Turn left (and then left again), It's as if the left has a self-destruct button, and can't stand being popular by Mark Steel

Mark Steel

Poor Gordon Brown has arrived at that point where his life is one long sequence of disasters. The moment Jacqui Smith left his office he probably went "Hang on, I can smell something burning. Oh no, it's the Spanish Minister of Trade, I must have pushed him onto the barbecue as I dropped a pickled onion down Jacqui's cleavage. And now a parrot's shat on my speech to the CBI."


And yet there's little sense of enthusiasm for the Tories, the way there was for Thatcher or Blair before they were elected. Instead it reminds me of kids picking teams at the start of a PE lesson, with Brown and Cameron as the last two left that no one wants, and the country muttering "Oh we'll have Cameron I suppose".


Nothing the major parties do seems to make them popular, because they both worship the ideals of the super-wealthy that have become hugely unpopular. This ought to make it an ideal time for socialists to win support for radically transforming society, in favour of the majority at the expense of the duck-island owning class. Certainly Tony Benn has become extraordinarily popular, packing huge theatres, and he'd have probably won Britain's Got Talent if he could have made a speech about the Suffragettes while playing the spoons.


But while individual socialists attract an audience, no socialist group or party could win more than a tiny vote. Whereas in Europe, new socialist groups have become credible enough to become a pole of attraction for a wide layer of people, and in Germany a group called "The Left" has quickly risen to 10 per cent in the polls.


The difference here must be partly that the left in the Labour Party are unmovable in their belief they should remain members, no matter how humiliated they become. If the next Labour leader was The Joker from Gotham City, and he sprayed the world with deadly laughing gas, the last choking gasp of the Labour left would be "Nonetheless Labour is the traditional party of socialism and I will remain loyal although I urge any survivors to raise this matter at the next constituency meeting".


But also the attempts to start new socialist groups have gone spectacularly haywire. George Galloway's Respect tore itself apart in a feud about nothing that anyone can work out, and it would have made more sense if one faction had issued a statement that they were leaving because the other lot snored. The Scottish Socialist Party achieved seven per cent of the total vote across Scotland, then went to war with itself over the issue of how to respond to the News of the World, when it accused their leader of going to a swingers' club.


It's as if the left has a self-destruct button, and can't stand being popular. The next time a socialist group appears to be doing well, they'll end their party political broadcast by saying "That's why we think you should vote for us. Now to finish, let's see what happens when I put a kitten in a microwave".


But the cheery note is that the Green Party has attained credibility while retaining its principles, and seems to be the home for many people who opposed the Iraq war, oppose the rule of bankers and private finance, and feel it might be worth looking at doing something about the fact the planet's about to melt. So I'm voting for them tomorrow, and if they implode in a petty row about nothing I'm obviously a jinx and I'm joining the bloody Tories.

First published in The Independent on 3rd June 2009

Perhaps it would be better if all MPs were sponsored...They will sit in the 'Cornhill Insurance Parliament' and swig on Lucozade by Mark Steel

Mark Steel

First published in The Independent on 20th May 2009

Can there ever have been a time when so many people were so furious? You can be walking your kids to school and the lollipop lady will say "There you go, dear, now always remember to look both ways before crossing. Unless you're an MP, in which case you DESERVE to get splattered into mush by a bloody great lorry, the thieving bastards. Have a lovely day at school, dear."


So the Speaker resigning is hardly likely to change that. News reporters get excited, gasping that this is the most dramatic event since the Battle of Hastings – but most people didn't even know who Michael Martin was. I doubt whether many people have said: "First it was Jade, then Peter and Jordan and now it's the Speaker of the Commons – well, they SAY these things come in threes."


What they are aware of is the almost admirable arrogance of the MPs who've been caught. Douglas Hogg, for example, seems utterly bemused as to why anyone would object to his expenses claim for cleaning his moat. He looks as if he's about to splutter: "Because of these shenanigens, I've had to lay off three of my archers – are you SATISFIED?"


And they make the most wonderful excuses, such as: "This situation is merely down to a mistake. I claimed for the mortgage payments on my second home because I simply forgot that I already own another house half a mile away. I'm a busy man and in these circumstances the odd bungalow easily slips the mind." Or: "Although it's true that I've been receiving payments for the last five years for a mortgage that was paid off in 1978, this was in no way due to deceit on my part, as throughout this time I've been unaware of who I am."


