Seumas Milne | ukwatch.net

Facing up to the crisis

Alex Doherty — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:19:36 +0000

The scale of the crisis engulfing the global financial system can no longer be in doubt. The events of the past few days have confirmed that we are living through the greatest meltdown since the Wall Street crash of 1929. For the second time in barely a week, an avowedly free market government in the citadel of laissez-faire capitalism has been forced to nationalise a linchpin of American finance – this time the world’s biggest insurance company, AIG – in an effort to prevent the toxin of collapse spreading further through the US economy.

That followed hard on the heels of the nationalisation of the mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; the bankruptcy of the country’s fourth largest investment bank, Lehman Brothers – corroded by bad debt and bonus-fuelled speculation – and the forced takeover of Merrill Lynch. And a year after the credit crunch triggered the fatal run on Northern Rock, British high street retail banks are being sucked into the crisis: at one point yesterday the country’s largest mortgage lender, HBOS, had lost almost 70% of its share value since the start of the week.

Meanwhile, the impact on the real economy is becoming stronger: output in Britain is falling and official unemployment is likely to rise above 2 million next year – the real figure will be significantly higher. More than 100,000 jobs are expected to go in finance alone. The only question is how deep and prolonged the recession will now be.

What is certain is that the dominance of the free-market model of capitalism, which has held sway across the world for more than two decades, is rapidly coming to an end. When its high priests in Washington are forced to carry out the largest nationalisations ever undertaken outside the communist world, while intervening on an unprecedented scale across markets that were supposed to be self-regulating in order to keep the system afloat, the neoliberal order is transparently falling apart.

Naturally, market fundamentalists and ideologues will continue to preach the old religion. The Times argued yesterday that the unfolding of the banking crisis showed that capitalism and markets were working, however “brutal and unforgiving” that might sound. Such otherworldly dogma is not a luxury candidates standing for election can afford – and even John McCain felt obliged this week to attack Wall Street’s “casino [of] greed, corruption of excess”, while Barack Obama blamed McCain’s economic philosophy of deregulation and called for wide-ranging reform.

That is exactly what should be happening in Britain. But instead, across the main political parties, there is a striking and continuing failure to face up to the extent of the economic crisis or the sea change in policy it must herald. Britain’s political class appears to be wedded to the politics of the 1990s and the glory days of neoliberalism, clinging to the economic legacy of Thatcherism and unable to make the shift from deregulation to intervention that the times demand.

The government has the most to gain and least to lose by doing so. But it’s hamstrung by Gordon Brown’s paralysing caution and New Labour’s original Blairite embrace of market ideology, private provision and corporate privilege. When Alistair Darling declared on Tuesday that he was “extremely anxious” about speculative manipulation of the markets, he invited the obvious question of what on earth he plans to do about it – and why he and Brown insisted on the “light-touch regulation” that created the destructive derivative whirligig in the first place.

The Liberal Democrats could be capitalising on the early warnings from Vince Cable, their new superhero, about the debt crisis and his calls for the public ownership of Northern Rock. But instead of building on the tradition of Keynes and Lloyd George, their leader Nick Clegg has chosen this of all moments to orchestrate a symbolic return to economic liberalism, forcing through a commitment to cut both taxation and spending.

The issue is not, of course, the Lib Dems’ welcome proposals to redistribute the tax burden from the low to the high paid – it’s the new plan to pay for extra tax cuts by reducing the overall level of public expenditure. Not only are spending cuts the last thing the economy needs as it sinks into recession. But underpinning the new policy is Clegg’s personal ideological conviction that state intervention is dead – exactly the opposite of what is required in the face of the storms now sweeping away the neoliberal nostrums of the past.

It also gives political cover to David Cameron’s parallel enthusiasm for a smaller state, backed up by more charity provision for the poor. Much has been made of the Tories’ latter-day conversion to social liberalism, their new enthusiasm for fairness and their self-proclaimed “progressive” agenda. Certainly, their rhetoric is a long way from the confrontational style of the Thatcher era – even if the word “progressive” has, as the social democratic sage David Marquand argues, been largely gutted of any meaning.

But when it comes to the core social and economic choices, all the signs are that Cameron’s Tories plan to follow precisely the same agenda of corporate privilege, deregulation, privatisation of public services and low taxes for the rich inherited from his Conservative predecessors via Tony Blair. Already George Osborne is moving away from his commitment to stick to Labour’s spending plans, while Cameron has declared that redistribution of wealth and income is an “approach that has run out of road”.

But that agenda is precisely the model that has delivered today’s financial breakdown. And as a result, the leaders of the party expected to win the next general election – tied as they are to City and corporate interests – have even less to say about the crisis carving a swathe through finance and the wider economy, and what to do about it, than Brown and his unfortunate chancellor. Beyond calling for better bank deposit protection, Osborne seems to be utterly at sea.

This all represents a woeful failure of institutional politics. But it is also a gift to anyone prepared to push a new agenda that breaks with the failed market orthodoxy and faces up to the reality of our times: that only decisive public intervention and regulation can begin to deal with the economic – or, for that matter, environmental – crises we face. For any Labour politician thinking of standing against the prime minister, that has to be the starting point.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

Lib Dems -Shifting to the right

Alex Doherty — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:06:40 +0000

Of course Nick Clegg and Vince Cable insist that today’s vote by the Liberal Democrat conference in favour of tax and spending cuts doesn’t represent a move to the right.

They have to say that both to keep on side their own activists – who put up an impressive rearguard fight against the U-turn on the floor of the conference – and to maintain their two-way-bet appeal to traditional Labour and Tory voters north and south.

But a highly symbolic shift to the right is exactly what took place in Bournemouth this afternoon – and it also marked a historic reassertion of old-fashioned economic liberalism against the party’s more interventionist and social-democratic trends which looks likely to have a wider impact on British politics.

It’s not their proposals to cut taxes on the low-paid with cash clawed back from tax loopholes for the rich and capital gains and higher-rate pension contribution exemptions that are the main issue.

That’s a redistributive package which leaves the overall levels of tax and spend unchanged, even if dropping the 50% rate was a step backwards. And there’s no question that taxes need to be cut for lower-paid workers, whose living standards have been hit hardest by fuel, food and housing cost rises.

The crucial change is the new commitment to reduce the overall level of public spending and taxation, which actually goes further than David Cameron and George Osborne have so far on behalf of the Tories – and that on the cusp of recession, when what is needed is a boost to public spending, not a cut.

Out of £20bn-worth of proposed Lib Dem cutbacks to the “bloated public sector”, around £4bn is being earmarked by the leadership for extra tax cuts. Naturally, that’s hedged around with qualifications and is anyway entirely hypothetical, since the party’s chances of even making it into a coalition government are minimal.

But in terms of the political terms of trade, the decision seems bound to have an impact on the other main parties and give cover to Cameron’s honeyed crusade for a smaller state – along with those within Labour who want to head in the same direction. If it were really just about making the tax burden fairer, as Clegg’s rival for the leadership Chris Huhne argues, there would have been no argument.

Instead, there were plenty of rhetorical echoes of classic Thatcherism in the conference debate today – about problems not being solved by “throwing money at them” and “giving back” people their own cash.

A key part of the motivation for the Lib Dems’ 180-degree turn from its previous higher tax commitments is clearly a desperation to shore up its position against the newly resurgent Tories, who are the main challengers to most sitting Lib Dem MPs.

But for Clegg and his closest supporters, it’s also ideological. The Lib Dem leader, whose politics were formed in Margaret Thatcher’s heyday, is an economic liberal whose conclusion from a decade of New Labour’s corporate-driven economic management is that social democratic state intervention is dead.

The libertarian rightwingers from the Liberal Vision pressure group are delighted with Clegg’s approach, but want him to go further still. Its chairman, Mark Littlewood, told a fringe meeting today that “low tax and small government” must be the Liberal Democrats’ “key message”.

How all this is supposed to bolster an economy buckling under the impact of an international financial meltdown and the failed politics of deregulation, or promote the greater equality all Lib Dems claim to be in favour of, is anybody’s guess. The likeihood is that it won’t save the bacon of Lib Dem MPs either.

Afghanistan - a way out?

Alex Doherty — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:42:38 +0000

The war in Afghanistan is running out of control. The multiple attacks mounted by Taliban guerrillas on Nato occupation troops on Monday and Tuesday – in which 10 newly arrived French soldiers were killed near Kabul and a US base hit by suicide bombers – are the most daring since the US-led invasion of 2001. More than 100 people have been killed in fighting in the past three days, as the war against foreign occupation has spread from the south to the east and the area around the capital.

The assault on the French reinforcements follows the killing of nine US soldiers in a single attack last month, and the freeing of hundreds of Taliban prisoners from Kandahar’s main jail in a night-time raid in June. As Afghanistan experiences its own Iraq-style surge of US and other Nato forces, the death toll is rising inexorably. The number of occupation troops killed in Afghanistan overtook the Iraqi level in May. Attacks on US-led forces are up by 50% on last year, Nato air attacks have increased 40%, and more than 2,500 have already reportedly lost their lives in the conflict since January – getting on for half of them civilians.

In a damning indictment of the impact of Nato’s occupation on Afghanistan, aid agencies reported earlier this month that insecurity was spreading to previously stable areas and the killing of civilians by all sides rising sharply. The US air force seems to have developed a particular habit of attacking wedding parties – last month 47 civilians were killed in one strike – while British troops, who lost 13 soldiers in June alone, killed a woman and two children last weekend, which the high command naturally blamed on the Taliban.

