Dispatch from London-City of Disappearances By IAIN A. BOAL

"We've been sold down the river", said one of the draymen, "right down the fucking Wandle." The closing of Young's brewery in Wandsworth in 2006 was a milestone in the march of gentrification across post-Big Bang London. "A humiliating, downright cry-in-your-beer travesty", in the words of one local, whose bulletin from the left bank of the Wandle ended with this indelible lament: "When a particularly juvenile men's magazine article challenged British breweries to organize a piss up, some breweries laid on rock 'n' roll bands...another had fish and chips delivered by limousine. Young's response was to lock us in their small, secret bar in an old stable at the back of the Ram Brewery and give us free Ram and Special until we had to stop. Their point being: this is Wandsworth, we don't do bollocks, we do beer. Not any more."

Well, just across the river, they still do any more. At the old Griffin brewery. A bit of a surprise, since Chiswick is sinking under the weight of Chelsea tractors, real estate agents and yellow dumpsters. The Griffin somehow survives on the original site at the west end of Chiswick Mall, near the Hogarth roundabout, where Fuller Ales have been brewed since 1845. I recently returned for a visit.

I first lived in London in the mid-late sixties, at the other end of Chiswick Mall. My lodgings were a garret at 16 Hammersmith Terrace. It was the home of the Zvegintzovs, Mischa and Diana. Mischa's father had been an Octobrist and president of the fourth Duma; he was killed on the Galician front in 1915. The Zvegintzov family were enemies of the Tzarist state but as epitomes of Russian parliamentary liberalism they had to flee the Bolsheviks. They eventually reached London via Finland and Sweden. The young Mischa was turned into an English gent by way of Winchester College and Corpus Christi, Oxford. There were limits, mind you - his old school chums insisted on calling him "Zog". He took a job as a research chemist at the Gas Light and Coke company. In 1940 he joined Political Intelligence and ended the war as Director-General of the German Chemical Industry in the British zone. Back in austerity Britain he became a pioneer of food processing for Unilever. When I knew him, he had retired but was energetically leading the agitation for a Thames barrage. Not from any premonition of Arctic meltdown, but because the Thames is tidal at Chiswick and floods daily over the Mall. Indeed when spring tides coincided with cyclonic low pressure and a strong nor'easter, the gardens and basements of Hammersmith Terrace were likely to be under water.

From the high windows of No. 16, one could look east to the ironwork of Joseph Bazaglette's Hammersmith Bridge, a Victorian baroque structure which was seriously underbuilt and hence the target of three separate IRA bomb teams. First in 1939, when Maurice Childs, a local hairdresser walking home late at night across the bridge, noticed smoke and sparks coming from a suitcase. He opened it to find a bomb inside, which he chucked into the river. The explosion sent up a 60ft column of water.

Beyond the bridge, on the Barn Elms reach, one could just see the roof of Harrod's massive furniture depository (long before Mohamed Al Fayed flogged it to the property development arm of Bahrain International Bank for stockbroker apartments) and I used to watch flocks of geese on their glide path towards the reservoirs along Castlenau. Through the window, when the wind was from the west, the astringent smell of hops and mashed barley drifted down from the Griffin brewery. Through the wall, no matter what the wind, came the sound of the New Zealand Ladies Massed Choir, accompanied by Mischa and Diana's son, who had a voice like Chaucer's pardoner. He passed his days listening to antipodean sacred music, captured in a collection of vintage 78s which he played on an ancient HMV gramophone. To this day, his thin piping descant mingles in my mind with the other music that filled my nights that year. Not that he had the remotest interest in the new sounds emerging from the Hammersmith Odeon, the World's End, and the Troubador at Redcliffe Gardens, thanks to John Mayall, Alexis Korner, Stevie Winwood, John Renbourn and co. All virtually within earshot, owing to recent developments at the Marshall Amplifier Company.

