of a Labour government that would give the Tories a breathing space seemed to some to be more realistic than a head-on collision.

Wilson ultimately came to power leading a minority government, but the political tensions were by no means dissipated. Troops were mobilized again in June, July and September. In October, Wilson secured a majority in the second election that year. In both elections MI5 officers fed material to the press claiming that Wilson was a Soviet agent.

A key part of the disinformation against Wilson was the operation code named Clockwork Orange, which was run by the Information Policy Unit that worked out of the Army Press Office in Northern Ireland in conjunction with MI5. Colin Wallace was a Ministry of Defence press officer who was involved in Clockwork Orange. He was later framed and imprisoned for manslaughter when he attempted to expose this operation. Wallace told the documentary team how the Information Policy Unit briefed the press with false information that linked Wilson and other Labour MPs to Soviet intelligence and the IRA.

The intelligence community, Wallace explained, believed that the government of the day was unable or unwilling to take the necessary measures to deal with the threatwith the scale of the threat. They believed they were the guardians of the United Kingdom. They felt that the political machinery was incapable of giving them support or introducing the policies that would enable them to deal with that threat.

He went on, The information that I received was related to political unreliability. It was quite clear that this information was designed not just to discredit him in a general sense, but bearing in mind that we were in a period running up to a general election, that that information would, most likely, have had a fairly major impact on how the public viewed him.

As in so many other respects the British occupation of Northern Ireland became a focus for the most reactionary forces in UK society and measures developed there came to be employed in Britain itself. The security apparatus that was designed to combat Irish republicanism was directed against British workers too.

What emerged from the documentary was that Wilson already knew about Wallaces activities in 1976. He told Penrose and Courtiour to speak to him, but they failed to follow up the lead. Had they done so, Wilsons suspicion that the security services were attempting to smear him would have been confirmed.

As Wallace pointed out, One of the main by-products of the disinformation campaign of 1973-74 was the dramatic growth of paramilitary organisations in the United Kingdom. The efforts of Walker and Greenwood were complemented by those of former intelligence officer Brian Crozier to liaise with serving officers.

When Crozier was asked by the interviewer if he had spoken with top brass of the military, he replied, Well, at the risk of making myself unpopular, they were [top brass], but they didnt wantfor reasons that you and I can understandthey didnt want any of that to be made public.

Lord Chalfont, who was a Labour defence minister and Foreign Office minister, confirmed this. He said, If youre talking about people who had a serious idea of a military coup, yes, they would be fairly senior people.

Many questions remain unanswered

The BBC documentary has done something to revive the question of the conspiracies against the Wilson government, but it was an unsatisfactory programme which raised as many questions as it answerednot least of which is the question of what happened after Wilson resigned. It cannot be imagined that the ruling elite ceased to operate in this way once Wilson had left the scene, since he was only part of the problem. The real issue was how they should discipline the working class in a period that had a pre-revolutionary character.

Wilsons resignation shifted leadership of the Labour Party to James Callaghan, a man with impeccable credentials as far as the intelligence services were concerned. It was under Callaghan that Labour was to ditch its commitment to Keynesian-style welfare measures as it lurched ever further to the right. It was eventually brought down by the working class following the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent.

During its period out of office, forces within the Conservative Party grouped around Margaret Thatcher developed an entirely new strategy based on a monetarist economic agenda and a determination to rectify Heaths failure to make a decisive reckoning with the working class.

The BBC documentary did not explore to what extent the forces that were behind Thatcher were the same ones that had been involved in the plans to carry out a coup. Crozier, who admits to discussing a coup with senior officers, was among her advisers. One revealing comment about the connection between Thatcher and the right-wing forces that had planned to oust Wilson came from Jonathan Aitken, who described how in the mid-1970s CIA head James Angleton had enlisted him to get a private message to Thatcher about Soviet penetration in the UK.