This is the conflict western politicians have convinced themselves is the “good war”, in contrast to the shame of Iraq. Britain’s defence secretary, Des Browne, recently declared it “the noble cause of the 21st century”. Nicolas Sarkozy, who faces a similar level of domestic opposition to the Afghan imbroglio as in Britain, insists that France is fighting for “democracy and freedom”. Barack Obama calls it the “central front” in the war on terror and, like Gordon Brown, is committed to transferring troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to bolster the fight.

That will certainly jack up the killing and suffering still further. As Zbigniew Brzezinski – the former US national security adviser who masterminded the early stages of the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan – argues, putting more troops in is not the solution: “We run the risk that our military presence will gradually turn the Afghan population entirely against us.”

The original aims of the invasion, it will be recalled, were the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and the destruction of al-Qaida in the aftermath of 9/11. None of those aims has been achieved. Instead, the US and its friends brought back to power an alliance of brutal and corrupt warlords, gave them new identities as democrats with phoney elections, and drove the Taliban and al-Qaida leaderships over the border into Pakistan.

Far from reducing the threat of terrorism, this crucible of the war on terror has simply spread it around the region, bringing forth an increasingly potent campaign of resistance and giving a new lease of life to a revamped Taliban as a champion of Pashtun nationalism. And as mission creep has detached the Afghan war from its original declared target of al-Qaida – let alone the claims made about women’s rights, which have been going into grim reverse again in much of the country under Nato tutelage – it has morphed into the kind of war of “civilisation” evoked by Sarkozy and Browne, a certain recipe for conflict without end. No wonder British politicians have talked about digging in for decades.

Meanwhile, the long-term cost of the west’s shameless support for Pakistan’s military dictatorship as the linchpin of its war on terror, while forever preaching democracy, became clearer this week. General Musharraf’s welcome departure has left the country in political crisis and exposed the contradictions at the heart of the US relationship with the nuclear-armed state.

Even while the Pakistani military has relied on the US alliance to underpin its strategic position with India, its intelligence arm, the ISI, has maintained links with the Taliban as a long-term regional investment – at the same time as the Pakistan army has fought the local Taliban under American pressure. Now the threat of full-scale US incursions against Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan’s border areas risks profoundly destabilising one of the most combustible states in the world.

Afghanistan was supposed to be a demonstration of Nato’s expanded horizons in the post-Soviet new world order. Instead, as with Nato’s disastrous engagement with Georgia, it has underscored the dangers of giving the cold war alliance a new imperial brief. The growing conflict must also be added to the litany of US foreign policy failures that have been overseen by George Bush – from Iraq, Iran, Palestine and Lebanon to Latin America and now the Caucasus – and the evident necessity of a new direction.

That is likely to be a mountain to climb, even under an Obama presidency. The Afghan war certainly cannot be won, but the bitterly unpopular 2005 agreement for indefinite bases in the country left no doubt that the US is planning to stay for the long haul. Nato’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, made clear in a speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington earlier this year that western interests in Afghanistan went well beyond good governance to the strategic interest in having a permanent military presence in a state that borders central Asia, China, Iran and Pakistan.

The only way to end the war is the withdrawal of foreign troops as part of a political settlement negotiated with all the significant players in the country, including the Taliban, and guaranteed by the regional powers and neighbouring states. A large majority of Afghans say they back negotiations with the Taliban, even in western-conducted opinion polls. The Taliban themselves insist they will only talk once foreign troops have withdrawn. If that were the only obstacle, it could surely be choreographed as a parallel process. But given the scale of commitments made by the US and Nato, the fire of the Afghan war seems bound to spread further.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

A Classic Colonial Status

Ellie Keen — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:42:52 +0000

Whatever the Iraq war was about, we were assured, it definitely wasn’t about oil. Tony Blair called the idea a “conspiracy theory”. It was about democracy and dictatorship, weapons of mass destruction and human rights, anything but oil. Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, insisted the conflict had “literally nothing to do with oil”. When Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, wrote last autumn, “Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he was treated as if he were some senile old gent who’d embarrassingly lost the plot.

That argument is going to be a good deal harder to make from next week, when four of the western world’s largest oil corporations are due to sign contracts for the renewed exploitation of Iraq’s vast reserves. Initially, these are to be two-year deals to boost production in Iraq’s largest oilfields. But not only did the four energy giants – BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell and Total – write their own contracts with the Iraqi government, an unheard-of practice: they have also reportedly secured rights of first refusal on the far more lucrative 30-year production contracts expected once a new US-sponsored oil law is passed, allowing a wholesale western takeover. Big Oil is back with a vengeance.

It’s a similar story when it comes to the future of the US occupation itself. The last thing on anyone’s mind, we were told when the tanks rolled in, was permanent US control, let alone the recolonisation of Iraq. This was about the Iraqis finally getting a chance to run their own affairs in freedom. But five years on, George Bush and Dick Cheney are putting the screws on their Green Zone government to sign a secret deal for indefinite military occupation, which would effectively reduce Iraq to a long-term vassal state.

In April, I was leaked a draft copy of this “strategic framework agreement”, intended to replace the existing UN mandate at the end of the year. Details of the document, which came from a source at the heart of the Iraqi government, were published in the Guardian – including indefinite authorisation for the US to “conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security”. Since then, much more has emerged about the accompanying “status of forces agreement” the US administration wants to impose: including more than 50 US military bases, full control of Iraqi airspace, legal immunity for US military and private security firms, and the right to conduct armed operations throughout the country without consulting the Iraqi government.

This goes far beyond other such agreements the US has around the world and would shackle Iraq with a permanent puppet status. Not surprisingly, it has led to uproar in the country and opposition in the US, where congress will be denied a vote on the arrangement because the administration has chosen not to call it a treaty.

But it also evokes powerful memories in Iraq, which has been down this road before. After Britain invaded and occupied Iraq during the first world war, it imposed a strikingly similar treaty on its puppet government in 1930 in preparation for the country’s nominal independence. Just as in George Bush’s version, Britain awarded itself military bases, the right to conduct military operations, and legal immunity for its forces – though the proposed new US powers and restrictions on Iraqi sovereignty go even further than in the pre-war colonial treaty.

To add to this sense of imperial revival, the four oil companies now preparing to return in triumph to Iraq were the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company, which Britain gave a free hand in the 1920s to dine off Iraq’s wealth in a famously exploitative deal. The Anglo-Iraqi treaty and those bitterly unjust oil concessions dominated Iraqi politics for decades, feeding riots, uprisings and coups until the monarchy was overthrown, the tables turned on the oil companies and the British were finally sent packing by the radical nationalist General Qasim in 1958.

The 50th anniversary of the 1958 revolution appropriately falls next month. But Bush and Cheney seem increasingly determined to force through both their security agreement and the stalled law for the privatisation of Iraq’s oil industry before the US election. The signs are that, despite intense Iraqi opposition, a combination of strong-arm tactics, bribery and some watering down of the most extreme US demands may yet secure the full imperial package.

When Bush contradicted Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki earlier this month on the occupation deal and predicted: “If I were a betting man, we’ll reach an agreement with the Iraqis,” he sounded as if he knew what he was talking about – rather as he did when he explained a couple of weeks ago that he was “confident” Gordon Brown would not after all be cutting British troop numbers in Basra according to any fixed timetable. Meanwhile, Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, is suddenly sounding similarly confident about “progress” on the oil law because “the Americans are very keen”.

Perhaps they are all coming to believe the Bush administration propaganda that the surge has succeeded and Iraq is starting to “fix itself” in time for the US election, as the Economist’s cover story put it last week. Much is still being made of the decline in US casualties and resistance attacks to 2004 levels, even though the factors behind that drop are widely acknowledged to be contingent and precarious. Given the carnage of the past few days alone – including seven US soldiers killed since the weekend and a Baghdad car bomb that butchered 65 people – as well as this week’s withering US Government Accountability Office report on the administration’s claims of “progress” in Iraq, any other view would seem perverse.

What is certain is that, if Bush’s blueprint for indefinite foreign rule in Iraq and the takeover of its oil is forced down the throats of the Iraqi people, resistance and bloodshed will increase. Of course, it’s true that the US and Britain didn’t invade Iraq only for its oil. It was a projection of American power in the world’s most strategically sensitive region, with oil at its heart, which has brought catastrophe to Iraq and great danger to the Middle East and the wider world. That’s why the struggle to restore Iraq’s independence matters far beyond its borders – it is a global necessity.

The Story of Modern Corporate Britain

Tim Holmes — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:11:05 +0000

The government, the opposition and the bulk of the media are back in bed together again denouncing workers for striking in defence of their living standards. The hardline Blairite business secretary John Hutton declares today’s walkout by Shell tanker drivers over pay “cannot be justified“ (what strike ever could be in the eyes of Hutton and his friends?). His Tory shadow, Alan Duncan, accuses the Unite union that called the four-day stoppage of being “utterly irresponsible“. The Independent today raised the hoary old spectre of Britain being “held hostage by the labour unions“.

None of this will wash. In parallel with millions of other employees, the tanker drivers have seen their wages and conditions drastically squeezed since Shell contracted out fuel deliveries 15 years ago. In 1992, when they were directly employed by the oil giant, their basic pay was around £32,000 for a 37-hour week. Today, it is still about £32,000 for a 48-hour week – in other words, a drastic real pay cut – while pensions have eroded, facilities deteriorated, hyper-flexibility and insecurity intensified.