When I reached the river, the tide was on the turn and Chiswick Mall glistened with a film of Thames sludge. The scene at Upper and Lower Mall was remarkably unchanged, though Hammersmith Terrace had sprouted a fresh crop of blue plaques. Under New Labor, the heritage industry has been hard at work commemorating this radical corner of the book world. Edward Johnson the master calligrapher lived for a while at No. 3, the typographer Emery Walker at No.7, May Morris next door at No. 8. Her father William lived a few yards away at 26 Upper Mall, Kelmscott House, from which he sallied forth to harangue the proletarians of the Hammersmith Socialist League. His neighbor and fellow socialist, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, was a burned-out barrister whom Janey Morris thought capable of something therapeutic with his hands. And so the Doves Bindery and Press came about, first at 15 Upper Mall and later at 1 Hammersmith Terrace. One night in 1915, as blood flowed at the second Battle of Ypres, Cobden-Sanderson, by then a burned-out bookbinder, threw all the Doves type (from which the Kelmscott Chaucer and Bible were composed) off Hammersmith Bridge, to spite his old partner Emery Walker. The business closed down soon after. But not before he had trained an apprentice, the New Town utopian, Douglas "Care of Books" Cockerell, whose own son Sydney Cockerell in turn took on an apprentice, Gillian Cartwright-Allen, who became my life companion.

T.J. named the Doves Bindery after the neighboring pub at 19 Upper Mall. The Doves was a coffee house in the eighteenth century, but lately - since 1796 - has been serving Fuller's beer. When I was a frequenter of the Dove (it turned singular sometime in the early 20th century) hot food was an unthinkable accompaniment to a pint of London Pride. You could get a bag of crisps (blue touchpaper twist of salt included) or if you were lucky a "Ploughman's Lunch". It sounded like a primordial birthright, but was actually a high marketing concept invented in 1960 by Richard Trehane, chairman of the English Country Cheese Council. It consisted of a lump of cheddar, a crust of bread and some Branston pickle. Today the Dove is a designated "gastro pub", with a two-page menu and a wide selection of organic vegetables picked at dawn, prepared by virgins. Eat your heart out, Trehane.

I crossed over Hammersmith Bridge, and down the steps to the gravel riverside path - pot-holed and ragged and miraculously unimproved. A rus in urbe experience, vouchsafed no doubt only by savage cuts in public works maintenance. The water lapped close to the boathouses at Putney Hard, and over a pint of Dog's Knob Bitter at the Duke's Head I pondered the fragility of this riverscape and the coming deluge. The Thames barrage will soon enough seem like a pathetic finger in the dyke.

From outside the Duke's Head I could see the tower of St Mary's Church, at the foot of Putney High Street. St Mary's was my destination, for an evening of 17th century secular music. Last year there was a poll of Guardian readers, who were asked to nominate the neglected event in Britain's radical past that best deserves a proper monument. Unexpectedly they chose the "Putney debates" over other potential candidates, such as Bodmin parish church in Cornwall, scene of the 1549 Prayer Book rebellion; the 1819 Peterloo massacre site in Manchester; Queen's Square, Bristol, site of the reform riots of 1831; Discovery House in east London, centre of the Poplar rate dispute of 1921; the Orgreave coking plant in Yorkshire, symbol of the 1984 miners' strike.

The Putney debates took place in the late autumn of 1647 in St Mary's Church, the home base of Oliver Cromwell's chaplain Hugh Peters who preached fiery sermons there on the edge of the Thames. (He was also one of the founders of Harvard University, a role he has come to regret.) The debates culminated in the execution of Charles 1, the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, and the institution of the 11-year English Republic. In the words of Geoffrey Robertson's introduction to a new edition of The Putney Debates (Verso, 2007): "From its first ascendancy here at St Mary's, there may be traced the acceptance - centuries later in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and now in two-thirds of the nations of the world - of the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens, irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth."