However, the programme did not go on to examine the military and security preparations that were being made behind the scenes during Thatchers confrontation with the miners in 1984. In many respects Thatchers government represented the fulfilment of the aims of the earlier conspiracies. Indeed, her attitude to what she described as the enemy within was identical to that of the coup plotters of the 1970s.

A military coup proved to be unnecessary because the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour leaders were able to direct the militancy of the working class into a purely syndicalist struggle that did not raise the question of political power. Elements of the ruling elite may have feared that they were facing a revolution, but workers themselves were left in ignorance of the depth of the crisis.

The only socialist organisation that attempted to warn workers about the secret preparations for military rule and the danger they faced was the Workers Revolutionary Party, the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. It produced a pamphlet entitled Britains State within the State based on articles originally in its newspaper, the News Line. None of the Labour politicians who had themselves been the subject of smears and political attacks saw fit to expose the conspiracy against the working class. Radical political parties ridiculed the WRPs warnings.

The full extent of the right-wing conspiracy did not become apparent at the time and is only being revealed decades later. It is now evident that the state within the state was working against an elected government which had the support of large sections of the working class. The political implications are immense and are not confined to the past. Parliamentary democracy is often thought of as the inevitable and unassailable form of government in the UK. Westminster is regarded as the Mother of Parliaments and Britain reckoned to be a mature democracy. Its political class is considered well used to dealing with crises that elsewhere would result in some form of military or authoritarian rule. That kind of thing is not supposed to happen in Britain.

In fact, parliamentary democracy is far less stable than the official history of postwar Britain would have us believe. The loss of empire, the decline of manufacturing industry, the devaluation of the pound, and the revolutionary upsurge of the working class in the late 1960s and early 1970s were not managed as smoothly as the ruling elite would like to pretend. Britain came close to joining the military dictatorships of the period. The evidence contained in the documentary serves as a warning against the complacent assumption that parliamentary democracy was written into the DNA of the British ruling class with Magna Carta.

Today, British parliamentary democracy is no more stable than it was 30 years ago. In fact, it has become far less viable as social inequality has increased and the mass of the population has become effectively disenfranchised from the political process. Thirty years ago retired army officers and aristocrats could plot to overthrow an elected government; today a tiny elite, who have become stupendously rich from globally mobile capital, are no less arrogant in their political presumptions and no less lacking in democratic sensibilities.

Concluded

Notes:

3. Richard Thurlow, The Secret State: British Internal Security in the Twentieth Century, (Blackwell, 1994).

4. British Irish Rights Watch www.birw.org/bsireports/51_70/report59.html and Tony Geraghty, The Irish War, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

Wilson Coup - Part One

Alex Doherty — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 17:00:06 +0000

This is the first part of a two-part article reviewing the BBC 2 documentary The Plot against Harold Wilson.

For the past 30 years rumours that the security services were plotting against the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and that preparations were being made for a coup have been dismissed as a paranoid fantasy. The general tenor of press comment has been that Wilson was already in the grip of the Alzheimers disease that eventually killed him when he made his allegations of a plot against him. But a recent BBC documentary has confirmed that the security services, top military figures, leading businessmen and members of the royal family were conspiring against Labour governments led by Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s.

The programme was broadcast on March 16 to coincide with the anniversary of Wilsons resignation in 1976. It was based on interviews that BBC journalists Barry Penrose and Roger Courtiour conducted with Wilson and his private secretary Marcia Williams shortly after he resigned. The tapes were made secretly and have never before been broadcast or made public. Despite their considerable historical value, they have remained in Penroses attic ever since. Only a small portion of more than 70 hours of recording were dramatised in the documentary.

Various rumours were circulated to explain Wilsons sudden resignationas the result of threats by the security services to reveal evidence that he was a Soviet agent, that he had compromised himself by having an affair with Marcia Williams, or more prosaically that early stages of Alzheimers disease had convinced him that it was time to go. But the documentary made clear that Wilson wanted to expose those who were seeking to discredit him and wanted the activities of the security services investigated. He invited Penrose and Courtiour to his house with the specific intention of telling them about his suspicions and gave them valuable leads that would enable them to pursue their inquiries. Far from being afraid of exposure, Wilson wanted the case brought out into the open.