In other words, it’s the story of modern corporate Britain – and the context for a 13% pay claim that would still leave the drivers earning substantially less in real terms than in the early days of John Major’s premiership. Meanwhile, on the back of soaring oil prices, Shell is now making £1.3bn profit a month as its executives enthusiastically stuff their pockets on the back of it. Shell’s chief executive was paid £4.5m last year as average boardroom salaries increased 16%. The drivers, on the other hand, have been offered 7% by the two Shell contractors, Hoyer and Suckling Transport.

If New Labour’s leaders had taken steps to rein in corporate greed and used the tax system to counter ballooning inequality, politicians like Duncan and Hutton – who instead recently demanded that Labour celebrate “huge salaries” – might have more credibility. As it is, workers in both the private and public sectors are increasingly taking action themselves wherever they can.

The response of tanker drivers working for other companies, who have refused to cross Shell workers’ picket lines this morning, is a demonstration of the breadth of support for the strike throughout the workforce. It also means the impact of the action is likely to go well beyond Shell garages, which account for about 10% of all filling stations.

The two sides in the dispute are now probably only a couple of hundred thousand pounds apart, but behind the scenes both the government and the CBI have been putting pressure on Shell not to settle. After the success of the Grangemouth pensions strike in April and growing industrial action over real terms pay cuts in the public sector, they’re worried about the impact of another high profile strike victory on the rest of the workforce. A bit late for that, you might think.

Compare and contrast

Tim Holmes — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:58:56 +0000

Given the dog-like determination of governments and corporations to conceal what what they are really up to, unofficial leaks are an effective way of holding power to account. For journalists, they are a crucial lever for getting information to the the public about what is actually going on behind the veil of official secrecy. Over the years, I’ve had my share of anonymous brown envelopes in the post, stuffed with photocopied documents revealing what officialdom doesn’t want you to know.

So it’s good news that the foreign office official Derek Pasquill won’t be going to prison for sending secret government documents to the New Statesman political editor and ex-Observer journalist Martin Bright after the prosecution dropped official secrets charges against him at the Old Bailey on Wednesday.

But how come Pasquill walked free from court while another civil servant, David Keogh, and a researcher, Leo O’Connor, were jailed last May for breaching the Official Secrets Act by passing a secret government memo to the Labour MP Anthony Clarke?

The case against Pasquill collapsed after it emerged senior officials in the Foreign Office had privately argued that, far from damaging national security, the leaks had helped provoke a “constructive debate”. Potentially even trickier was the fact that the defence planned to call cabinet ministers such as David Miliband, Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears to make its case.

A couple of Pasquill’s leaks were about British involvement in US secret rendition – otherwise known as kidnapping – of terror suspects and the radicalising impact of British foreign policy on Britain’s Muslim community.

But most were about the government’s policy of engaging with non-violent Islamist movements, both in Britain and abroad – and its relations with the Muslim Council of Britain umbrella organisation. Pasquill thought this was “appeasement” – and so did Martin Bright, who went on to write a pamphlet for the Tory-linked thinktank Policy Exchange, “When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries“, much praised by neoconservatives on both sides of the Atlantic.

Partly as a result of the leaks and Bright’s efforts, government policy towards relations with Muslim organisations changed last year: the MCB was sidelined in favour of more pliable (and less representative) bodies such as the Sufi Muslim Council. Kelly, Blears and Miliband were among those backing the shift.

Keogh and O’Connor’s leak, on the other hand, was of a document detailing White House discussions between Tony Blair and George Bush in April 2004 during the first US assault on Falluja in Iraq, when it is known that British commanders had expressed concern about the use of white phosphorus by US troops. Speculation was published about the document’s contents – which Keogh is said to have described as “abhorrent” and “illegal” – including claims that the US president wanted to bomb the al-Jazeera TV station in Qatar. The courts have imposed tight reporting restrictions on the actual contents of the leaked material.

Could it be that the crucial difference between the two cases is that Pasquill’s leak suited a faction in the government, which used it to change policy – whereas Keogh and O’Connor’s leak was deeply embarrassing, not only to the British government, but also to the Bush administration, and so the two men were duly thrown to the wolves? Which would only go to show that it is political convenience, rather than any consistent application of the law, that determines when whistleblowers go to jail in Britain and when they go free.

Listen to Iraq's People

Tim Holmes — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:25:22 +0000

Who would have believed it? When George Bush arrives in Jerusalem today to salvage something from the wreckage of his attempt to impose a new pax Americana on the Middle East, there will at least be one ray of sunshine in an otherwise grim presidential vista. Iran may be resurgent, Hizbullah unbroken, the prospect of an Israel-Palestine peace settlement more remote than ever. But, as far as the US administration is concerned, things are at last coming good in Iraq. Its people are “reclaiming a normal society”, Bush has declared, a theme echoed enthusiastically across the US and wider western media. American casualties are down, economic growth is up, refugees are returning home, and people can once again walk the streets of Baghdad in safety, the story goes.

“We are out of the woods,” Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, the Iraqi government’s national security adviser, insisted last month. And however such claims are regarded in Iraq, they are certainly having an impact on the US presidential elections. The Iraq war is still top of American voters’ concerns, but it now jostles with the economy, immigration and healthcare and, while a clear majority want troops withdrawn, a record 40% believe the past year’s troop surge is making things better. The result is that the leading Democratic candidates are hedging their bets on troop withdrawal – Barack Obama would keep trainers and special forces, Hillary Clinton is only committed to pulling most troops out by 2013. Meanwhile, the glad tidings from Iraq means pro-war Republicans are once again in with a fighting chance.

The one part of this tale that is true is that the level of violence has dropped sharply in the past three months, both involving Iraqis, and US and British occupation troops. The monthly average of US soldiers killed between October and December was 33, compared with 110 in April to June, and the number of Iraqi civilians reported killed in December was 902, according to Iraq Body Count, compared with 2,731 in May. Any reduction in the suffering of Iraqis in particular, who have certainly endured hundreds of thousands of deaths as a result of the invasion of their country, must obviously be welcome. But if that dip in violence is misinterpreted as reflecting the beginning of a successful stabilisation and reduces the pressure to end the occupation, it will only prolong that agony into the future.

The fact is that 2007 was the deadliest year for US troops, with 901 killed; and the second bloodiest for Iraq as a whole, with at least 22,586 civilian deaths. The level of resistance attacks on US forces is still running at 2,000 a month, and the level of violence is back to roughly where it was in 2004-05 – seen as disastrous at the time. The reasons for that drop are mostly not disputed. The first is the creation of “awakening councils”, in effect US-backed Sunni militias, to police areas that have been at the heart of the resistance campaign.

Then there is the six-month ceasefire called by Moqtada al-Sadr’s anti-occupation Mahdi army, the most powerful Shia militia in the country. And lastly, there has been the impact of the surge in US troop numbers and the change of tactics orchestrated by its architect, General Petraeus, including the carving up of cities such as Baghdad into ethnically cleansed security zones behind Israeli-style walls, barriers and checkpoints. Iraqis also report that US troops have sharply reduced their patrols and operations in the last couple of months in Baghdad and elsewhere, with fewer clashes as a result.

But already, the upsurge in bombings, assassinations and attacks on US forces in the last couple of weeks – including the first killing of American troops by an Iraqi soldier – should be a warning to those now talking up the success of the surge. Here are four reasons why the lull in violence is highly unlikely to hold. First, the occupation-funded awakening councils, which are now getting on for 80,000-strong, are an unstable mishmash of groups with different agendas, created in the teeth of opposition from the supposedly sovereign Iraqi government, which have already been drawn into sectarian clashes with Shia militias. To solve one problem, the US has created another.

Second, the surge was only ever a temporary fix, and US troop numbers are already being reduced. Third, violence has been increasing in Shia areas and is likely to continue to do so, both as militias vie for power and as they come into conflict with US forces now tilting towards Sunni interests – or as a result of the clash between the US and Iran. But perhaps most important, there hasn’t been the slightest move to a political settlement for which the surge was meant to buy time. The government barely exists, parliament rarely manages a quorum, and there has been no change in the fundamental issue which drives armed resistance: the foreign occupation of the country against the will of its people.

The reality of the surge is this: the number of people displaced from their homes has quadrupled to over 2 million, and detention without trial has risen dramatically (the US alone holds 25,000 prisoners). Another 2 million have fled the country since the occupation began – and about 30,000 have returned, mostly because of lack of cash and visa restrictions. In oil-rich Iraq, electricity is now available in Baghdad for only eight hours a day, half the level before the invasion; unemployment is over 60%; food rations are being cut; corruption is rampant; and 43% of the population now lives on less than a dollar a day.

The surge has bought time for the US but achieved nothing to prepare the way for an end to the occupation. On the contrary, Bush recently signed an agreement with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for a long-term presence in the country. On Monday, a spokesman for what is regarded as the largest Sunni-based resistance group in Iraq, the Islamic Army, rejected any cooperation with the awakening councils and pledged to “resist the US forces as long as they are in Iraq”. Meanwhile, focus-group surveys carried out for Petraeus in five Iraqi cities last month found that all sectarian and ethnic groups believe the US invasion is the primary cause of violence in the country and regard the withdrawal of all occupying forces as the key to national reconciliation. Those who preach democracy for Iraq should listen to its people.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

Poisonous and Dangerous

Tim Holmes — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:20:39 +0000

This week’s forensic exposure by the BBC programme Newsnight of the apparent fabrication of evidence underpinning an inflammatory report into British Muslims by the Tory-linked think tank Policy Exchange has revealed the soft underbelly of what has become an increasingly poisonous and dangerous campaign.

