Solomon Hughes | ukwatch.net

Waiting for the barbarians

tim — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:56:49 +0000

In his verse ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy describes a country where all public life focuses on its enemies. Citizens wait in the forum because ‘the barbarians are due’. The emperor and consuls are dressed in their finest garments to impress the barbarians when they arrive. Normal laws are suspended, and parliamentary debates cancelled during the present barbarian danger. Then the worst possible news reaches the city: ‘... the barbarians have not come. / And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.’ The barbarians’ failure to materialise hurts more than their expected arrival – after all, ‘... what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.’

A generation of Western politicians grew up during the Cold War, when the fear of the ‘barbarians’ of Russia and China was used as a key to international and domestic politics: all confrontations between the West and developing nations were recast as battles between freedom and communist tyranny. Anti-communism dominated home politics during the 1950s, and remained a significant force right up to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Ideas to the left of the Democrats in US, or of social democracy in Europe, were often painted as illegitimate relations of the communist enemy. Some leading politicians seemed disorientated when the barbarians of the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a unified force. The Soviets had provided a ‘kind of solution’ to how to organise US and European government, and now they were gone.

Leaderships in the White House and Westminster have seized on the new terrorist threat as a new kind of useful barbarian, again shaping much of foreign and domestic policy into the frame provided by the ‘war on terror’. Relations with the developing world are determined according to who is on side in the battle against terrorism, and who harbours the diverse terrorist enemy. Authoritarian regimes like those of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia can be part of the coalition for freedom simply by declaring themselves against terrorism. Populations or nations that find themselves in conflict with the Western consensus – like many Iraqis, Palestinians and Iranians – are lumped together with Osama bin Laden’s small, violent network as part of the terrorist threat. Home politics are also bent towards an authoritarian, surveillance-happy ‘homeland security’, with the suspension of ordinary civil liberties and the enactment of emergency laws. The threat of the new barbarians provides a new and unhappy political ‘solution’. The theme of this book has been that, while legislators and officials are drawn to this political solution by themselves, they are also encouraged along this road by a substantial business lobby with a commercial interest in militaristic and authoritarian responses to the threat of terrorism.

The neoconservatives have a long history of building up the threat of the barbarians. In the 1970s George Bush Sr founded a group called ‘Team B’ to second-guess the CIA’s estimate of Russian weapons and intentions. This group, which included Paul Wolfowitz and other prominent neoconservatives, deliberately overestimated the scale of the Soviet military and the aggressive threat of the Russian leadership in an attempt to derail détente between East and West. From Team B developed the Committee on the Present Danger, a lobbying group which sought to keep up political pressure for a strong, interventionist US army. The Committee fought against anti-military feelings generated by the Vietnam failure, countering them by emphasising the Soviet threat. In effect the Committee on the Present Danger, led by neoconservative figures like Richard Perle, strained to keep the Cold War going. Unfortunately, these ideologues saw their present recede decisively into the past, when the Soviet bloc fell apart during the last decade of the twentieth century.

Unsurprisingly, given this past, neoconservatives like Cheney and Wolfowitz seized on the terrorist threat as a source of new barbarians. They set out an argument that would make the Islamist terrorists into an enemy around which all Western foreign policy – and a substantial amount of domestic policy – could turn. They enthusiastically embraced the idea that the terrorist menace could replace the red menace. A new ‘Committee on the Present Danger’ was formed by figures like James Woolsey to argue that the terrorist threat was not a ‘law enforcement issue’, but rather an ‘existential war’. The US leadership tried to frame all foreign policy questions in terms of the war on terror, in the same way that a previous generation of leaders had tried to squeeze all international conflicts into the frame of anti-communism.

During the Cold War, the US and British leaderships were willing to back any dictator, warlord or coup that was thought to provide protection against communism. For example, millions suffered and died while the West backed the South African regime and its vile proxies in Angola and Namibia, simply because they were seen as bulwarks against the red menace. In Southeast Asia, the Cold War was very hot, taking the form of the Vietnam War. In Central and South America it meant backing death squads against anyone – whether guerrilla or nun – who looked the least bit red. During the war on terror, all conflicts have been squeezed into the framework of the battle with Osama bin Laden – even when, as in the case of Iraq, such a connection had to be fabricated. As during the Cold War, reactionary, authoritarian and bloody regimes – Libya, Egypt, Uzbekistan – were welcomed aboard as long as they were ‘against terrorism’.

Perhaps it is not so surprising that Bush and Cheney tried to update old red-baiting strategies for the age of terror, and to use the war on terror to police domestic opposition to their policies. But Cold War nostalgia was not limited to the US. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown explicitly argued that the Cold War model should be used in the new war on terror – for example, in an article for Rupert Murdoch’s daily Sun newspaper. Brown’s apprentice in his previous post as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ed Balls, made the same point in a radio interview. Brown wanted the Cold War analogy to sound reassuring after some of Prime Minister Blair’s bellicose stands, by emphasising the ‘cultural’ nature of the conflict with communism and the use of the ‘soft’ power of influence, as well as of the ‘hard’ power of war.

Brown said that the Western confrontation with the Soviets had been ‘a battle fought through books and ideas, even music and the arts’, and a ‘battle for hearts and minds’, as well as one of military power. The cultural war against communism included the covert funding of political organizations and magazines; the imposition of loyalty pledges; the removal of ‘unsound’ people from positions of influence, from Hollywood to local schools; the harassment of labour activists and campaigners – so Brown’s evocation of ‘soft power’ offered little comfort. It underlined the fact that Brown saw himself as continuing with the policy of making into a wide-ranging ‘war’ a conflict with the lethal but thankfully relatively small threat of domestic terrorism.