Wilson attempted to impress on the two reporters the need for investigative journalism. The Watergate scandal had forced President Richard Nixon to resign only two years before. What I have to say to you, Wilson told them, is of the utmost seriousness. Democracy as we know it is in grave danger. Prominent people are coming under attack. I think you as journalists should investigate the forces which are threatening democratic countries like Britain. The dirty tricks that have been going on against myself and also my government.

He warned them of Business groups and other antidemocratic agencies, these people are putting our whole idea of democracy at risk. This was, as Penrose said in the documentary, Mind blowing stuff. Wilson was offering himself as their Deep Throat. Unfortunately, it was not an offer that Penrose and Courtiour were able or willing to take up. They allowed themselves to be increasingly diverted into investigating the scandal surrounding Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe. [1] As a result, the extent and seriousness of the antidemocratic measures that powerful forces were taking in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s continued to be obscured by rumour and have remained so until the present day.

In the intervening years various aspects of the events of those years have emerged, but official spokesmen have generally denied claims that there was a conspiracy and the media have ridiculed the very idea that there was ever a serious plan to carry out a coup. What became apparent from the documentary was that senior civil servants, government ministers and journalists are now prepared to admit that a conspiracy took place.

A key piece of evidence was a brief interview with Lord Hunt, who was cabinet secretary from 1973 to 1979 and conducted an official inquiry into Wilsons claim that the secret services were bugging 10 Downing Street. Hunt confirmed that the security services thought Wilson was a Soviet agent and were working against him and his government. A top civil servant has never made such a statement in public before. Hunts report was not released to the National Archives when other documents from the period were made available and is clearly still regarded as highly sensitive.

Hunt attempted to excuse what the security services had done. All he said was, I dont think they [the security services] were people who were in any sense evil. They were people who, on the whole, followed a train of thought that the Russians used to try and entrap everybody. They must have tried with him, [Wilson]. They must have succeeded.

When Peter Wright, the former assistant director of MI5, attempted to publish his memoirs detailing these events the British government banned the book and the cabinet secretary at the time, Sir Robert Armstrong, went to Australia in an attempt to prevent its publication there in 1986. It seems that cabinet secretaries have become a little less economical with the truth on this matter since then.

Hunts oblique remark tacitly accepted that the security services had been attempting to undermine the government of the day. The implications of his admission are enormous. If the security services thought Wilson was the agent of a hostile power they would not have been doing their duty if they had not tried to topple his government. Under those circumstances they would have turned to the military, to the press, to politicians and to prominent businessmen to assist them. The lineaments of a wide-ranging plot begin to take shape. Evidence of such a plot has long existed, but Hunts statement puts it on a firm historical basis for the first time.

It should be said that no evidence has even been produced to indicate that Wilson was a Soviet agent and the idea that he, or someone close to him, was is not entirely incredible. The UK intelligence services had themselves been penetrated by Soviet agents and since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Eastern European regimes the existence of other agents has been revealed, but no evidence has ever emerged to suggest that Wilson or any of his staff was a spy or agent of influence. It is difficult to believe that some enterprising historian with anticommunist views would not have published such evidence had it existed.

Nonetheless, for a large part of his career and throughout his time as prime minister from 1964 to 1970 and again in 1974-76 Wilson was the object of a smear campaign that emanated from the British security services and the CIA. They fed material to the press that appeared to substantiate the view that he was a Soviet agent who had been put in place after the KGB had supposedly murdered Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. In the course of the documentary, the Daily Express defence correspondent Chapman Pincher unapologetically admitted his part in spreading those rumours.