The elaborate nature of some of these claims are inspired. You expect the next one to go: "The MP claimed £7,000 for a carpet, and then another £9,000 for the same carpet, saying he'd employed it for nine months as his personal secretary."


But in some ways the ones who say sorry are worse. What do they mean – sorry? So they've been claiming this money for years, then suddenly they become sorry on the same day their fiddle's reported in the newspaper, well what a coincidence.


Perhaps this is a result of a strain of dyslexia, in which the sufferer mixes up the word "sorry" with the word "caught". What they mean to say is: "I'm giving back some of the money because I feel truly, truly caught."


Maybe this will be the trend, and if a burglar's caught climbing out of a window with a television, he'll say: "Doesn't this show how we have to reform this dreadful system. Look what it's made me do."


But in one sense you can see the source of the MPs' frustration. The Tories, and for the last 15 years Labour, have made it their philosophy that acquiring wealth is not only beneficial for the individuals who acquire it, it's the force that keeps society going.


They encouraged the city bonuses, congratulated the super-rich on their extravagances, and befriended characters who moved billions offshore to avoid paying tax. We would all benefit, so the politicians argued, from this gluttony.


For New Labour especially, it became almost a matter of principle to be seen enjoying wealth, as it made a statement they were no longer old-fashioned class warriors from the 1970s. And for politicians of either party, the sums emerging from their expenses claims must seem tiny. When you've helped create an environment in which Philip Green can shift over a billion pounds to Monaco to avoid tax, a couple of grand for a few chairs must seem like fiddling a bus fare.


So their solutions to the expenses system will probably be that MPs should be sponsored, so they'll sit in the "Cornhill Insurance Parliament" and promise that, during every speech, they stop to take a swig of Lucozade, then say: "Following the Minister's report on worsening relations between this country and the government of Burma, is it not the case that the Wickes bathrooms springtime sale offers prices that are crazy, crazy, crazy.


"We'd ALL wish we were under house arrest if it meant spending more time in a Wickes bath. So come on Mr Speaker, don't just say order order, say order order a Wickes bathroom today."


But the most disturbing lesson that can be taken from all this, is things must have got pretty rotten when to sort out your code of ethics you depend on the Daily bloody Telegraph.

Here's what filthy rich really means-One MP will have claimed for panda food, another for a Rembrandt by Mark Steel

Mark Steel

First published in The Independent on 13th May 2009

By now, Jacqui Smith's husband must be preparing a new apology that goes: "I am now TRULY sorry for fiddling porn films on expenses. What was I thinking of? Compared to the rest, I could have claimed for King Dong and Chesty Morgan to perform live on the lawn and not seemed out of place."

How do you top Douglas Hogg, who claimed £2,000 for the cost of clearing his moat? Presumably he thinks, "No politician can represent their constituents properly if they've got a dirty moat." Whenever there's a debate in Parliament about housing estates with squalid conditions, he must think, "Oh how dreadful, these poor blighters must make do with a communal moat."

Or Oliver Letwin, with his £2,000 claim for a pipe under a tennis court. Maybe this isn't the main issue, but why does a tennis court need a pipe under it anyway? Is he having Hawkeye installed? So he'll make a statement saying: "As a member of the Shadow Cabinet, I might be asked to entertain senior businessmen with a game of tennis, and if that was to end in a vicious fight over a disputed line call it would be highly damaging to Britain's interests."

And there's all the Hazel Blears types, who see nothing wrong in claiming that, on becoming an MP, they moved into a new residence in a litter bin, which meant the home they had been living in for 20 years was now their second home, and it was essential for their kids they employed a full-time snooker referee.

There's nothing that could now be surprising. By next week it will turn out one of them claimed for an original Rembrandt, insisting they lived under it as a second home. Another will have claimed for £20,000 of panda food, or a time machine, or £3,000 to have a light bulb changed by Elton John. David Davis, the Conservatives' former law and order spokesman, claimed £2,000 for mowing his paddocks. Maybe that's why he was so angry with teenage criminals – he was appalled by their lack of ambition. What he meant to say was: "These thugs should be ashamed of themselves. Instead of mugging people for a mobile phone they should grab them and say, 'Don't move, bruv, you're surrounded, innit. Now mow my paddock or I'll mash you up'."