Throughout this year, a steady stream of hostile and sensationalised stories about the Muslim community in both press and television – often based on research by apparently reliable think tanks – has helped feed anti-Muslim prejudice to the point where Britons were found this summer by a Harris opinion poll to be more suspicious of Muslims than Americans or citizens of any other major west European country.

Policy Exchange’s October report, The Hijacking of British Islam: How extremist literature is subverting Britain’s mosques – which claimed that a quarter of a representative sample of 100 mosques had been found to be selling “extremist material, some of it anti-semitic, misogynistic, separatist and homophobic” – was a typical case. The story was given top billing by several newspapers and broadcasters, including the Times (on its front page) and the BBC.

On Wednesday, Newsnight – which had been going to run Policy Exchange’s report as an exclusive story – revealed that it had investigated five out of 25 receipts for such literature provided by Policy Exchange’s researchers and found clear evidence that they had been faked, written by the same person and/or were not issued by the mosques in question. Policy Exchange insists it stands by its research, but so far refuses to say whether it believes the receipts are genuine.

It might be assumed from this that the other 20 receipts were found to be authentic and that Policy Exchange’s basic case was solid. It has now become clear that is not the case. Newsnight insiders make clear that they didn’t have the time or resources to check the other receipts – and in at least one of those that they didn’t look into, supposedly issued by Edinburgh central mosque, the mosque authorities have said that leaflets claimed to have been found there calling for the killing of the apostates were in fact dumped in the mosque grounds after the report was published.

Given the clear evidence of falsification at the heart of Policy Exchange’s work, it cannot be taken in any way as a piece of reliable research – and there must be serious doubt as to whether the 100 mosques supposedly surveyed were in fact a representative sample. Policy Exchange has form in this area: earlier this year, the methodology and reliability of another heavily-publicised Policy Exchange report on alleged British Muslim attitudes, Living Apart Together, came under heavyweight academic attack.

Of course, as Soumaya Ghannoushi remarks today in a blog for the 1990 Trust: “Islamic bookshops are a far cry from Waterstones or Borders. Some of the books on sale on djinns, angels, dreams, signs of the day of judgement and hellfire often make me laugh/cringe/both”. You can also see plenty of ugly material in other religious institutions in Britain, such as the homophobic pamphlets I recently found on display in a south London evangelical church.

But the constant regurgitation by the media of Muslim-baiting “research” by hard right think tanks (the Centre of Social Cohesion is another offender) not only misleads the public about one of the most sensitive issues of our time – it is also clearly driven by a neoconservative political agenda, which seeks to convince people that jihadist terror attacks in Britain and elsewhere are driven not by outrage at western violence in the Muslim world but by opposition to western freedom.

A quick glance at the profiles of those involved in Policy Exchange underlines the point. Its policy director, Dean Godson, who blustered at Jeremy Paxman on Wednesday, worked for the Reagan administration in the US as special assistant to the secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, was a signatory to the The Project for a New American Century and was special assistant to the jailed former Telegraph owner Conrad Black. Charles Moore, the former Daily Telegraph and Spectator editor who has made the case for public debate about whether the prophet Muhammad was a paedophile, is the Policy Exchange chairman. And who did he replace? Policy Exchange’s co-founder, Michael Gove – author of that rallying text for British neocons Celsius 7/7 – and now David Cameron’s education spokesman.

Only dogma and corporate capture can explain this

JamieSW — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:12:23 +0000

UnitedHealth is the largest healthcare corporation in the US, making billions of dollars a year out of cherry-picking patients and treatments, squeezing costs and restricting benefits to 70 million Americans forced to get by in the developed world’s only fully privatised health system. Its chief executive, Bush donor William McGuire, paid $125m in 2004, had to step down last year in a share-option scandal.

Last month, UnitedHealth agreed with insurance regulators in 36 states to pay out $20m in fines for failures in processing claims and responding to patient complaints. That follows a string of other fines over delayed payments, Medicare fraud and “cheating patients out of money” in New York State.

Other major US health corporations, such as Aetna and Humana, have also faced repeated fines for shortchanging doctors, using unlicensed agents, payment delays, failures to give information to claimants or fraud. In one case of a cancer patient who was refused payment for a failed experimental treatment its own doctors recommended, Aetna was ordered to hand over $120m damages after it was found by a California jury to have committed “malice, oppression and fraud”.

All three companies figure prominently in Michael Moore’s new film Sicko, a compelling indictment of the US health system – under which 18,000 Americans die a year because they are uninsured. Hardly the ideal players, you might think, to take a central role in the reform of the National Health Service.

But it is precisely these three corporations, along with 11 other private firms including KPMG, McKinsey and Bupa, that the government this month announced have been lined up to advise on or even take over the commissioning of the bulk of NHS services. Primary care trusts, which control most of the NHS’s £90bn budget, will now be encouraged to buy in advice from the 14 selected companies on health needs, contracts and local provision. Potentially, these corporations could take over the management of the heart of the NHS.

For the first couple of months after Gordon Brown became prime minister, it had seemed that the new administration was pulling back from the privatising excesses of the Blair years. One of Alan Johnson’s first moves as the new health secretary was to announce that there would, after all, be no “third wave” of controversial private surgery and diagnostic units, known euphemistically as independent sector treatment centres.

But the award of a framework primary care contract to the 14 privateers – only mildly watered down from an earlier incarnation – and Johnson’s backing for a key private-sector role in 150 new health centres and 100 new GP practices, have set the seal on the Brown government’s commitment to the continuing market-driven reconstruction of Labour’s greatest social achievement.

Under the banner of choice and reform, New Labour has struggled to create an artificial market in health and turn an integrated system of universal provision into a tax-funded insurance system tailored to the private sector. The move to outsource service commissioning will now pave the way for private companies to decide the range of services provided and use their access to information to pick the most profitable services to bid for in other areas. Allyson Pollock, head of Edinburgh University’s international health policy centre, calls it the “last piece in a jigsaw” that opens the door to a US-style health maintenance organisation model – dominated by corporations like UnitedHealth.

Ministers have always insisted that using private companies is all about improving services and value for money. But the evidence is that far from making better use of the extra cash pumped into the health service, privatisation has been expensive, inefficient, destabilising, unaccountable and led to closures, cuts and job losses.

The costly and underfunded private finance initiative, which has landed the NHS with a total bill of £50bn for new hospital buildings, is already milking £700m a year from NHS trusts and fuelling the financial crisis across the service. The private treatment centres used for elective surgery are not, as the Commons health select committee found, more efficient than NHS units, nor have they mostly increased capacity; they are in fact more expensive, have heavily underperformed their contracts and often ended up taking over NHS staff.

Add to that the huge transaction costs of administering the new market system and it’s hardly surprising Labour’s own conference last year declared that the “major cause” of the financial crisis in the NHS was the “move to a competitive, market-based system” and “the continued use of PFI”. Meanwhile, it’s become clear that bargain-basement contract cleaning has been a key factor in the rise of hospital infections. In Wales, where cleaning is now carried out in-house rather than by contractors, MRSA infection is less than half the English rate.

Given the evidence on cost and inefficiency, and its unpopularity among medical staff and voters, the government’s determination to press on with privatisation and marketisation might seem baffling. Why insist on heading off in the direction of a health system with the highest per capita cost and inequalities while courting its main beneficiaries? The only sensible explanation has to be that what New Labour derided as the influence of producer interests has been replaced by corporate capture: a mixture of market dogma, business lobbying and a revolving door syndrome that saw Simon Stevens, former adviser to Tony Blair and a succession of New Labour health secretaries, move effortlessly on to become European president of UnitedHealth.

The risk is now that with a continuing patchwork privatisation and cash squeeze, public support for the principles of the NHS could erode, opening the way to charges, top-up fees and private insurance. Both the Tories and Liberal Democrats either accept private provision or are gagging for more of it, so not much help can be expected there. But Wales and Scotland have mostly resisted the worst of the health service’s English disease – and support for the kind of socialised health system Michael Moore lauds in Sicko is deeply rooted in Britain. What’s needed now is to turn that sentiment into pressure for a real change of direction.

Stop The (Next) War

Tim Holmes — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:37:23 +0000

It seems almost incredible after the catastrophe of the Iraq war, but the signs are growing that the Bush administration wants to do it all over again – this time to Iran. Just as in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, the Washington air is thick with unsubstantiated claims about weapons of mass destruction; demonisation of the country’s president has reached bizarre proportions; intelligence leaks about links with al-Qaida and attacks on US and British targets are now routine; demands for war from the administration’s neoconservative outriders are becoming increasingly strident; the pronouncements of George Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, are turning ever more belligerent – and administration sources claim that the British government is privately ready to play ball.

You might imagine after invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq at such huge human and strategic cost, an attack on another Muslim country would be the last thing on the US president’s mind. But the drumbeat of war has been unmistakable since the summer, when Bush declared he had “authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities”, and the administration let it be known that it was preparing to brand Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a “terrorist organisation”.

Last month Bernard Kouchner, the hawkish new French foreign minister, insisted that “we must expect the worst” and “the worst is war” – while Mohamed ElBaradei, the UN’s chief weapons inspector in charge of overseeing Iran’s nuclear programme, warned against the “neo-crazies” pushing for an attack after 700,000 had died in Iraq on “suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons”. Meanwhile, Israel’s recent air raid on Iran’s ally Syria has been widely interpreted as, at least in part, a power play aimed at Tehran.

