George Galloway | ukwatch.net

Stopping the rot of child poverty

Alex Doherty — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:03:33 +0000

Last Saturday’s rally by the Campaign to End Child Poverty deserved wider coverage than it received. The campaign’s work and research findings, published last week, are a reminder, for those who needed it, that economic hardship and a widening chasm between rich and poor did not begin with the credit crunch. They go back to before the Blair years. They continued through them and under Gordon Brown.

The figures on child poverty on Britain, in the third term and 11th year of a so-called Labour government, returned with majorities beyond the dreams of Harold Wilson, are symptoms of a deep sickness in our society.

In my own constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow are some of the highest concentrations of child poverty anywhere in the country. There are 23,450 children, 79%, living in poverty. Neighbouring Poplar and Limehouse is not that different.

Across Tower Hamlets as a whole in 2007, two-thirds of children were living in “income-deprived families” (how Orwellian the language of public policy has become), making it the most deprived borough in England on that measure.

The incidence of child poverty is directly linked to lack of work and dependency on benefits. Despite these root causes children, parents, teachers and education officials in Tower Hamlets have done extraordinarily well in raising the level of educational achievement – a success praised by the End Child Poverty Campaign.

Responding earlier this year to news that the government was going to miss its target of halving child poverty by 2010, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, England’s children’s commissioner, said:

Poverty is, in our view, the single most pernicious influence that is blighting the lives and prospects of our young people. We are one of the richest countries in the world. Yet Unicef has found that we have some of the highest levels of poverty. Poverty underpins most of the other social issues we are concerned with.

We also have the unhappiest children in Europe. Beneath the aggregate statistics lies an ocean of suffering. It is not simply the overall family income that is stunting the lives of children in east London. Housing, health and welfare inequalities are cutting them down at an early age. It is by no means unusual for constituents to turn up to my surgery looking to be rehoused because they are living 12 or 14 to a two-bedroom flat.

To repeat – this was going on throughout 2005 to 2007, and before I became the MP. It was going on while New Labour and their clique were boasting endlessly of the economic bounties they were bestowing on Britain. It was going on while Gordon Brown assured us – against all experience and contradicting the insights of even sophisticated pro-capitalist economists – that he had abolished the boom/slump cycle.

And through those years the people of east London saw the gleaming spires of finance capital soar higher and higher in the City of London and Canary Wharf, dwarfing the inhabitants in between. The wealth would trickle down sides of the Gherkin and the NatWest Tower, we were assured. Instead, the poorest got swept down the gullies. And now it is going to get a lot worse, quickly.

The official anti-poverty strategy for Tower Hamlets cites the 90,000 jobs “created” at Canary Wharf as central to progress. But scarcely any of those jobs went to people living in Tower Hamlets. And now, as the empty Lehman Brothers offices bear witness, the question is how many of those jobs are going to go over the next few months.

It is not only Brown and New Labour who stand hopelessly exposed by the turn of events. So too are David Cameron and the Tories. Their call for an end to casino capitalism and for tighter regulation of the finance sector falls into the category of telling the biggest whopper you can think of in the hope that the public will be so stunned they’ll doubt their own critical faculties.

This is the same Cameron who says he wants to be as radical in the social field as Margaret Thatcher was in economics. It sounds like a darkly mumbled line from Marlon Brando in the Godfather. I can only imagine that it means something like shutting every social services department and getting rid of red-tape such as legislation guaranteeing children’s rights. It was under Thatcher that child poverty doubled.

The steps proposed by both parties are hopelessly inadequate. The Liberal Democrats don’t even enter the picture thanks to their hapless leader choosing this of all moments to lurch towards the free market – watch the space between those shoulder blades.

As this financial crisis deepens, people will want radical policies – more like the New Deal of Roosevelt than Blair’s workfare scheme of the same name. Already public ire has turned against the stockbrokers, the hedge-fund managers and the City slickers.

It is becoming clearer by the day that an emergency programme of radical anti-poverty and anti-recessionary measures is required. The signal from Brown’s reshuffle is that he is going to do exactly the opposite. Who on earth in the Brown circle thinks the Peter Mandelson has traction with Labour people? Putting him in charge of business is a sign that it will be the bankers and the chief executives, and no one else, who get to enjoy a lavish welfare state and economic protection.