Brown’s comments about the Cold War were revealing in two ways. Firstly they showed that, though one of the main actors in the war on terror, Tony Blair, had walked off the stage, his understudy Gordon Brown intended to follow a similar script. Secondly, by invoking the Cold War Brown invited us to wonder whether the problems of the Cold War were going to be repeated in the war on terror. The theme of this book has been that President Eisenhower’s warnings about the ‘military–industrial complex’ can be restated for the war on terror: in short, there is a new ‘security–industrial complex’ made up of a circle of businessmen and politicians with a vested interest in responding to the terrorist threat with ever more aggressive, broad, expensive and counterproductive overreactions on the domestic and international fronts. Eisenhower’s warning came from the old Cold War years, but Brown’s attempted revival of one aspect of that conflict showed that the old warning could not, unfortunately, be treated as a mere historical curiosity.

One battle over Iraq, in 2007, affords a clear sense of how closely the British and US political leaderships were intertwined with business interests in the war on terror. The battle was not fought in the streets of Baghdad, but in the courts of Washington, D.C. Rival security companies launched legal actions and political lobbying campaigns to wrestle the most significant private military deal in the Iraq theatre – the ‘Reconstruction Support Services’ contract – out of the hands of Aegis, the British paramilitary company run by Tim Spicer.

This $280 million-a-year contract was at that point one of the most complete military privatisations ever. The deal put a private company in charge of mobile armed units, called Security Escort Teams, guarding the most important political figures. The contract also demanded that the company create and run ‘Reconstruction Operations Centres’ in Iraq, which would be in charge of all other private security companies in the country. These centres would manage military intelligence for the contractors, which they would also provide to the US army. Clauses in the contract said that the private company must have analysts with ‘NATO equivalent SECRET clearance’, who will conduct ‘analysis of foreign intelligence services, terrorist organizations, and their surrogates targeting Department of Defense personnel, resources and facilities’.

The contract places the contractor in charge of the most delicate military intelligence. After gathering this intelligence, the company is supposed to use its analysis both to assist the US army in its battle with the insurgency and to help direct the other security firms – keeping them out of harms way in the dangerous Iraqi ‘red zone’. Aegis itself codenamed this contract ‘Project Matrix’. The company told the Washington Post that its teams would go into Iraqi towns and cities and report back to the US – to ‘provide “ground truth” to the Army Corps’ – and help guide other contractors with ‘threat assessments for the people that travel the battlespace’.

Aegis worked hard to keep this lucrative contract. Spicer took great pains to build relations with the US state, hiring Kristi Clemens to run Aegis’s Washington office. Clemens had the right background to lobby for her new employer in the US. Clemens had previously been a spokesperson for Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq. She later became a Republican political appointee in the US Department of Homeland Security, but left that job after being accused of distorting public statements about terrorism to help get Bush re-elected.

Spicer also hired Robert MacFarlane as an Aegis director. MacFarlane had worked for Ronald Reagan, helping run the Iran–Contra operation. McFarlane was central the plot, which involved selling arms to Iran in return for hostage releases, while using the profits to pay for the ‘secret’ US backing of the Contras in their war against Nicaragua’s government. MacFarlane had been found guilty of misleading Congress in the affair, and had tried to kill himself with an overdose of Valium. He was later pardoned by President Bush Sr. A number of veterans of the Iran–Contra affair turned up in the administration of the younger President Bush, so MacFarlane was a useful contact. The advantage to Iraqis of these legal battles and struggles for influence is less obvious.

Spicer’s new links with the US security establishment did not guarantee that the company would be able to retain its grip on this slice of business. The contract was so central to the new military privatisation that other leading companies tried to take over, keen for their staff to be in charge of the ‘battlespace’ and the delivery of ‘ground truths’ in Iraq. When the contract came up for renewal in 2007, this jewel in the crown of military privatization attracted multiple bids. Two of the companies rejected from the bidding – the US firm Blackwater and the Anglo-South African Erinys – immediately launched court actions, demanding to be reconsidered. One of the consequences of privatisation was that the new wings of the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq now devoted valuable time and resources to fighting each other in court. Links with the political establishment – the British establishment as much as that of the American – were clearly prized by the security companies.

Two British firms were allowed to bid for this US security contract: Spicer’s Aegis and the Armor Group. Aegis had hired a prominent British politician – former Conservative defence minister (and grandson of Winston Churchill), Nicholas Soames. The Armor Group’s chairman was former Conservative defence secretary, Malcolm Rifkind. Rifkind had been Soames’s boss in the last Conservative administration, but now the two MPs were rivals in the battle for Iraqi security cash. The fact that the military companies were so keen to employ former ministers meant that any current or future politician knew that they could look forward to a lucrative career in the new security industry. The ‘revolving door’ between politicians and the security business provided the basis for the new security–industrial complex. It created a financial incentive for politicians to press forward with the subcontracting of state security services. In turn, the security industry had a vested interest in persuading politicians that new military interventions or extended police powers were feasible, and even positive ventures.

This game of musical chairs between positions of political influence and the boardrooms of the security industry is now well documented. Former Conservative leader Michael Howard sits alongside former CIA director William Webster on the advisory board of Diligence, a private intelligence company set up by former MI5 and CIA agents. The traffic of personnel between the new security industry and the leadership of Britain’s political parties affected both the Labour government and opposition. Prime Minister Gordon Brown made several ministerial appointments from outside his own party, announcing that he wanted a government ‘of all the talents’.