This week John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN, used the Tory conference to call for an attack on Iran, as leaks to the US press about war preparations continued. Newsweek reported that Cheney had been discussing the possibility of encouraging Israel to launch missile strikes at an Iranian nuclear site in order to provoke Iran into “lashing out”, and open the way to a wider US assault. And in the New Yorker magazine, the investigative writer Seymour Hersh reported that in a videoconference this summer Bush told the US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, that he was thinking of attacking targets in Iran, and the British “were on board”.

A Downing Street spokesman said yesterday that the “prime minister and president have never had a discussion about an attack on Iran in Iran” and that the government was pursuing a diplomatic solution. “Of course, it’s the job of a lot of people to see that contingency planning is done,” he added, but denied that any go-ahead had been given. The echoes of similar denials in the runup to the Iraq war, however, cannot be missed. Nor should the reference to an attack on Iran “in Iran”. Both the US and British military now regard themselves as already involved in a proxy war with Iran in Iraq, as General Petraeus recently told the US congress.

What is becoming clearer is that the likely pretext for aggression against Iran has shifted from the possibility that Tehran might develop nuclear weapons to its role in supporting and allegedly arming the resistance in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration is increasingly convinced that it will be far easier to convince the American public of the case for war on Iran if it’s seen as being about the protection of US troops rather than nuclear scaremongering from the people who brought you Saddam Hussein’s WMD. So the focus of the military plans has changed accordingly: from a wide-ranging bombing assault on Iran’s known and suspected nuclear sites to “surgical” strikes on the Revolutionary Guards, who the US claims are backing armed attacks on its occupation forces.

In reality, the growing confrontation between Washington and Iran has less to do with nuclear weapons or Iraqi resistance and more with the fact that Iran has emerged as the main strategic beneficiary of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran and its allies now offer the only effective challenge to US domination of the Middle East and its resources. It’s hardly surprising that the US is alarmed by the increased influence of an avowedly anti-imperialist state sitting astride a sea of oil, now making common cause with other radical, independent regimes in Latin America. But it is of course the direct result of Bush’s own policies, which have also provided an object demonstration of the advantages of possessing nuclear weapons – even if there is as yet no evidence that Iran actually intends to acquire them.

Of the three states Bush originally damned as the axis of evil, one – Iraq – had no nuclear weapons and was duly destroyed. The second, North Korea, managed to acquire some nuclear capability and is this week reaping the benefits in aid and negotiation. The third is Iran, a country surrounded by US troops and caught between two nuclear-armed US allies: Pakistan and Israel. And despite the populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ugly remarks about the Holocaust, it is the nuclear states America and Israel that now threaten and have the capacity to attack Iran, not the other way round.

What should not be in doubt is that the consequences of an attack on Iran would be devastating, both in the region and beyond. Iran has the reach to deliver an unconventional armed response in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf – as well as on the streets of London. The economic impact could be even greater, given Iran’s grip on the 20% of global oil supplies that are shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. It would also certainly set back the cause of progressive change in Iran.

Iranian leaders have dismissed the threat of attack as “psychological warfare”, and no doubt the US would prefer to bring Iran to heel through political upheaval in Tehran rather than by force. But current destabilisation efforts seem unlikely to succeed, and so, short of a sudden US embrace of genuine negotiation, the chances of war before Bush leaves office look high. The likelihood of a Brown government directly participating in an attack must be small after the debacle of Iraq. But the possibility that logistical or political support might be offered is more serious. The need to step up public pressure to make sure that does not happen could not be clearer.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

The Beginnings of a Racist Witch Hunt?

Tim Holmes — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:50:11 +0000

Britons are now more suspicious of Muslims than are Americans or citizens of any other major western European country, including France. According to an international Harris poll last month, nearly 30% of British people believe it’s impossible to be both a Muslim and a Briton (compared with 14% who think you can’t be French and a Muslim); 38% think the presence of Muslims in the country is a threat to national security (compared with 21% in the US); and 46% believe that Muslims have too much political power in Britain, far above the level of any other surveyed country. You might think that these findings, reported in the Financial Times, would have been the occasion for some soul-searching about where British society is going, the state of community relations, and a new self-restraint in the way Muslim stories are covered in the media.

Not a bit of it. The fact that a large minority of Britons have some of the most Islamophobic attitudes in the western world has passed without comment. Instead, we have since been treated to a renewed barrage of lurid and hostile stories about Muslims which can only have further inflamed anti-Muslim opinion and the community’s own sense of being under permanent siege. This isn’t just a problem of hate-filled tabloid rants, such as the Express’s denunciation of Muslims’ “alien and threatening outfits”, or Richard Littlejohn’s Muslim-baiting in the Mail. For the past three weeks, there has been a stream of hostile coverage in the heavyweight press and on TV current affairs programmes.

This week it is was an hour-long Channel 4 Dispatches about attacks on Muslim converts to Christianity; last week it was the BBC Newsnight programme’s 20-minute interview with the latest defector from the non-violent Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir; the week before that it was a Newsnight special on radical Islamist books in east London libraries, complete with sinister music and a round-table debate. The same week there was a Times front-page splash about the “hardline takeover of British mosques”, focused on the deeply conservative Deobandi religious movement which has long had a strong presence among British Muslims of Pakistani origin. For both Newsnight programmes, it was apparently felt that Patrick Mercer – the Tory MP sacked by David Cameron for making racially inflammatory remarks and appointed a security adviser by Gordon Brown – was the ideal person to comment on Muslim issues. Meanwhile, the novelist Martin Amis denounced “liberal relativist appeasers” of a “racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitorial, imperialist and genocidal” doctrine.

The problem isn’t necessarily with the stories themselves. There are obviously legitimate issues to report about jihadist or anti-Jewish strains within the Deobandi school, the agenda of a group like Hizb ut-Tahrir that the government originally wanted to ban, or intimidation of converts to any religion. But in a climate of anti-Muslim prejudice, their disproportionate and sensationalist treatment can only feed ethnic tensions (“Christians in Britain are under attack”, this week’s Dispatches programme began, even if the numbers were tiny). Nor is the record of these kinds of reports impressive – an earlier Dispatches programme on the preaching of hate in British mosques was recently found by the police and Crown Prosecution Service to have “completely distorted” what speakers had said.

The level of Islamophobia highlighted by the Harris poll is obviously partly a response to the July 2005 bombings and later failed terror attacks. But given the fact that most British people have little contact with Muslims, some are bound to be swayed by the media campaigns of the past couple of years – which have not only focused on jihadist groups but also the niqab and multiculturalism. What has given the anti-Muslim onslaught particular force is that many secular liberals have convinced themselves that since Islam is an ideology rather than an ethnicity – and because they see themselves as defending liberal values – they are on the righteous side of racism. In reality, of course, religion isn’t only about beliefs, it’s also about culture and identity and, as the British National party has worked out, Islam has become a toxic racial proxy.

The relentless public invective against Muslims and Islamism is also clearly fuelled by a political agenda, which seeks to demonstrate that jihadist violence is driven, as Tony Blair and the US neoconservatives always insisted, by a socially disconnected ideology rather than decades of western invasion, occupation and support for dictatorships across the Muslim world. That is certainly the view of Richard Watson, the reporter behind Newsnight’s Muslim coverage, who recently wrote that extreme Islamism and terror are the product of a “seductive cult”, not western foreign policy, and demanded that British Muslims find new leaders. And the co-author of the thinktank report which formed the basis of Newsnight’s programme on Islamist books in Tower Hamlets libraries is the self-proclaimed neocon Douglas Murray.

Gordon Brown is said to want to mimic the clandestine methods used by the CIA against communism during the cold war in the cultural field to win Muslim hearts and minds. If the government’s sponsorship of the pliant Sufi Muslim Council is any indication of the way he wants to go, that won’t work – nor will any approach that tries to load responsibility for jihadist violence on to the Muslim community while refusing to take responsibility for the government’s own role in fanning the flames by supporting aggression and occupation in the Muslim world.

None of this is an argument for refraining from criticising Muslims or their organisations – but it does highlight the need for context and sensitivity in a climate in which Muslims are under a crude assault that would simply not be accepted if targeted on any other community. The relentless media onslaught in Britain on Muslims, their culture and institutions risks turning into a racist witch-hunt. On the ground, it translates into violent attacks – and Crown Prosecution Service figures show that 82% of convictions for identified religiously aggravated offences last year involved attacks on Muslims. Those attacks reportedly spike not only after terrorist incidents but also in response to media feeding frenzies. Some pro-war liberals like to argue that Islamophobia doesn’t exist – try telling that to those at the sharp end.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

"Good War" - or Bloody Failure?

Tim Holmes — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:35:59 +0000

Enthusiasts for the catastrophe that is the Iraq war may be hard to come by these days, but Afghanistan is another matter. The invasion and occupation that opened George Bush’s war on terror are still championed by powerful voices in the occupying states as – in the words of the New York Times this week – “the good war” that can still be won. While speculation intensifies about British withdrawal from Basra, there’s no such talk about a retreat from Kabul or Kandahar. On the contrary, the plan is to increase British troop numbers from the current 7,000, and ministers, commanders and officials have been hammering home the message all summer that Britain is in Afghanistan, as the foreign secretary, David Miliband, insisted, for the long haul.