From the Chicksands Estate and the Roman Road there’s a burning resentment at what’s been done to this country and its children. A glance at the history of the East End should give the powers that be fair warning: they’d be ill-advised to ignore the suffering lapping at their gates.

Jackboots Of Our Time

Tim Holmes — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 18:49:03 +0000

At least with hard man John Reid it was man-to-man hand-to-hand fighting. The latest New Labour witch-hunter to come out kicking Muslims, Jack Straw, has resorted to picking on women, and a pretty ugly sight it is too.

While he might now wish he had drawn a veil over his disturbing preoccupation with his female constituents clothing, he has unmasked how frenetically the Dutch auction in anti-Muslim rhetoric in Britain is proceeding.

Tabloid frenzy feeds government ministers, who feed the tabloids, and the resulting toxicity fuels the kind of firebombing of isolated Muslims in places like Windsor, where last week the Medina Dairy was attacked.

Almost a pre-pogrom atmosphere is being created in Britain and too few progressives are standing up against it.

Imagine if a minister in the US dared to instruct the Amish how to live their lives, railed against their unwillingness to act, think, live, dress like the majority around them?

Can you imagine a demand to the Orthodox Jewish residents of Stamford Hill that they must end their “separateness”, cut their locks, get out of their “ghettos”. Or that Sikhs should abandon their turbans?

Inconceivable, of course, and yet that is exactly what is being demanded of Britain’s two million Muslims by Straw.

Britain is often described as a secular country. It is not. It has an established church, the head of which is the head of state (come to think of it, all concerned have a prediliction for unusual headgear themselves).

We have been on the other hand more tolerant than most of the minorities in our midst. What on earth is tolerant or secular about demanding of religious people that they should amend their religious observance to suit those who don’t share their beliefs? No politician has any right to enforce a dress code on those to whom he is beholden for his very role in life.

This breathtaking arrogance would never be tried by anyone about any other group than Muslims. This Islamophobia is the secularism of fools.

Less than 10,000 women throughout the country wear the niqab – the veil covering all but the eyes. Unless they are all concentrated in Mr Straw’s constituency, it is a fair bet that such women represent a tiny proportion of even his Muslim constituents.

By singling them out in this way for ruthless attention by the Richard Littlejohns and the John Gaunts, the gutterscribes of the Daily Mail and the Sun, Straw has committed a grotesque and cowardly attack on an already fretful minority of a minority.

At the risk of enforcing a dress code myself, he should put a big sock in his foul mouth and stop whipping up trouble between the different groups in this already fragile polity.

Sunday saw people gathering to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the great battle of Cable Street.

On that day progressive people of all kinds rallied to protect the significant minority of immigrants in London’s east end against the strutting jackboots of a domestic fascism, one of whose very arguments was against the very “separateness” of the Jews who lived there. Their very garb, unusual diets, habits of living in close proximity to each other was a standing affront to the beef-eating Englishness of the Moselyites.

“Leave the Jews alone” was the response of the best of the British left. Let them eat dress and live as they want. It is a call that should be echoed about today’s whipping boys, the Muslims.

Axis of Aggression

Alex Doherty — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 18:19:15 +0000

Imagine that Lebanon destroyed every bridge in Israel, blew up the international airport, seized the airspace and turned it into a free-fire zone, blockaded the ports, severed every arterial road and ordered people to leave their homes, then bombing them to pieces when they did. Do you think any western leader would utter the words: “Lebanon has a right to defend itself”?

This is the basic truth that every news bulletin seems designed to obscure. It is the fundamental reality that is enraging hundreds of millions of people across the globe as Israel launches its barbaric action against the people of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

And it is not just Israel, of course. Barely commented on in the British media is the fact that it was Britain and the US that prevented the G8 summit from coming out with a call for a ceasefire.

Tony Blair and his ministers were again instrumental on Monday in preventing the EU from issuing a condemnation of Israel’s aggression. No one should be in any doubt why: George Bush and Blair want Israel to continue its assault on Lebanon, and they are intervening to quell international condemnation of the attack.

The US state, with the craven support of Blair’s government, is giving Israel a green light – not because of some imagined stranglehold on Middle East policy exercised by a supposedly omnipotent Zionist lobby, but because Israel is doing what it has always done: it is serving the interests of US imperial power in the Middle East.

Israel is cloaking its attack in neocon rhetoric about an axis of evil linking Iran and Syria to Hizbullah in Lebanon. Its claims are dutifully repeated by a media that never once stops to point out that the Israeli missiles and bombs raining down on Lebanon were supplied by the US.