On the eve of the 360th anniversary of the debates, Tristram Hunt, historian and New Labor apparatchik, reminded Guardian readers (G2, October 26, 2007) of the events they had voted to commemorate:

By summer 1647, the Roundheads were winning the English civil war. At Marston Moor and Naseby, Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army had crushed the Cavaliers and King Charles I himself was now in custody. But among the victorious soldiers there was a gnawing fear that parliament and the army generals (or "grandees") were preparing to sell them out. Some MPs, fearing the religious militancy of the army and keen for a settlement with the king, wanted to cut soldiers' pay, disband regiments, refuse indemnity for war damage and pack them off to Ireland. Most loathsome of all, they also looked set to betray the religious and political ideals the New Model Army had spent the previous five years fighting for. "We were not a mere mercenary army hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state, but called forth ... to the defence of the people's just right and liberties," the soldiers complained. The Levellers in the Cromwell's regiments demanded religious toleration ("The ways of God's worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human power"); a general amnesty and an end to conscription; a system of laws that must be "no respecter of persons but apply equally to everyone: there must be no discrimination on grounds of tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth or place"; regular, two-yearly parliaments and an equal distribution of MPs' seats by number of inhabitants.

With Oliver Cromwell in the chair, the general council of the New Model Army came together at Putney church, in October 1647, to argue the case for a transparent, democratic state free from the taint of parliamentary or courtly corruption. It proved to be one of the greatest intellectual encounters in western political thought. What was first of all remarkable was the active involvement of rank and file soldiery. And it is thanks to the shorthand notes of the army secretary, William Clarke, that 360 years on we get to hear their political theory. "Never again, even up to today, have private soldiers been allowed to question their officers," as one Guardian reader remarked during the competition.

On the second day of the debates, after a good five-hour prayer session, the soldiers focused on the question of the franchise. Who had the right to vote? For the Levellers, the answer was clear: all those who placed themselves under government should have the right to elect it. The vote was a natural right, irrespective of property or position. "I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he," in the celebrated words of Colonel Rainsborough, "and therefore ... every man that is to live under a government ought first, by his own consent, to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under."

The wealthy, socially conservative grandees were horrified by this spectre of egalitarian democracy. To their minds, it presaged anarchy and corruption with wealthy politicians able to buy up the votes of the uneducated, dependent masses. Instead, Cromwell's son-in-law, Henry Ireton, proposed that the franchise be limited to those with a "fixed local interest", that is, the independent, propertied sort. For Rainsborough, such a solution was a wretched betrayal of the civil war sacrifice. "I would fain know what we have fought for: for our laws and liberties? (Yet) this is the old law that enslaves the people of England - that they should be bound by laws in which they have no voice at all!" In the end, they reached a compromise that the vote should be granted to all adult males - excluding servants, apprentices, foreigners, beggars and, obviously, women.

The debates then went on to discuss how to deal with the problem of Charles I. And it was during those chilly autumn days, in the pews of Putney, that the mood hardened against that "man of blood" King Charles and a deadly momentum developed to put him on trial for high treason. The road to the English republic - that epic moment in these islands' history - flowed downstream from Putney to parliament.

Given such subversive sentiments, it was unsurprising that Clarke's shorthand manuscript (subscribed into long hand after the Restoration) was kept hidden. Many of the ideas expressed at Putney - liberty of conscience; a government dependent upon the sovereign will of the people; equality before the law - would, via the ministrations of John Locke, make their way into American political thought and the US constitution. But in Britain these philosophies remained buried late into the 19th century until the Clarke Papers were finally unearthed in Worcester College, Oxford, by the historian CH Firth.

Tuesday's recital of 17th century music was part of a week of events at St Mary's - drama, readings, reenactments, dialogues - challenging establishment amnesia and official history whereby the phrase "English Republic" cannot even be pronounced and the years 1649-60 are rendered in Latin for the sake of decency. Never mind the gap, children, it was only an interregnum, viz., a regrettable hiccup in the glorious pageant of the British monarchy. So this project joins the great works of recovery and levelling - Christopher Hill's pioneering reinterpretation in The World Turned Upside Down, Kevin Brownlow's film Winstanley, Caryl Churchill's play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many Headed Hydra.

Further down the Thames, on the other side of London, some major levelling of quite another kind has begun. On Saturday I cycled from Shepherds Bush to Hackney Wick to take a look at the future scene of the London Olympics. In the last two months an 11-kilometer cyanide blue fence has been erected around a vast swathe of the East End. The Wandsworth brewery would be swallowed up unnoticed in the vast new building site being prepared for three weeks of calisthenics in 2012. The inhabitants of the Blue Zone have all been evicted; fifteen families of travellers who settled at Clays Lane in 1971 were the last to go, earlier this month, not because they refused to leave but because the date of departure set for them by the Olympics Delivery Authority (in charge of "land assembly") was postponed eleven times.

