Liz Davies | ukwatch.net

Why Stay?

JamieSW — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:41:54 +0000

Liz Davies was an active member of the Labour left between 1979 and 2001 and elected as a Grassroots Alliance candidate to the Labour Party’s national executive committee between 1998 and 2000. Here she responds to Alex Nunn’s essay and opens a debate that continues on the Red Pepper website and forum.

I’ve been struck by the lack of analysis on the Labour left as to what went wrong in the recent Labour leadership elections. This is the first attempt to provide such an analysis and I welcome it. All I’ve seen before now is the Labour left congratulating themselves on the campaign itself and then bemoaning ‘we was robbed’. All of us who want to challenge the bipartisan approach of the two major parties were robbed. But what does that mean and why did it happen?

John McDonnell ran an exemplary campaign. It reached out to the grassroots, was based on transparency and accountability, and put forward a manifesto of principled, pragmatic socialist strategies. A contest between him and Gordon Brown would have meant that trade union and Labour Party members had a real political choice – a neoliberal warmonger against a democrat and a socialist. It’s a contest that Brown would have hated and that’s why MPs were mobilised to prevent McDonnell standing.

In comparison, Jon Cruddas’s bid for deputy leader was a pale imitation. His vote reflected the fact that a certain proportion of Labour Party members (and a much higher proportion of trade union members) don’t support New Labour. But Alan Simpson is right to point to Cruddas’s poor voting record. Compass – his main base – was one of the building blocks of New Labour. Cruddas’s response when asked on Question Time which piece of legislation passed under Blair he would repeal – he couldn’t initially think of anything – showed his loyalist instincts.

I don’t believe, as Alan Simpson suggests, that the Labour left declined because of the Chesterfield conferences 20 years ago or because we were too fragmented. The Labour left lost because New Labour won, building on the right-wing shift started by Neil Kinnock. New Labour capitalised on the party’s despair after the 1992 election defeat and convinced too many party members that only New Labour would make the party electable – and that becoming electable required shutting down the party’s democratic structures (such as they were), preventing the left having a voice in the party, and promoting neoliberal values.

Many party members – and many Labour voters in 1997 – believed that this was a smokescreen to get into power. But Tony Blair was speaking the truth when he said ‘We were elected as New Labour and we shall govern as New Labour.’ Since his election as party leader in 1994, the Labour Party has become the party of privatisation, authoritarianism, war and racism. Thatcher’s greatest achievement has been to re-mould the Labour Party in her own image. Gordon Brown was as much an architect of New Labour as Blair, and the ideology of New Labour continues under his premiership.

When New Labour shut down the democratic structures, it ended any chance of socialists in the Labour Party being able to make a difference. No matter how many party members are horrified by war, privatisation, the assault on civil liberties and so on, their voices aren’t heard, and they certainly can’t change the policies. The leadership’s iron grip prevents any real challenges – just as it did with McDonnell’s bid for leadership.

It’s not surprising, then, that the party membership has changed. Jon Cruddas’s vote showed that it’s now predominantly trade union members – not Labour Party members – who are dissatisfied with the leadership. Given that McDonnell’s exemplary campaign couldn’t even get the left off the starting-block, the question must be asked: what can the Labour left possibly achieve by staying in the party?

Fostering Sectarianism in Iraq

Alex Doherty — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 21:04:35 +0000

Bush and Blairs public opinion ratings are lower than ever before. Their weapons of mass destruction excuse for invading Iraq is known to be a cynical lie. American and British body bags come home every week while Iraqi casualties of the invasion and occupation were conservatively put, by the Lancet eighteen months ago, at over a hundred thousand. The country is in chaos, the most unsafe place to live in the world. A majority of the American and British electorates and a vast majority of Iraqis want the occupying troops to leave.

And yet, as Anthony Arnove points out in his new book: Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, the case for continued occupation is made not just by cheerleaders for the invasion, but by liberals, including some who spoke against the invasion three years ago.

