Julie Hyland | ukwatch.net

Labour refuses to answer Davis’s by-election challenge

Tim Holmes — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:58:55 +0000

Labour will not contest the by-election forced by the resignation of shadow home secretary David Davis, which he says is intended to initiate a public debate on the government’s attack on democratic rights.

The decision confirms that the Labour government is incapable of defending its extension of the period in which people can be detained without charge to 42 days—a measure that it managed to push through Parliament only with the support of nine members of the Democratic Unionist Party, reportedly “persuaded” with financial incentives for Northern Ireland.

More fundamentally, it underscores Labour’s hostility to any form of democratic accountability—a position which it made a point of principle with its decision to support the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq in defiance of popular opinion.

Initially, Davis’s announcement was greeted with universal scorn and derision by the media, who claimed that his “egotistical stunt” would backfire due to broad public support for the government’s stance.

While Labour joined such claims, it refused to say if it would contest the election from the very start. Instead, having been defeated in the London Mayoral contest by Conservative Boris Johnson and with record lows in opinion polls, it turned to its closest backer, Rupert Murdoch, for help.

Within hours of Davis’s resignation, Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of the Sun, boasted that he had the oligarch’s blessing to take on Davis and that “the Sun has always been up for 42 days, or perhaps even 420 days, frankly.”

MacKenzie, who said he had discussed his candidacy with Murdoch and Sun editor Rebekah Wade earlier that evening, said he was “90 percent certain” to challenge Davis if Labour decided not to. He also revealed that Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Tony Blair had been present at the party, implying that he had Labour’s backing to act as its proxy.

But as thousands of e-mails and texts to newspapers and media outlets showed that Davis’s stance had struck a chord with the public, little was heard from MacKenzie or the Sun for several days.

The former editor’s claim that Murdoch would finance his candidacy—which would be illegal under electoral law—combined with the possibility that the Sun’s claim to represent the “man in the street” would founder should it be seen to tie itself too closely to an unpopular government—appears to have done for MacKenzie’s candidacy.

Not that Murdoch was out of the picture. The Guardian reported that the Sun had also “considered approaching Rachel North, a survivor of the 7/7 bombings, who has campaigned for justice for the victims.” And his other media outlet, Sky News, reported that Labour was canvassing John Smeaton to stand in its place. The baggage handler won the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for helping police foil a terrorist attack at Glasgow Airport last year. The report was considered especially authoritative because it came from Sky TV’s political editor Adam Boulton, husband of Anji Hunter, Blair’s former spin-doctor and close friend.

North, however, told the Guardian that she “admired Davis’s stand” and was “a big fan of civil liberties and freedom and democracy.” At the weekend, Smeaton also scotched claims that he had any intention of standing, stating that he did not understand where the rumours were coming from.

Finally, on Thursday, MacKenzie confirmed he would not be a candidate in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, citing financial considerations.

“The clincher for me was the money. Clearly the Sun couldn’t put up the cash—so I was going to have to rustle up a maximum of £100,000 to conduct my campaign,” he said, rewriting events to suggest that the earlier declaration of his candidacy had been entirely a personal whim. Instead, he urged Sun readers to support Northampton market trader Eamonn Fitzpatrick, who has said he will run as an independent in favour of 42-days detention.

Currently, the unknown fruit and vegetable salesman is one of several independent candidates who, in addition to their campaign over one or another single issue, are defending the government’s detention powers.

Labour’s hostility to democratic accountability

Labour has attempted to justify its abstention on the grounds that the by-election is a “farce.” Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman accused Davis of “wasting over £80,000 to run a by-election, paid for by the council taxpayers,” while Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has said Davis should be made to personally foot the bill.

Such demands establish an entirely new criterion for elections—i.e., whether the government of the day considers them politically pertinent or financially worthwhile. Labour has already overturned its manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty—rejected by Irish voters last weekend—on the grounds that it no longer considers it necessary.

In truth, Labour cannot publicly defend its policies because it is the political plaything of big business and the super-rich, whose interests are antithetical to those of the broad mass of the population.

That is why Brown chose to make his rebuttal to Davis before an invite-only audience of just 50 people from the pro-Labour think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.

The thrust of his speech on June 17 was that “modern security” requirements, “modern challenges” and “new threats” could not be managed “by the old, tried methods and approaches.”

Terrorism, organised crime and drug trafficking were all organised globally, using the latest technology, he said.

Whereas in the “old world” police took “fingerprints, now we have the technology of DNA.”

“While the old world relied on the eyes of a policeman out on patrol, today we also have the back-up of CCTV.

“While the old world used only photographs to identify people, now we have biometrics.”

In other words, technological progress justifies the state’s acquisition of massive new powers—including plans for a national DNA database, identity cards and widespread surveillance (as in the case of closed-circuit cameras)—an argument that evokes Orwell’s 1984.

As for Brown’s claims that technological developments could be used to “strengthen the protection of the individual,” there was no evidence of this in his speech, which was all about strengthening the state. His pledge that liberty meant “never subjecting the citizen to arbitrary treatment” and “always respecting basic rights and freedoms” was made ridiculous by the government’s passage of 42-days, and its earlier plans to introduce 90-days detention.

Concern at exposure of Labour and the “left”

It is a measure of the putrefaction of Labour and the so-called “left” in general that a right-wing Tory can present himself as the champion of civil liberties.

Labour’s 42-days detention is only the latest and most draconian of the more than 200 pieces of “anti-terror” legislation enacted by Labour since 2001 that have overturned fundamental civil liberties and have established the legislative framework for a police state.

Throughout this time, the Conservative Party has supported the “war on terror.” Davis himself voted in favour of 28-days detention without charge and the Iraq war. But he can attack Labour as “gutless” because not a single Labour “left” was prepared to break ranks and challenge the government. The two Labour “rebels” over 42-days who have said they will back Davis—Bob Marshall-Andrews and Ian Gibson—only did so when it became clear the government would not contest the election.

Even more strikingly, all the government’s critics have thus far preferred to sign up to Davis’s campaign, rather than launch their own. Veteran Labourite Tony Benn has said he supports Davis, as has Observer columnist Henry Porter and Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights organisation Liberty.

This has raised alarm at the pro-Labour New Statesman magazine, which, like all official political circles in Britain, was caught off-guard by the extent of the political disaffection that would be revealed by Davis’s resignation.

On June 12, New Statesman editor Martin Bright had hailed Davis’s “courageous” resignation. In his blog, “I salute David Davis,” he wrote that the shadow home secretary had done “the decent thing” and wished “Davis well” in the election.

Within a week, his position had changed. The government’s abstention and the willingness of its “liberal” critics to rally to a Tory candidate left Bright concerned that Labour’s left periphery was fatally compromised politically.

In an air of desperation, Bright wrote, asking, “Where is the David Davis of the left, prepared to resign and challenge the government’s authoritarian agenda.... Where is the politician or public figure to challenge the government’s authoritarian agenda from a progressive perspective? In short, where is the liberal candidate to stand in Haltemprice and Howden?”

Issuing the call for a “genuinely liberal candidate to stand against David Davis,” he pledged that such a candidate “would receive the full backing of the New Statesman.”

New Labour Push Through 42 Days' Detention

Tim Holmes — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:15:25 +0000

The Brown government managed to pass its new anti-terror bill through parliament on Wednesday by a majority of just nine.

By 315 to 306, it was agreed to extend the period in which a person can be detained without charge from 28 days to 42. Little now remains of habeas corpus, on which Britain’s international reputation as the home of personal liberty rested. The UK now has one of the most undemocratic terms on detention without charge in the world—worse even than Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, which the British government routinely condemns as dictatorial and authoritarian.

There had been speculation that Prime Minister Gordon Brown would lose the vote. Some 47 sitting MPs had voted against then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s plan to extend the period of detention without charge to 90 days and both the former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer and former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had spoken out against the 42-day measure. Virtually the entire media, with the exception of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, had also denounced it, as had the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and human rights organisation Liberty.

In the event, just 36 Labour MPs voted against the 42-day extension. That still would have been enough to defeat the measure, but it was salvaged by the nine votes of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party.

The DUP claimed that it had voted out of principle, in order to safeguard national security. But principle was the last thing that was involved in the debate. Afterwards, it emerged that democratic safeguards had been horse-traded for the sum of £1.2 billion—the financial aid package Brown reportedly offered Northern Ireland in return for DUP support.

Labour discussions with the DUP continued up to the last hours before the vote. Reports indicate that the government has agreed that Northern Ireland will be able to keep the proceeds from the sale of army bases, worth £1 billion, and will gain a further £200 million through the relaxation of Treasury rules on the proceeds of new water charges. The government has also apparently pledged that Britain’s liberal abortion laws will not be extended to Northern Ireland.

It took even less to buy off some potential Labour “rebels,” some of whom were apparently persuaded to support the government by vague promises on compensation to miners with lung disease and that the UK would back a relaxation of sanctions on Cuba.

The more fundamental concern for many of the putative rebel Labour MPs in switching to backing the government was the political implications of a defeat of the 42-day extension. Labour MP Austin Mitchell said that he had changed to supporting the extension in order to “save Gordon Brown for the nation. I support him and I think he would be on his way out if he had been defeated on this.”

After a series of electoral losses for Labour, and with opinion polls showing that the party’s supporters are leaving it in droves, the government feared that the bill’s loss would leave Brown fatally wounded.

That only intensified accusations that Brown was proceeding recklessly in forcing the matter to a vote—utilizing the “war on terror” for political posturing in the manner of his predecessor, and further discrediting Parliament in the process. Likewise, Liberty charged that Brown had “sexed up” the case for extending the period of detention—the charge made against Blair over Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Brown countered that his refusal to back down on the extension was motivated solely by “national security” concerns, and made necessary by the fact that it took far longer for police to trawl through computers and decrypt potential terror plots. According to the latest figures available, however, 1,113 people had been arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 between September 11, 2001 and September 30, 2006, of which just 104 were charged with specific terror-related offences. Moreover, since the limit was raised to 28 days in 2006, only 11 suspects have been held without charge for longer than 14 days.

Writing in the Times, Philippe Sands QC said that the prime minister had “plucked a detention number from the air with no evidence to back it up.”