One such talent was the former First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Alan West. While Sir Alan had never been talented enough actually to be elected, he did have his admirers. After resigning from the navy, Sir Alan had become a paid adviser to a company called QinetiQ, which had been formed out of Britain’s military laboratories, which had themselves been sold to US-led private investors. QinetiQ’s workshops once housed the historical counterparts of ‘Q’ – the gadget man who supplies James Bond with his spy kit. The newly commercialised boffins knew which way the market was moving, and the firm set up a ‘rapidly expanding security business’ to deal with ‘homeland security’ issues. The company sells surveillance systems, ‘data mining’ programmes to identify ‘dangerous passengers’, scanning machines designed to identify dangerous weapons, and other high-tech security products.

Shortly after Brown appointed the ex-QinetiQ man, the leader of the Conservative opposition, David Cameron, made Dame Pauline Neville-Jones his own senior security advisor. She had formerly been the head of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, but in her retirement from public life had been chairwoman of QinetiQ for three years. So the security advisers to both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition had worked for the same security-focused company. The government could approach the terrorist threat politically or technically: it could aim to reduce the terrorist danger by trying to bring enough disaffected people into the political consensus, to isolate the hard core, violent minority; but it could also look to expensive computerized security systems as a way of trying to identify terrorist groups. The strong presence of security industry veterans in the political process makes the latter strategy more likely.

The nexus of links between the political class and the new security industry can both make company employees into ministers and ministers into company employees. Lord George Robertson – previously Labour defence secretary and then head of NATO – now works for Englefield Capital, a banking firm that owns GSL, which itself operates the private prisons, immigration detention centres and secure transport that form the backbone of the private security industry. The post-ministerial career of former home secretary, David Blunkett, includes a job advising Entrust, a Texas-based security firm bidding for work on Britain’s identity card. Former Labour cabinet minister Lord Barnett runs Atos Origin, a French-owned company also bidding for work on the identity card.

The US and British states have taken on new powers to fight the war on terror, and then promptly delegated these powers to a new and growing corporate sector. discontent over individual parts of the war on terror has not yet been enough to substantially shift British or US policy. One of the many reasons that the transatlantic leadership continues to reach for militaristic and authoritarian solutions to current crises is that there is now a substantial commercial lobby beckoning them in this direction. The first step towards unravelling the influence of the security–industrial complex is the recognition that it exists. I hope this book goes a little way towards making that possible.
Footnote

War on Terror, Inc: Corporate Profiteering from the Politics of Fear, by Solomon Hughes, is published by Verso, price £16.99

Follow the money

Ellie Keen — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:45:08 +0000

The “war on terror” and the multinationals who are profiteering from it

I started writing about the private security industry in July 2001, when I sold a story to the Observer newspaper about a company called DynCorp. They were hired by the US to help the “reconstruction” of Bosnia and Kosovo by running the new post-war police force.

Kathryn Bolkovac, one of the US police officers sent by the firm, discovered DynCorp staff were trafficking women. DynCorp tried to stop her investigation then sacked her. DynCorp are a US company, but ran the Bosnian operation through their subsidiary in Aldershot, so Bolkovac went to an industrial tribunal in Southampton which backed her claims.

At the time this seemed like an odd piece of corruption from the fringes of the system. But then came the 9/11 attacks and, as Tony Blair told us, “the rules of the game changed”. Under the new rules, there was going to be a lot of privatised “reconstruction”. Indeed, even before the bombers started their “deconstruction” of Iraq, the US government handed contracts to Bechtel and Halliburton to rebuild what had yet to be destroyed.

An army of private military contractors – or mercenaries – guarded the corporate reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan. DynCorp, fresh from sex trafficking in Bosnia, supplied the Praetorian Guard for Hamid Karzai in Kabul.

As a journalist I found that contractors gave me a steady stream of scandal stories. I wanted to try and understand the whole process of security privatisation, not just describe the many areas where it went rotten.

It quickly became clear that this was an Anglo-American operation. So, for example, the most important security contractor in Iraq – Aegis – is a British firm. Before the Iraq war Dick Cheney came to Britain to promote battlefield privatisation in a conference with Labour ministers and transatlantic businessmen because he thought that, “our British colleagues are far ahead of us” in commercialised warfare.

It was also clear that the privatisation went way beyond the well known examples in Iraq. Private companies supplied interrogators in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Contractors even helped the “waterboarding” of US captives in the secret “black sites”.

Corporations also run the massive databases, “data mining” operations and bureaucracies that make up “homeland security” in the US. In Britain the biggest “homeland security” contract, the ID card, will be run by big transnational firms.

When judges told the then home secretary Charles Clarke he could not lock up foreign nationals without a trial, he turned instead to “control orders”. This form of house arrest was nicely packaged and run for Clarke by private companies Serco and Group 4. All these are parts of the ongoing privatisation of “anti-terror” security.

Trying to understand the effect of War on Terror, Inc, meant trying to understand the “war on terror” itself. Gordon Brown and his boy wonder, David Miliband, came to my aid by offering an analogy. They said the “war on terror” should be like the Cold War. Their nostalgia for the era of anti-red witchhunts and support for “anti-communist” dictatorships was hard to understand, but their analysis was spot on.

During the Cold War the Anglo-American political leadership tried to brand every challenge to their leadership, at home or abroad, as part of international communist subversion. Similarly, in the “war on terror”, leaders in Washington and London try to use the terrorist threat to justify a whole host of new international interventions or authoritarian measures at home.

