Lindsay German | ukwatch.net

On The War in Iraq

Ellie Keen — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:30:37 +0000

In 2001, faced with the threat of war against Afghanistan, 80,000 people took to the streets of Britain. In the intervening six years there have been more than 20 national demonstrations against the War on Terror, calling for the troops to be brought home from Iraq and Afghanistan. That this campaign has been sustained over such a long period is a tribute to many thousands of hardworking activists who have canvassed and petitioned on high streets up and down the country. It is also a tribute to the many millions of supporters of the campaign who have felt strongly enough to protest again and again at the warmongering policies of our government.

Together we have helped unite the people of the world for peace. February 15, 2003 saw more than 30 million people across the world take to the streets against Bush and Blair’s wars, including two million in Britain; the biggest protest in British history.

Political isolation

This historic campaign is far from over. Key supporters of the war have been driven from office. Tony Blair has been forced out of Downing Street; the final straw his support for Israel’s war in Lebanon in 2006. Such was the revulsion at this, even within his own party, that he was forced to announce that he would go within a year. In the USA neo-conservative architects of the war, Donald Rumsfield and John Bolton, have resigned. Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, Italian president Silvio Berlusconi, and more recently Australian prime minister John Howard all lost office as a result of their support for the Iraq war. Only Bush remains, an isolated figure with historically low poll ratings: a lame-duck president, but still dangerous and itching for another war – a war with Iran.

We are now five years on from the invasion of Iraq, which has lasted longer than the Second World War. For the US, daily military operations have already cost more than 12 years in Vietnam and the United States is spending $16bn a month on running costs alone in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then there is the missing cash: the $8.8bn Development Fund for Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority, for example; and the unaudited millions that flows through the Department of Defence.

For the UK, the combined cost of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past 12 months is more than £3bn. The total cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 now totals about £10bn. “This is the politics of Mad Hatter priorities,” said Alan Simpson, a Labour opponent of the war. “The government is throwing money into unwinnable war zones at the same time as withholding money that creates a war zone in our hospitals.”

Dubious gains

The achievement in Iraq? In excess of a million deaths and a further million displaced peoples; the destruction of towns and cities; the pollution of the countryside with cluster bomb munitions and depleted uranium; and the total collapse of the country’s social infrastructure. Last word goes to Hans Blix, the former United Nations arms inspector who has claimed that the war was “clearly illegal.” “There were question marks [over the evidence of WMD], but they changed them to exclamation marks,” he said.

He has also accused America of a “witch-hunt” to justify the war. The achievement in Afghanistan? Three years after then defence secretary John Reid talked of completing the British military deployment there “without a shot being fired” and eliminating the opium harvest, the majority of the country is under Taliban control and prime minister Hamid Karzai is known as the Mayor of Kabul. Since last year, 81 British troops have died and untold numbers been maimed for life. The United Nations calculates that violent incidents have risen by 20-30% since the British took over NATO command, with at least 5,000 local deaths. Meanwhile, the opium harvest is at record levels.

Leaders of the Stop the War Coalition, CND and BMI will deliver a letter to the prime minister at 10 Downing Street at midday on Thursday 20 March calling for UK troops to be withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. There will also be a protest in Whitehall and a minute’s silence to mark the death of all those killed as a result of the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manchester Demo

jo — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 16:39:57 +0000

The amount of money spent on communications by the government has trebled since it came to power in 1997. The biggest single increase in this astonishing figure has been at the ministry of defence.

The conclusion is simple – our money has been used by this government to sell the most unpopular series of wars in history and to convince people in Britain that Tony Blairs craven support for George Bush will make the world a safer place.

This is nearly as great a waste of money as the war itself. It is a credit to the anti-war movement that we have conclusively won the arguments against the war on terror – even though we rely on public meetings and protests, while the government has access to the mass media and spin doctors.

Yet the government has repeatedly refused to bow to mass opinion throughout Britain, including in the Labour Party itself, as Blair rides from disaster to disaster.

Most recently, his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire while Lebanon burned under Israeli bombs shocked even some of his most loyal supporters.

MPs who trooped into the government lobby over Iraq without a murmur, and who voted to send more British troops to Afghanistan found this too much to stomach. Many Labour MPs now want him to go and go fast.