Some members of the security services may have come to believe their own fabrication, but essentially the smears against Wilson were part of the plot against him, not the cause of it. To understand why Wilson became the victim of such an elaborate campaign and why powerful figures plotted to carry out a coup against him it is necessary to look at the political character of the period.

The background to the Wilson governments

Early in his career Wilson had been associated to some degree with the left of the Labour Party. By the time he became prime minister in 1964 he was on the right of the party, although he was still capable of using demagogic attacks on the Tories to win popular support.

Nevertheless, he headed a government that had come to power under conditions of a political crisis for the Conservative Party, and with the support of a militant working class that was demanding social change. Labours youth movement, the Young Socialists, was dominated by the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League, forcing the party leadership to carry out witch-hunts and expulsions. On the industrial front, many trade unions were led by members of the Communist Party and there was a powerful shop stewards movement as a result of rank-and-file disaffection with the union tops.

Wilsons government attempted to introduce anti-trade union legislation to prevent strikes and imposed the largest package of spending cuts that had ever been seen. In other words, he did everything he could to resolve the crisis that British capitalism faced and to place the burden of that crisis on ordinary working people. But he still became the focus of political fears in ruling circles that Labour in power was only a stepping stone to revolution.

The CIA was particularly alarmed at developments in Britain. The belief of James Angleton, the head of counter intelligence, that Britain was becoming ungovernable was cited by the documentarys makers. Angleton also believed that Wilson was a Soviet mole on the basis of testimony from the Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn. Interviewed on the documentary, former Tory minister Jonathan Aitken described how Angleton told him of his suspicions about Wilson.

Angleton is often thought to have been clinically paranoid, but his suspicion of Wilson was an expression of the more general political paranoia within ruling circles. During the Cold War it became impossible for men like Angleton to see the movement of the working class as anything other than the work of Soviet agitators and agents.

The worst political fears of these layers of the possibility that the UK government would lose control of events seemed validated by the revolutionary eruptions that developed in Europe and internationally between 1968 and 1975. It was in this period that the smear campaign against Wilson dramatically broadened into preparations for a coup. It was carried out by forces that saw the military coup that took place in Chile against the social democratic government of Salvador Allende in 1973 as the correct response to the threat posed to bourgeois rule by the working class.

The documentary compressed a great deal of material into a short space and failed to distinguish clearly between the different episodes and incidents it described. It presented evidence that related to a number of distinct conspiracies widely separated in time. All these different events were combined in the programme as though they were part of one generalised coup plot that was hatched over a brief space of time. Generally, the coup plot is portrayed as an aberrant response by a few members of the security services who let their paranoia get the better of them. However, ultimately, good sense and wiser counsels prevailed.

That was very much the impression that Lord Hunt and some of the other interviewees on the programme wished to convey. Lord William Waldegrave, a minister under the Conservative Thatcher and Major administrations, described the sense of despair. Tension over Vietnam. The collapse of the economy. The sense of all the institutions … none of them working. Britain forever sliding down every league table you could think of.

Waldegrave indicated the hostility with which ruling layers viewed Wilsons government. Taxes [were] at unimaginable levels now. The top rate of income tax was 98 percent.

Something had to be done. He freely acknowledged, There were people talking about coup détats. Lord Mountbatten was going to become head of some sort of junta that was going to rescue us, and so on. Where was this going to end?

A coup was avoided, Waldegrave argued, because in the end the democracy produced the counter-weight which produced the new policies that produced some kind of solution. This blue-blooded aristocrat, who can trace his ancestry back to the Stuarts, knows the value of preserving the forms of parliamentary rule rather than risking the open class confrontation that a military coup would have entailed.

Lord Mountbatten and the formation of private armies

However, the evidence suggests that the plot against Wilson was one small part of a larger picture that involved a protracted period of planning and involved a number of different, but interconnected, sections of the British ruling elite, with the assistance of the South African security service BOSS and elements in the CIA.