Within hours of the fall of the Twin Towers, Donald Rumsfeld said to his note taker that the US needed to attack: “Near term target needs… go massive – sweep it all up. Things related and not.” For the last five years we have seen the US “going massive” and trying to squeeze unrelated issues into the “war on terror” – most obviously by making the attack on Iraq part of the response to Al Qaida, despite Saddam’s lack of any connection to the terrorist killings in New York.

The whole point of the “war on terror” is not to deal with terrorism as such. It is to assert US political and military might. Britain’s leaders have decided to ride on the coat tails of that power.

There is a novel feature to the “war on terror”. While Britain and the US grabbed extra power, they quickly passed that power to private corporations. The new authoritarian state and the post-Thatcherite shrinking state bred and formed a new hybrid of subcontracted authoritarianism and privatised warfare.

During the Cold War, US president Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence” of the “military industrial complex” because “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”. The new security industrial complex has created a powerful commercial lobby with a vested interest in new military interventions abroad and new authoritarian measures at home.

While politicians in Washington and London are quite capable of throwing themselves into the disasters of the “war on terror” on their own account, they are encouraged by their authoritarian and military urges magnified by the new security executives.

There are two main mechanisms. Firstly, the industry lowers the bar to wars abroad and crackdowns at home. Every time a minister ponders such a move, a gaggle of businessmen will offer some “can do” solution.

Secondly, when ministers and officials leave government they can now count on a comfortable seat on the boards of the security companies they previously hired. In addition the security industry funds a gaggle of paid-for academics to pump up “security” fears.

Recently the Labour linked think tank IPPR got funding from four firms cashing in on the “war on terror” – Raytheon, Booz Allen, EDS and De La Rue – to fund a “security commission” pushing new alarmist claims.

War on Terror, Inc is published by Verso. Solomon Hughes writes a weekly column for the Morning Star. You can contact him at sol.hughes@btinternet.com

From Reaction to Confection

Tim Holmes — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 17:05:11 +0000

Tony Blair recently told an audience of Rupert Murdochs News Corp executives that political cross-dressing is rampant. While Tranny Tony yearns to swap political clothes and put on Thatchers blue suit, Conservative Party chairman Francis Maude is in charge of the Tory dressing up box and the driving force behind David Camerons costume change.

Maudes career shows the links between the old Tory reaction and the new Conservative confection. Maude hands out the new touchy feely Tory costumes now but he was an old-fashioned minister back in the days when the Conservatives were in government.

Thatcher gave him a junior foreign office post, where his first big success was organising the forcible repatriation of Vietnamese boat people from Hong Kong. In 1989, he got riot police to force the Vietnamese refugees back to the red country they had fled, while the Thatcher government continued to shout about freedom and proclaim its opposition to totalitarian communism.

As a Treasury minister in John Majors government, Maude was a top privatiser. Major says that in 1991 Maude ran a series of head-to-head meetings, or bilaterals, with departmental ministers in which he would challenge them on their plans for privatisation, competition and contracting out. The electorate kicked Maude out of parliament in 1992, so he took a job as head of privatisation at Morgan Stanley bank, which profited from these same policies.

Maude was re-elected in 1997 and rebranded himself a moderniser. In 2003 he signed the letter that brought an end to Iain Duncan Smiths leadership of the party. While Duncan Smith was too Neanderthal for Maude, he was happy to be party chairman when the equally right wing but less stupid Michael Howard led the Tories.

Maude also launched a think tank, called C-Change, to promote Tory modernisation. It is the sister organisation of Policy Exchange, David Camerons favourite think-tank, which Maude set up with Archie Norman in 2002.

C-Change shows how the Conservative milieu has changed. Dougie Smith, one of the leading lights of Maudes think tank also organised fever parties, upmarket orgies for the adventurous yuppie. The revelation caused some embarrassment, but not much: these new generation Tory swingers showed that the Tories have moved on, morally although not that much. While Maude stood by sex-party Smith, he recently assured local Tory associations that he would not impose mincing metrosexual candidates on gritty northern seats.

Maude has given up some bigotries, but he has not moved on economically. Rather than moving to the left, he hopes to benefit from Labours move to the right. Maude praised Blairs politics, saying, One of the great achievements of New Labour is to take class out of politics.

Maudes strategy is to give his party a makeover to remove its obviously reactionary twitches. Take out the obvious prejudice but leave the basic politics intact. Maude believes Labours business-friendly approach means the Conservatives cannot be challenged for championing the rich and powerful.

In his keynote speech setting out the Conservative agenda to parliament, Maude admitted that the public thought Tory plans for privatisation were aimed at enriching sinister business interests. Because the public looked at commercial providers in the NHS with suspicion, the plan to hand over the welfare state to big business is unlikely to be achieved by one party working alone.

However, Maude was pleased to admit that Labour MPs such as Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers are willing to argue publicly for privatisation. While the old Tories, like Iain Duncan Smith, reacted to Labours shift rightwards by trying to find even more reactionary policies to distinguish themselves, the modernisers simply welcome Blairism and hope to take over the job when Blair goes.

Maude certainly puts business first. Until earlier this year he was chairman of a PR Firm, called Incepta. Maude was not worried that one of its subsidiaries, Citigate, donated thousands of pounds to the Labour Party: Citigate represented privatisers like Group 4, so Maudes firm needed to pay cash to the governing party to represent its clients. Business trumps politics.

Maude has helped run Camerons modernising campaign, like the Tory leaders recent speech claiming he would put commercial responsibility before profits, and castigating sweety makers for adding to Britains obesity crisis. While Cameron takes on the chocolate oranges, Frances Maude is chairman of the Mission Marketing Group. Maudes new company is an ad agency whose clients include Walkers Crisps and Virgin Cola.