When the chief executive of the ODA claimed that the purpose of the Wall was "not to separate communities but to protect them", one local had this to say: "This is exactly what the East German authorities said when the Berlin Wall was constructed. What could you possibly be building that you need to protect the people on the outside of that wall? You're simply afraid that us we'll sneak in and start half-inching all your equipment."

I was only able to grasp the scale of the thing after climbing to the 19th floor of a high-rise block off Carpenter's Road, at the invitation of a Jamaican pensioner I'd met in the moribund Stratford Arms, a pub suddenly cut off from passing trade by the blue barrier. I cycled northwest along the deserted Hackney Navigation canal in the hope of finding a gap in the perimeter. There weren't even any viewing ports. Eventually I came across an active works entrance where a platoon of security guards were on weekend duty. They were friendly enough, but got serious when I attempted to finesse my way past. I hung around and photographed them inspecting a heavy goods vehicles on its way into "Olympic Park". One of the goons threatened to seize my plastic Boots camera. "It's throwaway, right, squire?" Right.

I headed further north, beyond the Hackney Cut. Apart from one trip long ago to the old Lea Valley Cycle Circuit, now on the wrong side of the fence and under the jackhammer, this was a landscape I'd only read about. I was entering Iain Sinclair territory, the world of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, and Downriver, his playground of weird connections. Sinclair's psychogeographical fictions have recently got up the nose of John Barker. He accuses Sinclair of giving comfort to the colonizers of East London by making the old docklands exciting and safe for the modern bourgeois with a taste for the off-beat. Mind you, Barker seems even more angry at the sterilizing of his favourite Hackney pubs, which used to cater to the goths and mohicans of the anti-capitalist movement and where the craic was fierce and wild.

I had no intention of getting between Sinclair and Barker, or romancing the Hackney Marshes and the River Lea. I was just aiming to get a feel for the Blue Zone, so that I could compare London's new enclosures with the social cleansing also under way in Delhi (for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, a kind of Olympics lite) and now more or less complete in Beijing (ready for next year's Olympics). I would like to understand the evolution of these sportscapes, which are microcosms of spatial form and urban dispossession under capitalist modernity. They have a direct connection to Hitler's clearances in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, and to land grabs under the cover of Expos and World's Fairs.

That deeper history of London's transformation got an airing last Friday night at the launch of the paperback edition of London: City of Disappearances, compiled by - who else - Iain Sinclair: " Alongside the London of noise and celebrity is that other city: of the dead, the unvoiced, the erased...and urban myths with more blood and vigour than the contemporary cartoons of manufactured notoriety." A gathering of weird old England, organized by Penned in the Margins, assembled in the great hall of the Bishopsgate Institute behind Liverpool Street Station. We were witness to a rare urban excursion by the Northampton magus of the graphic novel, Alan Moore. He was in conversation with the anarchist pasticheur Michael Moorcock - sometime Hawkwind librettist, lambaster of Heinlein and C.S. Lewis, the anti-Tolkien, and author of barrowloads of fantasy, most recently The Metatemporal Detective. There was also a reading by the performance artist Brian Catling, although poor acoustics and a uvular delivery combined to obscure his drift. On the other hand, Kirsten Norrie of the low-tech poetics group The Wolf in Winter, galvanized the company with her astonishing vocal improvisation. Using a looper meant for guitar, with a 14 second record time, she built up layers of sound in real time...a solo massed choir.

A sound, it occurs to me, that might have tempted even Zvegintzov fils down from his garret.

Iain Boal is a historian of technics and the commons, a member of the Retort collective, and co-author of Resisting the Virtual Life and Afflicted Powers. He can be reached at: boal@sonic.net

from CounterPunch

Blair's legacy: from liberalism to Murdochracy by John Pilger

In an article for the Guardian, John Pilger writes that in Britain, after more than a decade of the New Labour "project", once noble terms such as democracy, reform, even freedom, have been emptied of their true meaning and replaced by a murdochracy.