A political storm is brewing over Blairs head which will erupt at Labours conference in two weeks time.

The spinners and ministers will try to keep it off the conference agenda, as they have in recent years.

But the demonstration building for Saturday 23 September in Manchester will determine the real agenda for the conference, whatever the order paper says.

People from all over Britain are arriving in Manchester by road, rail, foot, bicycle and horse. Trade unionists, students, pensioners, Muslims, Christians, Jews and atheists will all be there.

It will be a demonstration of a different type. Labour conferences held in seaside resorts have always attracted demonstrations, but never on the scale that we will be able to mobilise in a major city like Manchester.

The big centres of population in Yorkshire and Lancashire are just short journeys away. They have to turn out thousands from each town and city to make this a mass mobilisation on a scale which will bring Manchester to a halt and force the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Right up to the last minute, leaflets, posters and street meetings can attract new people to the protest.

A special responsibility lies with London. Our demonstrations have attracted mass mobilisations of Londoners to protest at foreign policy. With its huge population even last minute activity helps a good turnout.

This time Londoners have to do what people from Manchester and the rest of the north of England have had to do to support London demos – get up early to catch a train or coach.

Tickets

Organising for this cant be left to the last minute. It needs to be done now. Every London Stop the War group should have organised transport and be selling tickets for coaches and the special train.

Most groups are holding public meetings in the next week. They should become organising centres for Manchester, sending out teams of people to poster and leaflet stations, mosques, colleges, schools and workplaces.

Nearly every major union is actively and enthusiastically supporting this demonstration, which means we can get record numbers of trade unionists, from Aberdeen to Plymouth.

The next week is critical in building the march, especially in London.

Every socialist should work all-out to make 23 September a mass exodus of protesters from London.

People in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon will be watching. People in Cairo, Gaza and the West Bank will be watching. The whole world will be watching. This isnt one to miss.

Lindsey German is national convenor of the Stop the War Coalition. She writes here in a personal capacity.

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One Law For The Rich

jo — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 20:40:44 +0000

‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’ Really? What about the big criminals robbing people of millions and of a decent life?

Compare and contrast, as the exam papers say. A heist called the biggest robbery in Britain takes place where £50 million in notes is stolen from a depot. Days of headline news follow, including a dramatic incident where police shoot out the tyres of a car, the eventual recovery of some money and the detention of suspects.

Around the same time, a number of banks announce profits running into billions of pounds. The news is greeted as at worst slightly excessive, and at best as a sign of entrepreneurial skill and endeavour. It brings to mind the German writer Bertolt Brecht’s famous saying, “What’s robbing a bank compared to owning one?”

He couldn’t have put it better. There is a great deal of talk about crime and its victims – as we can see with New Labour’s emphasis on combating crime in its local election campaign. But this focuses on a very narrow group of crimes at the expense of a wider understanding of who steals what in our society.

Different crimes can place a lot of different pressures on people’s lives. It is very frightening to be mugged or burgled, let alone to be physically or sexually assaulted. All of these can have terrible consequences for people’s lives, and should not be sanctioned in any civilised society.

However, while there is outrage about such incidents, little or nothing is said about the crime of stealing people’s pensions. To have to work another five years in order to gain a pension which you have paid for all your working life is effectively to steal tens of thousands of pounds from each worker, a cumulative total running into millions. Such robbery also ruins lives, and affects people’s security, mental or physical health and living standards.

Lengthening the working day, cutting back on health and safety at work, and allowing the food companies to influence food labelling have negative impacts on the lives of millions, as does building new roads, cutting public transport, and polluting or poisoning the atmosphere.

Yet most of these would not even fall into the category of crime, let alone carry heavy penalties. With international law, the biggest criminals run the world while the smaller criminals may if they’re unlucky end up in the Hague. The law is made by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful. The whole development of capitalism is hardly free of crime – slavery, colonialism, the theft of land through enclosure or clearance.

A rhyme from the 18th century makes the same point as Brecht:

“The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.”

The landowners became some of the most powerful people in Britain, backed up by the law, police and judges. Some also went on to own mines, mills and factories where they took even more – the wealth produced by their workers’ labour – to produce their profits.