Liam Byrne

Tim Holmes — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 20:17:04 +0000

Sometimes you can see someone on the up and up in public life, and really wish they were on the down and down. Or hope they would, crab-like, scuttle off sideways into obscurity. But you know that they just tick too many of the right boxes with the wrong people to be stopped. What do you call these kind of people? A reader of my Morning Star column suggested rising starseholes.

Liam Byrne, the new minister for immigration is definitely a rising starsehole. The Labour government is getting ready for some serious right-wing policies on immigration, and Byrne, who only became an MP two years ago, in a 2004 by-election, was given the ministerial job to carry them out.

Byrne fought his Birmingham seat by attacking the Lib Dems from the right. His election leaflets promised voters he would be someone who is tough and on your side. In particular his leaflets accused the Lib Dems of being soft on asylum. Byrne told voters: I know that people here are worried about fraudulent asylum claims and illegal immigration. Yet the Lib Dems ignore what people say. They ignore what local people really want. The Lib Dems want to keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum seekers. They voted for this in parliament on 1 March 2004. They want your money and mine to go to failed asylum seekers. You can tell from his Good Samaritan attitudes that he is a proud member of the Christian Socialist Movement.

Byrne issued a Fabian pamphlet after the election warning that Labour would lose the next election if it shifted left. He said the party needed to win what he called right-wing voters on crime, anti-social behaviour and asylum.

True Blairites are few and far between. Blair owes his position to Labour MPs who were not fully signed up to the project, but were prepared to keep quiet as long as Tony won elections. So a real Blair believer like Byrne has a good chance of early promotion. That chance became a certainty when he received the mark of Murdoch.

Tim Allen, a Labour spin doctor who went on to work for Murdochs Sky television, wrote a memo containing plans for Sky to keep up the interplay between the Murdoch machine and the Labour government. The plan included a set of rising star dinners with the men Allen thinks are tomorrows people; Liam Byrne was singled out as a thrusting young MP. Byrne got the immigration job soon after Allens memo was written. A campaign by the Sun against his predecessor, Tony McNulty, helped him to win it.

For all his tough talk, Byrne is not really a street politician. He got into Labour politics by the traditional route of, er, a job as a management consultant with Accenture. In 1996 Byrne moved into Tony Blairs office to help the future PM make good relations with (and presumably raise funds from) big business. Byrne first went to work for Blair on secondment, so was simultaneously an employee of Accenture and the Labour Party. In 1997 he became a banker, working for NM Rothschild in the City while also helping out at the Fabian Society. He still holds the interest-free loan Rothschilds gave him to fund his Harvard MBA.

Byrne keeps up the corporate contacts. At the last Labour conference he was a prominent business-backed speaker, appearing on platforms sponsored by BUPA and catering and cleaning firm Compass.

Byrnes fans hope his business background will help him sort out the Home Office. These hopes are misplaced. Byrne was briefly a health minister. While at the Department of Health, he claimed the national NHS IT strategy was within budget, ahead of schedule in some areas, and, in the context of a 10-year programme, broadly on track in others. In fact it was wildly over budget and behind schedule.

The Home Office has already been plagued by a combination of draconian announcements and failed business support. On the one hand, a series of Blair-inspired eye catching initiatives have led to more oppressive measures against asylum seekers. On the other, a series of corporate contracts for IT systems and asylum centres have spectacularly failed. The new minister combines a pro-business approach and enthusiasm for playing the right-wing tough guy, so his appointment promises a lot more of the same old rubbish.

Solomon Hughes column appears in the Morning Star every Friday

Sol.Hughes[AT]btinternet.com

Cameron The Compassionate

Tim Holmes — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 13:11:26 +0000

David Cameron is fed up with hearing that Conservatives are out of touch, backward looking and lack compassion. So he is probably fed up with any reminder of his political career. Cameron was part of Tory prime minister John Majors breakfast club. This true blue brat pack advised Major in pre-dawn meetings on confronting Labour in parliament. Cameron pumped Major with slick arguments against the minimum wage, compassionately claiming that rises for the low paid would leave them unemployed.

Dave then became special adviser to Tory chancellor Norman Lamont. In his memoirs, Lamont recalls that he was a brilliant Old Etonian with a taste for the good life. Cameron stood by Lamont when the chancellor said mass unemployment was a price worth paying, and when he wasted billions failing to prop up the pound on Black Wednesday.

He had a sudden loss of compassion, however, when Lamont resigned, after which he got a new job as special adviser to Michael Howard. A hurt Lamont recalls his first, awkward, post-resignation Tory cocktail party. The next person I saw was David Cameron, my former special adviser at the Treasury. He cut me dead. Unable to show compassion even to fellow Tories, Cameron wants us to believe he cares about the poor and excluded.

Working for Howard, Camerons compassion also seemed rationed. Derek Lewis, the former head of prisons, claims Cameron asked him to reconsider regulations giving prisoners a balanced and nutritious diet. Lewis says Cameron was passing on orders not from the home secretary, but from his wife, Sandra Howard, who thought the food rules were too generous. Howard strenuously denied that Cameron asked Lewis to keep vitamins out of the prisoners porridge, but Cameron certainly stood by Howard as he shifted the Tory partys law and order strategy ever rightwards. Later, he went on to be part of Team Howard, the group campaigning to make Howard the Tory leader of the opposition.

