Blair | ukwatch.net

Obama - Wiping the Slate Clean

JamieSW — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:28:32 +0000

Appearance and Reality in the Relaunch of Brand America

In 1997, the British media filled with talk of “historic” change. Blair’s victory that year “bursts open the door to a British transformation,” the Independent declared. (Neal Ascherson, ‘Through the door he can begin to create a freer land,’ The Independent, May 4, 1997)

A Guardian leader saluted the nation: “Few now sang England Arise, but England had risen all the same.” (Leader, ‘A political earthquake,’ The Guardian, May 2, 1997)

The editors predicted that, by 2007, Blair’s triumph would be seen as “one of the great turning-points of British political history… the moment when Britain at last gave itself the chance to construct a modern liberal socialist order.” (Ibid)

The Observer assured readers that the Blair government would create “new worldwide rules on human rights” and implement “tough new limits on arms sales.” (http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=5063)

This, after all, was the dawn of Blair’s “ethical” foreign policy.

It was a dawn of the dead – Blair left behind him the almost unimaginable horror of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A rare poll conducted by Ipsos last January of 754 Iraqi refugees in Syria found that “every single person interviewed by Ipsos reported experiencing at least one traumatic event in Iraq prior to their arrival in Syria.” (http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/iraq?page=news&id=479616762)

UNHCR estimated that one in five of those registered with the agency in Syria over the previous year were classified as “victims of torture and/or violence.” The survey showed that fully 89 per cent of those interviewed suffered depression and 82 per cent anxiety. This was linked to terrors endured before they fled Iraq – 77 per cent of those interviewed reported being affected by air bombardments, shelling or rocket attacks. Eighty per cent had witnessed a shooting… and so on. (Ibid)

John Pilger was a lonely voice in 1997 warning that Blair was a dangerous fraud, a neocon in sheep’s clothing. As Pilger later pointed out, the media could hardly plead ignorance

“Blair’s Vichy-like devotion to Washington was known: read his speeches about a new order led by America. His devotion to Rupert Murdoch, who flew him and Cherie Booth around the world first class, was known. His devotion to an extreme neoliberal Thatcherite economics was known…” (John Pilger, Blair’s bloody hands,’ March 4, 2005; http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=5063)

Over the past two weeks – one decade and three wars later – the same media have been insisting, as one, that US president-elect Barrack Obama is another “new dawn”. A Guardian leader observed:

“They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world…

“Today is for celebration, for happiness and for reflected human glory. Savour those words: President Barack Obama, America’s hope and, in no small way, ours too.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/06/barackobama-uselecti…)

In the Guardian‘s news section, Oliver Burkeman described the victory as “historic, epochal, path breaking”. But there was more:

“Just being alive at a time when it’s so evident that history is being made was elating and exhausting.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/05/uselections2008-barackobama)

In 2003, the Guardian‘s foreign editor, Ed Pilkington, told us:

“We are not in the business of editorialising our news reports.” (Email, November 15, 2003)

Someone forgot to tell Burkeman, indeed the entire Guardian news team. At times like these, the media’s claims to balanced coverage seem to belong to a different universe. Over the last two weeks, the public has been subjected to a one-way delusional deluge by the media. The propaganda is such that comments made by independent US presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, appear simply shocking:

“What we’re seeing is the highest level of resignation and apathy and powerlessness I’ve ever seen. We’re not talking about hoopla. We’re not talking about ‘hope’. We’re not talking about rhetoric. We’re not talking about ‘rock star Obama’. We’re talking about the question that is asked everywhere I go: ‘What is left for the American people to decide other than their own personal lives under more restrictive circumstances year after year?’ And the answer is: almost nothing.” (Interview, RealNews.com, November 4; http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&It…)

Nader says of Obama: “This is show business what you’re seeing.” The crucial point: “Obama doesn’t like to take on power.” (Ibid)

But our media, passionately committed to ‘balance’ though they claim to be, are not interested. Their view (or so they claim): Obama’s victory is a wonderful, transformational moment for the world.

The message is enhanced by precisely the abandonment of any pretence of impartiality. This might be termed the ‘Get Real!’ stratagem of propaganda swamping. The suggestion is that the truth is so obvious, so marvellous, that it is churlish to be concerned with balance. When the whole media system is screaming at us to be overjoyed, something is wrong – life is just not that straightforward.

The same version of events has been repeated right across the media. The Times‘s leading warmonger under Bush-Blair-Brown, Gerard Baker, commented: “there haven’t been many days preceded by more energy and freighted with much greater historic significance than this one”. (Baker, ‘Amid the silence, citizens will make history with their sacred rite,’ The Times, November 4, 2008)

The BBC’s Justin Webb wrote:

“On every level America will be changed by this result – its impact will be so profound that the nation will never be the same.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/justinwebb/)

David Usborne gushed for the non-editorialising news pages of the Independent:

“As tears wetted a thousand cheeks in the Chicago crowd, it was clear that the significance of Mr Obama’s victory may take some while to sink in.” (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/barack-obama-wins-his-p…)

How to communicate the impact?

“Call it the demise of cynicism or the end of apathy. The country that pretends to be the standard-bearer of the democracy and presumes, indeed, to export it to the other countries around the world was living up to its own standards.”

Jon Snow of Channel 4 News did not disappoint:

“Hello history (to use the word of the times). What a staggering and indescribable moment this is. Barack Obama’s graceful acceptance of what had seemed both inevitable and impossible is up there equalling any political event since the downing of the Berlin Wall and the release of Nelson Mandela.” (Snowmail, November 5, 2008)

And the basis for this staggeringly important moment?

“Even after so many months of speech-making it’s still not clear what are the concrete changes that may now ensue and in particular, there are some big foreign policy areas where Obama is not promising a hugely different tack from Bush…” (Ibid)

As we will see below, the amazing fact is that this eruption of media hype is based on essentially nothing. Obama has had little to say about what he will do, and what he has said has been depressing for anyone hoping for genuine change. Matthew Parris summed it up in the Times:

“Here we have a handsome, dashing and intelligent man, a man with generous instincts and a silver tongue; but a man with no distinctive plan for government that he has seen fit to share with us; a daring opportunist; somebody we may one day judge as a sort of Tony Blair with brains. And here we go again, all over again, hook, line and sinker.” (Matthew Parris, ‘Calm down! He’s not President of the World,’ The Times, November 8, 2008)

The former Europe minister and arch-Blairite, Denis MacShane, also unwittingly supplied a note of caution:

“I shut my eyes when I listen to this guy [Obama] and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.” (Tom Baldwin, ‘Blair team look in mirror of history,’ The Times, November 8, 2008)

Obama And Iraq

As discussed above, the media’s propaganda swamping on Obama – of which we have sampled only a fraction – is based on almost nothing at all. Tariq Ali commented on Democracy Now!:

“As for what the policies are going to be, the situation is pretty depressing. I mean, Obama, during his campaign, didn’t promise very much, basically talked in clichés and synthetic slogans like ‘change we can believe in.’ No one knows what that change is. In foreign policy terms, during the debates, what he said was basically a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies. And in relation to Afghanistan, what he said was worse than McCain…” (http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/6/president_elect_obama_and_the_futu…)

Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Observer:

“Iraq and Afghanistan are the sharp end of the partnership between Britain and the United States. Senior members of the British government quite candidly confess: ‘We don’t have a particularly clear view about what they want to do.’” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/09/obama-administration…)

And yet, in the face of Obama’s silence, and flat rejection of progressive policies, the media has sought to portray him as an all-new “dawn”. Thus, Jonathan Freedland wrote in his open letter to Obama:

“You have promised to… end the war in Iraq.” (Freedland, ‘A few thoughts on how to handle the world’s most potent political weapon,’ The Guardian, November 5, 2008)

In the same newspaper, Julian Borger described Obama’s goals: “US troops will be pulled out of Iraq in the next 16 months…” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/05/uselections2008-barackobama6)

A Times leader asked: “How quickly can the United States military withdraw from Iraq?” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article5084156….)

We doubt any journalist on the Times actually believes Obama is intending to withdraw US troops from Iraq (in the intended meaning of the term).

In the Guardian Jonathan Steele supplied a more realistic appraisal:

“... his position contains massive inconsistencies… he has not repudiated the war on terror. Rather, he insists that by focusing excessively on Iraq, the Bush administration ‘took its eye off the ball’. The real target must be Afghanistan and if Osama bin Laden is spotted in Pakistan, bombing must be used there too.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/06/barack-obama-war-on-...)