“What seems to have happened is that early on in his premiership Mr. Brown took a punt on a number—an arbitrary 42 days—and is now stuck with it. The policy was fixed on the basis of an ill-conceived political objective—tough on terror—and not on the basis of the evidence or any proper consultation.”

Powers already exist to extend the period of detention beyond 28 days. The Civil Contingencies Act allows for an additional 30 days, but the government argued that it wanted the police to be given the extra time without having to declare a state of national emergency.

In the end, Brown agreed a number of supposed safeguards on the 42-day extension. These are that a chief constable and the Director of Public Prosecutions must request the extension from the Home Secretary only in the context of a “grave exceptional terrorist threat.” Parliament must then debate and vote in favour of this extension within one week of the request being made. If it is passed, police will have 30 days to exercise their powers. But the government claims that the principle of habeas corpus will be upheld by judges having to regularly scrutinize such detentions. It has also said that those held beyond 28 days and then released without charge will be liable for compensation of up to £3,000 for each day they are held.

None of these “protections” are viable. As the Times newspaper editorialized, the security services would likely refuse to release details of the evidence on which they were applying for the extension to parliament, on the grounds that it would compromise national security. “But if they did, and Parliament upheld a request, it would have voted on the evidence and thereby jeopardised the suspect’s chances of a fair trial. And if they did not, this vaunted parliamentary scrutiny would be little more than a charade.”

More importantly, 42-day detention without charge (and 28, 14 and 7 days for that matter) is a flagrant abuse of democratic safeguards. Once again, the state has been given extraordinary powers to lock people up and interrogate them without those held having any legal recourse, or even knowing the grounds on which they are being imprisoned. And, as Liberty has pointed out, the Home Secretary’s decision to invoke “grave and exceptional” circumstances is not subject to any legal requirement that he cite his evidence and can be taken in response to a supposed threat emanating from anywhere in the world.

Political commentary following the vote was generally in agreement that the result would do nothing to win Brown popular support. The Guardian said it was a “hollow victory” in which “the prime minister has squandered parliamentary time, goodwill and his reputation as a man of principle on a symbolic sacrifice of liberty.” The Times wrote that Brown was “still fighting for his political life.” Only the Sun lauded the result as “a major victory for the PM after a torrid six months. He passed it with credit.”

Such supposed “credit” was immediately spent when it was revealed, within moments of the vote, that top-secret documents containing the government’s latest intelligence on Al Qaeda had been left on a London subway train.

One document, commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, reportedly contains “damning” information on Iraq’s security forces. The other document, reportedly entitled “Al-Qaeda Vulnerabilities,” was commissioned jointly by the Foreign Office and the Home Office and marked “UK Top Secret” and “for UK/US/Canadian and Australian eyes only.”

The revelation that an intelligence official had apparently forgotten the documents made a farce of Brown’s earlier insistence that his government would “take no risks with security.”

Brown no doubt was determined to see through the 42-day extension and prove himself “tough” on national security to the likes of the Sun. He has been ridiculed as a “coward” and a “ditherer” after backing down on a range of issues, including calling an early general election immediately after he assumed leadership of the Labour Party.

But focusing exclusively on the political crisis surrounding Brown serves to dull the political faculties of working people as to the consequences of Parliament’s decision. Numerous commentators claim that the government is in such a mess, and so weakened, that the bill will not make it onto the statute books.

Former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, for example, said the “thinness of the Commons majority” justified the House of Lords blocking the bill. And the Equality and Human Rights Commission established by the government under its chairman Trevor Phillips had already announced before the vote that it would launch a legal challenge to the extension if it were passed, on the grounds that it violates the European Convention on Human Rights. The Guardian editorialized that the law “quite possibly, will never come into force.”

Willem Buiter in the Financial Times gave voice as to what really had been agreed. The “UK’s gutless House of Commons” had taken a “major step on the road to a police state in the UK—a horrifying encroachment on human rights,” he wrote. “This introduction of state-of-emergency-instruments and powers during ‘normal’ times is a constitutional outrage.”

The correctness of the police-state analogy is further underscored by the fact that it was the police and security services which have been the prime advocates and movers of the extended powers—and no doubt insisted that Brown bite the bullet. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland Sir Hugh Orde, and former Metropolitan police head of anti-terrorist operations Peter Clarke were amongst those members of the security apparatus who made their insistence on the extension known.

The implications of such draconian and arbitrary powers have already been seen in the arrests of Nottingham University student Rizwaan Sabir and university staff member Hicham Yezza. Both are high-profile political campaigners at the university and have been particularly active in anti-war protests. Sabir’s “crime” was to download, from a US government web site, a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which he was using to research his dissertation on “the American approach to Al Qaeda in Iraq.” After he emailed the document to Yezza to print it for him, the pair were arrested and held without charge for six days. Released on May 20 without charge, Yezza was rearrested on immigration matters and is currently facing deportation from the country.

In an unprecedented move, Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5, released a public statement on the 42-day extension. While maintaining the secret service’s guise of political neutrality, the purpose of the statement was to refute claims that MI5 was opposed to the extension. MI5 “are not, and never have been, the appropriate body to advise the government on pre-charge detention time limits,” Evans wrote, continuing “except to say that we recognise the challenge posed for the police service by the increasingly complex and international character of some recent terrorist cases.”

Two leading former spies with MI6, responsible for international espionage, also made rare public statements in favour of 42 days. Baroness Park stated that “MPs will be very irresponsible if they take out the 42 days,” and would put spies’ “lives at risk,” while Lady Ramsay, a former member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, said, “Voting against 42 days increases the odds in favour of the terrorists.”

Conservative victory in Crewe and Nantwich as Labour disintegrates

tim — Sun, 25 May 2008 20:46:26 +0000

The Brown Labour government suffered its third major defeat in a month on Thursday in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, which saw the party’s 7,078 majority transformed into a 7,860 lead for the Conservatives.

Considered an extremely safe Labour seat, it had been held for 34 years by Gwyneth Dunwoody, the longest-serving female MP, until her death earlier this year.

The 17.6 percent swing to the Conservatives came despite Labour doing everything possible to maximise its advantage, including selecting Dunwoody’s daughter, Tamsin, as its candidate.

Only two weeks before, the Brown government had announced a £2.7 billion tax cut package, designed to placate voters’ anger over its decision to abolish the 10 pence tax band, which hit more than 5 million low earners.

Despite this, with turnout a relatively high 58.2 percent, the Conservative Party candidate Edward Timpson took 20,539 votes, up from 14,162 in the 2005 general election. Labour’s vote collapsed by almost half, from 21,240 to 12,679. Its sole consolation was that it was not beaten into third place by the Liberal Democrats, whose vote also fell, from 8,083 to 6,040.

“This was a classic ‘send a message’ by-election, and a sad one for us,” said Labour’s Steve McCabe.

The result is far more than that. The Financial Times opined: “Although Crewe is depicted as a traditional Labour stronghold, its make-up is more complex, part ‘true blue Cheshire,’ part working class. Labour’s unbroken hold over it was both a tribute to Gwyneth Dunwoody, its popular local MP, and New Labour’s ability to straddle the political centre ground. The loss by Dunwoody’s daughter Tamsin is a sign that the alliance that swept Labour to power is fragmenting.”

But Labour has not only lost the support of those “swing” voters—many previously Conservative supporters—that gave it its landslide victory in 1997 and has since maintained it in power. What marks out the result in Crewe is the extent to which former Labour voters switched directly to the Tories.

Reports in the days and weeks before the by-election were filled with personal accounts of long-time Labour supporters stating that for the first time in their lives they would vote Conservative.

This dramatic sea-change confirms that Labour is considered so opposed to the concerns and interests of working people that even the Conservatives appear attractive by comparison. Many of those interviewed remembered bitterly the period of the Thatcher Conservative government, but they were even more hostile to Labour’s 11 years in office.

Writing in the Guardian on Labour’s expected defeat, the pro-New Labour columnist Polly Toynbee cited recent research by Professor Tony Travers of the London School of Economics on the May 1 elections in London.

His analysis found that “the white working class has abandoned Labour. All Labour’s signals have been wrong for them,” she cited, adding, “Travers finds many millions of middle- and low-paid people who are young or middle-aged are right to feel Labour has done nothing for them—because those without children at home have had nothing, and they know it. They pay too much tax, they start paying tax on very low incomes, the minimum wage is very low, public sector pay is screwed down for five years—and then they see Labour ‘celebrating’ the mega-rewards of the rich. It may be daft to vote Tory in their anger, but they are not the deserters: Labour has deserted them.”

Such an appraisal should not come as a revelation. A central premise of the “New Labour” project initiated by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was that it did not matter how far the party removed itself from its traditional working class constituency, or how right-wing it became, working people would remain loyal because they had nowhere else to go.

For years, the likes of Toynbee bought into this claim. Now, so completely has Labour effaced the old distinctions between itself and the Conservatives—becoming for an entire period the preferred party of the City of London and the super-rich—that the former taboo on “switching sides” no longer applies.

According to reports, the Conservative campaign plan changed as this became apparent. The Financial Times reported that the Tories had “sensed a fundamental shift in Crewe. At first, their campaign plan was aimed at voters in Nantwich and more well-heeled villages surrounding Crewe. But after the first week they refocused, realising they were making inroads into solid Labour areas.”

Labour is completely incapable of stemming the rot. A publicity stunt mounted to point up Timpson’s privileged background (he is the multimillionaire son of the Timpson family’s shoe repair and key-cutting business) backfired badly. Conscious that far too many of its own supporters had similar backgrounds (it subsequently transpired that one of those dressed in top-hat and tails had attended a private school), and anxious not to alienate the well-to-do, the ploy was disowned by the government and central office, leaving Labour’s electoral campaign floundering.

Even the party’s attempts to brand the Conservative candidate “Thatcher boy Timpson”—a reference to a speech by Tory leader David Cameron on taxation—fell flat. After all, the Labour Party has claimed Thatcher as one of its own, with both Blair and Brown going out of their way to sing the former Conservative premier’s praise and to proclaim themselves as her true inheritors.