Some people say Camerons Tory modernisation is all spin. Well he does have a history of dressing up cheap rubbish having been Carlton TVs spin-doctor in the 1990s.

Maybe that is all in the past, but when does the new Cameron appear? One of his newly declared principles is to stand up to big business. However, Cameron was also a director of a mega-bar firm, Urbium plc, until 2005. This business liked standing up to regulators even the police. When Nottingham council turned down Urbiums licence application for a city centre bar serving 1,700 drinkers on the advice of the chief constable, the firm hired lawyers to try to overturn the judgment in the high court. When Westminster council refused to license Camerons company to let accompanied under 16s into their bars because they had not shown they would protect children from harm, the firm also challenged the ruling.

Cameron owes his modernising Tory leadership to a generously funded leadership campaign. The new, reforming Cameron said: We have a picture in our minds of a Britain in which no child grows up trapped in multiple deprivation of family breakdown, drug and alcohol dependency, decayed housing, dangerous neighbourhoods and poor education. But some of his funders seem to have a different picture in their minds.

Property magnate Trevor Pears bankrolled Daves leadership challenge. A major landlord, Pears firms have been forced to change unfair tenancy agreements by the Office of Fair Trading: tenants had to pay for repairs even when they were not responsible for damages, and often unfairly lost deposits. The appeal court also stopped a Pears firm from imposing five-fold rent increases on Brighton tenants. The judge said legal clauses behind the increases masqueraded as proper agreements, and were just devices to evict tenants. Pears firms were also heavily criticised when they tripled rents for elderly tenants in Greenwich formerly housed by a charity, forcing many into council accommodation.

Cameron also got campaign cash from Firoz Kassam. He built a fortune by housing 700 benefit claimants in the notorious Mount Pleasant hotel near Kings Cross, a cash cow that keeled over when a rebellion by residents against the miserable conditions stopped Camden council funding the gaff. More recently Kassam bought the London Park hotel in Elephant and Castle, making nearly £3 million profit a year by taking home office cash to house 500 single male asylum seekers. Kassam did not re-invest enough of his profits to stop the depression, crime, prostitution, and violence that soon plagued his guests.

Perhaps a new Tory party focusing on social justice, the environment and global poverty will be born from Camerons reviews. Or perhaps they will just keep the nasty side of the nasty party out of the press long enough for Cameron to try to grub for the votes Labour is losing through cynicism and despair about its performance.

The Identity Business

eddie — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 15:44:54 +0000

The introduction of ID cards will not only increase the power of the state over the individual. It will also transfer £3.1 billion from the state to the big companies that are now among the most persistent lobbyists for the scheme, circling around ministers with promises of glamorous high-tech solutions.

The ID card programme is so huge that the government is likely to divide the work into several contracts, so different members of this circling pack will get a bone. Firms are as likely to get to the front of the pack by way of strong political connections as any proven track record of competence.

Siemens, for example, has made sure it is among the big dogs by hiring Sovereign Strategy, a lobby firm with former Labour minister Jack Cunningham on its board. The company also funds the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), a key Labour-linked think-tank. Siemens was behind the failing information systems at the Home Office and Passport Office that left asylum seekers and travellers in difficulties.

Atos Origin is already running trials for the ID card and can look forward to bigger contracts when the card goes live. Atos got a head start over its rivals when it bought out SchlumbergerSema, a firm that already had strong links to the Labour government (see Know Your Enemy, January 2004). Atos has also hired Lord Barnett, a former Labour cabinet minister, as its UK chairman, and funded the IPPR think-tank.

Like Siemens, the company has been involved in some notable public sector failures. For example, Atos ran the NHS computer system that was supposed to let doctors book hospital appointments from their desktops. The National Audit Office found the scheme was underperforming woefully (see Know Your Enemy, April 2005). Atos also runs disability benefit testing for the government, recently proposing centre closures that campaigners say would leave disabled people struggling to get benefit assessments.

Computer giant Unisys is another big dog in the contractor pack. Unisys sponsored the Fabian Society seminar in July at which Home Office minister Tony McNulty made a fresh attempt to sell the scheme by apologising for the governments over-enthusiasm in overselling the card in the past. The company also helped to pay for a recent procurement conference with Katherine Courtney, the Home Office mandarin in charge of the programme. Unisys was formed from the Burroughs Corporation, a firm founded by the grandfather of avant garde author William Burroughs, who wrote fantastical tales about authoritarian and corrupt systems of power which seems somehow appropriate.

The track record of Unisys includes introducing an ID card system in Panama. The multi-million dollar deal came unstuck in 2002 when Panama’s electoral commission cancelled the four-year contract for the high tech digital cards. Unisys was sacked after a Colombian man was found illegally holding 500 blank cards and the company admitted that it too had 30,000 blank cards, all of which should have been handed to the Panamanian government. While the electoral commission dismissed rumours that the blank cards were part of a voting fraud or drug crime plot, they terminated the contract over general security concerns. Unisys responded by suing the Panamanian government.

Unisys also run Malaysia’s Mykad identity card, introduced to help the country expel an estimated 1.2 million illegal immigrant workers. The Mykad is generally judged a success, but even a relatively efficiently-run scheme such as this has experienced problems. Government staff have already been arrested for illegally issuing Mykads.