“We should be thinking in terms of decades,” the British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, declared; Brigadier John Lorimer, British commander in Helmand province, thought the military occupation might last more than Northern Ireland’s 38 years; and the defence secretary, Des Browne, last week confirmed that the government had made a “long-term commitment” to stay in Afghanistan to prevent it reverting to a terrorist training ground. Even allowing for the Brown government’s need for political cover if it is indeed to run down its forces in Iraq, that all amounts to a pretty clear policy of indefinite occupation – one on which it has not thought necessary to consult the British people, let alone the Afghans.

All this follows the escalation of Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan last year, when Browne’s predecessor, John Reid, sent thousands of extra troops to the south to “help reconstruction”, hoping they would be a able to leave “without firing a single shot”. Two million rounds of ammunition later, what was supposed to be a peacekeeping mission is now an all-out war against a resurgent Taliban that has become an umbrella for Pashtun nationalists, jihadists and all those determined to fight foreign occupation. British casualties have risen sharply – seven have been killed in the past month – along with those of other western forces, while the public at home is increasingly fed a media diet of Kiplingesque deeds of derring-do by “our boys” on the front line. And in a telling echo of the claims that have punctuated each phase of the Iraq disaster, Browne last week said he detected a “turning point” in the British campaign to “bring stability” to Afghanistan.

For Afghans, six years after they were supposed to have been liberated, life is getting worse. As the International Committee of the Red Cross reported two months ago, the humanitarian situation is deteriorating and civilians are suffering “horribly” from growing insecurity and violence in an increasingly dirty war. The fighting in the south has driven 80,000 from their homes, and the civilian casualty rate has doubled over the past year: more than 200 were killed by US and other Nato troops in June alone – far more than are estimated to have been killed in Taliban attacks. The savagery of indiscriminate US aerial bombardments provoked violent demonstrations and is widely seen as having increased support for the Taliban’s armed campaign.

Given the manifest failure of the occupation to bring either peace or development to Afghanistan, it’s not immediately obvious why it’s still considered by some to be a good war – though a majority of Britons, Canadians, Italians and Germans, it should be said, want their troops withdrawn. Partly it must be the fact that the original invasion was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks – which turned out to have been at least partly coordinated from al-Qaida’s Afghan camps – and had some measure of UN acquiescence (even if the relevant resolutions didn’t actually mention Afghanistan). Added to that is the oppressive and obscurantist record of the Taliban regime and the elite fear that military failure will fatally undermine the projection of western power in future.

But by intervening on one side of an ethnically charged civil war to overthrow the Taliban – rather than, say, targeting special forces against al-Qaida – the US and its allies ended up exchanging warlords for theocrats and turning most of the country into a collection of lawless and brutal fiefdoms. Instead of al-Qaida terror networks being rooted out, they were allowed to migrate to the borderlands, Pakistan and Iraq; Osama bin Laden, whose capture was the first aim of the war, escaped; and the limited expansion of women’s and girls’ freedoms in Kabul and a few other urban areas was offset by an eruption of rape and violence against women. Western politicians like to describe the Afghan government as democratically elected, when in fact the elections were marked by large-scale fraud and intimidation in polls that gave regional warlords pride of place, while political parties were not allowed to take part. In real life, occupied Afghanistan is, as the UN warned last year, a failed state, which now produces 90% of the world’s opium and where corruption and insecurity have sunk reconstruction.

Of course there was a time, in the 1970s and 1980s, when girls were encouraged to go to school and university in Afghanistan, women accounted for almost half the country’s teachers and civil servants and the government redistributed land to the rural poor. But the US spent billions of dollars to destroy it in a cold war coup de grace and laid the foundations for the jihadist Frankenstein of al-Qaida in the process. Gordon Brown now claims Afghanistan is “the frontline against terrorism”. In reality, the key to the al-Qaida threat lies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and the dictatorial regimes the west sponsors there, while its support is fuelled by the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories.

Britain is now fighting its fourth war in Afghanistan in 170 years, and might have learned by now that you cannot impose a government from outside against a people’s will. Earlier this summer the Afghan senate called for a date to be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops and negotiations with the Taliban, as did the Pakistani foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, this month. There will be no peace or stability in Afghanistan while foreign troops remain, and a wider settlement will surely have to include the Taliban and regional powers such as Iran and Pakistan. Unfortunately, politics dictates that a great deal more blood is likely to be shed on both sides before that comes to be accepted.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

Britain and Israel

Alex Doherty — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 13:31:25 +0000

Jack Straw has brought Britain’s standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds to its lowest point for half a century. By withdrawing British monitors from a Palestinian jail in Jericho on Tuesday, the government as good as handed over to Israel the prisoners it had made an international agreement to protect. In doing so, it colluded with its American co-sponsor and – at the very least tacitly – with the Israeli occupation regime in an armed attack on the prison and the seizure of an elected political leader regarded by many Palestinians as a national hero.

As the ruins of the British Council building in Gaza smoulder, the foreign secretary can reflect on his contribution this week to peace in the Middle East: the humiliation of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, the undermining of efforts to form a viable Palestinian administration and the confirmation in Arab and Muslim eyes that Britain cannot plausibly be regarded as an honest broker in the region. No wonder the prime minister struggled to defend the blunder in parliament yesterday.
As the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan turn ever bloodier and more disastrous, you might think that the last thing Britain would want to be responsible for was more degrading TV footage of Arab men being paraded in their underpants by another occupying army. But then this is the foreign secretary who used a recent visit to Beirut to praise Ariel Sharon’s “courage and statesmanship” and “work towards a long-term peace settlement” – in the very city where he oversaw the massacre of 2,000 Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Phalangists in 1982. It’s perhaps no wonder that British complicity with Israel’s assault on Jericho was yesterday being compared in the Arab media to the duplicitous US deal which led to that slaughter. As anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will know, while Britons may not be familiar with the history of their country’s involvement in the region, it is not forgotten by those who suffered at its hands: from the 1917 Balfour declaration, which promised Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people, to the collusion with France and Israel over the 1956 invasion of Egypt.

Both Straw and Tony Blair have claimed that a security threat to the British (and US) monitors justified the decision to withdraw them from Jericho. But no credible evidence of any such threat has been offered – and the complaint that the prisoners were allowed to use mobile phones cannot be treated as a serious reason to end the four-year-old agreement. The five prisoners captured as a result – including Ahmad Sa’adat, leader of the leftwing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – are accused by Israel of responsibility for the killing of the racist cabinet minister Rehavam Ze’evi in 2001, carried out in retaliation for the assassination of Sa’adat’s predecessor, Abu Ali Mustafa. The deal to hold them in a Palestinian jail under British-US supervision later ended the siege of Yasser Arafat’s compound.

But judging by last week’s joint British-US letter to the Palestinian president, it was the pledge by the newly elected Hamas to release these prisoners, rather than concerns about security, that lay behind the decision to withdraw the monitors. If they had been released, it would have been the Palestinian Authority, not Britain, that broke the agreement. As it was, in the knowledge that Israel was ready to seize the men, the British-US pullout makes far more sense as a calculated warning to Hamas and a favour to the acting Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

In Israel the Jericho operation is of course highly popular and regarded as a boost for Olmert’s electoral credibility as a tough successor to Sharon. But that only helps explain why waiting for Israeli politics to deliver a viable peace deal is a recipe for failure – and why the western powers that helped create this conflict will also have to help resolve it. Instead they have connived in the continued illegal occupation, colonisation and carve-up of the West Bank, the building of the land-grabbing wall and the throttling of Gaza – all the while paying lip service to a future Palestinian state whose viability looks less plausible daily. The landslide for Hamas in the Palestinian elections in January was largely a response to this unending misery and the breakdown of the Oslo arrangements of the 1990s.

Britain’s strategic support for Israel while claiming to be even-handed in the Middle East conflict is nothing new: recent revelations of the UK’s secret supply of nuclear materials to Israel in the 50s and 60s are a reminder of that. But there are also clear signs that the Blair government has recently tilted even further towards Israel in what appears to be a growing Americanisation of British policy in the region. Palestinians who deal regularly with British officials report an unmistakable shift in attitudes towards the conflict, now increasingly seen through the US prism of the war on terror, Iran and Iraq.

This shift may help to explain Tuesday’s events; it certainly represents an unjustifiable abandonment of international responsibilities to protect an occupied people and help achieve their human and national rights, denied for nearly 60 years. But it is also a highly dangerous role to adopt in the most inflammatory conflict on the planet – and one which puts at risk the security of people in Britain, as well as the Middle East.

Phoney Centre

Alex Doherty — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 09:47:57 +0000

No one can doubt that we are in the endgame of the Blair era. Even if the sense of crisis that gripped Downing Street in the run-up to Christmas – when John Prescott lashed out at the government’s plans for schools, and Gordon Brown signalled his dissatisfaction with Blair’s European rebate deal – has passed, the prime minister’s authority is manifestly draining away. He has already been defeated by his own MPs on the flagship terror bill; he has lost control of Labour’s national executive, and was unable even to get his candidate elected as general secretary; and he now faces a string of backbench revolts, culminating in the prospect of defeat on education reform, without a climbdown on selection and local authority powers.

Assuming he swallows that indignity, the next crunch is likely to come with the May local elections. They are almost certain to be a gruesome experience for Labour, especially in London, for which the prime minister will find it difficult to pass the buck. And while it’s true that Blair relishes nothing so much as the war without end on his own party, an increasingly public cabinet struggle over the timing of his departure can only undermine the government’s electoral prospects as the media darling David Cameron drives all before him.
But instead of opening up an unrepresentative political system after years of New Labour control freakery and spin, the prime minister’s loss of grip seems to be closing it off still further. The forces that dominate British politics have responded to Blair’s enfeeblement by rushing to occupy that narrow strip of territory now taken to be the centre ground. In the case of the Tories, Cameron has presented himself as Blair’s natural successor, even as marginally to his left – appearing to challenge business and police privileges, prioritise global poverty and the environment and, in the ultimate pantomime of spin, redistribution and social justice. And whoever wins the Liberal Democrats’ leadership election, there is no question that the young turks, with their little Orange Books and neoliberal nostrums, are the rising power in the party.