However wrong the invasion was, they argue, now that the troops are there, shouldnt they stay to nurture peace and democracy? Indeed, dont the occupiers owe it to the Iraqis, having devastated their country?

Arnove dubs this rationale the new white mans burden. It ignores the historical, economic and real-politik context of the invasion of Iraq: the significance of oil, the strategic importance of Iraq, the CIAs long record of suppressing democratic movements in the middle east. It also ignores the history of US imperialism, with its record of human rights abuses, black ops and puppet dictatorships. It portrays the illegal detentions, torture, killings and other abuses committed by the occupiers in Iraq as aberrations, unrepresentative of the nature of the occupation. Above all, it betrays a racist assumption: a belief that Iraqis, left to their own, cant build democracy or human rights.

Arnove alls for the immediate withdrawal of all US and international troops from Iraq. He gives eight reasons why the US and its collaborators should leave Iraq immediately.

First, the US and British military have no right to be in Iraq. Given that the invasion was illegal, so is the occupation. Its not a defence for a burglar to argue that he has a right, indeed a moral and legal obligation, to remain in the house hes burgled because he suspects its occupiers cant look after it.
Second, they are not bringing democracy to Iraq. That was not the purpose of the invasion. Iraqi popular opinion forced the US to hold two elections. Even then the occupiers tried to subvert the process and promoted the notion of a strictly sectarian political choice for Iraqis. Despite the election not returning the USs favoured option, the occupiers make sure that they pull the strings of any new government.

Third, the occupation does not make the world a safer place. Other countries (Israel, Russia, India) dub their opponents terrorists and cite US-UK behaviour as precedent for their own atrocities. Countries labelled as rogue-states note that Iraq was vulnerable precisely because it didnt have weapons of mass destruction and thus escalate the nuclear arms race.

Fourth, the US and Britain are not preventing civil war in Iraq. Rather, they deliberately foment sectarianism, a traditional weapon of colonisers. The Western media is obsessed with the Kurd-Shia-Sunni divide. In truth, and even now, Kurds, Shias, Sunnis live side by side in most cities. They inter-marry, and live and work together. Sectarianism, particularly against the Kurds, was certainly fomented by Saddam Hussein. The occupation has taken that to new extremes, fostering sectarian-based political parties and construing resistance to the occupation as sectarian violence and even permitting (or perhaps encouraging) its Iraqi allies to engage in such violence. What is clear that the longer the occupation continues, the more sectarianism will increase.

Fifth, the US and Britain are not fighting terrorism in Iraq. The occupation of Iraq and other manifestations of the war on terror have made us all more at risk of terrorist attack. Iraqi civilians face a murderous double whammy: they are victims of state terrorism conducted by the US and Britain as well as home-grown acts of violence.

Sixth, we are not honouring those who died by continuing the conflict. It is a strange argument that justifies future deaths as a necessary memorial to those who have already died. Bush says We will honor their sacrifice by staying on the offensive against terrorists. Cindy Sheehan replies Why should I want one more mother to go through what Ive gone through, because my son is dead?.

Seventh, the occupiers are not rebuilding Iraq; they are looting the country. Of the $18.4 billion allocated by the US Congress for reconstruction, less than half has been spent. Electricity, water and sewage supplies dont work. Hospitals are in chaos. Unemployment has sky-rocketed. Lucrative contracts are handed to multi-national corporations (Haliburton being the principal beneficiary) and a blind eye is turned as money is misspent, siphoned off, unaccounted for, and private companies fail to deliver and dont even employ Iraqis. Untapped oil reserves are sold to multi-nationals (the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions is campaigning hard to keep the existing oil reserves in public ownership). Aggressive privatisation and neo-liberalism are being written into the constitution.

Finally, the US and Britain are not fulfilling their obligations to the Iraqi people by occupying their country. We certainly do have an obligation to Iraqi: to make reparation for 12 years of sanctions, the deaths of over half a million children, for unleashing death from the skies throughout the 1990s, for the invasion of 2004 and the civilian deaths, poverty and instability that have followed. And further back: for arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, for selling arms to Saddam Hussein, for helping to suppress democratic movements in Iraq over many decades. Reparations cannot be made at gunpoint. Reparations require military withdrawal followed by a massive influx of cash distributed by democratically elected politicians, cancelling the whole of Iraqs debt, working to eliminate land mines, combat the effects of depleted uranium, and prosecuting Bush, Blair and others for war crimes.