Going further back, in 1996 Unisys were removed from a contract to register Massachusetts voters after state officials called their work shoddy and inferior. In 1995, the company paid the state of Wisconsin $2.2 million in fines for poor work running medical benefits. In 1998, 13 Unisys employees were jailed after a gang stole nearly half a million dollars from the state of Florida health insurance system. A grand jury panel found that: While Unisys corporate officials did not direct such offences to occur, we find that there existed a corporate culture which tolerated the employees’ misdeeds. Unisys called these charges unfair, but the firm left its $86 million a year contract two years early as complaints about poor service built up. In 1990, meanwhile, Unisys paid the US government $190 million in fines. A federal investigation called Operation Ill Wind found they won defence contracts through fraud and bribery.

In 1990, Unisys sold a personnel tracking computer system to Saddams Ministry of the Interior. This could have been used to organise the secret police pay cheques, but could also have been used to keep tabs on Iraq’s population. Unisys also sold computers to Iraqs defence department.

When the Roman emperor Vespasian was attacked for taxing the urine taken from Roman toilets to help cure leather, he replied, Money has no smell. Two thousand years later companies such as Unisys seem still unbothered about odours attached to their cash.

Care in the Business Community

Alex Doherty — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 14:51:45 +0000

The governments NHS choice agenda sounds appetising, at least until you look at the ingredients. I like my consumer choice as much as anyone and spend lots of supermarket time deciding how to get my daily dose of Sudan 1. It seems the government operates very similarly, turning to the retail industry to help it fulfil its objectives. Stephen OBrien, formerly a marketing director at Kingfisher, the parent company of electrical retailer Comet and DIY store B&Q, now runs the Department of Healths marketing intelligence unit, helping hospitals sell their services in the new, competitive NHS.

The first step in the proposals is choose and book: GPs will offer patients a choice of four different providers for their treatment via a desktop computer system. The government plans that at least one choice will be from the private sector. The British Medical Association (BMA) described this as creeping privatisation, but thanks to a computer cock-up it is creeping very slowly. The National Audit Office found that only 63 bookings were made through the computer system instead of the 205,000 the government had projected.

The company originally hired to provide the computer system was SchlumbergerSema, which also supplied the Labour Partys membership system, donated money to the party and paid for meetings with government ministers at Labours annual conference. But after business failures SchlumbergerSema was sold at a huge loss to another firm, Atos Origin, which now runs (or fails to run) the choose-and-book computer system. Atos also has good political contacts: former Labour cabinet minister Lord Barnett is chair of its UK operations.

The Department of Health is currently selecting the private firms that GPs will be able to choose and book from. It intends to invest in private clinics and hospitals, helping ensure healthy returns for their executives and shareholders.

Thus, Netcare, South Africas largest private hospital group, was contracted to provide eye operations. South West Oxfordshire Primary Care Trust was bullied into buying Netcares eye operations even though it already had a well-respected NHS eye hospital in Oxford. A management consultants report commissioned by the Thames Valley Strategic Health Authority, but kept secret until after the Oxfordshire contract was signed, said the NHS hospital might be destabilised by the deal; Netcare would cream off the more simple operations the hospital traditionally supplied, starving it of money and training opportunities.

The consultants also said that the Oxfordshire contract would lead to fewer developmental opportunities for NHS trusts because of reduced investment, and that this would lead to poorer services for patients. But the consultants came up with some brilliant recommendations for obviating these problems: public sector health staff could gain experience working with Netcare for free; and the NHS should hawk surplus services in Wales and Scotland.

To tempt private companies into this new market, they get higher fees per operation than the NHS, to the inevitable detriment of the latter. To take just one example, in 1999 Tony Blair opened an ambulatory care and diagnostic centre at Londons Central Middlesex Hospital, hailing the walk-in clinic as amazing and the embodiment of the new NHS. The centre is now running at half capacity and with the threat of closure hanging over its collective head. This is simply because patients are being siphoned away by the private sector.

One of the private firms to have benefited from the governments reforms is Alliance Medical. The company sells MRI scans to the health service. As a result, the NHSs own scanners are lying idle and unused. Alliance secured the £95m contract after one of the companies that part owns it, Bridgepoint Capital, hired former health secretary Alan Milburn as an adviser (Healthy lucre, Know Your Enemy, July 2004). The contract has since been widely criticised by figures within the medical establishment.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Red Pepper uncovered papers showing that the original idea for the MRI scan contract had come not from the government but Alliance itself. The only difference between the deal that Alliance finally secured and what it had at first proposed is that the company had also wanted to provide endoscopies, and ultrasound and PET/CT scans. But good things come to those who wait: now health secretary John Reid has announced plans for a £1 billion contract that would result in Alliance carrying out these services for the NHS as well.

The Best Home Secretary America Ever Had?

Alex Doherty — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 14:28:47 +0000

David Blunkett may have absconded from government, but evidence of his authoritarianism remains all over the law books. His Extradition Act 2003 is less well known than his measures for indefinite detentions, ID cards and antisocial behaviour orders, but consider the case of Babar Ahmad and you will know it is a very bad law.

Ahmad is in prison awaiting extradition to the US for alleged terrorist offences. Thanks to Blunketts extradition law, the facts that he is British, that his alleged crimes were supposed to have been committed in Britain, and that the British police have already arrested, investigated and released him without charge are no barrier to shipping him off to the US for trial there.

A computer worker from Tooting, south London, Ahmad is accused of running websites that organised support for Chechen fighters and terrorists. The US indictment clearly states that at all times material to the indictment, defendant Babar Ahmad… was a resident of the United Kingdom. The American authorities are seeking extradition simply because one website allegedly linked to Ahmad was hosted by a Connecticut internet service provider.