In the end, Labour’s campaign tried to outflank the Conservatives from the right by centring on law and order and anti-immigrant measures.

The pro-New Labour network, Compass, complained that Crewe represented “a new low” in Labour “ill-advisedly demonising its opponents, speaking the crass language of authoritarianism and clumsily trying to close down the issue of immigration.”

The party was resorting to the “hysterical maligning of young people” and “advocating police harassment,” it complained, citing the electoral pitch of Dunwoody: “I want the Police to harass yobs, get in their faces.”

“Perhaps most poisonous of all was the Crewe campaign’s attempt to make political capital out of issues involving Crewe’s large Polish population, via a claim that the Conservatives are opposed to ‘making foreign nationals carry ID cards.’ This smacks of the poison spread by the far right. In addition, it misrepresents the debate. The Tories are opposed to making anyone carry or be issued with an ID card. So, in the face of massive public unease about the project, should be the Labour Party.”

Labour now faces another by-election in Henley, the former seat of newly elected Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson.

In the lead-up to the Crewe ballot, Trade Union Congress leader Brendan Barber called on the government to “reconfigure its DNA” and take a stand against “casino capitalism.”

The government must challenge “corporate and personal greed at the top,” he said, in order to “reconnect” with “ordinary working people” who are “angry that they are struggling to pay the bills as a super-rich minority is allowed to float free from the rest of society.”

Entirely beholden to the banks and stock markets, Labour is incapable of making any such change in tack, even to salvage its own political fortunes. With little prospect of any substantial shift in policy, there will be renewed demands for Brown to stand down, in the hope that a shift in personnel will be enough to restore the party’s standing.

There were already demands being made for Brown to go, even before the Crewe result was known. Writing in the Guardian, for example, on the eve of the election, Jenni Russell stated that the lack of an apparent alternate leader should not prevent Brown’s removal. “The party’s unpopularity has hit an all-time low,” she wrote. “It cannot recover under Gordon Brown. He has to go, and go quickly…. The party must find the courage to depose him.”

Such calls, if heeded, would result in nothing more than an orgy of internecine feuding between contending right-wing forces. The desperation they express is amplified by the fact that it is not even a year since Brown was elected overwhelmingly and unopposed by the Labour Party, as the man who could salvage its fortunes in the wake of their collapse under Blair over the Iraq war.

So brief was Labour’s respite, however, that Brown even put off an early general election out of fear the government would lose it.

It was the run on the Northern Rock bank that revealed how exposed Britain is to the global economic crisis sparked by the credit crunch. A Bank of England forecast released just before the Crewe by-election projected that the UK faces its most protracted slowdown since the early 1990s, with its outlook on economic growth falling from 3.3 percent this year to 1.5 percent in 2009.

At the same time, the Home Builders Federation (HBF) warned that sales of newly built houses have “fallen off a cliff,” putting tens of thousands of jobs at risk. Chairman Stewart Baseley said, “The implications for the economy are dire. Tens of thousands of jobs are at risk, possibly even more, as the potentially massive layoffs amongst homebuilders start to filter through.”

The UK’s biggest homebuilder, Taylor Wimpey, is to close 13 offices and cut its workforce by more than 10 percent, having recorded a pre-tax loss of £19.5 million last year, compared with £406 million credit in 2006. Persimmon’s sales of new homes are already down 24 percent this year, causing it to put all new developments on hold while Redrow has laid off 15 percent of its staff.

The Crewe and Nantwich by-election marks a further shift in the ongoing disintegration of Labour. Whatever the various manoeuvres of the next months, the party is in meltdown. Haemorrhaging support and entirely dependent on a layer of self-interested, corrupt careerists—themselves riven with petty factional differences—the party is also in debt to the tune of £18 million.

Labour’s “re-launch” stymied by worsening economic forecast

tim — Sat, 17 May 2008 16:45:45 +0000

The Labour government brought forward a series of measures this week in a rearguard action to try to rescue its political fortunes in wake of the party’s collapse into third place in the May 1 local elections.

With a by-election due on May 22, in which the Conservatives are currently tipped to overturn a 7,000 Labour majority, Prime Minister Gordon Brown sought to placate voters’ wrath.

On Tuesday, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced what many described as an emergency “mini-budget” on taxation. The government’s abolition of the 10 pence tax band has severely financially affected more than 5 million low-earners. While the measure had been announced last year, it only took effect last month.

In 2007, the move won applause from Labour’s backbenches, not least because it had enabled the government to make cuts into corporation tax. But a lot has changed since then, particularly the sharp decline in living standards due to the global economic crisis.

Rising food prices sent the UK’s official annual inflation rate to 3 percent in April—the sharpest increase in the cost of living in almost six years, rising 0.5 percent in just one month. Reports indicate that the real cost of living, however, is far greater, as food costs alone are increasing at an average of 15.5 percent a year. Rising costs in other essentials such as fuel and utilities mean that many families are already spending £1,000 a year more out of pocket—without taking into account spiralling mortgage costs.

In his mini-budget Darling announced that personal tax allowance would rise by £600. Those earning less than £40,000 per annum (the overwhelming majority) will gain up to £120 this year. The chancellor claimed that this would also compensate the majority of those who lost out from the scrapping of the 10 pence tax band.

Labour’s attempt at a political re-launch was followed by Brown outlining planned legislation to be brought forward in the next Queen’s speech, which he claimed would create a “more prosperous and fairer Britain.”

He set out the further “reform” of schools, hospitals and the welfare benefit system. His government will grant new powers to local authorities to intervene against “failing schools,” link hospital funding to performance, introduce tougher controls on immigration and more punitive measures against the long-term unemployed.

The government had given an indication of just what this amounted to in an earlier statement promising a radical shakeup of England’s social care system for the elderly. State support for elderly care is means-tested in England, with most having to pay for home help and assisted accommodation. Thousands have been forced to sell their homes to raise the finance as a consequence.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson said that the government was initiating a six-month consultation period to consider how people could be provided for in old age. He claimed that the government had set “no pre-determined answers,” but went on to make clear that what was intended is a move away from universal state provision to an insurance-based scheme paid for by the individual. “If we are running out of so-called free personal care—which even the Liberal Democrats have dropped as a commitment—then you are looking at some kind of insurance that can be provided by the state or the individual,” he said.

It is a measure of how far removed Labour is from the realities of millions of people’s lives that it could consider such measures to be a popular re-launch. Moreover, while the government claims that these moves are necessary because of a £6 billion shortfall in provision, it has had no such qualms over using some £100 billion of taxpayers’ money to shore up the banks, or the some £800 million per month being spent on the occupation of Iraq.

So right-wing are Labour’s politics that the Conservatives are casting themselves as a “progressive” alternative, even while boasting that they are the only party prepared to “break open the monopoly” on state education and social welfare.

But as Brown was speaking in Parliament, asking the voters to “judge and test” him on the basis of his economic stewardship, his room for political manoeuvre was rapidly diminishing. Not only are some 1 million low-earners still out of pocket despite Darling’s announcement, but hopes that tax changes will help re-stimulate the economy were almost immediately dashed by the Bank of England’s quarterly inflation report.

Governor Mervyn King warned that the “the nice decade is behind us” and the economy was “travelling along a bumpy road.”

“Real take-home pay has not risen by much in the past four years—by well below 1 percent a year. The next couple of years are going to see at least as great a squeeze on living standards that will erode purchasing power,” he continued.

The report spelt out that millions of working people would be hit financially from all sides over the next period. According to the Bank, gas, electricity and food prices will continue to rise pushing inflation towards 4 percent while the housing market, which it stated has already worsened “markedly,” is set to fall even further. The banking crisis could continue well into 2009, the report stated, while economic growth is likely to slump toward 1 percent by the end of 2008, bringing the risk of recession.

The assessment made a mockery of the trade union bureaucracy’s claims that the chancellor’s tax allowance changes were sufficient to salvage Labour. Tony Woodley, joint leader of Unite, had pronounced that Darling’s mini-budget meant the party was “reconnecting with Labour’s social conscience” and “with voters generally,” while GMB general secretary Paul Kenny congratulated Brown and Darling for “listening to the public and changing tack.”

No doubt the trade union leaders hoped that Darling’s measures would be enough to prevent the party imploding in an orgy of unprincipled factionalism.

Labour’s latest drubbing in the polls coincided with the publication of memoirs by Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie, former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and Blair’s Middle East envoy, Lord Levy.

All seized the opportunity to settle personal scores with Brown directly—and to make some money in the process. Prescott described Brown as “prickly,” saying that he could “go off like a volcano” while Levy, who was arrested twice during the cash-for-honours inquiry before being cleared of any wrongdoing, told the BBC that it was “inconceivable” that the former chancellor had not known about the party’s financial arrangements.

Darling’s announcement proved to be enough to silence a potential rebellion by sections of Labour backbenchers who are afraid they will lose their seats. Frank Field, who had led threats to vote down the government’s budget and who had said he would be “very surprised” if Brown were still Labour leader at the next election, pronounced his satisfaction with the changes and publicly apologised to the prime minister.

But outside of Labour’s immediate environs, criticism of Brown and the government in ruling circles rages unabated. Under banner headlines on the day Brown spoke, the Independent reported that the “spectre of ‘stagflation’” associated with the 1970s was back on the agenda. “The 15 percent decline in the value of sterling—as steep as when the pound was forced out of the ERM on ‘Black Wednesday’ in 1992—has exacerbated inflationary pressures,” it said, “hitting living standards, especially for pensioners and the poorest,” hardest. There was little leeway for policymakers, it continued, “as they are pulled between the need to fight inflation and avoid a slump.”

Against this background, economists complained that Darling’s compensation package would push public borrowing towards £50 billion this year, jeopardizing the government’s fiscal rules. The Financial Times said that Darling’s measure smacked of “desperation,” as the government failed to make tax policy “with an eye to the long-term health of the public finances and a coherent fiscal philosophy.” It had “shattered any residual idea that Mr. Brown’s administration can run an orderly fiscal policy,” the newspaper pronounced.

Such comments were intended to serve notice that big business will not tolerate any palliative measures, no matter how pitiful, even at the expense of the government’s fall.