Sunday thrills

While those crimes are hidden or ignored for most of the time, the other sort of crime is highlighted. No Sunday night would be complete without several television detective series highlighting murder. Crime thrillers are one of the most popular categories of books and films.

This serves to make us frightened and fascinated about terrible but luckily rare crimes, while remaining quiescent about corporate or state killing which unfortunately affects far more people.

New Labour’s stress on crime, needless to say, focuses exclusively on individual crime, and uses Asbos especially against young people. Even here the contradiction is obvious. I recently attended a school question time where it was said that all of the pupils from the school had been banned from the local Asda because a small number had been involved in bad behaviour there. Is this the same Asda that had to pay £850,000 to staff at its Tyne and Wear depot for unlawfully offering them a financial inducement to give up union rights? Is this the same Asda which is in dispute with its warehouse workers because it wants to lower wages?

Shouldn’t someone put an Asbo on them?

Going Backward

jo — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 17:06:23 +0000

Sometimes I feel I’m going back to the 1950s. There seems to be an endless parade of mostly women in the media telling us that we can’t have it all, and that women who choose careers without giving due thought to how and when they will have children will regret it. You really wouldn’t be surprised to see a young Doris Day pop up with advice on how to keep your man, or a new game show on how to beat your biological clock.

There is almost a vicious pleasure at others’ misfortunes in some of these pronouncements, as if to say, “We said you would have to pay for enjoying yourself, being educated, going for a decent job, and having sex outside marriage. Now your punishment is not being able to have children at all.”

Paradoxically, one of the issues prompting these concerns is the latest figures projecting that a fifth of women who are young adults today in Britain will not have children. Most of these women will choose to remain childless. “What’s wrong with that?” you might say. It is, after all, a choice which in an ideal world women should be free to make without coercion.

But this argument isn’t about free choice for women. Rather it is part of an ideological debate which has raged on and off for the past four decades about women’s equality and how to win it.

For it was back in the mid-1960s when women in the US student movement – committed to fighting racism and war – began to question why they were marginalised and sometimes derided by men. Women’s liberation came out of the great movements for change in the 1960s and was influenced by them. Its very name imitated the national liberation struggles from colonialism. In Britain, the early women’s movement campaigned around equal pay strikes.

But ultimately the movement failed. While it made important changes in terms of raising the consciousness of some in a generation of women, it did not confront the oppressive structures of capital itself, especially those of class.

It was always as much a reflection of the changes in women’s lives as a theory of change. Women were working outside the home more than ever, were being educated to higher levels than ever, and were controlling childbirth, marriage and sexuality more than ever. The early demands of the movement attempted to overcome the inequalities highlighted by this situation.

Women are now expected to work outside the home and be mothers. Their personal freedom tends to be much greater than their grandmothers. But the changes have been far from cost-free. Women and men now work longer hours than 20 or 30 years ago. Flexibility means the right to be exploited on the same basis as men. Sexual liberalisation has meant turning every aspect of sex into commodities for the market.

So the fleeting glimpses back to the 1950s don’t really tell you the whole picture. It is impossible to turn the clock back so women are in the home primarily as housewives. But they do tell you that the ideas around women have gone backwards in recent years. We have neoliberalism to thank for that.

Finest achievements

Women are expected to compete on the same terms as men, and not allow motherhood to get in the way. Women whose livelihoods are destroyed by the reach of global capital are given the choice of emigration to care for other people’s children or clean their houses in the richest parts of the world, or joining the growing number of women forced to sell sex.

We now blame the victim for everything that goes wrong, rather than the system which creates so many victims. Feminist government ministers regard as their finest achievements raising women’s pension age or forcing single parents back to work.

Yet the ideas of liberation are not forgotten. International Women’s Day is on 8 March. It was originally organised by European socialist women before the First World War to commemorate a huge uprising of women factory workers in New York.

Their counterparts today are in the shanty towns of Caracas, the factories of the Philippines, and in the anti-war movement. And when they fight for their rights they are increasingly likely not just to demand equality with the men of their class, but to position that fight as part of the wider struggle for social justice and an end to exploitation.