In December 2003 Ahmad was arrested and held for six days under anti-terror laws. Three family houses were thoroughly searched, but no charges were laid. Ahmad says he was beaten when arrested, a claim supported by a report by a London hospital consultant. Ahmad was re-arrested on the US warrant shortly after publicly protesting about his injuries. His wife said to Red Pepper: Why have the British authorities taken this so-called evidence to America? Why not charge him here? If you think youve got some evidence on him, show it to us and charge him here.

The simple fact is, the current political climate in the US means it is much easier to launch such prosecutions over there. Blunketts law has given the US authorities even more power: the right to extradite British citizens on minimal evidence just as America launched into a series of dubious prosecutions in the name of the war on terror.

Much of the evidence cited by the American authorities actually comes from the British police searches. In their extradition request, the Americans cite as evidence of terrorist activities Ahmads possession of a 1974 tourist brochure for the Empire State Building, a souvenir of a trip his father made before Ahmad was born; they also point to three books about warfare and one on Islam seized by British officers. The books are all available through Amazon.

Ahmad cannot challenge the meagre evidence on offer: under Blunketts law the US can ask for a British citizens extradition simply by showing official documents alleging a crime. British defendants have no right to ask for, or challenge, evidence before the extradition. The UK has no such right to summon Americans.

Also threatened by the new law are three NatWest bankers the US wants to be extradited for alleged involvement in the Enron fraud. But while Blunkett was happy to see Ahmad rendered to the US, one of his last acts as home secretary was to step in and ask the courts to stop the Enron extradition proceedings for further consideration. Blunkett proposed his extradition law four days after nine/11: it was clearly designed to deal with terrorists and not bankers.

Louise Christian, the solicitor who helped Ahmad obtain medical reports for claim of assault against the police, told Red Pepper that Ahmad was a victim of his own governments folly in allying itself with the extremely right-wing US administration.

Ahmads wife said: The authorities criminalised Irish people in the 1970s, then black people in the 1980s. Now they are doing the same to Muslim people. Blunketts extradition law certainly seems to hit some groups harder than others.

Messages of support can be sent to: Babar Ahmad MX5383, HMP Woodhill, Tattenhoe Street, Milton Keynes MK4 4DA, e-mail: info@freebabarahmad.com and visit: www.freebabarahmad.com, www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk, www.stoppoliticalterror.com

Don't Read All About It

jo — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 17:59:15 +0000

In July the US senate intelligence committee blamed pre-war claims about Iraqi WMD on a global failure of intelligence. The British press gave this shocking indictment front-page coverage, just as it now publicises the Iraq Survey Groups failure to find gas bombs, germ rockets or atomic weapons. But while the newspapers are right to contrast Blairs claims about Saddams weaponry with the final official verdict, they are less keen to discuss their own failures.

For the simple truth is the British media contributed to that global failure of intelligence. The Telegraph, for example, said: Saddam Hussein is hiding chemical and biological weapons supplies in mosques and hospitals. Similarly, almost a decade ago The Sunday Times ran one story for three weeks claiming Iraq was building atomic weapons; what it never reported was the fact that the UN body the International Atomic Energy Agency had declared that the documents behind the tale were faked.
But the problem with British newspapers is not just their reluctance to confess when their facts are exposed as lies; often they will refuse to look at real stories even when theyre placed under their noses.

Back in November 2000 I discovered that a firm linked to the Republican Party, ChoicePoint DBT, was hired by the state of Florida to knock ex-felons off the electoral rolls there. I found that many of those losing the right to vote were protesting that they were disenfranchised illegally. With Dubya winning Florida, and the US presidency, on a mere 537 votes, the possibility that a firm linked to his party gerrymandered the vote seemed explosive. But when I approached The Observer and The Guardian with the tale, they didnt want to know.
I think one reason why newspapers refuse to run certain stories relates to sources. In newspaper orthodoxy, the best sources are those at the top of society: the senior politicians, advisers and civil servants who know more than ordinary folk. The problem is, those at the top of society are not keen to reveal their own misbehaviour. While my story about ChoicePoint rested on openly published official documents, it did not come from a top source, and was indeed denied by such sources.

Of course, an individual, dedicated journalist can make a difference. Investigative journalist Greg Palast took the ChoicePoint story and, with huge effort, made it stand up. It is worth noting, though, that both Palast and I were involved in this story as freelances, without permanent employment on any newspaper. Newspapers dislike news that is not ready-packaged, and investigative journalism costs money. And while columnists can also be expensive, they are reliable, which explains why newspapers are awash with comment: a good columnist will churn out their 1,000 words come rain or shine; a long investigation, on the other hand, might find nothing.

I had a second lesson about sources when Saddams supposed mobile bio-weapon labs were found. The Iraqis claimed, correctly, that the vehicles were not bio-weapons vans, but trucks to inflate weather balloons for their artillery. US secretary of state Colin Powell mocked this balloon explanation, and it went unreported in Britain. I discovered, however, that the UK had exported military balloon systems to Iraq. This suggested the Iraqis were telling the truth. The Observer was interested, but not really ready to run the story until, that rare event, an inside source (one David Kelly) turned round and confirmed the vehicles were balloon, not bio-war, trucks.

Sometimes the Sunday papers act as a court of appeal for missed stories. I sold the Observer a story exposing the link between Enron and the Labour Party. I first knew that Enron funded the Labour Party because The Guardian published a list of Labours financial backers. However, while the paper listed these donors, it spent no time wondering who they were; and when I tried to interest it in the grim history of Labours newest friend the paper didnt want to know. I was more successful with The Observer, but it says a lot about the press in this country that the first exposé of the Labour-Enron link came from a freelance on the fringes of the press, not from someone working in the heart of Fleet Street.