The earlier the withdrawal, the sooner Iraqis can start to rebuild their country. But what are the factors that might make withdrawal a reality? Arnove identifies five forces that ultimately led to the US withdrawing from South East Asia: mass resistance by the Vietnamese people; resistance by US soldiers and veterans; domestic opposition; international protest and the growing economic consequences of the war. The reference to Vietnam is poignant. Arnoves title is taken from Howard Zinns book Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal which was published in 1967. The US withdrew from South East Asia five years later. Those five years claimed the lives of a million Vietnamese and thirty thousand Americans.

Its the job of the anti-war movement to make the occupation untenable in the US and Britain now, so that Iraqis dont have to repeat the suffering of the Vietnamese. Public opinion generally thinks that there should be a withdrawal, but is less certain about when it should be. Arnoves book is an invaluable tool for engaging with the arguments that arise whenever the occupation is discussed. It makes an unanswerable and urgent case.

Iraq: the Logic of Withdrawal is published by the New Press.

Liz Davies is a barrister, long-standing peace and labour movement activist, Vice-Chairwoman of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers and involved in Iraq Occupation Focus. This column first appeared in the Morning Star.

Shoot to Kill - Never Again

eddie — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 19:04:30 +0000

London is a frightening place to live right now. We Londoners are being shown a small glimpse of what it must be like to live in Baghdad. We are in danger from terrorist bombs and trigger-happy police.

On Friday, the police acted as judge, jury and executioner. Jean Charles de Menezes is a victim of the war on terror in London, just as those who died on 7 July are victims. He was killed for three simple reasons: he wasnt white, he was wearing a bulky coat and he ran away from the police. Who knows why he ran, but for no reason that could justify summary execution.

The rush by leading London and national politicians, and by most sections of the media, to support the police action was breath taking. In a democratic society, the first response when a member of the public is killed by the police should be to suspend the officers involved and to announce an independent inquiry. There are circumstances, obviously, when an inquiry might conclude that the only thing that the police could have done, to protect the public or themselves, was to kill. But the gravity of that conclusion is such that it should only be reached after independent scrutiny of all the circumstances, not as a knee-jerk reaction on the day. Instead, politician after politician queued up to explain that shoot-to-kill is now necessary.

Now that we know that Menezes had nothing to do with terrorism, and there is to be an inquiry, Sir Ian Blair expresses his regret at the tragedy but adds, almost casually, that it might happen again. The inquiry must examine not only the actions of the police at the scene, but the instructions from the top and the whole shoot-to-kill policy. It must never happen again.

Where have we seen the state operate shoot-to-kill before? Apartheid South Africa, present-day Palestine, Los Angeles, and, of course, Northern Ireland.

New Labours assault on civil liberties, ratcheted up several notches post-9/11, reproduces the infamous policing techniques used in Northern Ireland. Extraordinarily, New Labour chooses those methods from Northern Ireland which were not only abuses of civil liberties but were also profoundly ineffective. Internment in 1970s Northern Ireland, described as the IRAs best recruiting tool, has been followed by 21st-century detention in Belmarsh. Muslim communities are treated by the police and racists as suspect communities, with thousands of young non-white men subject to stop and search, and racist attacks escalating, just as the Irish community was in the 1970s and 1980s. Now we see the police operating shoot-to-kill and doing so under pressure, after 21 July, to get results. The pressure to get results produced the Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, Annie Maguire and her family, and Judith Ward all appalling miscarriages of justice, but at least not executions.

This war on terror has become a by-word for failures of intelligence. A failure of intelligence led to Jean Charles de Menezes death. A failure of intelligence, and our politicians doctoring the intelligence that was available, led to the announcement that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, to an illegal invasion and continuing illegal occupation, and to the deaths of thousands of innocents civilians and soldiers. Those failures of intelligence have created the climate for terrorism to escalate.