There is a link with Syria and Iran, but it is not the lie that Syrian and Iranian troops are in Lebanon: it is that the US has made no secret that it is preparing for an attack on Iran, which has signed a mutual defence pact with Syria.

Israel’s attack on Lebanon serves as a pre-emptive strike on Hizbullah, which would respond militantly to any US attack upon Iran. There is an axis of aggression. It links Tel Aviv and Washington – and Tony Blair has placed London at its midpoint.

It is at that midpoint that those of us who live in Britain must strike a blow. By taking to the streets in mass numbers this weekend and at the mobilisation in Manchester in September, we can speed the day when Britain is detached from Bush’s “war on terror”.

Resistance is growing across the Middle East. It is our responsibility to make a breakthrough here in the fight against imperialist subjugation.

Labour's Retreat

Alex Doherty — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 23:13:32 +0000

Labour’s long retreat from class politics – marked by the marginalisation of trade unions, privatisation, the abandonment of council housing and the helter-skelter of billionaires queueing up to fill the party funding gap – has finally forced some worms to turn.

Margaret Hodge, New Labour minister and formerly Islington’s red duchess, and Jon Cruddas, once Downing Street’s union-link man, have broken ranks to highlight the rupture in Labour’s heartland: the end of the 100-year affair with white working people, those with nothing to sell except their work.

Labour’s 1945-97 coalition of the working class and progressive middle-class allies – buttressed from the mid-60s by millions of mainly Commonwealth migrants – is being crushed in a vice-like process. The abandonment of traditional Labour social policy has been coupled with a foreign policy that deeply alienates parts of that coalition. The resulting fracture is now haemorrhaging votes from each element.

The point is well made by Chris Jones, professor of social policy at Liverpool University, in his critique of the lauded but less than scholarly book The New East End. It is not, as the study claimed, welfare dependency that breeds poverty and inter-ethnic strife, but rather “the onslaught on state welfare workers over the past 25 years, the reductions in welfare provision, the hollowing-out of social and community facilities in so many working-class neighbourhoods”.

When the mainly Asian women workers of Gate Gourmet were sacked last year at three minutes’ notice by a Texan billionaire with a bullhorn in the firm’s car park, the widespread revulsion disguised this underlying reality: he was within his rights, and the women had almost none. When Tony Blair boasts that we have the “most flexible” labour force in western Europe, he really means the most sackable (as Peugeot’s workers have discovered), working the longest hours with greater job insecurity, some of the poorest conditions of service, and the lowest pensions – even they are under threat from a spurious pensions crisis.

In the East End of London, the names of labour-movement luminaries such as Arthur Deakin and George Lansbury grace council blocks – the reward for stoicism in the Blitz and postwar Labour loyalty. Those estates are now among the many which have been ruthlessly driven out of council tenure and into the semi-privatised netherworld. The spectacle of a council, a Labour council, scuttling around in limousines spending hundreds of thousands of public pounds on DVDs and glossy magazines in order to persuade its tenants never to darken the town hall door again might have even Neil Kinnock’s hair turn red again.

When Mr Blair bragged to the assembled claque at a soiree in the headquarters of Goldman Sachs – whose partners are among the richest people in Britain – that everyone present was paying less in income tax under him than under Margaret Thatcher, he seemed neither to understand nor care how repellent that sounded during a third Labour term and with multiple urban deprivation beginning just a stone’s throw from the City.

In meetings across the country over the past couple of years I have been arguing that every country needs a labour party – but that Britain no longer has one. A party that will serve working people, whose interests are different and separate – as Keir Hardie argued more than a century ago – from those of Goldman Sachs. A party that will care for those now too old to work; for those who are not yet old enough to work but deserve the right to free study; for the poor, the marginalised, the migrants.

We have been challenging, from the left, New Labour’s refusal to represent those it was elected to serve. Hodge and Cruddas are highlighting the threat posed in parts of east London and the north of England by the brown-shirted bread-and-butter “patriots” of the British National party, their poisonous pitch spiced with anti-immigrant rancour.

White workers on low pensions or wages, served by inadequate schools and hospitals, living in substandard housing, have, we are told, fallen for the falsehood that the interests of the black poor and white poor can be separate too.