And so many of these MPs have harrumphed with approval at the clampdowns on false claims for housing and invalidity benefits. They've gone along with campaigns such as "Rat on a rat" and "Benefit cheats, we're closing in". And then they object, as Luton's MP Margaret Moran did, that they had to claim for a house in Southampton (nowhere near her work) because "I can't do my job without somewhere to be with my family". So that's what to say if you're caught fiddling the dole. Tell the fraud officer you were saving up for a house in Southampton, because these days a house in Southampton is clearly a basic human necessity like toilet roll. Surely the Labour Party must set a target that by 2013 every family in Britain will have a house in Southampton.

But, of course, these people don't think they've done anything wrong because both parties now stand for the values of big business. Lord Peter Mandelson declared famously that New Labour was "relaxed about people being filthy rich". Politicians move in those circles. Their heroes are Murdoch, Branson and Berlusconi. They inhabit a world of clean moats and mowed paddocks. Bit by bit, I get the impression the way this country is run is not quite right.

How Britain wages war by John Pilger

In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the insidious militarisng of Britain as the effects of two colonial wars and the cover-up of atrocities come home.

The military has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort to barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to avoid legal scrutiny.Five photographs together break a silence. The first is of a former Gurkha regimental sergeant major, Tul Bahadur Pun, aged 87. He sits in a wheelchair outside 10 Downing Street. He holds a board full of medals, including the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery, which he won serving in the British army.

He has been refused entry to Britain and treatment for a serious heart ailment by the National Health Service: outrages rescinded only after a public campaign. On 25 June, he came to Down ing Street to hand his Victoria Cross back to the Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown refused to see him.

The second photograph is of a 12-year-old boy, one of three children. They are Kuchis, nomads of Afghanistan. They have been hit by Nato bombs, American or British, and nurses are trying to peel away their roasted skin with tweezers. On the night of 10 June, Nato planes struck again, killing at least 30 civilians in a single village: children, women, schoolteachers, students. On 4 July, another 22 civilians died like this. All, including the roasted children, are described as "militants" or "suspected Taliban". The Defence Secretary, Des Browne, says the invasion of Afghan istan is "the noble cause of the 21st century".

The third photograph is of a computer-generated aircraft carrier not yet built, one of two of the biggest ships ever ordered for the Royal Navy. The £4bn contract is shared by BAE Systems, whose sale of 72 fighter jets to the corrupt tyranny in Saudi Arabia has made Britain the biggest arms merchant on earth, selling mostly to oppressive regimes in poor countries. At a time of economic crisis, Browne describes the carriers as "an affordable expenditure".

The fourth photograph is of a young British soldier, Gavin Williams, who was "beasted" to death by three non-commissioned officers. This "informal summary punishment", which sent his body temperature to more than 41 degrees, was intended to "humiliate, push to the limit and hurt". The torture was described in court as a fact of army life.

The final photograph is of an Iraqi man, Baha Mousa, who was tortured to death by British soldiers. Taken during his post-mortem, it shows some of the 93 horrific injuries he suffered at the hands of men of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment who beat and abused him for 36 hours, including double-hooding him with hessian sacks in stifling heat. He was a hotel receptionist. Although his murder took place almost five years ago, it was only in May this year that the Ministry of Defence responded to the courts and agreed to an independent inquiry. A judge has described this as a "wall of silence".

A court martial convicted just one soldier of Mousa's "inhumane treatment", and he has since been quietly released. Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, representing the families of Iraqis who have died in British custody, says the evidence is clear - abuse and torture by the British army is systemic.

Shiner and his colleagues have witness statements and corroborations of prima facie crimes of an especially atrocious kind usually associated with the Americans. "The more cases I am dealing with, the worse it gets," he says. These include an "incident" near the town of Majar al-Kabir in 2004, when British soldiers executed as many as 20 Iraqi prisoners after mutilating them. The latest is that of a 14-year-old boy who was forced to simulate anal and oral sex over a prolonged period."At the heart of the US and UK project," says Shiner, "is a desire to avoid accountability for what they want to do. Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary renditions are part of the same struggle to avoid accountability through jurisdiction." British soldiers, he says, use the same torture techniques as the Americans and deny that the European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act and the UN Convention on Torture apply to them. And British torture is "commonplace": so much so, that "the routine nature of this ill-treatment helps to explain why, despite the abuse of the soldiers and cries of the detainees being clearly audible, nobody, particularly in authority, took any notice".