We must end the view that civil liberties are negotiable. America and Britain have encouraged, and practised, torture, despite the absolute prohibition on torture in international law that both countries have signed up to. Both countries will use evidence extracted by torture elsewhere. Both have practised torture on detainees in Iraq, in Bagram, and in Guantanamo Bay, alternatively denied and justified as preventing further acts of terorrism. But, of course, what someone says under torture is not reliable, its aimed at what the victim believes the torturer wants to hear. Mass murders have not been prevented. Torture didnt identify the bombers in Madrid, Istanbul, London, Egypt. Now summary execution is acceptable if, apparently, it is used to forestall mass murder. But, just like torture, the chances of summary execution actually preventing mass murder are remote. The chances, however, of the police getting it wrong and killing innocent people are high. A democratic state has a duty to maintain non-negotiable standards; otherwise we slip further and further into arbitrary state power.

Fridays shooting will make it harder for the police to find and prosecute those involved in 7 and 21 July, or anyone planning similar criminal acts. Just as the Irish community was suspicious of the police, so anyone who might be mistaken for a Muslim (logically any of us given that it is a religion, but in practice those who are not white) will think twice before giving information to the police. Suppose they detain me as a terrorist suspect? Suppose they shoot me if they raid my next-door neighbours house?

After 7 July, Charles Clarke announced further anti-terrorism offences. With the exception of the thought-crime proposal to criminalise anyone glorifying acts of terrorism, these offences are as yet unspecified and will be put before Parliament in the autumn, along with the governments earlier proposals to introduce ID cards. Its hard to imagine that Labour MPs will now have the guts to vote down ID cards; but the arguments remain the same post-7 July. ID cards wouldnt have prevented the tragedies of 7 July. As for the creation of further anti-terrorist offences, there are plenty of criminal offences available – murder, conspiracy to commit murder, the carrying of explosives. The police dont lack offences with which to charge potential suicide bombers; their problem lies in detecting them. The reality of more anti-terrorism offences is that the police will have more tools, and more opportunity, to harass anyone they choose and grievances will escalate.

Above all, political solutions are required to end the war on terror. Blairs denial that the London bombs had any connection with the occupation of Iraq is as unrealistic, and self-justifying, as an alcoholic denying that he has a problem. Ending the occupation of Iraq and achieving justice for the Palestinians are necessary to bring about a better world, and would have the useful by-product of eliminating some of the sense of grievance that causes a very few to resort to violence. Until those happen, we will all remain less safe from terrorism and from the state.

Liz Davies is a barrister and activist. She is Vice-Chair of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, but writes in a personal capacity. This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

Never Again

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 16:07:57 +0000

It must never happen again

Where have we seen the state operate shoot-to-kill before? Apartheid South Africa, present-day Palestine, Los Angeles, and, of course, Northern Ireland.

Why I Won't Be Voting Labour

Alex Doherty — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 20:27:14 +0000

Ive spent most of my life as an active member of the Labour Party, but I wont be voting Labour on 5 May. Let me explain why.

The Labour Party was always far from ideal but no serious socialist could deny its real achievements and positive impact on working-class lives most enduringly in the creation of the NHS.

But the Labour Party that built the NHS no longer exists. The Labour Party that offers itself for election in 2005 is hostile to working-class interests and is an enemy of democratic rights and social equality. It is the principal British instrument of neo-liberalism, which is why it commands the support of the bulk of the British ruling class (which is not to say that significant sections dont still yearn for the Tories). Above all, Labour in 2005 is the party of war and of imperialism.