As the former car workers of Dagenham and the West Midlands, mill-hands in Lancashire and miners in Yorkshire watch their rulers cavort with the undeserving rich, it’s little wonder if some are prey to the patter of Nick Griffin and his fascism-lite. The worst thing to do under such circumstances is to make concessions to the BNP’s immigrant-bashing or to slander white working-class people as irredeemably racist, while continuing with the destructive neoliberal policies that are fragmenting and impoverishing working-class communities.

The fascists were driven out of the East End in the 1930s, 1970s and 1990s by uncompromising opposition to their racist filth and through the unity of white, black and Asian working people around genuine labour-movement values of solidarity and equality. Yet they are not the values prized by New Labour. The party made its bed when it abandoned those things that had commanded the loyalty of generations for the fool’s gold that is the temporary favour of rich men. In next month’s local elections it will have to lie in it – its former heartland supporters the victims, not the villains of the piece.

George Galloway is the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow

gallowayg@parliament.uk

A Reply to Palast

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 13:30:48 +0000

Until a couple of days ago I hadn’t heard of Greg Palast in years, the man who claims to have been pursuing me with questions for two months. He has never phoned, written, emailed or made any other contact with me, which is curiously reminiscent of the behavior of the US Senate committee. Having now forced myself to look at his pernicious writing, it seems like the deranged ramblings you might expect to find pushed out from under the door of a locked ward. He claims to be a journalist. He clearly doesn’t get much work.

Palast conflates meetings, truths and half-truths, statements taken out of context to produce a toxic smear which would be actionable in the country he claims to work in, my country. How many times do I have to respond to the ravings of guttersnipes? I met Saddam twice, the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld. The difference is that I wasn’t trying to sell him weapons and guidance systems. The first, and infamous time, my words were taken out of context. The second, where Saddam revealed his favorite confectionery, I was trying to persuade him to let the weapons’ inspectors back in. A vain mission, of course, as the US and UK had already decided to illegally go to war whatever he did.

The Mariam Appeal, which Palast drags in to allege I benefited financially from its work, was not a charity. It was a political campaign. Its primary function was not to provide medicines for Iraqi children, although we did, but to highlight the political conditions which were killing them. Sanctions! The largest donor was the ruler of the UAE (who gave approximately £500,000), followed by Fawaz Zureikat’s £375,000, and then the now king of Saudi Arabia (a regime I loath) with £150,000. The donations of these three represented 99% of the campaign’s total income. These donors were prominently identified at the time, there was no attempt to hide them, as this palooka claims. None of them have complained the money was ill-spent. Palast might take the view that finance should not be taken from such sources. Sorry, but needs must.

Among the works undertaken by the appeal was a daily newsletter on sanctions, a sanctions-busting flight into Baghdad, the Big Ben to Baghdad trip in a red London bus, countless meetings and conferences, posters and flyers, the projection of an anti-war slogan on the House of Commons, the first time that had ever been done — and the facilitating of trips to Iraq by dozens of journalists, many of whom sat in on my meetings with Tariq Aziz. And virtually all of whom were conducted around Baghdad by Fawaz Zureikat, openly introduced as the Mariam Appeal’s chairman, as well as a businessman trading with Iraq. We brought Mariam Hamza to Britain for treatment — immodestly, but factually, I claim that we saved her life — where she remained for half a year, sent back cured. I could go on and on but my enemies would surely claim I was blowing my own trumpet.

But what I will not tolerate — and will sue in any territory where it is possible to do so — is the lie that I personally benefited financially from the campaign. The Charity Commission inquiry Palast refers to was occasioned by a referral from Tony Blair’s Attorney General. The commission are in possession of every receipt of funds and every cheque issues or bank transfer ever made. They satisfied that there was no malfeasance and closed the case without further action, no doubt to the disappointment of Mr Blair’s Attorney General. Charities in Britain cannot campaign politically, which was the prime function of the appeal and in their judgment the commission said that the operation should have been split in two, one arm of which, the one which provided the physical aid, should have registered as a charity. Well, sorry, but that’s poppycock.