Steele commented on the number of troops Obama is planning to keep in Iraq:

Obama – Hawk

John Pilger – who was right about Blair in 1997 and who is surely right about Obama now – also rejects the mainstream consensus:

“Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates.” (http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=492)

Obama, after all, has supported Colombia’s “right to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders.” (http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2008/06/pilger-obama-truly-bush) He has promised to continue America’s fierce economic strangulation of Cuba. He has promised to support an “undivided Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital.

In August, Obama said he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government:

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” (http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0132206420070801)

He has also said: “We will kill Bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaida.” (http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,24464976-912,00.html)

ZNet’s Michael Albert commented last week:

“My guess is, sadly, that within one week, literally one week, Obama’s staff and cabinet choices will make decisively evident that without mass activism forcing new outcomes, change will stop at the surface. I fervently hope I am wrong.” (Albert, ‘Obama Mania?’, ZNet, November 7, 2008)

Albert appears to have been vindicated. Vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a pro-war Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, helped push through NAFTA and favoured the war on Iraq. Alexander Cockburn writes of him:

“He’s a former Israeli citizen, who volunteered to serve in Israel in 1991 and who made brisk millions in Wall Street. He is a super-Likudnik hawk, whose father was in the fascist Irgun in the late Forties, responsible for cold-blooded massacres of Palestinians.” (www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11072008.html)

In a co-authored book, Emanuel wrote:

“We need to fortify the military’s ‘thin green line’ around the world by adding to the U.S. Special Forces and the Marines, and by expanding the U.S. army by 100,000 more troops.” (Ibid)

Nader comments on Obama:

“What he’s basically doing so far is giving the Clinton crowd a second chance. Rahm Emanuel? He’s the worst of Clinton. Spokesman for Wall Street, Israel, globalization.” (Ibid)

Conclusion – Relaunching The Brand

We are to believe that the US political system that Ralph Nader accurately describes as “a two-party dictatorship in thraldom to giant corporations,” has produced a staggeringly different, progressive individual. And yet Nader has described how he was himself locked out of the election. He was not allowed to participate in the televised debates and lack of media coverage consigned his campaign to oblivion. He wrote to Obama:

“Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys… Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?” (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10809)

It is no accident that the entire media system is so fervently announcing “historic” change. The American and British political brands have been badly battered and bloodied by utter disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by the fiscal chaos of the “credit crunch”. The insanity of greed-driven militarism enforcing catastrophic ‘solutions’ has become all too obvious, as has the provision of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us.

And so the American political brand must be rebirthed, resold, relaunched as a fresh start under new management.

We are being put through a crash-course in “Learning to love America again,” as the Telegraph put it. (Iain Martin, ‘The election of Barack Obama,’ Daily Telegraph, November 6, 2008)

A leader in the Times on November 5 could hardly have stated the message more clearly:

“The American nation will replenish the confidence that it has lately lost. In the eyes of the world, the slate will be clean and the pretext, always spurious, for anti-Americanism has been removed.” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article5084156….)

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Humanitarianism went to war

JamieSW — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:49:41 +0000

Conor Foley’s new book, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, comes highly recommended. The author has been obliged to debate the oleaginous Oliver Kamm in the course of promoting his book, so I am doing my part to reduce the necessity of such an indignity. Foley does a number of things fairly effectively: first, he debunks ‘humanitarian intervention’ as an ideology from its origins in the Biafran War (there is some useful detail covering Bernard Kouchner’s early ascent here, though he is much more generous to Kouchner than I would be); secondly, he demonstrates conclusively that key examples of such ‘intervention’ were far from humanitarian in effect (he leaves the question of intent or strategy largely unexamined), for example the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; thirdly, he shows how the regnant discourse of a ‘Responsibility To Protect’ that emerged principally during the Balkans Wars provided much of the legal and moral cover for the invasion of Iraq – indeed, a consistent theme is just how much of the present barbarity was prepared in the decade of vicarious militarism that was the 1990s.

One of the strongest chapters in the book is the discussion of the Kosovo war. Foley takes the time to examine the context in which the KLA emerged, outlines some of their provocative conduct, shows with the help of some personal experience how they were active in ethnically cleansing Serb and Roma in the immediate aftermath of the war, and how their successors have been engaged in murdering members of both groups for years afterward. He nicely dissects Clare Short’s post-hoc rationalising scheme for the war, and shows – with the assistance of the Campbell diaries – that even Blair, the most belligerent of the warmongers, was himself doubtful about what the bombing was supposed to achieve. Those doubts were obviously suppressed by the time Blair made his Chicago speech, adumbrating a new doctrine of interventionism, which explicitly bracketed Milosevic and Saddam Hussein as the main threats to global peace. Rigorously citing figures and context, he debunks the claim that the war prevented a genocide, showing that what was actually exacerbated by the intervention was an insurgency by an extremely dubious gang of ‘Greater Albanian’ nationalists, and a counterinsurgency by the Serbian military. The chapter closes with a quote from Tony Blair in 2001, bragging about the success of an intervention that had made a humanitarian crisis into a catastrophe, savouring the prospect of “one of the great dictators of the last century” ending up on trial, and citing it as a precedent for future action.

The overarching story of Foley’s is a part-biographical one in which he observes up close how humanitarian organisations, traditionally committed to the politically neutral delivery of aid, end up as often unwitting auxiliaries to war-making states. One of the recurring themes is the way in which human rights and humanitarianism merged, particularly as left-wing politics subsided, into what he calls ‘political humanitarianism’. He notes, for example, that Amnesty International today has over a million members, far higher than the Labour Party. Its advocacy on any particular issue can galvanise substantial constituencies and, even where it does not call for military action, it can provide the moral and intellectual case for such action with an authority that governments compromised by their own bloody actions cannot. Rony Brauman, the former head of Médecins Sans Frontières, makes the argument in my book (you know the one I mean) that this merger of the two trends is a dangerous one. The reason is that when supposedly neutral humanitarian agencies delivering relief end up calling for the enforcement of human rights standards, and then in turn become dependent on those making war, they become co-belligerents. The trust that they require from all sides in order to be able to deliver aid is ruined if they are seen as accessory to one party in a conflict. Further, in order to elicit support, they can all too often end up disseminating misleading or exaggerated information about a given conflict, which can feed into the propaganda for war or produce calls for solutions that are at best counterproductive. In this connection, Foley has been particularly scathing about the calls for military intervention into Darfur from advocacy groups like Save Darfur.

The trouble that ‘political humanitarians’ faced was that their criticisms of various governments were always blunted to the extent that they refused to take a clear position themselves on what might be done in a given circumstance. So, MSF can demand action on Kosovo, but without saying what that might entail, they exposed their urgent appeals to ridicule. And so, in a way that Alex de Waal and others have related previously, ‘political humanitarians’ – quietly at first, but with increasing openness – began to mandate military action as a necessary supplement to their own campaigns. The obvious question that occurs to an outsider is this: why should humanitarians, even those with a commitment to basic human rights standards, have the answers to the world’s problems? How do they come to be the arbiters of just political action? Foley provides a very good sense from the inside of how it felt to be trying to bring about humanitarian outcomes, and how compelling the appeal to military force is when relief workers are trying to deliver people from terrifying physical danger and feel compromised by the bureaucratic structures, legalism and neutralism under which they are obliged to work. But he also shows how arguments for war on humanitarian bases came to be alibis for obvious, outright aggression – as when the Blairite inner circle appealled to international humanitarian norms to justify the invasion of Iraq. Behind all the moral and political arguments foregrounded by this discussion, of course, are immense historical, political and geographical facts which intersect in the fate of the 20th Century Left. (More on which can be found in my own book – you know the one I mean).