Gordon Brown has been heading in exactly the same direction. Presumably convinced he has party votes for the leadership succession in the bag, Brown has turned to the right. Declaring himself a Blairite at last, his attempts to woo Rupert Murdoch, the Daily Mail and the corporate world have become ever more shameless: boasting of his role in privatising air traffic control, the exorbitant private finance initiative and the disastrous partial sell-off of the London tube, all the while wrapping himself in an imperial union jack and banging the drum for a US labour market model that has seen workers’ hours rise by nearly 40% over the past two decades.

Blair’s response to the Cameron challenge has been to insist that only by sticking with the centre ground – and himself as long as possible – can the new Tory threat be seen off. Meanwhile, in case anyone else had any other ideas, he is seeking to clamp down on party pressure points (such as union voting rights) outside the charmed power circle of media and business.

There are two very obvious flaws in this cult of the centre presided over by the political elite. If only mathematically, it is clearly essential for any political party or alliance that wants to win office to straddle the centre ground (though in a first-past-the-post system, its importance will depend on the balance between the other main parties). But that in no way excludes the necessity of representing the majority of voters who are outside that political space.

For all New Labour’s claims about its big-tent politics, the party has been less of a genuine political coalition under Blair than at any other time in its history. The result is a crisis in political representation that has fuelled a wider alienation from mainstream politics. And the price for Labour was spelled out at last year’s general election, with well over a million votes lost to the apparently left-leaning Liberal Democrats and smaller parties, and a low turnout in its traditional areas. There is no need for Labour to evacuate the centre in order to give a stronger voice to working-class and more radical voters – but, given the Cameron novelty factor, among others, it is only through such an alliance that the party is now likely to be re-elected.

The other flaw at the heart of the current centrist mania is its cockeyed location of the centre ground. The assumption that the broad Blair-Cameron consensus – social liberalism combined with free-market economics, privatisation, low taxes on the rich, and a welfare safety net – reflects the centre of gravity of public opinion is completely unfounded. On the contrary, opinion polls have long recorded large majorities against privatisation and the commercialisation of schools and hospitals, support for stronger workplace rights and higher taxes on the wealthy – as well as opposition to the war in Iraq and kowtowing to Washington, all positions usually regarded as well to the left of centre in official politics. What is described as the centre ground in fact reflects the dominant views of the political, media and corporate establishment – hence the weight it is given across the political system.

But for Labour MPs, trade unions and all those who want to maximise the chances of a more progressive government after Blair has gone, the real centre ground of British politics is a pretty useful starting point. Key parts of an alternative agenda to address public concerns ignored by the Blair administration are in fact already Labour policy. In the last couple of years, Labour’s previously docile conference has voted to halt the privatisation and commercialisation of the NHS, keep the Post Office in the public sector, bring rail back into public ownership, restore the pensionsearnings link, and end the ban on Gate Gourmet-style workplace solidarity.

Blair and his fellow ministers have, of course, rejected all this. But, along with withdrawal from Iraq, they are all policies that command public support and could be used to help shape the terms of a post-Blair leadership contest. Now that Labour MPs have started to take things into their own hands – half the English and Welsh backbenchers have already signed up to the alternative education white paper – there is a real basis to challenge New Labour control of the government’s direction. But if Blair’s legacy is not to be a Cameron administration, that challenge will have to go much further.

New Terror Laws

Alex Doherty — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 10:56:48 +0000

As negotiating tactics go, it’s a pretty transparent one – but it still seems to work every time in British politics. The government has a policy it knows will arouse a blizzard of controversy. So it starts out with a maximalist, even outlandish, version. When that is predictably greeted with outrage, it retreats crab-like to its core position – and the final outcome is then accepted with relief that the government has compromised. But the net effect is to drive through measures that might have been thrown out without the softening-up process.

So it has been with Tony Blair’s anti-terror plans, first unveiled in August in the wake of the London bombings. In their original back-of-the-envelope formulation, they included the truly Ruritanian wheeze of codifying a list of violent historical events that Britons could be sent to prison for “glorifying, exalting or celebrating”. Last week, after two months of ridicule, the home secretary, Charles Clarke, let it be known that the most absurd parts of this censorship scheme had been dropped. Then on Tuesday, he signalled that the government might be prepared to shift on its proposal to jail terror suspects without charge for up to three months.

The apparent climbdown has, as expected, been embraced by key opponents. But, as publication of the terrorism bill yesterday confirmed, the most dangerous and inflammatory elements in Blair’s August package are still there: not only the effective internment power, but deportation to countries that routinely torture; banning of non-violent political parties; state control of mosques and the outlawing of any statement that might be seen as inciting or glorifying terrorist acts (including in history).

The main opposition parties are now focused on detention without charge. The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, wrote on these pages this week that the three-month internment power was now the “one major sticking point” – and changes to the glorification clause, he thought, meant that it was “a lot better” and that non-violent organisations such as the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir could not be banned.

In fact, under the terms of the bill, anyone who voices support for armed resistance to any state or occupation, however repressive or illegitimate, will be committing a criminal offence carrying a seven-year prison sentence – so long as members of the public might reasonably regard it as direct or indirect encouragement. Terrorism is not defined in the bill as, say, indiscriminate attacks on civilians, let alone an assault on civilian targets by states – but as any politically motivated violence against people, property or electronic systems anywhere in the world. This is not only an assault on freedom of speech and debate about the most contentious subject in global politics. It also makes a criminal offence out of a belief shared by almost every society, religion or philosophy throughout history: namely, that people have the right to take up arms against tyranny and foreign occupation. Clarke made clear on Tuesday that this was exactly his intention. He could not, he said, think of any situation in the world where “violence would be justified to bring about change”.

Clearly, that did not apply to the invasion of Iraq or the bomb attacks on street markets carried out in Baghdad by US and British-backed opposition groups before 2003. But, as the mayor of London pointed out yesterday, support for Nelson Mandela, the wartime resistance and any number of anti-colonial liberation movements would all have been crimes under this bill. In practice, of course, the law is intended to be used selectively: it is aimed not just at those who praise bomb attacks on the London tube, but at Muslims and others who believe that Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans and others have a right to resist occupation.

If there were any doubt about that, Blair’s stated intention to use this bill to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir – reaffirmed this week by the Home Office – should dispel it. There is little love lost among many Muslims – let alone non-Muslims – for Hizb ut-Tahrir, which campaigns for a restored caliphate (or unified Islamic political authority) throughout the Muslim world and against participation in elections. Although it denies being anti-Jewish, the organisation had on its website until recently a statement which by any reckoning crossed the line from anti-Zionism into anti-semitism. But there is also no evidence at all that it is involved in terrorism – it condemned both the London bombings and the 9/11 attacks. It does not, however, condemn armed resistance in Iraq and Palestine, which is how the government plans to catch it. Along with the criminalisation of support for resistance movements, such a ban on a non-violent political party would be unprecedented in modern British history. When set against the toleration of the routinely violent and relentlessly racist British National party, it is scarcely surprising that Muslim opinion is overwhelmingly hostile to all the main planks of the legislation.

The home secretary’s remarks in Washington last week that in dealing with global Islamism “there can be no negotiation about the recreation of the caliphate … no negotiation about the imposition of sharia law” (when support for the latter in particular, variously interpreted, is widespread in the Muslim world) heightens the perception that the war on terror is also a war on Islam. Blair’s August announcement was designed to show the government was taking tough action to protect the country from any repetition of the London bombings – and offset the majority view that he had put his own people in danger by invading Iraq. But if the terrorism bill in its current form becomes law, the likelihood is that instead of reducing the terror threat, it will increase it.

Any operational benefit to the police is bound to be more than offset by the further alienation of exactly those sections of the Muslim community whose cooperation is needed to prevent more atrocities. If peaceful organisations are banned, Muslims are routinely locked up without charge and support for mainstream Muslim causes is criminalised, some will certainly be intimidated and keep their heads down. But others will conclude that participation in politics is pointless, that the tolerance and liberal democracy proclaimed by the political establishment is a fraud – and go underground. It is in everybody’s interests that parliament resists a panic measure which threatens us all.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

The Iraq Link

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 10:19:24 +0000

In the grim days since last week’s bombing of London, the bulk of Britain’s political class and media has distinguished itself by a wilful and dangerous refusal to face up to reality. Just as it was branded unpatriotic in the US after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington to talk about the link with American policy in the Middle East, so those who have raised the evident connection between the London atrocities and Britain’s role in Iraq and Afghanistan have been denounced as traitors. And anyone who has questioned Tony Blair’s echo of George Bush’s fateful words on September 11 that this was an assault on freedom and our way of life has been treated as an apologist for terror.

But while some allowance could be made in the American case for the shock of the attacks, the London bombings were one of the most heavily trailed events in modern British history. We have been told repeatedly since the prime minister signed up to Bush’s war on terror that an attack on Britain was a certainty – and have had every opportunity to work out why that might be. Throughout the Afghan and Iraq wars, there has been a string of authoritative warnings about the certain boost it would give to al-Qaida-style terror groups. The only surprise was that the attacks were so long coming.