The stumblebum then drags in Hitchens — perhaps it’s two bums finding mutual support — a man I recently debated in New York. For what seems like the ten-thousandth time let me try to finally nail the canard that I benefited through the oil-for-food programme, an allegation at the time of writing which has netted me at least $4 million in libel damages and costs. Of course, when I talked with Tariq Aziz, I talked about the programme, but only in respect of the effects it was having on Iraq. I did not request or receive oil vouchers. I did not benefit financially. Not by one thin dime! I said voluntarily and on pain of prosecution under oath to the US Senate committee — another body which doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good smear — and I say it again. If I had been guilty of what Palast alleges I’d be sitting not in the House of Commons but a prison cell! Let that be an end to it because I’m sure the public is even more tired and bemused than I am.

Crawl back under your rock, Mr Palast!

Bitter Harvest

Alex Doherty — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 12:47:39 +0000

No one can condone the violence aimed at working people going about their daily lives in London last Thursday. They have not been a party to, nor are they responsible for, the decisions of their government.

They are entirely innocent and I, and Respect, condemn those who have killed or injured them.

I spent time at the Royal London hospital in my constituency where the medical staff toiled, without a break, to deal with the casualties.

I walked among the emergency workers, including the firefighters from the stations that have had engines taken away from them as economy measures.

I have spoken to the transport workers, whose heroism on the day is too rarely recognised and whose questions over the handling of the disaster have yet to be answered.

These are all public sector workers serving the public not private interests and they should stay in the public sector. I have been attacked, from predictable quarters, for speaking out in parliament and in the media last Thursday.

But within three hours of the atrocities Tony Blair and George Bush were claiming them as a vindication of their war on terror.

That cannot be allowed to stand. The primary responsibility for last Thursdays bloodshed lies with the perpetrators of those acts. However, the acts did not come out of a clear sky.

People killed in explosions by razor-sharp red-hot steel and splintering flying glass die the same death whether they are in London or Fallujah. When the US armed forces, their backs guarded by our armed forces, reduced Fallujah to rubble not a whisper found its way into the House of Commons.

A swamp of hatred towards this country has been watered by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, by the daily destruction of Palestinian homes and by the occupation of Afghanistan.

The enmity generated by those great events feeds the terrorism of bin Laden and the other Islamist terrorists. Is that such a controversial point?

When I was on the Labour benches and spoke in the aftermath of 9/11, I said that I despise Osama bin Laden. I have always despised him. I did so when the US and British governments set him to war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

I said nearly four years ago that if they handled 9/11 in the wrong way they would create 10,000 bin Ladens. Does anyone doubt that 10,000 bin Ladens at least have been created by the events of the past few years?

The pictures from Abu Ghraib, the hell of Guantanamo Bay, the daily humiliation of the Palestinians by Ariel Sharons forces all these have contributed to the bitterness against us.

Blairs government has hitched this country, against the will of the majority of its people, to Bushs global ambitions. The government says this has nothing to do with Iraq because 9/11 happened before the invasion of that country.

But Al Qaida took shape out of the last attack on Iraq, in 1991, and the murderous sanctions regime that followed only gave it another grievance to exploit.

The policies of successive US and British governments had already created manifold grievances.

The anti-war movement, and the British governments own security services, warned that the invasion of Iraq would inflame those grievances and make a terrorist attack in Britain more likely.

Bush and Blair said the war on Iraq would create a safer world it has not. They said there were weapons of mass destruction there were not. They said Al Qaida operated therethey did not. But they do now.

If the British government continues with this disastrous policy, greater disasters will follow to the people of Iraq, to our troops in Iraq and to the citizens of our country. If we bomb them, they will bomb us.

The only way out of this morass is to reverse the policies that have taken us into it. As the Spanish people showed us last year, the way out is to withdraw from Iraq and to break from Bushs war on terror.

It is to address the grievances across the region, not to add to them by support for Israels Ariel Sharon, and for the corrupt kings and presidents of Arabia.

If we start to drain the swamp, we can look forward to the day it dries up, when the monsters that lurk in it will have nothing to feed on.

George Galloway is the MP for Bethnal Green & Bow

Taking on the Senate

Fri, 20 May 2005 15:32:46 +0000

George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators who have accused him of corruption.

“Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one – and neither has anyone on my behalf.

“Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

“Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are – let’s be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had ‘many meetings’ with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

“I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as “many meetings” with Saddam Hussein.

“As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country – a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his.

“I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

“You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

“Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am ‘the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil’.

“Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that’s been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

“Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

“You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

“There were 270 names on that list originally. That’s somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

“You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I’ve never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he’s your prisoner, I believe he’s in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

“I’m not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

“And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

“Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where’s the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

“Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I’ll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don’t know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

“Whilst I’m on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don’t you think I have a right to know? Don’t you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

“Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

“You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph’s documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph’s documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 – never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

“And yet you’ve allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

“But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

“Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you’re such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

“In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there’s nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

“The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It’s a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

“Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life’s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

“Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

“If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth.

“Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq’s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq’s money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

“Have a look at the oil that you didn’t even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

“Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government.”

These are Blair's Last Days

Tue, 03 May 2005 16:38:53 +0000

When I first called the prime minister a liar on air over his repeatedly denied plans to invade Iraq – in the wake of the Texas meeting with George Bush in spring 2002 – the BBC presenter was aghast at my presumption. Today there can scarcely be a sentient being in the land who would disagree.

If Tony Blair had been told a couple of months ago that three days before polling day the 87th British soldier would be killed in Iraq (not that Blair cared to remember the number) and the first seven items on the Today programme would be about Iraq, he might well have called off the election. As if in a Shakespearean tragedy, a powerful leader with a fatal flaw is diminishing before our eyes – his prime ministerial title, as with Macbeth, “hangs loose about him like a giant’s robes upon a dwarfish thief”. Whatever the result on Thursday, these are the last days of Blair.

Taunted even by the star of the softball interview, Sir David Frost, at the weekend for being allowed out without his new best friend, Gordon Brown – the man he banished from the campaign leadership in a flurry of spin just months ago – Blair is on the run. But there is no diminishing in the pursuit.

He lied, and more than 100,000 died: the real blood price of his grotesque special relationship with Bush. As the epigrammist has it: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” The Blair betrayal is deep in the mire precisely because it has been a disastrous failure. Every “turning point” has led into a new cul-de-sac. The fall of Baghdad, the capture of Saddam, the “handover” of sovereignty, the destruction of Falluja, the much trumpeted and manipulated elections and last week, at last, a new client administration. None of these has achieved any reduction in the cycle of resistance to the occupation.

As the avalanche of leaks indicates, at the heart of the British establishment people are reaching the conclusion that Blair must pay for what he has done. He misled parliament and the people – the mandarinate might have swallowed that – but he lied to the armed forces, too. As Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, then chief of the armed forces, made clear at the weekend, he doesn’t intend to go into the dock by himself. The troops were told the war was both legal and unavoidable. We now know it was neither. They were promised a warm welcome by “liberated” Iraqis. Red-hot and razor-sharp has been the reality. This is treason – and it hasn’t prospered.

If every one of the hundreds of New Labour poodles were re-elected on Thursday, why should they learn new tricks? If there is to be no punishment for blunders, crimes of this magnitude, what meaning has democracy? And why should they stop at Iraq?

Bush may well soon demand the special relationship be consummated again. We know who the targets are and – in the light of the weekend’s revelations – it may even be that agreement has been reached to prime the guns again. This time we will not be able to argue that we did not know the truth.

The last redoubt of the apologists for the war is that while it might have been illegal, even unnecessary, at least it removed a tyrant. But weighed against the disfigurement of the international legal and political system, the mass graves of victims of sanctions, invasion and occupation, the surge of sectarian and ethnic strife in the country and the mass influx of recruits to Islamist fundamentalism, even the end has been undone by the means. There was no al-Qaida in Iraq before the arrival of US and British troops. Now fundamentalists are descending like spores of anthrax on the gaping wounds torn open by the war. It is without doubt the biggest foreign policy calamity in modern history.

When they are really behind the eight ball, the Blairites say that all this has the benefit of hindsight. But 2 million people on London’s streets in February 2003 had no 20/20 vision. They could just somehow see that visiting devastating violence on an already dangerously unstable part of the world was likely to make the world even more dangerous. This common sense somehow didn’t percolate into the House of Commons, which had already begun falling in behind the bugle call for war. Leaders of the anti-war movement, such as me, were called traitors for refusing to fall into line.

The name calling may have ended, but the reckoning has only just begun. History will link this prime minister irrevocably with Iraq. It will be the sculpting on his political tombstone. Iraq has been broken. Millions of lives have been shattered. But broken too have been the hearts of those who waited so long for the return of a Labour government. Tony Blair promised that a new dawn had broken. But he became the leader who lost his way. For a stars-and-stripes ribbon to pin on his coat, he betrayed us. For New Labour, it will be never be glad confident morning again.