Foley is by no means a radical anti-imperialist. He is himself a humanitarian worker with extensive background experience in various ‘theatres’ from northern Iraq to Afghanistan. Nor is he necessarily opposed to all such ventures – he is just far more sceptical about the arguments supporting them than most of his liberal cohorts have been. And if a solution emerges from this book clearly, it is that the UN must be strengthened and reformed, and that multilateral policies should be engaged instead of unilateral ones. Foley doesn’t take seriously the criticism that this refulgent Victorian humanitarianism is implicated in a renascent imperialism – in fact, it has to be said that his handling of these arguments is embarrassingly slight. While Foley is expertly equipped to deal with legalistic arguments about war, there is a basic failure to engage with theory on other levels: those of geopolitics and geoeconomics. To that extent, he seems to grapple with the arguments at their weakest – for example, he dismisses the idea that the invasion of Afghanistan was for the purpose of securing an oil pipeline dominated by Western energy concerns, as if this exhausted the anti-imperialist critique of that invasion. In general, it seems that unless there is some direct economic kickback, then there is no strategic interest involved – although we have just been through a dangerous Georgian spectacle in which the strategic ramifications of US action in Yugoslavia and southern Asia came increasingly to the fore. Similarly, he offers some shockingly blase justifications for the most controversial components of the failed Rambouillet Accords. Of the notorious clause admitting NATO personnel uninhibited access throughout the whole FRY, he dismissively refers to this as a normal part of UN peacekeeping: if this was so, why was it insisted on in the early negotiations phase and dropped in the final Ahtisaari-Chyrnomirdin-negotiated agreement that concluded the war? If it was so essential, why drop it? If inessential, why allow the negotiations to fail partially on account of it? Of the ‘free market’ clause, he says that Kosovo was going through a process of privatization and some stipulation had to be made about future property arrangements. One would not know that privatization in the former Yugoslavia was a deeply controversial matter, and that the process was itself implicated in the break-up of the country. A reading of Susan Woodward’s Balkan Tragedy would have helped here. (More on this in my own book – you know the one I mean). I could go on in this vein, but it would seem to be beside the point, as well unduly diluting the force of my earlier recommendation. Foley is trying to get to grips with how humanitarianism has in different ways been usurped, side-tracked, co-opted and diverted into the blind alley of Western militarism. To that extent, you are unlikely to get a more honest appraisal of how utterly mendacious our governments have been in casting their recent interventions as humanitarian.

Obama, The Prince Of Bait-And-Switch

Ellie Keen — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:46:46 +0000

On 12 July, the London Times devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also described the “high drama” and “meticulously practised routine” of evacuating another overheated journalist. For her US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, “saving a life took precedence over [their] security”. Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the only mention that “47 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday”.

Slaughters on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the British public. I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six children. A 500lb US Mk82 bomb was dropped on her mud, stone and straw house. There was no “enemy” nearby. I interviewed a headmaster whose house disappeared in a fireball caused by another “precision” bomb. Inside were nine people – his wife, his four sons, his brother and his wife, and his sister and her husband. Neither of these mass murders was news. As Harold Pinter wrote of such crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

A total of 64 civilians were bombed to death while The Times man was discomforted. Most were guests at the wedding party. Wedding parties are a “coalition” speciality. At least four of them have been obliterated – at Mazar and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar provinces. Many of the details, including the names of victims, have been compiled by a New Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, whose Afghan Victim Memorial Project is a meticulous work of journalism that shames those who are paid to keep the record straight and report almost everything about the Afghan War through the public relations facilities of the British and American military.

The US and its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on Afghanistan. This is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007. “The most frequently used bombs,” the Air Force Times reports, “are the 500lb and 2,000lb satellite-guided . . .” Without this one-sided onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear, might not have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America’s and Britain’s puppet, has said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners have all but united a resistance that now includes former warlords once on the CIA’s payroll.

The scandal of this would be headline news, were it not for what George W Bush’s former spokesman Scott McClellan has called “complicit enablers” – journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a “good war”, the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber.

In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power – because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, “bait-and-switch” Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

Those who write of Obama that “when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush” demonstrate the same wilful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton – and Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, “ideology has surrendered entirely to ‘values’ . . . there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain . . .”

Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.

A new politics of class- Interview with Jon Cruddas MP

tim — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:33:24 +0000

What brought you into politics?

I was from a very political family, but not in terms of formal party politics. Ours were informed by Catholic social teaching and by liberation theology. We didn’t have labour movement heroes as such, it was more the likes of Oscar Romero or John F. Kennedy. My family came from Donegal and my dad was a sailor. I was one of five brothers and sisters, and we were the first generation in our family to go to university. Before I went there, I spent some time in Australia and got involved in trade union politics. After getting involved in the labour movement I gravitated towards the Labour Party. I couldn’t vote in 1979, but I was a product of Margaret Thatcher. Youth unemployment, the bomb, the miners’ strike, all were central to my politics. In 1981 I went to Warwick and stayed to do an MA and PhD. I was interested in political economy and the debates around new forms of economic regulation and postfordism. Robin Murray’s work on what constitutes a modern left political economy influenced me. At the time, he was working with Ken Livingstone at the GLC. I was
interested in analyses of the world that were less prescriptive and dogmatic than some of the old left traditions.

Did you keep hold of the liberation theology?

Not really, though scratch beneath the surface and it’s there. My middle brother became a Carmelite.

Were you drawn to the issue of migration through it?

Absolutely. I’m really interested in the issue of migration and demography. It is like going round in a personal full circle. It’s the Irishness of it, the nature of diaspora politics. But when I was younger it was never codified in the Labour Party, despite support for the Labour Party in the family. It was much more fl uid and diverse than that. Much more ideas driven. I was interested in traditions of thought. And now I think we’re faced with a need to just keep traditions of thought alive, despite their unfashionable nature.

After Warwick you started working for the Labour Party. You were quite into the New Labour establishment weren’t you?

Yes. I was drawn to it. I started working for the Labour Party on labour market issues and did a lot of work with the trade union movement. I could see a lot of strengths in what Blair was doing. At his best he was an interesting and seductive political figure. He challenged old assumptions. I saw him at close quarters from the early 1990s when he became Shadow Employment Minister. In 1997 I was in Downing Street for two years and we had some space to deal with issues around individual and collective rights at work, some of which will be enduring. But that is a long way away now. At the time I thought the important thing was to gain power and then it was ‘game on’ in trying to change things. It wasn’t about seeing power as an end in itself. But I began to think that the New Labour project was simply morphing into an exercise in power retention – seen as an end in itself. I really began to fall out with the New Labour project after I became MP for Dagenham. There was a contradiction between the language used by the government and the empirical reality on the ground.

You must have confronted something there that didn’t fit easily with the New Labour rhetoric.

To me Dagenham is the prism through which I see it all. It is the traditional cornerstone of manufacturing industry in London. It is the lowest cost housing market in Greater London and the site for extraordinary demographic change. You see global forces ripping through it at the micro-level, and the wreckage being created. The government cannot offer anything other than a benign take on these forces. What’s worse is that politically it is actually ratcheting up the tensions rather than working out how we can help communities navigate through this dramatic period of change – for example through debates around migration and asylum. But it was the debate around Higher Education funding that really broke it for me.

Why was that?

It went to the core of my own family’s experience. Both my parents left school at fourteen. We are five kids and between us we have fi ve degrees, four MAs and two PhDs. We were the beneficiaries of comprehensive education and free access to higher education. Higher education provided us with the ability to live in a completely different world. Here was a Labour government coming up with a highly utilitarian approach to knowledge. It reduced education to a rational economic exchange – discount for the future, borrow money to get a qualifi cation which will allow you to enter the labour market at a higher rate of return. Education was simply seen as an issue of economic rationality. Questions about what constitutes knowledge and the liberating potential of education were abandoned in favour of a very right-wing conception of human capital.

Once you became an MP, what was the experience of Dagenham like?

It’s the fastest changing community in Britain. The velocity of change is extraordinary. If you see the changes in the school rolls and the patterns of take up of the right to buy, against the legacy of long-term inequalities in access to health and the large percentage of low skilled work amongst the resident population, it throws up issues that have been completely off the radar of government. The population is growing faster than the state is financing public services. These changes occur in a zero sum game, and this allows people, and in particular the far right, to racialise access to scarce resources.
I’m not an oppositional MP. My psychology is one of pragmatism and incremental attempts to alter the terms of debate. But I couldn’t accept the Government’s failure to recognise what was going on on the ground – the material forces that lie behind community fracture and racial tension.
What is the solution? Is it to talk about ‘British jobs for British workers’, trying to dog whistle to people’s fear? Or is it to find a different take on the problem?

I think that in fully addressing these problems class is the crucial issue. But class has no traction within the Labour Party. The Government, or New Labour, is almost demonising a white working class as violent and degenerate. It’s as if it is unable to have a rational debate about patterns of migration, or inequality, or demographic change. Instead there is this populist, dog-whistling rhetoric – that’s the kind of game that’s going on now in terms of political positioning. I think we can retrieve this situation if we remake a class politics which recognises the heterogeneity of the working class. Why is the issue of class politics so contaminated now? The answer lies back in the intellectual moves made by Blair- particularly the debates around the knowledge economy – which assumed that the working class was withering away.

As Blair transformed Labour into New Labour he legitimised the change by importing an intellectual framework that described old labour as being in empirical decline. The working class was no longer of relevance as a political and economic category. But you can challenge that view by looking at where jobs are being generated, and what is happening in the real economy, as opposed to the new economy. Look at the interlinked issues of the demand for labour, the patterns of migration, the long term inequalities in wages and access to public services and housing. These have a resonance today even more than they had when New Labour was elected ten years ago. Focus on these issues and we’ll be able to get back into the debates around inequality and social immobility, and so fi nd alternative, social democratic remedies.