This was not a moment of madness, nor was it the work of a few, isolated hot-heads who were responding ineptly to the political tensions of a particular historical conjuncture. The conspiracies of the period were determined by a complex series of historical processes that can be traced back to the first decades of the twentieth century when Britain began to lose its position of hegemony in the world. Fuelled by the Cold War, they reached a peak between 1968 and 1975.

The conspiracies alluded to in the programme can be traced from at least 1965 when, in response to the unilateral declaration of independence by the white-minority regime in what was then Rhodesia, the Earl of Cromartie and a group of Scottish aristocrats with SAS connections planned to set up a government under Lord Mountbatten. The following year, Mountbatten was involved in discussion with another group of conspirators who wanted to replace Wilson. Daily Mirror press baron Lord Cecil King planned what he called an emergency government or national government. King had initially approached Denis Healey, then chancellor of the exchequer, as a potential prime minister of a government that was to include Conservative politicians and leading businessmen. The proposed presence of a Labour politician may have given the plans a less sinister appearance, but at the same time preparations were well advanced to use the remote Shetland Islands as an internment camp. [2]

The Earl of Cromartie plot was merged with these later episodes in the BBC documentary in a confusing way. But one useful piece of information did emerge from the programme when, in the course of an interview with Major Alexander Greenwood, it became clear that Mountbatten was also involved with the private armies that various ex-military men were setting up in the mid-1970s.

Mountbatten emerges a significant figure in the plots against the Wilson Labour government. He seems to have been the point at which many of the different networks of conspirators intersected. In part this was due to the record of his own career. He was the last Viceroy of India and responsible for implementing the division of the subcontinent that resulted in bloody massacres and lasting communal antagonisms. As chief of defence staff from 1959 to 1965 he had contacts with all sections of the military. In addition, he was a member of the royal familya great-grandson of Queen Victoria. As such he might have been capable of playing a constitutional role himself, or at least had privileged access to the Queen. The extensive and ill-defined role of Crown prerogative in the unwritten British constitution could conceivably allow a military coup to be carried out in perfect legality, since all members of the military take an oath to the monarch, not Parliament, the government, or the constitution. In most cases, Crown prerogative works to the advantage of the government of the day because it allows the prime minister to act arbitrarilyas in declaring war. But should significant sections of the ruling elite be hostile to the government, it could easily allow an elected government to be overthrown with the backing of the monarch.

To be continued

Notes:

1. In 1978 Jeremy Thorpe was accused and acquitted of hiring a hit man to kill his alleged former lover, Norman Scott.

2. The conspiracies against Wilson are traced in Stephen Dorrill and Robin Ramsay, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, (Harper Collins, 1992) and in David Leigh, The Wilson Plot, (Heinemann, 1988).

Dissent at the Oxford Union

Alex Doherty — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:34:11 +0000

The Oxford Union Society is the most famous debating society in the world. It has hosted such controversial figures as Malcom X, who demanded black empowerment by any means necessary, and Richard Nixon, who made his first public speech there after Watergate. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams spoke there at a time when UK television was banned from broadcasting his voice, and the Ulster unionist demagogue Reverend Ian Paisley caused an uproar when he denounced Catholicism at the Oxford Union.

One of the most famous motions ever debated at the Oxford Union was, This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country, which was passed in 1933 by 275 votes to 153. The motion was denounced in the press and in Parliament. Winston Churchill declared it to be abject, squalid and shameless. The Union was accused of encouraging Hitler to invade to invade Europe.

The Oxford Union, the societys web site states, believes first and foremost in freedom of speech: nothing more, nothing less.

It is all the more surprising therefore that an organization that is no stranger to controversy, and indeed actively courts it, should have acted to censor and curtail a demonstration that was organized by Survival International when Botswanas President Festus Mogae visited the Union on Friday, March 14.

Members of the Union, as well as activists from Survival International, were asked to leave the building or were escorted from the grounds as soon as they revealed their political sympathieseither by asking pointed questions about the treatment of the San Bushmen, who are the indigenous inhabitants of the Kalahari Desert, distributing leaflets or exposing T-shirts with slogans protesting the treatment of the Bushmen.