Unbelievably, says Shiner, the Ministry of Defence under Tony Blair decided that the 1972 Heath government's ban on certain torture techniques applied only in the UK and Northern Ireland. Consequently, "many Iraqis were killed and tortured in UK detention facilities". Shiner is working on 46 horrific cases.

A wall of silence has always surrounded the British military, its arcane rituals, rites and practices and, above all, its contempt for the law and natural justice in its various imperial pursuits. For 80 years, the Ministry of Defence and compliant ministers refused to countenance posthumous pardons for terrified boys shot at dawn during the slaughter of the First World War. British soldiers used as guinea pigs during the testing of nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean were abandoned, as were many others who suffered the toxic effects of the 1991 Gulf War. The treatment of Gurkha Tul Bahadur Pun is typical. Having been sent back to Nepal, many of these "soldiers of the Queen" have no pension, are deeply impoverished and are refused residence or medical help in the country for which they fought and for which 43,000 of them have died or been injured. The Gurkhas have won no fewer than 26 Victoria Crosses, yet Browne's "affordable expenditure" excludes them.

An even more imposing wall of silence ensures that the British public remains largely unaware of the industrial killing of civilians in Britain's modern colonial wars. In his landmark work Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses, the historian Mark Curtis uses three main categories: direct responsibility, indirect responsibility and active inaction."The overall figure [since 1945] is between 8.6 and 13.5 million," Curtis writes. "Of these, Britain bears direct responsibility for between four million and six million deaths. This figure is, if anything, likely to be an underestimate. Not all British interventions have been included, because of lack of data."

Since his study was published, the Iraq death toll has reached, by reliable measure, a million men, women and children.The spiralling rise of militarism within Britain is rarely acknowledged, even by those alerting the public to legislation attacking basic civil liberties, such as the recently drafted Data Com muni cations Bill, which will give the government powers to keep records of all electronic communication. Like the plans for identity cards, this is in keeping what the Americans call "the national security state", which seeks the control of domestic dissent while pursuing military aggression abroad. The £4bn aircraft carriers are to have a "global role". For global read colonial.

The Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office follow Washington's line almost to the letter, as in Browne's preposterous description of Afghanistan as a noble cause. In reality, the US-inspired Nato invasion has had two effects: the killing and dispossession of large numbers of Afghans, and the return of the opium trade, which the Taliban had banned. According to Hamid Karzai, the west's puppet leader, Britain's role in Helmand Province has led directly to the return of the Taliban.The militarising of how the British state perceives and treats other societies is vividly demonstrated in Africa, where ten out of 14 of the most impoverished and conflict-ridden countries are seduced into buying British arms and military equipment with "soft loans". Like the British royal family, the British Prime Minister simply follows the money. Having ritually condemned a despot in Zimbabwe for "human rights abuses" - in truth, for no longer serving as the west's business agent - and having obeyed the latest US dictum on Iran and Iraq, Brown set off recently for Saudi Arabia, exporter of Wahhabi fundamentalism and wheeler of fabulous arms deals.

To complement this, the Brown government is spending £11bn of taxpayers' money on a huge, privatised military academy in Wales, which will train foreign soldiers and mercenaries recruited to the bogus "war on terror". With arms companies such as Raytheon profiting, this will become Britain's "School of the Americas", a centre for counter-insurgency (terrorist) training and the design of future colonial adventures.