Your analysis contradicts a lot of what the more high profile sociologists are saying about individualisation, and the cultural changes in class. Can a singular working class still be appealed to?

I’m arguing that we anchor the experiences of different groups in a materialist politics. That is not necessarily reductive. It allows you to contextualise materially the shared experience of different people. The approach we have at the moment is a semiotic game of emphasising difference, be it through symbols of race or of religious difference. It’s unable to understand or navigate its way through the politics of migration and demography. For the last ten years New Labour has used patterns of migration as a twenty-fi rst century incomes policy, holding down the wages in semi-skilled and unskilled work. Now the government is reaping the consequences. And they can’t deal with it by regulating the labour market because they’ve set themselves against this
approach. Instead they have retreated into an identity politics which includes a simplistic idea of a white working class that is illiberal, intolerant and degenerate. Without a materialist politics one is unable to transcend the things that break people apart – one cannot find the shared experiences that bridge cultural, religious and racial differences.

Is it just about identity politics? The ideology associated with the knowledge economy introduces a method or practice of entrepreneurialism – it sets about constructing supposedly self-reliant individuals out of class subjects.

This human capital approach has all the hallmarks of right-wing liberal economics. The only defi ciency that matters is imperfect information and knowledge. The Labour Party has retreated to the foundations of neoclassical political economy. The state is removed as an actor except for providing the means to access human capital. Once this access is perfected inequality is remedied. This is why the HE debate is so critical – it emptied out the politics of class and inequality. What counted was individual rational decision making and discounting for the future rather than materially locating the inability to work or to become socially mobile within a broader pattern of inequalities. This was always the fundamental dividing line between left and right and it has been intellectually collapsed. As education is commodifi ed it becomes a form of capital you can use to consume more commodities. This to me is the intellectual cornerstone of the whole movement that is New Labour. As such Blair was a more profound political figure than people assume.

Does this intellectual project have its source in Peter Mandelson and Charlie Leadbeater at the Department of Trade and Industry in 1997?

That’s exactly it. I remember we were having a fight around what eventually became the Employment Relations Act – two years debate about the labour market, union recognition, new ideas of solidarity through rights the state intervenes on. At the same time Mandelson and Charlie Leadbeater were writing the 1998 White Paper on the knowledge economy – the definitive neoclassical testimony to the New Labour project. It was followed by a second White Paper in 2001, which addressed the creation of a labour force suited to the knowledge economy. I think these will be seen in the future as key texts that shaped the New Labour project. In terms of the history of economic thought it places New Labour on the right of centre intellectually: a neoclassical Labour. Their neoclassical political economy frames all inequalities in terms of individual economic rationality. Those who fail in education and the knowledge economy do so because of their inability to act on their preferences with reference to knowledge, work and leisure. The White Papers intellectually emptied out the whole of the labour and social democratic traditions.

Was Mandelson the key figure in shaping this New Labour politics?

What he was doing with Leadbeater was profoundly important intellectually. They provided the justification for the lack of desire to intervene over and above simply correcting market imperfections. Margaret Thatcher used to talk about unemployment as if it was a trade off between work and leisure. Now it’s the same logic but talked about in terms of economic inactivity. Poverty is viewed as a consequence of an individual choice between work and leisure.

Risk is shifted from the state and business to the individual.

The state has no role other than maintaining infrastructure and facilitating markets. Stuart Hall’s analysis of New Labour’s ‘double-shuffle’ is absolutely right. The veneer, the narrative, the language was brilliantly constructed – the semiotic game of political positioning was brilliant – but underneath was the much more important engine which was working off the deep liberal agenda of the commodification of public services, responding to capital’s global demands and the like.

You present a very different image to the one many people have of a New Labour dominated by a pragmatic ‘let’s see what works’ mentality. There was a deeper intellectual current at work.

I do think there was a deeper philosophical movement in New Labour that was worked through during the long period of opposition. You can trace it through an arc beginning with the 1983 Manifesto, then the defeat in 1987, up to the supply side socialism of 1992, with Brown as the architect. Then there is the radicalism of Blair from 1994 onwards. Throughout this period there is a systematic withdrawal of the state. Post-1983 the negatives are defined as trade unionism, ‘tax and spend’, and the politics of nationalisation. I think there was a grouping of right-wing Labour figures who saw that, generationally, the only way to gain power was to confront these polling negatives. Initially this was done with reference to a body of ideas that were quite brazenly used as justification for short-term political moves in pursuit of electoral purposes.

The intellectual work of New Labour intensifi ed from 1994 on, when a number of intellectuals, for example Giddens and Leadbeater, rose to the challenge and codified the political retreat. The genius of Blair when he became party leader was his ability to tell a story that legitimised all the political retreats since 1979- ‘there is a rupture occurring in terms of industrial organisation caused by new technology and globalisation. Only I can understand it with reference to the knowledge economy’. The intellectual work helped to mobilise and organise the electoral cohorts that mattered in terms of gaining political power. It also wrote off the working class and other groups who had no political traction. It used a sociologythat assumed they had no empirical signifi cance in the future. It was a brilliant political movement to gain and retain political power.

How did it start coming undone?

The world was not like their stylised construction of it. The central contradiction of the knowledge economy thesis and the higher education debate is the belief that there is a massive expansion in the demand for graduates. If there isn’t this demand and you’re equipping people with this utilitarian way to tap into something that doesn’t exist, they end up doing jobs for which they’re overqualifi ed. You’ve got
generational immobility in the jobs market and in housing.

So the higher education system is producing a large number of graduates who have aspirations for a better life which the labour market will deny them? As well they’ll have large debts, they’ll have to pay for their own pensions, mortgages and deal with the financial burden of the ageing baby boom generation. New Labour’s emphasis on the supply side and its liberal economics have created a series of contradictions which are adding up to one big contradiction.

I think New Labour’s reforms that were influenced by the knowledge economy thesis are built on sand. The question is how can we create new forms of economic and social solidarity that can deal with the economic problems we face and also address the renewal of democracy and the global issues of environmentalism. The only alternative approach is one grounded in the empirical realities of modern Britain in terms of migration, housing, labour market insecurity. It also demands electoral reform. I always thought electoral reform was a second order issue. Now I think our present electoral system has helped to sustain the neo-liberal project.

Returning to the contradiction. There also exists a large swathe of the population who are totally estranged from the education system.

This is where you get the fear of the far right. The BNP is getting very sophisticated. They’re talking about being more labour than New Labour. They are using ne technologies to mobilise people. Their message is anti-globalisation, anti-Europe, anti-Muslim, and the scapegoating of forms of cultural and racial difference. It is precision bombed onto those cohorts who were disenfranchised from the New Labour project, people for whom it was previously an article of faith that they’d go nowhere else. I’ve spent the last year going round the country and this problem is everywhere. The BNP stood 800 candidates in the local elections in 2006. That’s 500 more candidates than they’ve ever stood before. They averaged 14.8 per cent of the vote. They have their own internal contradictions, like any Trotskyist group, but they’re not going away.

The seeds are there for extremism and violence. My fear is that if they become more effective, especially in areas where the Labour Party is no longer an organising and mobilising force, they’ll be much more significant than the National Front of the late 1970s. Compass is attempting to grapple with these issues but in a very cold climate. We’ve tried to force the government to deal with the issue of agency workers. Migrant workers are being abused by unscrupulous employment agencies. In my constituency there are Lithuanian workers on £15 a day – half the minimum wage- and these stories ricochet through the community. The state should intervene. But this goes against New Labour politics. We’re reaping the consequences of the way we’ve been using migration to enforce our fl exible North American labour market.
Similarly the education strategy around secondary school academies undermines the capacity to provide solidaristic, comprehensive solutions.

These issues were central to your campaign to be elected Deputy Leader. Did you decide yourself that you wanted to stand?

I was asked to by some colleagues in the union movement and the Party. It wasn’t my thing.

But why did they ask you?

I was never interested in the Campaign Group. I’m fairly pragmatic, but I’m increasingly frustrated, so maybe it was that. I’ve got no idea. It was a punt from the left field that arguably wasn’t going to fly.

Well, it did.

It did, despite my anonymity. If we can build some ideas, I now think there is more life left in the Labour Party than I had previously assumed.

There’s something about you being both inside and outside that makes you an attractive proposition in terms of how to go beyond New Labour. You have to be outside enough to see the problems, but inside enough to have a hand in it, to have some leverage. Compass has a similar kind of structure.