More significant for Brown’s political survival was the savaging he received in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper. Describing Darling’s tax changes as a “gamble” with taxpayer’s money, it complained that it was “not the first time Gordon Brown has panicked in the face of the polls.”

Having backed out of calling an early general election in November it had “rewritten a Budget just over two months old ... if he can be persuaded to rip up a Budget, what’s to stop Labour’s union paymasters and the public sector demanding pay rises this summer?” the newspaper thundered.

There is already widespread discontent across the public sector at the government’s imposition of a below-inflation pay award. The Sun is only too aware that this will grow significantly over the next months and does not believe Brown has the mettle to face down the opposition. In a particularly hostile piece the next day, associate editor Trevor Kavanagh wrote that the local elections had “torpedoed this Government beneath the waterline.”

“As Gordon Brown prowled the TV studios saying sorry yesterday, we were watching a dead man drowning. I give him six months.

“Labour has burst asunder from stem to stern, its timbers rotten to the core,” he continued, as the “Blair/Brown Government has been sussed as the incompetent, interfering and wasteful political con-trick it was from May 1, 1997.”

Given that Rupert Murdoch and his tabloid have been one of the main political backers of New Labour and have played a major role in shaping its policies, such supposedly newfound wisdom is deserving only of contempt.

In a comment in the Guardian designed to bolster Brown by laying New Labour’s failings at Blair’s door, Robert Harris revealed the substance of the party’s meltdown more tellingly than he had perhaps intended. Complaining that the former prime minister had cut and run, leaving New Labour high and dry, Harris then opined that the current crisis in Labour was not so much one “of leadership as a crisis of purpose—of existence, in fact...”

“What is this thing called the Labour party for, exactly? One can see why the Tories exist, and why the Liberals have endured. But Labour—this friend of global corporations, this ally of the neocons in Washington, this raiser of income tax on the poor—where is its place supposed to be in the political firmament?”

For the likes of Murdoch, et al the answer appears to be clear. The “political con-trick” of New Labour completely exhausted, they are now looking at the Tories to repackage the same pro-business agenda. For working people, however, Labour’s right-wing putrefaction must underscore the necessity for the construction of a new workers party based on socialist policies.

Labour’s electoral meltdown continues to worsen

tim — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:21:42 +0000

The meltdown suffered by the Brown government in last week’s local elections, coupled with Ken Livingstone’s defeat by Boris Johnson in the contest for London Mayor, is a major staging post in the ongoing collapse of New Labour.

The party’s share of the vote fell to a 40-year low of just 24 percent, compared with 44 percent for the Conservatives and 25 percent for the Liberal Democrats. But its eclipse by the Tories is only part of the picture. Turnout was just 35 percent, confirming the widespread alienation from all the major parties.

Labour has long ago lost most of the support it once enjoyed in working class areas. The May 1 poll demonstrated that it has now also lost much of those sections of the middle class electorate it had won from the Conservatives in 1997.

In England, these twin factors found expression in the Conservative victory in Bury, in the north, for the first time in 22 years, and Labour’s loss of Reading, one of its few strongholds in the southeast.

The picture in Wales is even more devastating. Long considered Labour’s heartland, the party has continued to hemorrhage support and lost control of Merthyr Tydfil, Blaeau Gwent, Torfaen, Caerphilly and Newport councils. No one did particularly well, least of all Labour’s coalition partners in the Welsh Assembly, Plaid Cymru, as Labour’s vote dispersed across the political spectrum and resulted in victories for the Liberal Democrats, Tories and independent councilors.

Even so, the rise in support for the Conservatives amongst those who turned out to vote would be enough to secure them a general election victory. The poll has been compared with the situation that faced John Major’s Conservative administration in the local elections that preceded Labour’s landslide victory in 1997.

Just as devastating for the government was Livingstone’s defeat in London. Conservative candidate Boris Johnson has a high media profile, having cultivated his image as an eccentric plain speaker. He is in fact an arch right-winger, whose racist and anti-Islamic statements, and denunciations of people from Liverpool, has necessitated him making public apologies and made sections of the Tory party extremely nervous about his candidacy. In the final weeks, he was told to keep his mouth shut and maintain a low profile, leaving his campaign firmly under the control of Lynton Crosby who had spearheaded electoral campaigns for former Australian prime minister John Howard.

The pro-Labour press and the party apparatus—along with Respect Renewal, the Socialist Workers Party and the Greens—had all urged support for Livingstone. Labour promoted Livingstone’s support in the City of London, but it also hoped, with the aid of the nominally left and socialist parties, to be able to mobilise support in the inner-city areas, particularly amongst black and Asian workers, by portraying Livingstone as the “progressive” candidate.

Labour’s vote did rise slightly in these areas, but not by nearly enough to counter Johnson’s gains in the outer suburbs. The more fundamental problem for Livingstone and his left apologists was summed up by journalist Andrew Gilligan, who led the pro-Johnson offensive in the pages of the Evening Standard.

Responding to accusations that he was backing a reactionary, Gilligan retorted that, “Livingstone is the ally of some of the most reactionary forces in this city. I’m thinking of [Police Commissioner] Ian Blair, I’m thinking of property developers he’s in bed with, I’m thinking of City big business.”

The reaction in Labour circles to its electoral meltdown centred on disaffection with Gordon Brown’s premiership. He was condemned privately and publicly for his performance since taking over from Tony Blair in June 2007.

Martin Kettle, a personal friend of Blair, wrote in the Guardian that “the answer that stares these [Labour] MPs in the face is that, echoing Cromwell, they should tell [Brown]: ‘in the name of God, go.’ ” And there was widespread speculation as to whether a leadership challenge would be mounted and if so, when. Others more loyal to Brown urged him to “reconnect” with the electorate and Labour’s traditional supporters, or to “renew” New Labour’s “coalition,” supposedly marrying economic efficiency with social justice.

All that this produced was the pathetic spectacle of Brown seeking to emulate former US President Bill Clinton by telling the media how he felt “the hurt” of people struggling with rising prices and mortgage repayments.

In reality, Labour’s performance under Brown has only deepened a crisis that began under Blair. When Blair left office, he was widely hated and led a government condemned for the war against Iraq and viewed as a corrupt party of the super-rich. Its previous electoral showing in May 2007 gave it a predicted 27 percent of the national vote in a general election—just 3 percent higher than last week.

With Brown’s successions to leadership, there was a concerted campaign to claim a new era for Labour. The Daily Mirror described him as a man “on fire,” with a new “moral purpose,” while the Guardian wrote of a new “dawn” for a “new government.”

What actually took place was that Brown continued the big business agenda of Blair, bringing into government figures such as Sir Digby Jones, former head of the Confederation of British Industry, and praising Margaret Thatcher as a “conviction politician.”

The deluded belief within Labour circles that the new premier would somehow restore the party’s popularity found finished expression in Brown’s humiliating retreat from plans to hold a snap election as early as November last year when it became clear that, at best, Labour’s majority would be slashed and that it might even lose.

Brown’s climb-down at that time took place in the aftermath of the collapse of Northern Rock, amidst scenes of savers queuing up to withdraw their money. Since then, the economic crisis that began in the US subprime mortgage market has spread throughout the world and had a particularly severe impact on Britain.

Brown admitted, “What people are most worried about...[is that] petrol prices are going up, food prices are going up, they are worried about utilities bills, they are worried about their standard of living, there is an uncertainty about the economy.... People’s immediate priority is how to deal with the family budgets and the problems we face as a result of what is an economic downturn which started in America.”

But while Brown claimed to understand the “anxiety” over economic insecurity, his government suffered particularly badly at the polls because of its decision to abolish the 10 pence tax band for lower-income workers. The move, which had been announced by Brown when he was chancellor in 2007 and took effect this year, hit millions of people earning less than £15,000 per annum. In the same budget, Brown had slashed the headline corporation tax rate by 2 pence.

Under these circumstances, how could anyone believe that Labour’s support would not continue to plummet?

Since it came to power, New Labour has functioned as the political representative of the oligarchy, presiding over a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to the fabulously rich and the City. Only the flooding of the economy with cheap credit and rising property prices helped to partially conceal this process. Now that this possibility no longer exists, the full scale of Labour’s decline becomes apparent.

There had been calls for the prime minister to modify the 10 pence tax rate change or make some kind of recompense. But, beholden as it is to big business, Labour’s room for manoeuvre is strictly limited. Writing in Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper, Peter Riddell warned that “the real danger is that the government will find it hard to resist calls for relaxing spending controls and public sector pay limits in order to respond to the worries of Labour MPs and core working-class voters.” This is equivalent to instructing Brown not to do so.

Neither does Brown face any substantial unified opposition within the parliamentary Labour Party, let alone one that in any way advances the interests of the working class. Speculation that the leader of the Campaign Group of Labour MPs, John McDonnell, would stand against Brown was quickly dashed by McDonnell himself. In any event, McDonnell could only count on a few MPs and was unable to mount a leadership campaign last year.

For his part, Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas, who has the support of the Compass group and is portrayed by the media as a more traditional Labourite, limited himself to calls for Brown to “learn from Boris Johnson and from [Tory leader] David Cameron as well.... They seem to be more emotionally literate than us. Boris Johnson is connecting with people emotionally.”

Aside from that, there are merely reports of 40 or so MPs supposedly considering the possibility of making their unhappiness with Brown public, Brown being “safe” from direct challenge for at least a year and Labour’s Frank Field speaking about a sense of “private despair” amongst MPs.

What is unfolding is not simply the crisis of a premiership, but the crisis of a party. Labour’s fortunes cannot be restored by changing leaders. It is dead on its feet due to the impossibility of securing a popular mandate for policies that serve the interests of a tiny minority at the expense of working people. Labour is not merely exhausted and in need of reinvigoration. From the standpoint of the working class, it is a hostile entity that must be replaced by a genuine party of socialism.

As Basra Burns, Iraq Inquiry Call Supported by just 12 Labour MPs

Ellie Keen — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:53:14 +0000

As Iraq’s puppet army launched its bloody assault on Basra on March 25, Britain’s parliament once again rejected an inquiry into the Iraq war.