The responsibility for Labours crimes against humanity does not lie solely with Blair, Straw and the rest of the Cabinet (although every one of them is a war criminal). A majority of the PLP supported the war. Whilst it is true that, on the eve of invasion, a large minority of Labour MPs voted against military intervention, they did so under pressure from the unprecedented mass anti-war movement that took shape entirely outside the Labour Party. Since then, all but a tiny handful have fallen back into line. They have not spoken out against the occupation of Iraq, which is no more justifiable than the invasion itself. When a morally reprehensible act of imperialism is ongoing, voting against it on a single occasion in the past is no more than a token gesture. To reward those MPs with support at the ballot box would make a joke of the anti-war movement.

The Party as a whole also bears a heavy responsibility for the crimes of the last few years. Its true that large numbers of Party members were appalled by the invasion of Iraq. But their opposition did not result in any significant rebellion at any of Party Conferences. Significantly, not one pro-war MP was seriously threatened with de-selection by his or her local membership. That strikes me as incontrovertible evidence of a fundamental shift in the nature of the Party.

Once, Labour offered working-class people meaningful choice at the ballot-box. Today, it is an instrument whose main function is to obstruct that choice.

The argument that the Labour Party is organically linked to the working-class is no longer sustainable. The composition of the Party has changed its activists and members are not only overwhelmingly middle class, but also have a vested interest in the managerial politics adopted by the government. The Partys links with the corporate world (in donations, sponsorship, staff links, personal contacts) are stronger and more decisive than its remaining links with the trade unions. The cumulative changes in the Partys constitution have deprived unions of any effective voice in policy-making or the selection of candidates (and, from my experience on the National Executive Committee, I know that union members representation there is purely nominal).

To continue to claim in 2005 that Labour is the representative of the working-class is to place Labour in some abstract realm transcending history and its material base. Surely, Marxists know that all social institutions change depending on their relationships with shifting class forces.

In reality, most of those who vote Labour will do so because they view it as the lesser of two evils. But while lesser evilism has its place in politics, it cannot provide a strategic orientation for socialists. Leaving aside the minuscule current degree of difference between Labour and the Tories, this lesser evil argument effectively endorses the key plank of Blairism: that any atrocious compromise is justifiable if it helps win elections. I rejected that argument when I was in the Labour Party , and I continue to reject it. Blair wont construe a vote for Labour as a vote for a lesser evil but as an endorsement of his policies and specifically a mandate for war and occupation.

A vote for Labour in this election is a vote for war, for occupation, for continuing assaults on civil liberties both domestically and internationally. True, there are a tiny number of Labour MPs who consistently and actively oppose the occupation, both inside and outside Parliament, and they should be supported at the ballot-box. But a vote for Labour elsewhere will license the government to commit more atrocities, in the knowledge that it will never pay an electoral price and will never be held to account.

In Scotland, all those who believe that war and occupation are wrong should vote for the Scottish Socialist Party. In England and Wales, the picture is murkier.

The Liberal Democrats opposition to the war was short-lived and largely opportunist. There may be a few constituencies where a tactical vote for a Liberal candidate who personally has an impressive anti-war record would defeat a pro-war Labour MP, but, for the most part, that is not the case.

Respect is largely a creature of the SWP an organisation which in my experience has utter contempt for democracy, diversity and for the integrity of the broader mass movement. Respects refusal to endorse the fundamental democratic principle of secularism must raise grave doubts for any serious socialist. And its claim to be the party of the anti-war movement is simply untrue, displays a sectarian cynicism and contempt for the breadth and diversity of our movement.

In many constituencies, the Greens constitute the only viable anti-war vote. I support the Greens two outstanding MEPs, but the Party as a whole has serious weaknesses. It engaged only intermittently with the active anti-war movement and its position around the occupation of Iraq remains ambiguous. Activists should press for clear answers on this crucial issue from every candidate in their constituencies, including the Greens.

The unsatisfactory choices facing socialists in England and Wales are the result of the political inadequacies of the left as a whole over the last few years. I dont pretend that there are simple answers. But what socialists cannot do is to avoid the problem, pretend that New Labour is an acceptable choice or that any of the existing alternatives are adequate.

Liz Davies was a member of the Labour Partys National Executive Committee between 1998 2000. She is a barrister and vice-chairwoman of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. She writes this column in a personal capacity.