It has had almost no publicity.Of course, the image of militarist Britain clashes with a benign national regard formed, wrote Tolstoy, "from infancy, by every possible means - class books, church services, sermons, speeches, books, papers, songs, poetry, monuments [leading to] people stupefied in the one direction". Much has changed since he wrote that. Or has it? The shabby, destructive colonial war in Afghanistan is now reported almost entirely through the British army, with squaddies always doing their Kipling best, and with the Afghan resistance routinely dismissed as "outsiders" and "invaders". Pictures of nomadic boys with Nato-roasted skin almost never appear in the press or on television, nor the after-effects of British thermobaric weapons, or "vacuum bombs", designed to suck the air out of human lungs. Instead, whole pages mourn a British military intelligence agent in Afghanis tan, because she happens to have been a 26-year-old woman, the first to die in active service since the 2001 invasion.Baha Mousa, tortured to death by British soldiers, was also 26 years old. But he was different. His father, Daoud, says that the way the Ministry of Defence has behaved over his son's death convinces him that the British government regards the lives of others as "cheap". And he is right.

In the cause of fear and ignorance by John Pilger

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes another Britain: "a vicious, sectarian and mostly unreported war" against Muslims.

People snatched from the homes following 9/11 are consigned to a Kafkaesque oblivion, and worse.The British lawyer Gareth Peirce, celebrated for her defence of miscarriage of justice victims, wrote recently: “Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill’, the use of torture... brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions were taken, remained ignorant.”

Referring to the conflict in Northern Ireland, she was drawing a comparison with “our new suspect community”, people of Muslim faith, against whom a vicious, sectarian and mostly unreported war is well under way.

As Peirce points out, “internment, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland”, now allows, not 42 days, but the “indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him”. Those snatched from their homes in Britain following 11 September 2001 have all but vanished into an Anglo-American gulag, which in this country joins Belmarsh Prison, where people are consigned to oblivion, with Broadmoor psychiatric prison, where they are sent as they go mad, and with Kafkaesque versions of “home” where others are interred under “control orders”.

One such home prisoner, wrote Peirce, “a man without arms, was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact anyone without committing a criminal offence, subject to a curfew and allowed no visits unless approved in advance by the Home Office”. Going into the garden, arranging a plumber, speaking to a child’s teacher, all require permission. The families go mad, too.

Preferring “a quick death... to a slow death here”, one man who took a risk and returned to Algeria has been lost in the subcontracted gulag, where his new torturers have given the British government “assurances” and are themselves reassured by the fact that BP, the ethical oil company, has sunk £6bn into getting oil out of Algeria’s southern Sahara. Jordan, another subcontractor, is held economically afloat by the US so George W Bush’s “renditions” and torture can proceed there. No British court has found any of these people guilty of any crime, but as Tony Blair, a genuine prima facie criminal, put it so well, “the rules of the game have changed”.

As in the Irish conflict, it is again the ignorance of us, the public, upon which the state relies. All propaganda is directed at honing this ignorance and fabricating a fear. This is primarily the task of journalists. True fear is in Muslim communities. Visit them and you will find people terrified by your knock on the door, and women who now never go out. In effect, control orders have been served on thousands of British citizens.

As Peirce reminds us, the Irish had allies in the Catholic Church and the 40 million Americans of Irish descent; Muslims are alone as they watch the British state, with its “obstinate incomprehension” of their faith, do to them as it would never do to those of other faiths. You can’t imagine Jews treated this way; the profanity is too great. The silence of British Jews, who have the history, is also great.

As the suppressed facts of “terrorism” show, Muslims are by far the most numerous victims – up to a million Iraqis dead, including 500,000 infants, during “sanctions” against Iraq in the 1990s; perhaps another million dead when Blair and his mentor ignited the current inferno; countless killed and maimed in Afghanistan by weapons that include the British thermobaric bomb, designed to suck the air out of human beings. And there is Palestine, an entire nation under a permanent control order.

Reviewing this monstrous record, it is no less than amazing that the world’s most violent governments – Britain is now the world’s leading arms merchant – have sustained only two retaliations on their home soil. With every hypocritical act, they beckon another. Moreover, wrote Gareth Peirce, “If our government continues on [this destructive] path, we will ultimately have destroyed much of the moral and legal fabric of the society that we claim to be protecting.

The choice and the responsibility are entirely ours.”Was it like this for the Irish? by Gareth Peirce, London Review of Books.