The motion, tabled by the Conservative Party, was supported by the Liberal Democrats. But the Brown government won the day comfortably. The motion—for an entirely circumscribed inquiry to be conducted in secret by the Privy Council—was defeated by 299 to 271 votes.

Demonstrating once more the absence of any significant or principled opposition to militarism within the government, just 12 Labour MPs broke ranks to support the inquiry call. A government amendment, acknowledging the need for an inquiry but only after “important operations” in Iraq end, was then passed by 299 to 259 votes.

Little was said during the debate regarding the offensive just then being launched by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government in the southern city of Basra. With US support, tens of thousands of Iraqi troops were initiating Saulat al-Fursan (Charge of the Knights)—a major military campaign against militias loyal to Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr.

Despite this silence, the mounting concern over the Iraq quagmire within ruling circles was evident.

In 2003, William Hague—now Conservative foreign secretary—had accused those opposed to war of “appeasement” and endorsed then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to back the US, despite massive popular opposition, describing it as “absolutely in the interests of this country and the wider world.” In parliament last week, Hague defended his support for the war but argued it was now “vital” to learn all “possible lessons” from the invasion and its aftermath. Clearly motivated by the failure of British and US forces to establish a swift and successful occupation over the country and its oil resources, Hague said that it was time to convene an immediate inquiry into the origins and conduct of the war.

Hague made clear that the purpose of the inquiry would not be to hold anyone to account for the human catastrophe created in Iraq, nor the flagrant abuse of democratic accountability that accompanied it. He warned rather that the credibility of future military actions had been jeopardised by events in Iraq. “The passage of time, the urgent need to learn for the future, the need to reinforce the credibility of future decision-taking and the diminished role in Iraq of British forces” all pointed to the need for an inquiry, he said.

Writing in the Guardian prior to the vote, Hague cited the “poor co-ordination and lack of expertise” that had surrounded the invasion and warned that this had implications beyond Iraq.

“At this very moment in Afghanistan, we and our allies are struggling with somewhat different but nonetheless parallel problems of the co-ordination of both military and economic efforts in a vast and sometimes hostile land,” he wrote. “The need to learn the lessons of Iraq in terms of how government should function and countries should be rebuilt is transparently urgent. So too is the need to have studied, to the satisfaction of the British people, the actual origins of the war. For until that is done, any British government setting out to explain to parliament and people that military action is necessary to deal with a threat it believes to be serious will face a wall of scepticism and disbelief.”

Former Conservative Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind reiterated the need for Privy Council inquiry, pointing to the “inadequacy of the Government’s preparation for one of the worst conflicts that any British Government has been responsible for in the last 100 years.” Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Ed Davey said, “Frankly one would have thought that an inquiry ought to be automatic when a decision of the magnitude of going to war goes so catastrophically wrong. To put such an inquiry off, even five years afterwards, is nothing short of a scandal.”

Again and again, the word’s “Iraq” and “catastrophe” appeared together.

Referring to the current military campaign, the Independent complained, “When British troops handed over power in the province of Basra to the Iraqi government in December, we were told that the withdrawal was confirmation of the growing stability in the south of the country. Now we see just what nonsense that was.

“Our own government might have managed to see off last night’s attempt in the House of Commons to force an immediate public inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But, as Basra burns and yet another fanciful claim of progress in the country disintegrates, the charge sheet against those who embroiled us in this catastrophe grows still longer.”

In an attempt to assuage public hostility over the Iraq war, on his succession to Labour leadership, Brown pledged to reduce the number of British troops in Iraq from 4,100 to 2,500 by May of this year. Even before the latest offensive in Basra and Baghdad, that proposal was being quietly shelved. In February, the Observer had forecast that a “final all-out battle for Basra” was “inevitable.” It cited Colonel Richard Iron, military adviser to Iraqi Commander General Mohan, stating that plans for further troop withdrawals were “optimistic” given that the Iraqi Security Force was preparing for “confrontation” in Basra.

The military “confrontation” now underway in Basra, its surrounding areas and parts of Baghdad, was thus in preparation for some time with Britain’s full knowledge. Yet, for the last week, the government and the media have claimed that no British forces are involved in the “Charge of the Knights.” And, unlike President George W. Bush, Brown did not rush to give his support to Maliki’s actions, so as to maintain the fiction that Britain is no longer seriously “engaged” in the occupation.

Given that Britain took responsibility for policing southern Iraq—the main oil-producing centre—at the time of the invasion, this is not credible. Moreover, the claim that British troops remained in their barracks near to Basra airport while US and Iraqi troops battled with Sadr’s supporters led some political commentators to question the point of maintaining any forces in the country.

In the last days, the story began to shift. British assistance was limited to providing “logistical help and air support” to the Iraqi forces, it was said. On Saturday, the Telegraph admitted that British forces were “directly involved for the first time in the battle to stamp out militias from the Iraqi city of Basra, engaging suspected Mehdi Army positions with artillery.”

The newspaper continued, “Military analysts estimate that three British battlegroups—each of about 650 men armed with Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior armoured vehicles—are on hand to re-enter the city,” citing one unnamed British official complaining, “It’s ridiculous for Britain’s position in Iraq that we’ve got this firepower down there and we’re not willing to help the Iraqis out.”

The government is caught in a bind—wanting to relegate Iraq to the political sidelines, while acutely aware that the interests of British capital depend on eradicating and containing all opposition to the imposition of foreign dictates.

Prior to the parliamentary vote, Brown had pledged that an inquiry would be convened but argued that it would be inappropriate to hold one now, as the situation in Iraq remained “fragile.” Foreign Secretary David Miliband, in an oblique reference to the Maliki offensive, argued that the dispute between the Conservative and Labour parties “does not concern substance but timing,” warning that “the mission has not yet been accomplished.”

In holding this line, Brown could count on the overwhelming support of his own party. The Conservatives had sought to court a rebellion amongst Labour MPs, calculating that the limited character of their proposed inquiry, and a desire to retain some public credibility, would convince a sufficient number of backbenchers to back their demand. In the end, even fewer Labour MPs were prepared to defy the government over Iraq than the 19 who voted against its plan to close Post Offices.

Fifth Anniversary of Iraq War

Ellie Keen — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 14:52:00 +0000

Addressing the ISSE meeting in Glasgow, World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board member Julie Hyland explained that the campaign of disinformation and lies used to justify the war still continues.

“Earlier this month, in what was hailed as a victory for freedom of information, the secret first draft of the ‘dodgy dossier’ that notoriously set out the trumped-up case for the invasion of Iraq, was released,” she noted. The document had confirmed that Labour’s spin-doctors had indeed been involved in its drafting and that the first version did not include the spurious claim that Iraq could mount a chemical attack on its enemies within 45 minutes.

“The allegations that the document had been ‘sexed up’ to meet political ends—the charge that led to the death of whistleblower Dr. David Kelly and the convening of the Hutton inquiry—are true.

“We have also had confirmed, after more than a year of categorical denials, that US rendition flights carrying suspects to be interrogated under torture had indeed landed on British soil, twice. In his apology to the Commons, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the flights in 2002, which had landed at Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean Territory that is home to a US air base, had been mistakenly overlooked.”

But even while admitting to this “oversight,” Hyland continued, the government was taking steps to prevent far more damaging disclosures. “On February 28 the high court placed a gagging order on Ben Griffin, a former SAS soldier who had told how hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans captured by British and US Special Forces had been subject to rendition.” Before the gagging order, Griffin, who left the SAS in 2005, had stated that the use of British territory and airspace for rendition flights ‘pales into insignificance in light of the fact that it has been British soldiers detaining the victims of extraordinary rendition in the first place,’ and that he had ‘no doubt’ that ‘non-combatants I personally detained were handed over to the Americans and subsequently tortured.’”

This continuing campaign of disinformation was aimed at concealing the extent of the crimes committed by US and British imperialism in launching a preemptive war of aggression, Hyland said. Figures released in January by the British polling agency Opinion Research Business and its Iraqi research partner, the Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies, confirmed that more than one million Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the American-led invasion and occupation.

But there will be little reference to these horrifying statistics in the media, she noted, as the ruling elite seek to lull people into a false sense of security—claiming that violence is down, the “surge” is working and even that an end to the war is in sight with the last days of the Bush presidency and his possible replacement with a Democrat—either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

“In reality, neither Obama nor Clinton is proposing the immediate withdrawal of troops, nor more fundamentally can they offer an alternative to the aggressive military policy of the United States,” Hyland said. On February 25, the US military announced that the number of troops in Iraq following the “surge” begun last year will be some 10,000 more than pre-surge levels. What was claimed at the time as a temporary increase in US forces will in fact result in the indefinite presence of 140,000 US troops.

The US has refused to give any estimate of how long troops its will remain in Iraq. “As for Britain,” she continued, “late in February the Observer forecast that a ‘final all-out battle for Basra is seen as ‘inevitable’ as persistent violence looks set to keep British troops mired in southern Iraq longer than was expected.’”

The newspaper noted that Iraq security forces and Shia militia groups have been engaged in an “uneasy truce,” Hyland said. “Pressed for by Britain, this truce was secured on the basis that UK forces were moved to a base outside the city, giving Prime Minister Gordon Brown the possibility of announcing a troop reduction from 4,700 to 2,500 by spring.” But, citing Colonel Richard Iron, military adviser to Iraqi Commander General Mohan, the newspaper stated, “That timetable appears increasingly optimistic.” According to Iron, “There is a sense in the ISF [Iraqi Security Force] that confrontation is inevitable.”

“Neither Britain, nor the US can afford to simply quit Iraq,” Hyland explained. “Iron’s remarks were made as Michael Wareing, Brown’s business emissary in Iraq who heads the new Basra Development Commission, claimed that Western oil giants are readying to enter southern Iraq, which contains 70 percent of the country’s proven oil reserves. The Development Commission has organised an investors’ conference in Kuwait this month, and is to stage another event in London next month for European and US companies.”

The dangers of a broader regional war

To the extent that there has been any ebb in the conflict between Iraqi resistance groups and the occupying forces, she continued, this has been achieved by buying off substantial sections of the various militias, backed by a brutal counterinsurgency operation. Close to 80,000 mainly Sunni fighters are now on the US payroll.