Survival International says that in total 25 of its supports were thrown out of the union grounds, including most significantly some members of the Union from the debate itself.

The groups director Stephen Corry, who is a Union member, was one of those expelled by burly security guards. One protesteranother Union membertold the World Socialist Web Site that she had been seated in the front row of the debate and had asked President Mogae about his governments treatment of the Bushmen. She and another woman then stood up and removed their jerseys to reveal T-shirts with the slogan Botswana Police Shoot Bushmen. A steward immediately approached them and put his hand on the womans shoulder, saying, I think we are going to have to ask you to leave now. They were escorted out of the meeting and onto the street.

Survival Internationals press release compared the incident to the expulsion of 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang from the Labour Party conference and a similar point was made in a report by the Independent newspaper. Wolfgang was manhandled out of the conference and when he tried to return was prevented from doing so by police who cited anti-terrorist legislation in justification of their actions. In total 600 people were stopped by the police and questioned in the vicinity of the Labour Party conference under anti-terror legislation, many of them protesters including some targeted for wearing T-shirts.

Events at the Oxford Union were more low-key and the body insists that hostile questions were indeed asked of Mogae, in what was a successful debate. Anti-terror legislation was not cited and though Special Branch was involved in organizing security it is impossible to know whether the police played any direct part in removing protesters. But after the protesters were removed from the grounds, police were called to prevent them from leafleting those leaving following the debate.

Whatever the contradictory accounts given, such a response to a fairly small and well-behaved demonstration at an institution famous for robust debate indicates the extreme nervousness within official circles towards any manifestation of political dissent, as well as a growing readiness to respond by suppressing free speech. When seen against the backdrop of the passing by the government of anti-terror legislation and other measures undermining democratic rights, it is a worrying development.

The Oxford Union is not an official part of the political system, but it has acted as a training ground for generations of political figures in Britain and beyond since the days of Gladstone to more recent figures such as Edward Heath, Tony Benn, Benazir Bhutto and Tariq Ali. Its tradition of debate has played a significant part in training political leaders capable of defending not only British government policy, but the actions of its political allies internationally. Nevertheless as with all such institutions, it has acted as a democratic forum in which students have been able to hear dissenting opinion and form their own political views on the world. If the authorities now deem certain views to be unacceptable and attempt to deny them a hearing, it is an indication of a more general erosion of essential civil liberties.

The issues highlighted by Survival International and its supporters amongst Oxfords student body about the Botswana governments treatment of the Bushmen and its relationship with giant mining company De Beers are important ones.

The Bushmen live in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, an area that is unsuitable for agriculture but is rich in diamonds. De Beers controls the mining rights in the area. It denies that it wants to remove the local inhabitants, but since 1997 the government has been forcibly moving them to purpose-built settlements.

Bushmen state that armed game wardens and other government officials have confiscated their animals and forbidden them to hunt or collect food. So intensive was the official presence, according to Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg, that when Bushmen went to relieve themselves they found that they had an armed escort.

According to the BBC there have been beatings and tortures. Water tanks and wells have been broken and concreted over in an effort to force the Bushmen to move. A group of 240 Bushmen are currently taking the Botswana government to court demanding the right to return. Their lawyer Glyn Williams told reporters last year, The essence is the right of the people to continue to reside on their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. We believe that right is enshrined within the constitution, and forcibly removing the residents from their land by unlawfully terminating services is to deprive them of that right.

Last month police fired rubber bullets at a group of Bushmen who were trying to re-enter the game reserve. The government claims that the police were attacked and that they removed 35 Bushmen from the reserve, but deny that they did so at gunpoint. A number of Bushmen were arrested, including Roy Sesana, a prominent elder.