This Government Has Been the Most Rightwing Since the Second World War by George Monbiot

The prospect of a Tory in No 10 does worry me — but no more so than another term for this cabinet of war criminals

You can hear the wringing of hands and tearing of cloth all the way down Farringdon Road. Dismayed by the local election results, convinced that Labour will be crushed in Thursday’s byelection, afraid that this will presage disaster in the next general election, my fellow columnists are predicting the end of the civilised world. But I can’t understand why we should care.

Yes, I worry about what the Tories might do if they get in. I also worry about what Labour might do if it wins another term. Why should anyone on the left seek the re-election of the most rightwing government Britain has had since the second world war?

New Labour’s apologists keep reminding us of the redistributive policies it has introduced: Sure Start children’s centres, reductions in child poverty, raising the school leaving age, the national minimum wage, flexible hours for parents and carers, better conditions for part-time workers, the decent homes programme, free museums, more foreign aid. All these are real achievements and deserve to be celebrated. But the catalogue of failures, backsliding and outright destruction is much longer and more consequential.

One fact alone should disqualify this government from office: we have a cabinet of war criminals. The Nuremberg tribunal characterised a war of aggression as “the supreme international crime”. It is not just that Britain’s Labour government launched and sustained an unprovoked war, it also sabotaged all means of achieving a peaceful resolution. In April 2002 it helped the Bush administration to sack José Bustani, the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, in order to prevent him settling the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. In two separate offers before the invasion, Saddam Hussein agreed to meet the terms the US and Britain were demanding. But they slapped him down and concealed his offers from their electorates. (All references are on my website.)

Cluster bombs can be legally used because the British government helped to block an international ban in 2006: it is still holding out against an outright ban at the current talks in Dublin. The government has undermined another international peace agreement — the nuclear non-proliferation treaty — by deciding to renew the Trident missile programme. It was the first administration to announce a policy of pre-emptive nuclear attack: even the great nuclear enthusiast Harold Macmillan never went this far. In 2007 the defence secretary, without parliamentary debate, revealed that the US would be allowed to use the listening station at Menwith Hill for its missile defence system.

Labour appears to be prepared to meet any demand the Bush administration makes, however outrageous. In 2003 the government signed a one-sided extradition treaty, permitting the US to extract our citizens without producing prima facie evidence of an offence. In the same year the defence secretary announced that he would restructure the British armed forces to make them “inter-operable” with those of the United States, ensuring for the first time in British history that they became functionally subordinate to those of another sovereign power.

Labour’s foreign policy is as unethical as Margaret Thatcher’s. It provides military aid to the government of Colombia, whose troops are involved in a campaign of terror against the civilian population. It granted an open licence for weapons exports to the government of Uzbekistan, and sacked the British ambassador when he tried to draw attention to the regime’s human rights abuses. It has collaborated with the US programme of extra-judicial kidnapping and imprisonment, left our citizens to languish in Guantánamo Bay, and made use of Pakistani torture chambers in seeking to extract testimony from British suspects. Until 2005 it tied its foreign aid programme to the privatisation of public utilities in some of the world’s poorest countries. Last year it held out against reform of the International Monetary Fund’s unfair allocation of votes.

The proportion of the British population in prison has risen by a fifth since the Tories left office. Today Britain locks up 151 out of every 100,000 people. The Chinese judiciary, by contrast, which is notorious for its willingness to bang up anyone and everyone, jails 119 people per 100,000; Burma imprisons 120; Saudi Arabia 132. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, passed in 2005, contains clauses that permit the police to ban any demonstration, however peaceful. It is one of a long series of bills the Labour government has passed that restrict the right to protest.

The citizen has been re-regulated; business has been deregulated. Last year deaths caused by serious injuries at work rose by 11%: a predictable result of the sacking of 1,000 staff at the Health & Safety Executive and a 24% reduction in workplace inspections. In 2006 the government instructed the Serious Fraud Office to drop its corruption case against the arms manufacturer BAE Systems. It has obstructed efforts by other states to investigate the company.

Labour has shifted taxation from the rich to the poor, cutting corporation tax from 33% to 28% and capital gains tax from 40% to 18%, and introducing a new entrepreneurs’ relief scheme, taxing the first million of capital gains at just 10%. It tried to raise the income tax paid by the poorest earners from 10% to 20%. Labour has lifted the inheritance tax threshold from £300,000 to £700,000, and maintained the cap on the highest rates of council tax. While vigorously prosecuting benefits cheats, it has allowed tax avoidance, mostly by the very rich, to reach an estimated £41bn. Inequality today is slightly worse than it was when Labour took power in 1997 (the Gini coefficient which measures it has risen from 0.33 to 0.35).