But when the newly elected Respect MP George Galloway – who might be thought to have some locus on the subject, having overturned a substantial New Labour majority over Iraq in a London constituency with a large Muslim population – declared that Londoners had paid the price of a “despicable act” for the government’s failure to heed those warnings, he was accused by defence minister Adam Ingram of “dipping his poisonous tongue in a pool of blood”. Yesterday, the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy was in the dock for a far more tentative attempt to question this suffocating consensus. Even Ken Livingstone, who had himself warned of the danger posed to London by an invasion of Iraq, has now claimed the bombings were nothing to do with the war – something he clearly does not believe.

A week on from the London outrage, this official otherworldliness is once again in full flood, as ministers and commentators express astonishment that cricket-playing British-born Muslims from suburbia could have become suicide bombers, while Blair blames an “evil ideology”. The truth is that no amount of condemnation of evil and self-righteous resoluteness will stop terror attacks in the future. Respect for the victims of such atrocities is supposed to preclude open discussion of their causes in the aftermath – but that is precisely when honest debate is most needed.

The wall of silence in the US after the much greater carnage of 9/11 allowed the Bush administration to set a course that has been a global disaster. And there is little sense in London that the official attitude reflects the more uncertain mood on the streets. There is every need for the kind of public mourning that will take place in London today, along with concerted action to halt the backlash against Muslim Britons that claimed its first life in Nottingham at the weekend. But it is an insult to the dead to mislead people about the crucial factors fuelling this deadly rage in Muslim communities across the world.

The first piece of disinformation long peddled by champions of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is that al-Qaida and its supporters have no demands that could possibly be met or negotiated over; that they are really motivated by a hatred of western freedoms and way of life; and that their Islamist ideology aims at global domination. The reality was neatly summed up this week in a radio exchange between the BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr, and its security correspondent, Frank Gardner, who was left disabled by an al-Qaida attack in Saudi Arabia last year. Was it the “very diversity, that melting pot aspect of London” that Islamist extremists found so offensive that they wanted to kill innocent civilians in Britain’s capital, Marr wondered. “No, it’s not that,” replied Gardner briskly, who is better acquainted with al-Qaida thinking than most. “What they find offensive are the policies of western governments and specifically the presence of western troops in Muslim lands, notably Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The central goal of the al-Qaida-inspired campaign, as its statements have regularly spelled out, is the withdrawal of US and other western forces from the Arab and Muslim world, an end to support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and a halt to support for oil-lubricated despots throughout the region. Those are also goals that unite an overwhelming majority of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere and give al-Qaida and its allies the chance to recruit and operate – in a way that their extreme religious conservatism or dreams of restoring the medieval caliphate never would. As even Osama bin Laden asked in his US election-timed video: if it was western freedom al-Qaida hated, “Why do we not strike Sweden?”

The second disinformation line peddled by government supporters since last week’s bombings is that the London attacks had nothing to do with Iraq. The Labour MP Tony Wright insisted that such an idea was “not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense”. Blair has argued that, since the 9/11 attacks predated the Iraq war, outrage at the aggression could not have been the trigger. It’s perfectly true that Muslim anger over Palestine, western-backed dictatorships and the aftermath of the 1991 war against Iraq – US troops in Arabia and a murderous sanctions regime against Iraq – was already intense before 2001 and fuelled al-Qaida’s campaign in the 1990s. But that was aimed at the US, not Britain, which only became a target when Blair backed Bush’s war on terror. Afghanistan made a terror attack on Britain a likelihood; Iraq made it a certainty.

We can’t of course be sure of the exact balance of motivations that drove four young suicide bombers to strike last Thursday, but we can be certain that the bloodbath unleashed by Bush and Blair in Iraq – where a 7/7 takes place every day – was at the very least one of them. What they did was not “home grown”, but driven by a worldwide anger at US-led domination and occupation of Muslim countries.

The London bombers were to blame for attacks on civilians that are neither morally nor politically defensible. But the prime minister – who was warned by British intelligence of the risks in the run-up to the war – is also responsible for knowingly putting his own people at risk in the service of a foreign power. The security crackdowns and campaign to uproot an “evil ideology” the government announced yesterday will not extinguish the threat. Only a British commitment to end its role in the bloody occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is likely to do that.

Who To Vote For?

Alex Doherty — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 12:44:05 +0000

Voters opposed to the occupation of Iraq, the galloping privatisation of public services and the shameful inequality of Britain in 2005 – a majority of the British people, according to opinion polls – face a problem at next month’s general election. In most constituencies, they will have no one to vote for. That is because none of the three main parties will be offering a meaningful alternative on what are, by any reckoning, central issues in political and social life. But of course it’s not only the voters who have a problem. So does the government – because the majority of those who are most angry about the war, privatisation, inequality and attacks on civil liberties have in the past been committed Labour voters. And polling evidence suggests that millions of them could stay at home or switch to the Liberal Democrats or a protest party as a result.

New Labour has only itself to blame. The political boil of the war – and the attendant collapse of trust in the government – could have been lanced if Tony Blair had been induced to step down last summer, when the scale of the disaster unleashed in Iraq and the deception used to sell it had become fully apparent. That would have been better for the country, but also for Labour. Gordon Brown, Blair’s natural successor, was obviously tainted by the decision to go to war and responsible for some of the most damaging privatisations. But the ousting of Blair would have at least demonstrated that the government had been held to account and allowed a shift of policy, both domestically and over Iraq.
What’s more, polls have repeatedly shown that Labour would attract significantly more support with Brown as leader, whose popularity now far outstrips the prime minister’s dismal ratings – something Blair implicitly acknowledged yesterday, when he signalled that he did not after all plan to move Brown from the Treasury after the election. If a Labour victory remains the likeliest outcome, given rising living standards and the lack of enthusiasm for the Tories, that is now in spite of Blair. But if Labour were to be defeated or lose its majority next month, the party would be paying the price of Tony Blair’s ego.

Government supporters who insist that the dominating political controversy of the last four years can be safely ignored for the purposes of the election are dreaming. Of course the war does not affect British people’s daily lives. But awareness of the crime that has been carried out, the scale of the slaughter, the falsehoods peddled to justify it and the contempt for public opinion it involved runs deep in Britain. So does revulsion for the craven relationship with the US that underpinned it – frankly highlighted by Alan Milburn last month when he told the Guardian that the war had been in Britain’s interests “because you’ve got one superpower in the world nowadays”. But, as John Reid’s ham-fisted performance on BBC radio demonstrated yesterday, New Labour has little clue as to how to defuse visceral public hostility over the debacle.

The same goes for the privatisation of public services – more of which is due to be trailed in Labour’s manifesto under the banner of reform and choice, taking the sheen off Brown’s popular public-spending increases for many traditional Labour supporters. In health, education and social housing, profit-seeking private corporations are already being given a free hand as the price of new hospitals and schools, modernisation and quicker treatment – with all we now know that means for service quality, jobs, pay and conditions, public control and accountability. And in defiance of overwhelming public support for bringing the failed privatised rail system back into public ownership, the government is busy returning rail franchises to private companies. Meanwhile, despite Brown’s limited efforts at redistribution, income inequality has actually increased during Labour’s period in office – mainly because of the government’s refusal to raise tax for the highest earners – while wealth inequality has ballooned.

But in all these cases there is no clear way for voters to make their views felt because the main opposition party either agrees with the government – as on the war – or in the case of privatisation, is even more extreme, planning sweeping extensions of private provision. Many disillusioned Labour voters seem bound to be drawn to the obvious alternative, the Liberal Democrats. But although they originally opposed going to war and back a 50% tax rate for high earners, the Lib Dems have supported the occupation of Iraq and moved sharply to the right on the economy and public services, backing privatisation of health provision and the private finance initiative – while opposing trade union rights and a national minimum wage. In any case, in the large majority of seats likely to change hands, votes for the Liberal Democrats risk delivering them to the Tories.

The only possible outcome of the election is a Labour or Tory government and it would be absurd to discount either Labour’s achievements – such as the boost to health and education spending, new employment and other social rights, the cut in child poverty – or the crucial domestic policy differences between them. But there is also no avoiding the fact that hostility to New Labour over the war and its featherbedding of wealth and corporate power is at such a pitch that many Labour voters will not support the party again while Blair is leader and will instead look for points of pressure and protest. In Wales and Scotland, that may mean the nationalists and others to the left of New Labour; in a minority of seats in England, the Greens and, more pointedly, George Galloway’s Respect, the party that grew out of the anti-war movement and outpolled New Labour in parts of east London in last year’s European elections. Respect is calling on supporters to vote for “credible anti-war candidates” in constituencies held by those most closely associated with the war, such as Blair and Jack Straw. Elsewhere it is backing a Labour vote. Others will focus support on those Labour MPs who voted against the war or attempt targeted tactical voting, while trying to force issues that the main parties don’t want to discuss on to the campaign agenda.

There is in reality no “correct” answer to the problem of how to punish New Labour without punishing the British people, let alone how to elect a Labour government with a small enough majority to encourage pressure for a change of political direction. The fact that vast swathes of public opinion effectively now have no voice inside the main parties demonstrates that the political system isn’t working – and the Iraq war has made that crisis of representation much sharper. A two-party system can only function if both main parties are broad coalitions. By moving Labour so far to the right while silencing those on his left, Blair has made that impossible. The battle inside Labour for a change of direction will have to begin the day after the election – or the current process of political and electoral disintegration may become unstoppable.