This institutionalising of sectarian divisions is undermining Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s administration. In particular, there is growing conflict over the distribution and control of Iraq’s oil and gas resources, with many of the Shiite and Sunni groups making it clear that they would try to prevent any referendum on the status of the Kurdish-controlled area of Kirkuk, due to have been held by December 2007, until a new oil law was passed placing the province’s oil under Baghdad’s control.

The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in the north has since used the constitution to legitimise 15 production-sharing agreements signed with at least 20 transnational energy companies for small oil projects in its territory, Hyland explained. If the KRG took over Kirkuk, it could claim the right to hand out contracts and control revenues from some of the country’s largest oilfields:

“It is in this context that the recent incursions by Turkey in the Kurdish-controlled north must be understood. Over the last months, on the pretext of destroying the bases of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Turkey has conducted repeated air strikes, bombing villages and leaving a reported 1,255 people so far displaced. Last month, Turkish troops crossed the border into the Zap region and were involved in bloody clashes.”

Citing the World Socialist Web Site, Hyland explained, “It is by no means accidental that the invasion was launched just days after the Kosovo declaration and the KRG’s announcement of an agreement with South Korea’s National Oil Corporation to develop oilfields in northern Iraq and a US$10.5 billion contract with Korean Ssangyong Engineering and Construction for the rapid modernisation of the region’s infrastructure. Thousands of South Korean troops are still based around the Kurdish capital of Irbil. Turkey faces the possibility of major international players backing a declaration of independence by the KRG, using Kosovo as a precedent.”

Turkey’s recent military incursions were actively supported by the Bush administration, she continued.

“The US military is supplying intelligence on PKK locations and movements and has described Turkey’s actions as ones of legitimate ‘self defence.’

“The twists and turns in US policy towards the Kurdish parties are bound up with another mounting dilemma. In the initial years of the US occupation, the Kurdish parties were a crucial component of the Bush administration’s plans to transform Iraq into a client state and pursue its broader plans to dominate the Middle East. Now, Kurdish ambitions are becoming an obstacle to American interests.

“US policy is bound up with broader geopolitical considerations in the Middle East. The US alliance with Turkey, which is a member of the NATO alliance, is considered critical, both in terms of the supply routes for American troops in Iraq and for Washington’s strategic concerns in the Middle East, including possible military confrontation with the Iranian regime.

“However, Turkey is itself emerging as the major regional power actively pursuing its own interests and even conducting deals with Iran for joint gas ventures. Consequently, the US has sought to woo Ankara and isolate Iran by backing Turkish attacks in US-occupied Iraq and signalling its preparedness to sacrifice Kurdish interests in the region.”

In addition to the volatile situation regarding Iraq, Turkey and Iran, Hyland said, there is the deepening crisis within Afghanistan. Long pronounced the “winnable war,” recent months have seen an increase in the numbers of attacks by Taliban and guerrilla forces against NATO and its local allies. It is for this reason that the US has been seeking to bully the European powers—particularly Germany—into despatching more troops to Afghanistan in order that, in the memorable words of US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, they can take their fair share “of the fighting and the dying.”

According to Mike McConnell, America’s top intelligence chief, the situation is “deteriorating,” with Hamid Karzai’s government controlling just 30 percent of the country.

The Kosovo precedent

“The outburst of US military aggression, epitomised by Iraq, has not only destabilised the Middle East, but reignited all the unresolved historical questions of the past century,”0 Hyland went on.

“To claim that this is the result of a number of ‘mistaken’ policy choices by the Bush administration and its supporters in Britain is yet another attempt to chloroform public opinion as to the real processes at work.”

Hyland recalled how, speaking on March 29, 2003, just nine days after the outbreak of war, World Socialist Web Site chairman David North had explained to a meeting of the Socialist Equality Party in the US: “As in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, and in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II, the eruption of war in 2003 arises out of deep-rooted contradictions in the world capitalist system. Understood in the broadest historical context, the contradictions that have given rise to this war are, in their essence, the same as those which produced the previous world wars. Once again, war arises out of the underlying conflict between the essentially global character of economic development and the anachronistic character of the nation-state system.”

Economically weakened, faced with the emergence of new competitors such as China and Russia and a renewed battle for vital resources, the strategy of American imperialism, with the support of Britain, ‘consists,’ North explained, “of utilizing its massive military power to establish the unchallengeable global hegemony of the United States and completely subordinate to itself the resources of the world economy.” (See “Into the maelstrom: the crisis of American imperialism and the war against Iraq”)

“There can be no retreat from this struggle for global hegemony,” Hyland said. “There is no question that the presidential elections are bound up with arguments and divisions within the American elite as to the way forward. But the one issue on which they agree is that there can be no diminution in the striving of US imperialism to assert its interests. Rather the issue is how to more effectively direct its efforts to this end—one
which focuses on the ‘real’ enemy.”

In this context, she noted the remarks by Republican presidential contender John McCain in a German newspaper in which he called for Russia to be thrown out of the G-8, and for the creation of a “league of democracies” under US leadership as an alternative to the United Nations.

Similarly, a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, based on discussions with senior military figures and representatives of the establishment, noted that, notwithstanding the government’s declared faith in such supranational institutions as the United Nations, NATO and the European Union, all are very much weakened. Calling for the building of new alliances, it stressed that “coalitions of the willing are the only lasting kind; nations do not have permanent friends, only permanent interests.” It highlighted the “English-speaking world” as Britain’s “main diplomatic resource.”

“It is undoubtedly the case that the multilateral organisations established at the end of the Second World War are in terminal decline,” Hyland said. “However, this is not the result of ‘institutional’ failures but rather the growth of inter-imperialist antagonisms.”

This had been underscored by the decision to bypass the UN Security Council over Kosovo’s recent declaration of independence.

“During the mass international protests against the Iraq war in 2003, the various radical protest groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, argued that the invasion and occupation could be prevented by appeals to the UN and the European Union to intervene and call the US into line.

“Not only was that perspective an abject failure, but now the European Union has acted as the primary political mechanism for the machinations of the Great Powers. It is the EU that gave its stamp of approval to Kosovan independence. And if US actions in Iraq have gravely destabilised the Middle East, the consequences of the European powers bequeathing political legitimacy on Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia will have major repercussions for the whole of Europe and indeed the world.”

While the US had pushed for the EU declaration, German, British and French support for this latest trampling of international law was not simply the result of kowtowing to US dictates: “There is a growing fear within the major European powers that the evident weakness of the US, and the series of setbacks it has suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan, will have grave implications for them. How is the European Union—currently without any significant military forces—to counter the rising threat of China and Russia? This is what determines the growing rapprochement between so-called Old Europe and the US in the years since the Iraq invasion.”

In conclusion, Hyland stated that there is “no question that millions of people across the world are bitterly hostile to the growth of imperialist militarism and neo-colonialism. The movement of some 10 million people, in cities and towns across the globe in February 2003, showed the potential for an international movement against war. But the potential of this movement was hamstrung and fatally compromised by the political conceptions which dominated it—that war could be prevented simply by protests and appeals to reason directed towards one or another major power to act as an ‘honest broker.’”

The drive to war, Hyland said, is not the result of a mistaken policy, “a kind of wild excess on the part of an otherwise rational system. It is the inevitable product of a society in which all social needs are subordinated to the accumulation of corporate profit and the personal wealth of an elite.

“The struggle against war is today—as it was in World War One and World War Two—an international class question. The fight against war must be waged on the basis of an international socialist strategy, and that means constructing a political party—a truly world party—which unifies workers and youth across the globe in the fight for the revolutionary reorganization of global economic life on the basis of social need.”

The “White Season”

Ellie Keen — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:28:22 +0000

Last week, the BBC ran its “White Season”—a series as puerile as it was offensive.

Billed as an exploration of “what it means to be white and working-class in 21st century Britain,” the trailer summed up the central message. A close-up facial shot of a white, bald and obviously working class male was shown. As the hymn “Jerusalem” played, brown hands appeared, writing one after another in foreign languages in black pen across his face. Eventually his entire face—bar the whites of his eyes—was coloured black. As he closed his eyes, the words “Is white working-class Britain becoming invisible?” appeared.

Writing in the Daily Mail, under the heading “White and working class...the one ethnic group the BBC has ignored,” Richard Klein, the broadcaster’s Head of Independent Commissioning for Knowledge asserted that “Over the past two decades, Britain has been through a revolution.”

“Globalisation, mass immigration and economic upheaval have helped to transform the fabric of our nation,” he continued. “These changes have been the subject of noisy debate within the media, politics and academia, yet it is a curious irony that, in all the heated discussion about the consequences of this revolution, one voice has been largely absent: that of the white working class.”

Whereas once “the white working class were seen as an integral and respected part of our national life,” now, “The voice of the white working-class is barely allowed to intrude into British politics or culture. In metropolitan circles, where sneering at any minority ethnic group would be regarded as an outrage, this white working-class opinion is all too often treated with suspicion or contempt.”

With its “White Season,” Klein went on, the BBC was “determined to redress the balance by commissioning a new season of programmes looking at the attitudes of the white working class.”

Klein’s claims are an invention. Just when was it that the working class was considered the “backbone” of the country and treated with “respect”? Britain is a country in which every social advance—from healthcare, education, trade union rights and universal suffrage—had to be fought for tooth and nail in the face of fierce hostility from the ruling establishment. And once the working class had established these gains, over the past 30 years or so the ruling elite has done its utmost to dismantle them one after the other.

But it is the prefix “white” that really counts here. In preparation for the series, BBC Newsnight commissioned a survey amongst 1,000 or so “white” people. Blacks and Asians were excluded. So presumably were all non-British “whites.

And what of the results of this survey? It found that those designated as “white working class” were slightly more pessimistic about the future than those designated as the “white middle class.”

To anyone outside the rarefied environs of BBC executives and their political paymasters, this will hardly come as a revelation. Britain has indeed been through a “revolution” over the last decades. It is one in which the expunging of “class”—or more particularly, the interests and concerns of the working class—from every aspect of social and political life has been the central concern of the ruling establishment, and most especially the Labour Party, as it sought to implement a massive transfer of wealth away from working people to the super-rich and major corporations, making Britain one of the most socially unequal countries in the world.