I agree. Compass has been effective both inside and outside the party in using this structure. In the Trident debate it was able to quickly create a deep and
wide coalition. All sorts of NGOs and groupings joined. We managed to get one hundred votes against the renewing of Trident. Compass also created a coalition of NGOs and groups around the Company Reform Bill and managed to nudge a few changes through the Parliamentary process. It is also doing work around agency employment relations and a positive immigration policy. If we can introduce the basic tenets of social democracy – this is not by any stretch of the imagination a radical agenda – by putting our arguments into the mix it allows for a more lively and pluralist democracy, both in terms of the House of Commons and, more important, the Labour Party. It creates a contested terrain. Contrast this strategy with the government’s ever more sophisticated exercise in political cross-dressing and thecrafting of the soundbite.

You did incredibly well in the Deputy Leadership contest, you became a public figure and gained quite a lot of political capital – what might you do with it?

I’m not actually that interested in the question. The fundamental issue is what constitutes a non-sectarian, modern, centre-left politics, both inside the Labour Party and outside it. What coalitions do we need to create a durable politics? What is its policy framework? I think a narrative is beginning to take shape out of these questions. Compass is pioneering this process and translating it into political strategies. To be perfectly honest I had wondered whether the Labour Party was retrievable as an organisation. But going round the country during the Deputy Leadership contest allowed me to tap into what people were thinking. There were a lot more people interested in the issues than I thought there’d be. It has got me going and given me enthusiasm.

Parallel to the deputy leadership elections you were also involved in broader antifascist campaigns. The Hope not Hate campaign brought in music, made a film, and linked up with the Daily Mirror.

Yes, parallel yet linked campaigns – that is the future. We made use of the internet. We used databases and were able to communicate quickly and widely to large numbers of people. We used new forms of interactive engagement and tried to link these ways of organising to a more fl uid politics of anti-fascist activity. It worked well. I think you’ll see these organising techniques re-surface in Livingstone’s campaign for Mayor. We’ve created a collective memory – or at least the beginning of one – which we can tailor for other types of campaign.

Can the Labour Party develop these forms of cultural politics?

What we were doing was far better than simply discussing whether or not we’re in the era of the end of the political party. I think that some of the anti-BNP activity can re-build the Labour Party as a vehicle for local mobilisation. A cabinet minister told me that this argument is nonsense because we’re now in the era of the virtual party. The role of the party is to scientifi cally construct messages for a few thousand voters. I’d contest that idea. The crucial question is what will constitute a modern political party. It has to be much more open and contingent to local circumstances. Whether its development is towards formal membership or some other relationship to people is an open question. Personally I like the federal architecture of the party because of its essential pluralism. John Harris and I addressed these issues in our Compass pamphlet, Fit for Purpose. What would Conference look like? What would be the basic units of party organisation? How should we fund political parties? These questions are up for grabs. My approach is not to rule anything out in terms of organisational reform. I think we have to contest the authoritarian model that we have now. What worries me is that, despite what everyone during the Deputy Leadership contest said about rebuilding the party on the ground, very little has been done.

Do you meet with other Compass MPs?

Well it’s more we swarm around different issues. We’re not a faction with its own rule book and membership. We’re much more open-ended and deliberative, focusing on specific campaigns. The Tribune Group has in effect gone and the Campaign Group is in numerical decline. There are now acres of territory between New Labour and the Campaign Group. The question is how we enter into that territory and construct a fairly loose conversation around some of the issues.

But what do you do about power and actually achieving change?

Well you can’t just undo the rules of the game. You have to mobilise and organise around specific policies. There is also an issue about whether we should organise across the different decision-making bodies of the party.

Do you feel more at ease in Dagenham or when you’re out on tour than you do in Westminster?

Yes. I’m not particularly interested in the House of Commons. Actually I was never interested in being an MP. What interests me are the issues.

The reason I ask is that I detect a reluctance about you becoming a ‘personality’. You did incredibly well in the Deputy Leadership contest but you seem to be backing away from the implications. Whatever you think about it, people look to you as someone who might play a central role in reconstituting the left of the Labour Party.

Well that interests me. But it’s my general disposition … I mean I’m uncomfortable being an MP myself. I’m only just getting used to it.

What is it about being an MP that makes you uncomfortable?

I’m not interested in, as a mate described it, getting up there and ‘doing the Placido Domingo’. I don’t like the showmanship of the game. What grips me, perhaps in a naive way, are ideas and creating a radical programme of social and economic emancipatory change. I didn’t find the deputy leadership contest a lot of fun. I did it because it was put to me that one can’t be critical and then, when the opportunity arises to do something about it, run away from the responsibility. We’re told time and time again by successive leadership groups that the only game in town is a deeply cynical and pessimistic view about the human condition and the country. That the only way a non-conservative government can be in power is through the politics we have now. It’s seen as a given and beyond debate. In some ways I once agreed with this, as a strategy for gaining power in 1997. But now this approach is turning in on itself. It has itself become an actor in undermining our capacity for economic and social change, because of its deep conservative and liberal political economy. I’m forced to contest it intellectually, and that means politically as well.

You seem to be at a point now where you have to think about your future role.

I am getting more comfortable with being a politician. The last year has been a steep learning curve. A journalist said to me the other day that someone had told him that he wouldn’t be able to talk to me unless he understood my basic catholicity. I said that I thought that this was a ridiculous way of looking at it. He said no, no, it is the experience of migration – you see politics in a vocational way. That’s possibly true.

You occupy the very difficult ground between class and migrancy.

I find myself re-tracing my family genealogy, going back to Mayo and spending more time in Ireland. It’s very interesting but perhaps not what we should go into in a political discussion.

But it has shaped your political trajectory and your take on the world.

I’m sure that’s right, but I’m much happier looking at politics in terms of the shape of objective social and economic conditions. It’s why I find Compass really interesting. Things are beginning to happen. The experiences of the last year have been, on the one hand, uncomfortable personally, but on the other hand they’ve helped to shape political discussion. I think there are now opportunities for coalition building and policy debate and a retrieving of certain conceptions of what the human condition is about – going back again to ideas that have been emptied out through the atomisation of politics. We need to have discussions about what constitutes a modern form of solidarity when we talk about migration or labour market insecurity or housing. These issues are opening up because of the contradiction between the language of New Labour and the empirical realities on the ground. Dagenham is the prism through which I see this. It’s on the frontline. Politics is about ideas, but also about power. I still detect a drawing back – let’s discuss it but in the meantime let’s leave the other lot to run the country and the party. We’ve been effective but we haven’t constituted that base camp from which to go further and agree some of the terms of that strategy.

Is that because MPs in Parliament are not talking about it?

Yes.

There needs to be some ideological cohesion amongst the MPs.

I agree with that.

You can get together around issues and make a big impact.

But then it’s, ‘Oh shit let’s run for cover …’

You’ve upset them …

But hold on, we’ve just been through a very successful period. The Compass Programme for Renewal goes with the grain of what is going on empirically. If we can shape it into an organising and mobilising strategy I think we’re joining the dots in a fertile way. We’re in a period of transition.

People, even those who have given up on Labour or who refuse to vote for them because of the Iraq War, are wanting something to inspire them politically.

Until a couple of years ago I was thinking about the Labour Party ‘this is going, this is going, and it’s not coming back.’ But I’m much more optimistic now, and that comes from travelling round the country and fi nding that the basic social democratic disposition of huge swathes of the country is still there. It’s a question of how we tap into it and articulate some of the issues and build a programme of change through coalitions and ideas. I’m really interested in Ken Livingstone. He inverts the whole logic of New Labour in terms of power retention. His objective is to get power in order to alter the terms of debate and to shift the climate toward radical change. But he also acknowledges the complexities of the modern world. He is able to think about what constitutes a modern coalition that is both inside and outside the party. Increasingly I find him a key stopgap around issues of class and migration. He will defend the basic architecture of a modern, pluralist multicultural democracy. That needs doing. We’ve got good links with him. The next big campaign is to support him in the Mayoral elections.

New Labour is Dead

Ellie Keen — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:38:38 +0000

Power Can’t Shape Truth Forever

New Labour has suffered a crushing defeat. The Blair project of promoting and implementing right-wing policies in the knowledge that traditional working class voters would remain solid died on 1 May 2008. Labour’s vote in the local elections in dropped to 24 percent, a point below the Liberal Democrats and twenty points less than the Conservatives (44 percent). Given the scale of the catastrophe, It seems unlikely that Gordon Brown can win the next general election.

Awestruck by Margaret Thatcher, Blair and Brown aped her achievements within their own party, squeezing old social-democratic ideas out of themselves, drop by drop. They were all market fundamentalists now. Deregulation and privatisation became a mantra and over the last ten years the social divide in the country between rich and poor increased more than even under Thatcher. Redistribution of wealth was no longer on Labour’s agenda.