Both as chancellor and prime minister, Gordon Brown has forced the private finance initiative into almost all public services. His privatisation schemes have crept into places where the Conservative government never dared to tread. Labour has waged war against our planning system and overseen a disastrous decline in social housing: under Thatcher an average of 46,600 social homes were built every year; under Tony Blair the average was 17,300. Labour is closing post offices, small schools and GPs’ surgeries, while overseeing a doubling of airport capacity and the construction of 4,000km of trunk roads. These developments ensure that even the modest targets in the climate change bill are likely to be missed. Carbon dioxide pollution fell faster under the Conservatives than under Labour.

Above all, the Labour government has destroyed hope. It has put into practice Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” to a market fundamentalism that subordinates human welfare to the demands of business. Labour has created a political monoculture that kills voters’ enthusiasm, and has delayed electoral reforms that would have given smaller parties an opportunity to be heard. All we are left with is fear: the fear that this awful government might be replaced by something slightly worse. Fear has destroyed the Labour party, but people keep supporting it in trepidation of letting the other side win.

Save this government? I would sooner give money to the Malarial Mosquito Conservation Project. Of all the causes leftist thinkers might support, New Labour must be the least deserving.
monbiot.com

Published on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 by The Guardian/UK

Destroying The Best In Britian by John Pilger

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the New Labour government is destroying one of the the venerable features of "communal decency" in Britain - the local post office.

Economies need to be made, though not in the pursuit of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.When I first came to live in Britain, much of ordinary life was premised on a sense of community. It was mostly undeclared; occasionally, it would become vivid, even heroic. Watching Durham miners, defeated but unbowed by hunger and debt, march back to the pit in 1985, led by their women, was a glimpse of Britain at its best. In spite of Thatcher and Blair, that communal decency survives, though you may have to look for it. A good place to look is a local post office.

Local post offices, from the Highlands to the Pennines to the inner cities, are where precious parcels begin their epic journey to the other side of the world, and pensions, income support, child benefit and Incapacity Benefit are drawn, and Freedom Passes are issued, along with Lottery tickets and Mars Bars. I often walk down to my local post office just to browse, watching the kindness that Shailesh and Smita Patel hand out to the elderly, the awkward, the inarticulate, the harried. If an elderly person has failed to turn up on pension day, he or she will get a visit from Smita, with groceries. Smita has been doing this for most of 20 years.

Their post office, in Abbeville Road, Clapham, is one of 169 London branches due to close in May. That is a fifth of all post offices in the capital. Some 2,500 post offices are expected to be shut in Britain by the end of 2009. This includes rural and remote areas, where the post office is quite literally the heart of a community. The Patels in Abbeville Road have had just six weeks to mount a campaign. They have collected 4,500 signatures and packed a local church hall. My neighbours have little doubt about what will happen to "Abbeville Village" if the post office's shutters come down.

A proposed betting shop is Lambeth Council's idea of community - or yet another estate agent.The whole wilful destruction is a new Labour classic and shows why, in a nutshell, even the ever faithful have turned on them. Having already closed 6,000 post offices since it came to power in 1997, more than any other government, it issues press releases saying it wants to "help the Post Office modernise, restore profitability... invest in new products and look at innovative ways to deliver services". We know what this means.

It was left to a member of the Scottish Parliament, Fergus Ewing, to say it: "Senior management are preparing the ground for a huge sell-off of the postal service."Note the way they are doing it. For each branch marked for closure, the six-week "consultation process" is so "shrouded in secrecy", says Peter Luff, chairman of the Commons business, enterprise and regulatory reform committee, "that by the time it gets to a public consultation stage, the decision on a Post Office branch is a fait accompli".