Globalisation, job insecurity, crime and political marginalisation all featured strongly in the listed concerns of “white workers” and only slightly less-so amongst those decreed to be “white middle class.” Had the BBC not engaged in its own brand of racial profiling, one would have found that similar concerns find equal expression amongst black and Asian working people.

But none of these were explored in the BBC’s “White Season.” Its sole concern was to assert that the sense of political alienation and insecurity amongst white workers was bound up with race, and the economic and social impact of immigration and the sense of betrayal produced by the “liberal nostrums” of multiculturalism and “political correctness.”

From the Wibsey Working Men’s Club, just outside Bradford, where “With high unemployment and a perception that recent Asian immigrants receive the lion’s share of Government benefits, members feel that their very community is under threat and that racial tensions could erupt at any time,” to Peterborough where an influx of Polish immigrants is said to have raised tensions, to Barking in east London, the message was the same: “White, working class Britain” is being submerged beneath a sea of blacks and foreigners.

The great significance given to the small percentage points revealed in the survey between the views of working class and middle class people to the “loaded” questions they were asked was meant to hammer home the message.

In the same article, Klein insinuated that immigration was wholly for the “middle classes” who benefited from a “Polish plumber or a Ukrainian nanny.”

Others were still more explicit in deriding the “middle class” and their “liberal” values for being oblivious to the real cost of immigration. Caitlin Moran in the Times railed that immigration was “very useful” for the “liberal left-wing” who could use the “Ukrainian carpenters on £2 an hour.” Meanwhile, Moran continued with a palpable sense of horror, it was the working classes “who are actually living this multicultural life, and sharing their shops, schools, hospitals, pubs and streets with dozens of different nationalities, cultures and beliefs.”

Author Tim Lott, in an article entitled “White, working class—and threatened with extinction,” also claimed that “it’s the do-gooding liberal middle classes that have betrayed those ‘beneath’ them.” This “betrayal” apparently consists of the abolition of selective grammar schools, implementing policies of “multiculturalism” while deriding “the host white indigenous culture,” suppressing English nationalism and building council houses—in that order.

Lott at least acknowledged that “there is also a large liberal working class” that is, “rarely mentioned by the WLMC [white liberal middle class] who like to keep a monopoly on morals.” But it is not the views of this “white, working class” that concerns him and others. As Lott explained, their fascination is rather with those layers of the “white working class” who are “wilfully ignorant, hedonistic, angry, often racist,” and even “verging on the crooked,” tending “toward the philistine” and mistrustful of “education.”

Not that the BBC’s programme makers and its supporters claim to represent this working class. Klein remarked somewhat loftily, “Most people at the BBC don’t live lives like this, but these are our licence payers,” while Lott, answering his own rhetorical question as to whether he looks down on the white working class “now that I am middle class myself? Probably.”

The BBC claimed that its aim was to allow the “authentic voice of the traditional white working class” to be heard. Given the parameters set, this “voice” turned out almost universally to consist of right-wing commentators, overt racists and even fascists.

The BBC’s series of programmes were obsessed with the British National Party. Two of the areas chosen are where the BNP had scored small successes in local council elections. In Wibsey, a young white male—a Union Jack flag disfigured by a swastika hanging behind him—boasted, “If I saw a young Paki getting kicked and knocked over, I would not blink an eyelid, I hate them so much.” In Barking, the documentary focused on the campaigning activities of a local BNP officer.

Initiating the series, BBC Newsnight invited BNP leader Nick Griffin on to a roundtable discussion where he blamed “Islam and particularly Pakistani immigration” for the hard drugs trade in Britain.

“Impartiality” in the service of reaction

Many have noted that such a programme could not have been shown 10 or even 5 years ago. For the programme makers and their supporters it is evidence of a refreshing air of openness, “objectivity” and “impartiality.”

The BBC’s supposed “liberal” bias has long been the focus of attacks by media opponents, such as Rupert Murdoch, and those with a political axe to grind—from the Conservative Party (which views the BBC as Britain’s last “nationalised” institution), to the Blair government for its coverage of the Iraq war and its aftermath, and Zionists over its very occasional critical treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But over the last period, these complaints have also been raised from within the BBC.

Klein himself made a speech in 2006 in which he said that the BBC was “out of touch” and ignoring “mainstream” opinion.

His remarks followed an “impartiality” summit involving BBC executives and leading presenters where, according to the right-wing Daily Mail’s gloating report, “BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.”

In June 2007, a BBC-commissioned report found that the corporation existed in a “left-leaning comfort zone,” and that it had an “innate liberal bias.” The 80-page summary found that its broadcasting output was dominated by a liberal consensus that failed to give voice to a wide range of views.

Commenting favourably on the “White Season” in the Financial Times under the headline “White men unburdened,” John Lloyd noted that “A cultural movement is happening within liberal opinion. It no longer greets immigrants with open arms. They are welcome—but with tighter conditions, aimed at encouraging, even mandating, integration.... All these orotund concepts—assimilation, cultural diversity and mutual tolerance—are now in contest....

“This political shift has now spilled into Britain’s most important cultural institution, the BBC.”

The World Socialist Web Site has commented previously on the social and political evolution of a significant layer of the former liberal intelligentsia. From the Labour Party’s role as the chief ally of the Bush administration in the US and its doctrine of pre-emptive war, to the campaign by supporters of the New Statesman and the Euston Manifesto group against the “appeasement” of Islamic fundamentalism, former pacifists and leftists have become transformed into political apologists for free market capitalism and so-called liberal imperialism.

Domestically, faced with growing social inequality, a global economic recession and competition between rival nation states for control of vital markets and resources, the former liberals argue that it is no longer possible to sustain universal provision of health, education, housing and democratic rights. Rather these rights should be afforded, in general, to those born in Britain who have paid into the system. David Goodhart, editor of the pro-Blair Prospect magazine (for which Lloyd also writes), most famously propounded this view in the pages of the Guardian in 2004, accompanied by measures to “close the door” on immigration “before it’s too late.” “To put it bluntly, most of us prefer our own kind,” he declared.

Far from being “impartial,” the BBC’s “White Season” is a major attempt to encourage and legitimise this embrace of racial and ethnic politics as a justification for all manner of right-wing social and politic nostrums.

The highlight of the BBC’s efforts and by far the most politically revealing of the various programmes was Denys Blakeway’s revisiting of Conservative politician Enoch Powell’s infamous speech on immigration in 1968. Speaking before an audience of Conservative businessmen in Birmingham, Powell had warned of the dangers of racial integration in apocalyptic terms. Citing an unnamed Wolverhampton constituent, who was harassed by “wide-grinning piccaninnies” and “excreta pushed through her letterbox,” Powell—paraphrasing the Roman poet Virgil—foretold an imminent race war and “the Tiber foaming with much blood.”

In the documentary, Powell was portrayed as a “maverick” who “outraged the political establishment,” but “struck a chord with the public who wrote to him in their thousands, and London’s dockers came out on strike in support.” Its underlying thrust was that Powell’s sacking from the shadow cabinet the day after his speech meant that it was no longer possible to openly debate the dangers of unchecked immigration. Forty years on, the documentary suggested, Powell had been proven correct. Immigration and the policies of “multiculturalism” were jointly responsible directly for everything from the inner-city riots of the 1980s and 1990s to the July 7 London bombings.

A monetarist and free marketer when it was still considered socially inadvisable, Powell was in all essentials a forerunner of the Thatcherite Conservative Party. His economic proscriptions combined with his hostility to Britain joining the European Economic Community meant that he was a political opponent of then Conservative leader Edward Heath.

His speech was intended as a challenge to Heath by the Tory right. Deliberately inflammatory, it was directed against the Labour government’s planned introduction of the Race Relations Act prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of race in matters such as jobs and housing allocation—the notorious “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs” signs. Powell’s little white lady—whose existence was never proven—was a landlord who, he suggested, should be free to discriminate as she pleased.

Powell went on to leave the Conservative Party and joined the Ulster Unionist Party in 1974. By the end of Thatcher’s leadership, however, he was largely reconciled with the party.

None of this dealt was dealt with in the documentary. Nor was there any mention of inner-city poverty and police racism and harassment that actually sparked the riots in 1980 and 1990, much less the Iraq war that has done so much to fuel the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

Diehard reactionaries such as Powell’s biographer and champion of a specifically English nationalism, Simon Heffer, and philosopher Conservative Roger Scruton were featured in the documentary, which began by stating that “in the wake of riots and terror attacks, many are now asking, was Enoch Powell right to predict disaster in his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech?” Juxtaposing negative comments on “multiculturalism” with scenes of the London bombings, it concluded, “ten years after his death, many believe that Powell’s arguments were often prescient.”

Here it is worth noting Blakeway’s remarks on television’s treatment of history at the Imperial War Museum in London in October 2004, in which he highlighted the importance of “revisionist” historians, able to put “the past in a different light, and whose views have often changed the way the past is perceived.”

The “reinterpretation”—or rather rehabilitation—of Powell is only the latest mea culpa offered by former liberals who have now embraced the ideas of the right. Following on from their support for pre-emptive war and the “war on terror,” they have now ditched their old policies of multiculturalism in favour of a repackaging of the neoconservative theory of the “Clash of Civilisations”—masquerading as a defence of the “white, working class.”

London Mayoral Elections (Part Two)

Ellie Keen — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 22:59:27 +0000

Labour as the party of neo-colonial intervention

New Statesman Editor Martin Bright is unabashed about his adoption by the neo-conservatives. In a July 2006 Observer article, he explained how he was being “feted by the right” after his exposure of “Whitehall’s love affair with radical Islam” had earned him plaudits from “none other than David Frum, the neoconservative Bush adviser credited with coining ‘axis of evil.’” But it “is no shame for those on the left opposed to the rise of radical Islam to build alliances with conservatives prepared to call fascism by its real name”—a disingenuous statement given Bright’s willingness to ally with the most fervent advocates of American global military power.