As the market suffered a series of shocks—-the collapse of a debt-ridden British bank, Northern Rock, led to state intervention in the form of nationalisation. No lessons were learnt. Helping the rich by further tax-cuts, abandoning (under pressure from the Financial Times) plans to tax non-domiciled billionaires symbolised the regime. The neo-liberal model atomised social and political life, weakened democratic accountability and drastically reduced the margins of reformist possibilities within the system. After 9/11 civil liberties were seriously eroded. A fdew weeks ago Brown and his ministers were arguing for increasing the detention of suspects to 42-days without trial. The Conservatives and police chiefs opposed this as draconian.

The British electoral system helped to conceal the relentless ebbing of popular support for the Blairite agenda. No longer. The New Labour Emperor is now revealed without any clothes. Power can shape ‘truth’, but not forever. That is the lesson of the New Labour defeat.

In London the choice was clear. . A Conservative celebrity who carefully cultivates an ultra-reactionary image, Boris Johnson, is a star of TV comedy shows. Given the way that politics has gone to the dogs in so many parts of the democratic world, its hardly surprising that celebrity status and wealth have taken centre stage. A somewhat pathetic and ineffectual ex-policeman stood for the Liberal Democrats or Ken Livingstone, the Labour candidate. Even though Livingstone first won as an independent against New Labour, he subsequently made his peace with Blair and rejoined the party, while preserving an independent stance on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and developing his own foreign policy by inviting Hugo Chavez to visit London.

The elections for the Mayor of London reflected the national mood. That Livingstone made mistakes is obvious. The biggest error was not in receiving an eccentric Muslim cleric and annjoying the right-wing press, but re-entering the Labour fold. The basis of his popularity had rested on the fact that he was not a confected New Labour politician. The fact that margin of his defeat appears to be less than the national average reflected this fact, but was not enough to save him. The official result has yet to be declared, but New Labour commentators on TV have accepted defeat. He suffered because he was associated with an unpopular New Labour government. Had he remained an independent and lacerated the Blair and Brown regimes, instead of being photographed with them he would have been home and dry.

A city in which 70% of the citizens oppose the British presence in Iraq will now be represented by a pro-war mayor. Who cares if a million Iraqis have died since the occupation of their country, three million have become refugees and millions in that suffering country face the most horrendous conditions in their everyday lives. Anything associated with New Labour was punished.

Tariq Ali’s memoir Streetfighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties is published by Verso.

Anticipatory Compliance

Ellie Keen — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:13:01 +0000

If you want to know how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, read the reviews of Bruce Dover’s book, Rupert’s Adventures in China. Well, go on, read them. You can’t find any? I rest my case.

Dover was Murdoch’s vice-president in China. He took his orders directly from the boss. His book, which was published in February, is a fascinating study of power, and of a man who could not bring himself to believe that anyone would stand in his way(1). So why aren’t we reading about it?

Murdoch, Dover shows, began his assault on China with two strategic mistakes. The first was to pay a staggering price – US$525m – for a majority stake in Star TV, a failing satellite broadcaster based in Hong Kong. The second was to make a speech in September 1993, a few months after he had bought the business, which he had neither written nor read very carefully. New telecommunications, he said, “have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere. … satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels.”

The Chinese leaders were furious. The prime minister, Li Peng, issued a decree banning satellite dishes from China. Murdoch spent the next ten years grovelling. In the interests of business the great capitalist became the communist government’s most powerful supporter.

Within six months of Li Peng’s ban, Murdoch dropped the BBC from Star’s China signal. His publishing company, HarperCollins, paid a fortune for a tedious biography of the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, written by Deng’s daughter. He built a website for the regime’s propaganda sheet, the People’s Daily. In 1997 he made another speech in which he tried to undo the damage he had caused four years before. “China”, he said, “is a distinctive market with distinctive social and moral values that Western companies must learn to abide by.” His minions ensured, Dover reveals, that “every relevant Chinese government official received a copy”.

But the satellite dishes remained banned, so he grovelled even more. He described the Dalai Lama as “a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes”. His son James claimed that the Western media was “painting a falsely negative portrayal of China through their focus on controversial issues such as human rights”. Rupert employed his unsalaried gopher Tony Blair to give him special access: in 1999 Blair placed him next to the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, at a Downing Street lunch. To secure some limited cable rights in southern China, News Corporation agreed to carry a Chinese government channel – CCTV 9 – on Fox and Sky. Murdoch promised to “further strengthen cooperative ties with the Chinese media, and explore new areas with an even more positive attitude”.

Most notoriously, he instructed HarperCollins not to publish the book it had bought from the former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Dover reveals that Murdoch was forced to intervene directly (he instructed the publishers to “kill the fucking book”) because his usual system of control had broken down. “Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions to his senior executives or editors.” Instead he expected “a sort of ‘anticipatory compliance’. One didn’t need to be instructed about what to do, one simply knew what was in one’s long-term interests.” In this case executives at HarperCollins had failed to understand that when the boss objected to Patten’s views on China it meant that the book was dead.

Anticipatory compliance also describes Murdoch’s approach to Beijing. Dover shows that the Chinese leadership never asked for Chris Patten’s book to be banned: they didn’t even know it existed. But when Murdoch killed it, “our Beijing minders were impressed and the Patten incident marked a distinct warming in the relationship”.

The strategy failed. Murdoch was astonished that he couldn’t replicate “the cosy relationship he enjoyed with Britain’s political Establishment”. For the first time in his later career, he had encountered an organisation more powerful and more determined than he was. He has now retreated from China, after losing at least $1bn.

This is a riveting story about two of the world’s most powerful forces. Dover’s British publisher told me “I thought this was a natural for serialisation. We had the author primed and prepared to come over here. But we had to cancel as we could not raise enough interest. We’ve hit brick walls and we don’t understand why.”(2) The book has been reviewed in the Economist and the Financial Times, but neither the other British newspapers nor the broadcasters have touched it.

As far as I can discover, the book has been reviewed by only one Murdoch publication anywhere on earth – the Australian Literary Review – and that was an article of such snivelling sycophancy that you wonder why they bothered(3). The editor of another of News Corporation’s titles, the Far Eastern Economic Review, commissioned a review of Dover’s book, then admitted to contracting “cold feet” and spiked it(4).

But what of the other papers? Why should they appease Murdoch? “When you see the reaction of the British media to the book,” Bruce Dover tells me, “one can better understand why in some respects the Chinese so admired Murdoch – an Emperor who inspires fear in his followers need not raise a hand against them.”(5) He might be right, but I think there is also a general bias against relevance in the review sections. When I worked in faraway countries my books about the tribulations of obscure peoples were comprehensively reviewed. When I came home and wrote Captive State: the Corporate Takeover of Britain, it was ignored. There appears to be an inverse relationship between how hard a book hits and how well it is covered.

Paradoxically for a publication which inspires such fear, Bruce Dover’s story sometimes steps back from the brink. He observes that News Corporation never promised the Chinese government favourable coverage; Murdoch undertook only to be “fair”, “balanced” and “objective”. Dover takes these terms at face value, though it is obvious from his account that they were being used as code for sympathetic treatment. His book does not contain News Corporation’s most direct admission: the statement by Murdoch’s spokesman Wang Yukui that “we won’t do programmes that are offensive in China. … If you call this self-censorship then of course we’re doing a kind of self-censorship.”(6) He is wrong to suggest that “Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions”. As the testimony by Andrew Neil (formerly the editor of the Sunday Times) before the Lords Communications Committee shows(7), the paramount leader micromanages the editorial content of the newspapers he owns which swing the greatest political weight.

But I am sure it is true that anticipatory compliance is Murdoch’s most powerful weapon. I doubt he needed to tell all 247 of his editors to support the invasion of Iraq, but they did(8). He might not even have had to lean on Tony Blair to ensure – as Blair’s former spin doctor Lance Price reveals – that no British minister said “anything positive about the euro.”(9) Power is sustained not by force but by fear, as everyone seeks to interpret the wishes of his master and to meet them even before he asks.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Bruce Dover, 2008. Rupert’s Adventures in China: how Murdoch lost a fortune and found a wife. Mainstream Publishing.