When Royal Mail managers faced a public meeting off Abbeville Road, they got their facts wrong about the services provided by the local branch, and they seemed to have no idea of its cost base. Neither could they explain why the alternatives were post offices themselves marked for closure. Their chief executive, Adam Crozier, is the man responsible for cancelling the second mail delivery and introducing inept "flexible" work practices that have demoralised what was once the most loyal workforce in the country. For this, he saw his pay package rise by 26 per cent to £1.25m last year. That is £1,000 for every hour and 27 minutes he is seated at his desk.
The "S-word" is subsidy. While new Labour is happy to subsidise Crozier's fortune, a failed bank, colonial bloodbaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and a culpably useless Trident nuclear weapon system costing up to £20bn, it refuses to subsidise a true public service that costs, in relative terms, peanuts.

On 19 March, just 20 Labour MPs voted against the government on a motion calling for a delay in closure of post offices. My local, Labour MP, Keith Hill, made a speech in which he called Abbeville Road post office a "lifeline of human contact". He also called it "one of that 30 per cent minority of profit-making, commercially viable post offices", which he compared favourably with those post offices providing only a public service. He was not against closing branches, he said, but it "makes no sense" if they made a profit.

Charles Darwin would have understood the logic.

Power Can't Shape Truth Forever, New Labour is Dead By TARIQ ALI

New Labour has suffered a crushing defeat. The Blair project of promoting and implementing right-wing policies in the knowledge that traditional working class voters would remain solid died on 1 May 2008. Labour’s vote in the local elections in dropped to 24 percent, a point below the Liberal Democrats

and twenty points less than the Conservatives (44 percent). Given the scale of the catstrophe, It seems unlikely that Gordon Brown can win the next general election.

Awestruck by Margaret Thatcher, Blair and Brown aped her achievements within their own party, squeezing old social-democratic ideas out of themselves, drop by drop. They were all market fundamentalists now. Deregulation and privatisation became a mantra and over the last ten years the social divide in the country between rich and poor increased more than even under Thatcher. Redistribution of wealth was no longer on Labour’s agenda.

As the market suffered a series of shocks---the collapse of a debt-ridden British bank, Northern Rock, led to state intervention in the form of nationalisation. No lessons were learnt. Helping the rich by further tax-cuts, abandoning (under pressure from the Financial Times) plans to tax non-domiciled billionaires symbolised the regime. The neo-liberal model atomised social and political life, weakened democratic accountability and drastically reduced the margins of reformist possibilities within the system. After 9/11 civil liberties were seriously eroded. A fdew weeks ago Brown and his ministers were arguing for increasing the detention of suspects to 42-days without trial. The Conservatives and police chiefs opposed this as draconian.

The British electoral system helped to conceal the relentless ebbing of popular support for the Blairite agenda. No longer. The New Labour Emperor is now revealed without any clothes. Power can shape ‘truth’, but not forever. That is the lesson of the New Labour defeat.

In London the choice was clear. . A Conservative celebrity who carefully cultivates an ultra-reactionary image, Boris Johnson, is a star of TV comedy shows. Given the way that politics has gone to the dogs in so many parts of the democratic world, its hardly surprising that celebrity status and wealth have taken centre stage. A somewhat pathetic and ineffectual ex-policeman stood for the Liberal Democrats or Ken Livingstone, the Labour candidate. Even though Livingstone first won as an independent against New Labour, he subsequently made his peace with Blair and rejoined the party, while preserving an independent stance on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and developing his own foreign policy by inviting Hugo Chavez to visit London.

The elections for the Mayor of London reflected the national mood. That Livingstone made mistakes is obvious. The biggest error was not in receiving an eccentric Muslim cleric and annjoying the right-wing press, but re-entering the Labour fold. The basis of his popularity had rested on the fact that he was not a confected New Labour politician. The fact that margin of his defeat appears to be less than the national average reflected this fact, but was not enough to save him. The official result has yet to be declared, but New Labour commentators on TV have accepted defeat. He suffered because he was associated with an unpopular New Labour government. Had he remained an independent and lacerated the Blair and Brown regimes, instead of being photographed with them he would have been home and dry.

A city in which 70% of the citizens oppose the British presence in Iraq will now be represented by a pro-war mayor. Who cares if a million Iraqis have died since the occupation of their country, three million have become refugees and millions in that suffering country face the most horrendous conditions in their everyday lives. Anything associated with New Labour was punished.

Tariq Ali’s memoir Streetfighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties is published by Verso.

from CounterPunch