Another contributor to the Evening Standard’s campaign against Livingstone is Nick Cohen. A one-time Labour supporter and Observer columnist who postured as a left critic, Cohen is one of the most prominent signatories to the Euston Manifesto, first published in the New Statesman. A paean to “liberal” imperialism, it called for a “new progressive democratic alliance” to defend the policy of military intervention so as to safeguard “democracy.” The manifesto won support from a number of pro-Labour journalists, such as Will Hutton and Oliver Kamm, author of Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, and was endorsed by William Kristol in the US, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a leading advocate of war against Iraq.

Writing in the Standard January 9 under the headline “You can do it Boris—just wow us with your true grit,” Cohen informed his readers that he had been through Conservative candidate Boris Johnson’s policies “and found much to admire.” This despite Johnson, an unreconstructed Thatcherite, having had to make a public apology only recently for a 2002 article in which he referred to “piccaninnies” and “tribal warriors” with “watermelon smiles”—the same inflammatory terms utilised by Enoch Powell in his notorious 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech defending racial discrimination and advocating an end to immigration.

The accusation that the government has not been sufficiently resolute in prosecuting the “war on terror” at home is extraordinary. Under Labour, the threat of terrorism has been used to overturn fundamental civil liberties, including habeas corpus. Organisations have been banned and people, mainly Muslim students, jailed for reading material on the Internet said to be linked to terrorism.

Bright and Cohen’s evolution underscores the profound rightward shift within a layer of former “leftists” since the collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and in response to the decay of the old social democratic parties and trade unions.

Analysing the rush by former pacifists and radicals to demand military intervention against Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the December 1995 statement by the International Committee of the Fourth International, “Imperialist war in the Balkans and the decay of the petty-bourgeois left,” explained how these profound changes had “removed an essential prop for those who engaged in protest politics in a previous period.”

The leftism of this social layer, the statement continued, was based not on the independent capacity of the working class, but on the apparent strength of the Stalinist and social democratic or Labourite bureaucracies. The demise of the latter meant that the “workers movement no longer provides the petty-bourgeois left with the same sources of employment or paths to political influence,” while the policies of free-market deregulation and privatisation had provided a powerful social impulse for their conversion to the side of the bourgeoisie.

For a time, this embrace of Thatcherite economic nostrums could still be combined with a liberal stance on sexual and racial issues. The Labour Party especially promoted identity politics, based on race, religion and sexual preference, as it sought to junk any connection with the working class and social reforms and refashion itself as the preferred party of big business.

Now sections of the bourgeoisie have determined this policy is no longer sufficient and acts as a fetter on its broader, long-term ambitions. If British imperialism is to intervene determinedly in the fight to control strategic markets and resources globally, and particularly in the Middle East, the government must recognise that this will provoke opposition and prepare accordingly. Increasingly, the new mantra is that at home, just as abroad—you are either with us, or against us.

“Leftists” groups sign up to defend Labour

That some of the most vociferous proponents of this doctrine have emerged from the likes of the New Statesman and the Euston Manifesto group is proof of the political putrefaction of the Labour Party. This hollowed-out, bureaucratic apparatus, entirely divorced from any democratic control by the populace, much less the working class that once formed its primary constituency, has functioned as the main political representative of the neo-conservatives in Britain for more than a decade. As such it has become the incubator of the most right-wing, antidemocratic tendencies.

No mention of this is made by those now lining up to defend Livingstone. Rather than alerting working people to the dangers posed by the absence of a genuinely progressive alternative to Labour, they argue that a “progressive alliance” means supporting the very same party that has spawned Bright and his cohorts.

Labour’s Compass group issued a statement signed mostly by Labour MPs and National Executive Committee members—“Progressive forces unite behind Mayor.”

“Livingstone is a standard bearer for real progressive politics,” it claimed. “Of course, like all of us, Livingstone operates in the here and now. For London that means the domination of the Square Mile in the form of financial capitalism. He cannot be expected to address such forces at once or alone....

“The battle lines are clear. It’s them and us. And Ken Livingstone is us. We urge every progressive voter, activist and organisation to get behind the campaign to re-elect Ken Livingstone.”

Writing in the Guardian, Seumas Milne argued, “A defeat for Livingstone would not just be a blow to the broadly defined left, working-class Londoners, women, ethnic minorities and greens. It would represent a wider defeat for progressive politics, in Britain and beyond.”

Despite the increasingly personal character of the attack on him, Livingstone has said little about the fact that the opposition campaign is led by individuals associated with Labour and its periphery—arguing instead that he should be judged on his record. London is booming, he argues, and the key test is “whether London is ahead of New York” in the “contest for number-one city in the world.” As the official Labour candidate, it is not possible for Livingstone to identify the pronounced right-wing trajectory of his own organisation without its damaging his electoral chances.

As it is, the Economist forecast that Livingstone’s candidacy for the Labour Party was damaging his ability to trade on “Brand Ken.” In the Guardian, February 27, 2008, Sunder Katwala expressed similar fears over Labour’s ability to mobilise a sufficient vote: “In a low-turnout election, Johnson’s ability to mobilise the suburban vote and those uneasy with London’s diversity and openness could take him across the winning line,” Katwala wrote. Livingstone needed to be able to “mobilise London’s broad progressive majority, winning enough support from Lib Dems, Greens and others to see off” the Tory challenge, thereby offering “a major reason to be cheerful about Labour’s chances of political recovery nationally.”

In the drive to engineer such a “recovery,” declared opposition to the “neo-cons” is being used to support the very party that has championed the Bush doctrine of military intervention, the further redistribution of wealth from working people to the rich and the dismantling of democratic rights.

Yet again, the various petty bourgeois left groups have signed up en masse to this political charade.

George Galloway, whose Respect Renewal group split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) last year, has announced he will not challenge Livingstone for mayor. “There is an urgent need for change” in London, Galloway has said. “Just not the change from Livingstone to Boris Johnson.”

“In these new and developing circumstances, it would be self-indulgence, a luxury the left can no longer afford, to stand a candidate of the left against Livingstone for mayor.” Galloway has said he intends to form a “progressive slate” for the assembly, with himself as a candidate, to act as a check on the mayor.

The SWP is in the somewhat difficult position of having declared months ago that Stop the War Coalition leader Lindsey German would run for mayor. But in a statement on her campaign, German went out of her way to stress “I have many points of agreement with Ken Livingstone—his anti-racist and anti-imperialist policies are a credit to London and he has seriously attempted to cut car use in the city.... We should defend Ken against attacks from the right, and we should support him against the Tory candidate Boris Johnson and his right wing agenda.”

“However that does not mean that we can or should be uncritical.”

But what does this mean for the SWP’s campaign? With some relief, German explained that “Everyone has two votes for mayor, for their first and second preferences, so the second votes of the smaller parties can be distributed between the two lead candidates.... It is very important that we don’t let the Tory in, which is why I will be calling for all my voters to give Ken their second preference.”

According to reports, at one election meeting, German dismissed charges that her candidacy would damage Labour’s chances, stating that it would actually help Livingstone because the Single Transferable Vote system meant “we will gain votes for Ken.” In other words, the SWP doesn’t take its own campaign seriously and knows that it will not hurt Labour.

Similarly, for the Socialist Party (formerly the Militant), the elections pose “an invidious choice between a former left who has embraced a big business agenda and a Thatcherite throwback. Both offer neo-liberal policies and will continue to preside over obscene poverty and social deprivation while the City wallows in wealth.”

“The situation is crying out for a new workers’ party but, unfortunately, once more an opportunity has been lost,” it complained, following the decision of unions such as the Rail and Maritime Transport not to stand candidates. This meant there was “no coherent working-class alternative.”

The “Socialist Party is normally opposed to policies of ‘lesser evilism,’” it stated. “But there are occasions when different factors, especially working-class consciousness, compel us to modify our approach. In this case, through gritted teeth, like many London workers, we recommend a second-preference vote for Ken Livingstone.”

There is nothing new in the line-up of the former radical groups. When Livingstone stood as an independent in 2000 they came together to form a joint slate, the London Socialist Alliance, which promoted his candidacy. At the time, they argued that Livingstone’s success could be a force for reinvigorating the party or providing the nucleus for a new workers’ organisation. This was despite Livingstone’s stipulation that he intended to rejoin Labour at some future point. Even when he was readmitted to the party in time for the 2004 elections, these groups called for second preference votes to be cast for Livingstone.

Respect Renewal, the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party all claim to be involved in the fight to construct a new workers’ party. But when the chips are down, they immediately back Labour as the “progressive” choice. No matter how far Labour goes in its attacks on the working class and its support for neo-colonialism, the various left groups insist that it remains the “lesser evil,” which workers must defend if they are to beat back the attacks of the right.

But if support for Labour is truly a means of defending the essential class interests of working people, then why is there a need for a new party?

In truth, none of these groups believe it is possible to fight for a politically independent workers’ organisation. That is why, whenever the right rears its head—and even if substantial sections of that right are identified with the Labour Party—their response is always the same: defend Labour. One thing is guaranteed: as the election looms ever closer, their currently limited criticisms of Livingstone and the Labour Party will become even more circumspect.

The furore around the London mayoral contest does raise important issues. There is no question that a factional fight over political policy is raging within broad layers of the ruling elite, and within the Labour Party itself. Faced with the significant setbacks suffered by US and British imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan and the prospect of economic recession, some are demanding a drastic realignment of domestic politics in line with the battle being waged for global hegemony, which must entail even greater “sacrifice” from the population—especially as regards its democratic rights.

As always, the left groups claim that this can be dealt with by tactical manoeuvres on the electoral front. While warning of the threat from the right, they treat this development as if it can be resolved by putting a cross in the correct place on a ballot paper. But the bitter furore surrounding the London election is not a temporary, conjectural episode. Its roots lie in the deepening crisis of the world capitalist system and the growth of inter-imperialist antagonisms and social tensions this is generating.

The absence of a socialist alternative is not a secondary factor in this situation. It is the fundamental issue confronting working people. So long as the working class does not have any independent means of articulating its opposition to social inequality and the threat of war, the ruling elite are determined to resolve the crisis on their own terms.