2. Email from Bill Campbell, 17th April 2008.

3. Mark Day, 2nd April 2008. More than a mogul can bear. Australian Literary Review.

4. Donald Greenlees, 3rd March 2008. Review of Book on Murdoch Is Killed. The New York Times

5. Email from Bruce Dover, 17th April 2008.

6. Agence France Presse, 20th December 2001. Murdoch’s News Corp looks for further China access after TV.

7. Andrew Neil, 23 January 2008. Minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on Communications: Media Ownership and the News. House of Lords. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/lduncorr/comms230108ev15.pdf

8. David Harvey, 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p35. Oxford University Press.

9. Lance Price, 1st July 2006. Rupert Murdoch is effectively a member of Blair’s cabinet. The Guardian.

Indie’s new editor means bad news

Ellie Keen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:16:57 +0000

Roger Alton’s move from the Observer to edit the Independent is as shocking as Tony Blair’s appointment as Middle East envoy, and marks a set-back for the anti-war movement. To understand why, we must look at the Indie’s stance on Iraq, why Blair hated the paper, Alton’s politics and what he did at the Observer.

Alton was a crusader for the invasion of Iraq. As Johann Hari, who himself backed the invasion at the time, put it on the eve of the war: “There is now a considerable school of British centre-left thinkers and commentators who are lobbying hard for war, so that the Iraqi people can be freed: Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd, Julie Burchill, Roger Alton and David Aaronovitch.”

In other words, Alton was up there with the worst of British journalists in terms of craven support of Bush and Blair and contempt for the anti-war case.

Hari’s observation is backed up by Nick Davies, who discovered that Alton had an intimate lunch with Blair in autumn 2002 “from which, according to colleagues, Alton returned full of determined support for the campaign against Saddam”. With the Observer’s home affairs correspondent David Rose being fed “sheer disinformation” by MI6, and its political editor Kamal Ahmed deep in Alastair Campbell’s pocket, readers of Alton’s newspaper were, as Davies catalogues in some detail, “slowly soaked in disinformation” about Iraq.

Yet Alton carried on with his support for the invasion. When columnist Richard Ingrams quit the paper in 2005, he insisted that the Observer’s stance on Iraq was damaging the paper: “It’s particularly noticeable on the whole Iraq issue. In the Indie, you had a very strong attack on the whole thing from the beginning. But The Observer’s got it wrong about Iraq, which goes on and on, and you’re clobbered by that unless you get up and say: ‘We got it wrong’.”

Ingrams was right that the gap between the Observer and the Independent was huge.

On the day after the Hutton report came out in January 2004, the Independent produced a totally white front page with a one-word headline: “WHITEWASH”. In Blair’s last major public speech as prime minister, he attacked the Independent, after which the paper splashed with: “Would you be saying this, Mr Blair, if we supported your war in Iraq?” Beneath that headline, the paper’s editor Simon Kelner hit back brilliantly at Blair:

“After 10 years of the Blair administration, a decade of spin and counter-spin, of dodgy dossiers, of 45-minute warnings, of burying bad news, of manipulation and misinformation, we feel that the need to interpret and comment upon the official version of events is more important than ever.”

Kelner saw it as a “badge of honour” to be singled out by Blair.

Will Alton take a similarly brave and principled stand against Gordon Brown and George Bush? It is enough just to ask the question to see what an absurd proposition that is. But if you need more proof, here it is from the horse’s mouth.

Alton on Blair: “Blair is fucking good.“

And again: “I think he’s a very good prime minister and an exceptional politician who will be much missed when he’s gone. Some of the hostility to him is quite baffling. I just can’t understand it. It doesn’t logically relate to things.”

Alton on editorial priorities: “Absolutely have your environmental horrors in Sudan, but you might put it on page four. On page three you might well have, as we did, inside Sven’s five-star England football World Cup love nest — just because it’s more

visual.”

On the prosecution of BNP leader Nick Griffin: “ludicrous… should never have been brought”.

On Kamal Ahmed: “Kamal is one of the best journalists I have ever worked with and of the highest integrity, so if anybody impinges his integrity I’ll go and punch his fucking face in.”

What Alton’s editorship of the Independent means is this.

Every pro-war editor will feel safer in his or her job, and more confident in their editorial line. Piers Morgan and Greg Dyke, sacked over Iraq, are still in the news media wilderness. But Alton has taken over the Indie. The message couldn’t be clearer.

Every other editor will feel under even more pressure to give in to the dominant pro-war assumptions: our leaders’ intentions in the “war on terror” are noble; Iraq is yesterday’s story and our audience doesn’t want to hear about it; the anti-war movement is beyond the pale, an unrepresentative rump that is stuck in a rut.

Every journalist will feel it that more difficult to stand out against the notion that the Iraq WMD fiasco is behind us, we can carry on as if nothing had happened.

Alton’s appointment at the Indie is a disgrace. The anti-war movement should watch closely what happens to the paper and be ready to mobilise against Alton in support of the Indie journalists who have made their paper the conscience of the British media.

After 5 Years, Let's Put the Record Straight

Ellie Keen — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:40:47 +0000

FIVE years on, and the spin is as thick on the ground as ever. General David Petraeus – the latest American commander in Iraq and author of the “surge” policy – blames continuing attacks on the Iranian “Quds” movement. We are told of the ongoing British commitment to the coalition, while our remaining forces sit in isolation in an airbase, awaiting repatriation.

In short, we are no closer to hearing the truth from our governments today than we were during the build-up to this pointless war. Five years on, and British Government statements continue to be characterised by distortion, misrepresentation and downright lies. One would have thought that the powers-that-be would have learned some lessons by now, but perhaps we expect too much.

Yet this collective mindset of denial displayed by the governing class poses fresh dangers. There is a belief by many among them that they can literally get away with murder. It would be no surprise to me if George Bush’s administration – or a John McCain successor – launched another attack, this time on Iran, and possibly through the Americans’ Israeli proxies, with British support.

The truth is that the leading lights in both the Labour and Conservative parties believe they have got away with their dirty war on a sovereign state, in defiance of national and international opinion. Tony Blair appears to have walked away from his personal responsibility to a multi-faceted new role, including, improbably, as a Middle East peace envoy.

He is also being seriously peddled as a possible president of the European Union. That is a measure of how much of the establishment believe that Iraq as an issue is behind us. All those who so enthusiastically backed the illegal and immoral attack on Iraq – in politics, media, the forces and business – are happy now to criticise the post-invasion planning (or lack of it) in the vain hope that the dishonest and venal rationale for the invasion can be glossed over.

Well, it cannot for a variety of reasons – not least is the possibility of arraigning those responsible for this war of aggression before the international courts. At the very least, if we mouth platitudes about democracy and human rights, there ought to be a practical demonstration of our commitment to them before the international community. Otherwise, we will rightly be condemned as the hypocrites our leaders have shown themselves to be.

Of course, none of this could come to pass without there first being a full and independent inquiry into why we went to war in Iraq in the first place. There remains vigorous opposition to such an investigation. Conservative calls for one are based on the cynical view that they will not secure a parliamentary majority to ensure that there is one. Even if they were to succeed, we can rest assured that the Tories would scupper such an inquiry. After all, the record shows that they were more gung-ho for war than Blair.

The Hutton and Butler inquiries were narrow, controlled ones. Their terms of reference ensured that in neither case could they get to the nub of the issue: what had Blair agreed with Bush and when? What decisions were made to lie to the British Parliament and people to wage an illegal and immoral war? Now is the time to set the record straight.

Peter Kilfoyle is Labour MP for Liverpool Walton and a former defence minister

Arms and the Man

Ellie Keen — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:12:54 +0000

The British government was desperate to sell a batch of Eurofighter/Typhoon warplanes to bolster its special relationship with Saudi Arabia – a relationship built on fantastically lucrative arms deals. To justify dropping the investigation into Britain’s biggest arms company and a prominent Saudi prince over allegations of bribery and corruption, Tony Blair cited “national security”, the last refuge of an arrogant, frustrated executive.

Yesterday, Lord Justice Moses, a judge who has more experience than most of Whitehall deception, saw through it. One may have some sympathy with Robert Wardle, the hapless director of the Serious Fraud Office, for surrendering to Blair and Lord Goldsmith, his attorney general, who passed on the extraordinary claims from Downing Street.

These claims were that the heads of MI5 and MI6 feared Saudi Arabia would deprive them of vital intelligence that could save the lives of scores of people on London’s streets if the investigation into BAE Systems and Prince Bandar, went ahead. Indeed, we were told, the Saudis had already privately threatened to do so.

Riyadh has consistently exaggerated the significance of the intelligence it has on terrorist groups. But let us just imagine that it did come up with genuine and credible information about a planned terrorist plot in Britain. Would it really withhold that information? Would any foreign regime, however brutal, do that?

In a devastating passage in their long judgment, Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan, say:

“No one suggested to those uttering the threat that it was futile, that the United Kingdom’s system of democracy forbad presure being exerted on an independent prosecutor whether by the domestic executive or by anyone else; no-one even hinted that the courts would strive to protect the rule of law…

“If, as we are asked to accept, the Saudis would not be interested in our internal domestic constitutional arrangements, it is plausible they would understand the enormity of the interference with the United Kingdom’s sovereignty, when a foreign power seeks to interfere with the iternal adminstration of the criminal law”.