Botswana is seen as a model of good governance in Africa. The country is rated as the best credit risk in Africa. Its per capita income, at $9,200, is among the highest on the continent. Globally, Botswana ranks as a middle-income country. This relative wealth is dependent entirely on diamonds, which account for 80 percent of the countrys exports.

The diamond industry is largely in the hands of one companyDe Beers Botswana Mining Company (Debswana), which is jointly owned by the government and De Beers.

Only a small part of the population has benefited from the income that has come from diamonds. The majority of people still live below the poverty line. In 2003 life expectancy was 40 years. Approximately one in three are infected with HIV-AIDS.

Oxford, the alma mater of Sir Cecil Rhodes, who carved out a fortune for himself and an empire for Britain in Southern Africa with De Beers, is an entirely appropriate place to raise questions about these issues.

Live 8 - Good PR for Blair and Bush

Alex Doherty — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 13:22:55 +0000

In what was dubbed the final push, the last Live 8 concert took place in Edinburgh on July 6 as heads of state assembled at Gleneagles for the G8 conference. A rain-soaked crowd of 50,000 heard Nelson Mandela say via video link, In this new century millions of people in the worlds poorest countries remain imprisoned and enslaved in chains. They are in the prison of poverty. Its time to set them free.

The Edinburgh concert marked the end of a truly massive media event. Five million people are said to have logged on to AOLs live video stream of the Saturday, July 2, concerts. Upward of a million people are said to have attended the Live 8 events. Hundreds of millions are reported to have watched the concerts on TV. A quarter of a million people marched through the streets of Edinburgh.

The scale of the Live 8 event was spectacular. But its essential aim was of a far more politically sinister character than its altruistic pose would suggest. It was organised and backed by individuals and organisations with close ties to the Labour government of Tony Blair, and had the official backing of the government itself. By boosting the pitiful debt relief package agreed on by the G8 and hailing the proposals of Blairs own Commission for Africa for aid and relief tied to free-market initiatives, it set out to provide a much-needed mask of humanitarian concern to both Blair and US President George W. Bush.

The organisers of the event and its leading spokesmenBob Geldof and Bonoboth harked back to the legacy of Live Aid, Live 8s 1985 predecessor. But whereas Live Aid raised millions of pounds to combat famine in Ethiopia, they stressed that this time they did not want your money. Echoing Lord Kitcheners 1914 call for army recruits, they wanted You!

However, this is not to say that no money changed hands. The 10 concerts cost £25 million to stage. £1.6 million was paid to the Princes Trust to persuade that organisation to cancel its Party in the Park. Performers were not paid, though those at the Philadelphia concert reportedly got gifts worth £1,700. Perhaps the greatest payoff will be in the boost the concerts give to record sales. Sir Paul McCartneys performance of Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band was on sale within hours. London record shops reported a 1,000 percent increase in sales for Pink Floyd CDs the next day. David Gilmour, Floyds lead guitarist, immediately announced that his share would go to charity, and some other artists followed suit. But the royalties paid to artists are just a small proportion of the profits made from sales by the record companies. And there have been no magnanimous gestures from this quarter.

Moreover, in a digital world, CD sales represent a declining section of the market compared to sponsorship, broadcast rights and merchandising. Most of the costs of the event will be recouped in this way, and it is here that much of the profit and relatively cheap and phenomenally lucrative publicity will be sought. Naked commercialism was evident in even the most ostensibly charitable aspects of the operation. White Make Poverty History wristbands have been one of the most visible emblems of the campaign. From the start, they have been surrounded by controversy. It has been reported that some of these wristbands were made in Chinese sweatshops.

Journalist Stuart Hodkinson revealed in Red Pepper magazine that some of the wristbands were being sold with the logos of companies that are accused of violating workers rights. This included fashion company Tommy Hilfiger, accused by Stephen Coats, Executive Director of the US/Labor Education in the Americas Project of being at the bottom of the list in demonstrating refusal to accept responsibility for the way workers are treated. The offending wristbands were being sold at shops owned by Scottish millionaire Tom Hunter, who has pledged £1 million to the Make Poverty History campaign.

However, Hunter is a relatively small player compared to some of the corporate enterprises that have been signed up. The backing that Live 8 has won from media mogul Rupert Murdoch is just one indication that a massive business machine has been set in motion. Murdochs British tabloid the Sun gave the event enthusiastic support, although it is not a paper noted for its interest in Africa or liberal causes. It is, however, a key supporter of Blair.

The Murdoch and Live 8 connections are close. Elisabeth Murdoch, Rupert Murdochs daughter, is married to Matthew Freud, one of the organisers. Freud runs a leading public relations company that is, according to the Financial Times, one of the most influential in the UK. It has the largest media and entertainment client list in the country, with clients including famous actors and major companies such as AOLof which more later. He and his wife also have connections to the Blair government. They sit on various government committees, and his company, Freud Communications, has organised events for both the government and the Labour Party.

Freuds sister, Emma, is married to Richard Curtis, the writer/director/producer responsible for Love Actually, the Bridget Jones movies, Notting Hill, Mr Bean and Four Weddings and a Funeral. His latest film, The Girl in the Café, is a love story set at a fictional G8 conference, and is supposed to show how ordinary people of conscience can persuade the political establishment to do good. He is among those who founded the charity Comic Relief in the wake of Live Aid. Curtis has been one of the main organisers of Live 8. He is said to be particularly close to Chancellor Gordon Brown, who featured sympathetically as a barely disguised character in his latest movie.

Geldofs production company, Ten Alps, which provided the two big screens in Hyde Park, is also closely associated with the government. It owns 70 percent of Teachers TV, which makes programmes for the Department for Education and Skills. Last year, it enjoyed a 400 percent increase in profits. Ten Alps is positioning itself to become one of the key independent television companies in Britain. The high profile that Live 8 has given it can only enhance the companys international exposure.

Live 8 offered an unprecedented marketing opportunity. Nokia and Volvo were among the major corporate sponsors. Volvo spokesman Soren Johansson said the event fits with the DNA of the company and appeals to peoples emotions.

AOL ran live video streaming, billing Live 8 as the day music changed the world. The general opinion was that video streaming had proved its commercial value. Live 8 may indeed have changed the world or at least that part of it that comes under the heading of advertising.

ABC in the US was disappointed that its coverage netted only 2.9 million viewers because the lineup had been aimed at boomers, who would likely be at home on a Saturday night. But as one media expert said, the advertising was already paid for.

Although some of the charities affiliated to Make Poverty History had expressed their alarm over the scandal surrounding the wristbands, the commercial orientation of the campaign was no secret. The Live 8 web site still offers a link to AOLs music download service.

Despite its appearance, Live 8 was not a protest. It was a pro-government rally. Both Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown closely associated themselves with Live 8. Brown spoke on a charity platform in Edinburgh the evening before the Make Poverty History rally that was supposed to be putting pressure on him! As part of the buildup to the concerts, Blair gave an hour-long interview on MTV sitting alongside Geldof and fielding questions from Destinys Child.

The Notting Hill glitterati did good for Blair if no one else. As an effusive Observer journalist said, By first light today, a world majority will have offered Tony Blair a significant mandate for change.

We are now being asked to believe that attending a concert, or merely watching it on television, confers a democratic mandate. The Blair government was elected by only 20 percent of UK voters. It has the lowest mandate of any British government in history. The slogan of the campaign might as well have been Make Elections History.

Even the arrangements for the concerts, with their separate enclosures for celebrities, spoke of the essentially elitist conception of Live 8. This was an elitism based not on the traditional values of the British ruling class, but on the new global super-rich who are close to the Labour government, and who have made their base in London with its sympathetic tax laws. Black African musicians of considerable talent were relegated to a side event in Cornwall, because they do not have the same commercial weight as the acts booked for the Hyde Park event.