Driving the point home, they continue: “It is not difficult to imagine what they would think if we attempted to interfere with their criminal justice system”. There is no fear of that. The British government did not interfere when its citizens were tortured when wrongly accused of bomb attacks. The furthest the UK government goes is to allude in annual Foreign Office human rights reports to Saudi practices of torture and beheadings.

With characterstic wit and irony, Moses concludes the judgment by referring to Blair’s claim when the then-PM announced that the Serious Fraud Office had dropped the investigation. The judges note that Blair had said “this was the clearest intervention in the public interest he had seen”. They add: “We agree”.

Blair set the pattern, and ministers have since demonstrated they are prepared to play fast and loose with torture, whether it is colluding with the US practice of rendition or deporting suspects to such places as Jordan and Libya. On Wednesday, the courts stopped the deportation of the Jordanian, Abu Qatada, and two Libyans, regarded as threats to Britain’s national security.

This case has all the exotic ingredients – arms deals, alleged corruption, and claims that our national security is at stake. Ministers are now hatching a plot to introduce a law whereby the courts will not be able to intervene whenever the attorney general hoists the flag of “national security”. I wonder what Moses and his peers will think of that.

BAE Investigation Ruled Unlawful

Ellie Keen — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:32:17 +0000

The High Court this morning ruled that the Director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) acted unlawfully when he stopped a corruption investigation into BAE Systems’ arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

The judgment was handed down by Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan in response to a judicial review brought by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and The Corner House.

In the light of this judgment, the Serious Fraud Office must reopen the BAE-Saudi corruption investigation immediately. Both groups are calling upon the SFO to work jointly with US and Swiss investigators in doing so.

The judges detailed how BAE lobbied the Government by suggesting that the company would lose a large Saudi arms sale if the investigation was not dropped.

When the SFO was about to obtain access to Swiss bank accounts, Saudi Arabia threatened not only to cancel the arms deal but also to withdraw diplomatic and intelligence co-operation. This threat was made by Prince Bandar, who was allegedly complicit in the corruption under investigation.

The judges described the SFO Director’s subsequent termination of the investigation on 14th December 2006 as a “successful attempt by a foreign government to pervert the course of justice in the United Kingdom”.

They ruled that:

“No-one, whether within this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice. It is the failure of Government and the defendant [the Director of the Serious Fraud Office] to bear that essential principle in mind that justifies the intervention of this court.”

In explaining their reasons for ruling in favour of The Corner House and CAAT, the judges found that:

i. The Director of the Serious Fraud Office had failed to exercise his independent judgment in halting the investigation.

ii. The Director had failed to convince the court that he had done all in his power to resist the threat in order to uphold the rule of law.

They stated:

“The Director failed to appreciate that protection of the rule of law demanded that he should not yield to the threat . . . We are driven to the conclusion that the Director’s submission to the threat was unlawful.”

The judges were scathing about the Government’s arguments for ending the investigation

“It is obvious . . . that the decision to halt the investigation suited the objectives of the executive. Stopping the investigation avoided uncomfortable consequences, both commercial and diplomatic.”

As to whether the SFO Director’s action had broken the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention, the judges concluded that the SFO Director should answer to the OECD’s Working Group on Bribery.

Susan Hawley of The Corner House, said:

“This is a great day for British justice. The judges have stood up for the right of independent prosecutors not to be subjected to political pressure. And they have made sure that the Government cannot use national security arguments just because a prosecution is not in their interests

Symon Hill, spokesperson for Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), said:

“We are delighted. This judgment brings Britain a step closer to the day when BAE is no longer calling the shots. It has been clear from the start that the dropping of the investigation was about neither national security nor jobs. It was due to the influence of BAE and Saudi princes over the UK Government. As we have pursued this case, we have been overwhelmed by the support we have received from people in all walks of life, who do not want BAE to be above the law that the rest of us have to follow.”

The judgment comes just weeks after Gordon Brown’s Government announced that it is planning to give the Attorney General the power to stop criminal investigations and prosecutions by citing “national security” without the decision being subjected to judicial consideration or meaningful Parliamentary oversight. In the light of today’s judgment, The Corner House and CAAT insist that this proposed legislation, contained in the Constitutional Renewal Bill, must be abandoned.

Notes

1. Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) works for the reduction and ultimate abolition of the international arms trade. The Corner House is an environmental and social justice NGO. They have been represented throughout the proceedings by Leigh Day & Co, along with counsel from Blackstone Chambers.

2. Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan heard the judicial review brought by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and The Corner House on 14-15 February 2008. The full judgement and summary of the judgement are available as pdfs.

A time line of the judicial review and the arguments and evidence presented are also available.

3. The Corner House and CAAT challenged the SFO Director’s decision to terminate the BAE-Saudi investigation on six grounds, on which the judges ruled as follows:

i) It was unlawful and against the constitutional principle of the rule of law for the Director to give into the threat made by Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia;

ii) The Director failed to take into account the threat posed to the UK’s national security, the integrity of its criminal justice system, and the rule of law by giving into the threat;

iii) The Director mis-interpreted Article 5 of the OECD Convention and took into account irrelevant considerations;

iv) The Director failed to take into account the fact that Saudi Arabia would be breaching its international obligations on terrorism if it carried out the threat;

v) The advice given by ministers was tainted by irrelevant considerations under Article 5 of the OECD Convention;

vi) The Shawcross exercise was improperly conducted as ministers expressed opinion as to what the Director’s decision should be.

4. The Government published the draft Constitutional Renewal Bill on Tuesday 25 March 2008.

Clause 12 empowers the Attorney General to direct a prosecutor to discontinue an investigation or prosecution if satisfied it is necessary to do so to safeguard ‘national security’, which is not defined.

Clause 13 makes such a direction binding on prosecuting authorities. If the direction’s necessity is questioned, a certificate signed by a Government Minister certifying that the direction was necessary would be considered as conclusive evidence of that fact.

Clause 14 obliges the Attorney General to report to Parliament on the giving or withdrawal of a direction, but allows the Attorney General to exclude information that could prejudice national security or international relations.

Clause 17 defines ‘prejudice to international relations’ widely as including:
- relations between the UK and another other state, or international organization or court;
- the interests of the UK abroad;
- the promotion or protection by the UK of its interests abroad.

‘The interests of the UK’ are not defined.

Blair's Moral Inferiority

Ellie Keen — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:11:24 +0000

For once Tony Blair told the truth. With a “wall of sound” from hundreds of anti-war protestors in the background, he told the Westminster Cathedral audience at his lecture on Faith and Globalisation on 3 April, “I make no claims for moral superiority. Quite the reverse.”

Blair’s boundless hypocrisy and gall was much to the fore in the rest of his speech, in which he called for “people of faith” like himself — for whom “belief is quintessentially about truth” — to become “the conscience of the world”. No mention of course of the serial lying he told to take Britain into an immoral and illegal war. No mention indeed of Iraq at all, which the United Nations calls the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world today.

Blair claimed his faith guided him “to do good, to think and act beyond the limitations of selfish human desires”. Clearly his faith went into hiding over the last few months when he pocketed a five million pound advance for his memoirs, took a part-time advisory role with bankers JP Morgan, said to be worth up to £2.5m a year, and another advisory role with Swiss insurers Zurich worth half a million a year, added to which the £230,000 he got for one speech in China was just small change. (See http://tinyurl.com/2cbhnm)

The Westminster Cathedral lecture was preceded outside by a silent vigil by Catholic anti-war group Pax Christi, members of which then joined Stop the War’s noisy protest timed to start as Blair began speaking. For once, an anti-war protest got some media coverage, the Daily Mail report being one of the better examples: http://tinyurl.com/yoctq3

However, the BBC’s Today programmed managed to have a long feature on Blair’s speech without mentioning the protests outside. Musician and record producer Brian Eno, who participated in the anti-war “wall of “sound”, sent this response to the BBC:

“Your ‘Today’ report about Blair’s speech failed to mention the source of the noise in the background: many hundreds of people protesting outside against the absurdity of the man who has presided over Britain’s biggest foreign policy disaster since the Crimean War being asked to talk about globalisation. The real democrats were outside last night. Funny you missed them.”

Many thanks to Brian and everyone else who made the “wall of sound” protest so memorable. Blair apologised to his audience that we there. “Sorry about the people who follow me around,” he said. We intend to keep doing so until he is held to account for his part in war crimes that have destroyed Iraq, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians and turned four million people — one in seven of the population — into refugees.