The former Murdoch retainer Andrew Neil has described James Murdoch, the heir apparent, as a "social liberal". What strikes me is his casual use of "liberal" for the new ruler of an empire devoted to the promotion of war, conquest and human division. Neil's view is not unusual. In the murdochracy that Britain has largely become, once noble terms such as democracy, reform, even freedom itself, have long been emptied of their meaning. In the years leading to Tony Blair's election, liberal commentators vied in their Tonier-than-thou obeisance to such a paragon of "reborn liberalism". In these pages in 1995, Henry Porter celebrated an almost mystical politician who "presents himself as a harmoniser for all the opposing interests in British life, a conciliator of class differences and tribal antipathies, a synthesiser of opposing beliefs". Blair was, of course, the diametric opposite.

As events have demonstrated, Blair and the cult of New Labour have destroyed the very liberalism millions of Britons thought they were voting for. This truth is like a taboo and was missing almost entirely from last week's Guardian debate about civil liberties. Gone is the bourgeoisie that in good times would extend a few rungs of the ladder to those below. From Blair's pseudo-moralising assault on single parents a decade ago to Peter Hain's recent attacks on the disabled, the "project" has completed the work of Thatcher and all but abolished the premises of tolerance and decency, however amorphous, on which much of British public life was based. The trade-off has been mostly superficial "social liberalism" and the highest personal indebtedness on earth. In 2007, reported the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the United Kingdom faced the highest levels of inequality for 40 years, with the rich getting richer and the poor poorer and more and more segregated from society. The International Monetary Fund has designated Britain a tax haven, and corruption and fraud in British business are almost twice the global average, while Unicef reports that British children are the most neglected and unhappiest in the "rich" world.

Abroad, behind a facade of liberal concern for the world's "disadvantaged", such as waffle about millennium goals and anti-poverty stunts with the likes of Google and Vodafone, the Brown government, together with its EU partners, is demanding vicious and punitive free-trade agreements that will devastate the economies of scores of impoverished African, Caribbean and Pacific nations. In Iraq, the blood-letting of a "liberal intervention" may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, while the British occupiers have made no real attempt to help the victims of their lawlessness. And putting out more flags will not cover the shame. "The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30% compared to the Saddam Hussein era," says Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at Basra children's hospital. In January nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then international development secretary, describing how children were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations under UN security resolution 1483. He refused to see them.

Even if a contortion of intellect and morality allows the interventionists to justify these actions, the same cannot be said for liberties eroded at home. These are too much part of the myth that individual freedom was handed down by eminent liberal gentlemen instead of being fought for at the bottom. Yet rights of habeas corpus, of free speech and assembly, and dissent and tolerance, are slipping away, undefended. Whole British communities now live in fear of the police. The British are distinguished as one of the most spied upon people in the world. A grey surveillance van with satellite tracking sits outside my local Sainsbury's. On the pop radio station Kiss 100, the security service MI5 advertises for ordinary people to spy on each other. These are normal now, along with the tracking of our intimate lives and a system of secretive justice that imposes 18-hour curfews on people who have not been charged with any crime and are denied the "evidence". Hundreds of terrified Iraqi refugees are sent back to the infinite dangers of the country "we" have destroyed. Meanwhile, the cause of any real civil threat to Britons has been identified and confirmed repeatedly by the intelligence services. It is "our" continuing military presence in other people's countries and collusion with a Washington cabal described by the late Norman Mailer as "pre-fascist". When famous liberal columnists wring their hands about the domestic consequences, let them look to their own early support for such epic faraway crimes.

In broadcasting, a prime source of liberalism and most of our information, the unthinkable has been normalised. The murderous chaos in Iraq is merely internecine. Indeed, Bush's "surge" is "working". The holocaust there has nothing to do with "us". There are honourable exceptions, of course, as there are in those great liberal storehouses of knowledge, Britain's universities; but they, too, are normalised and left to natter about "failed states" and "crisis management" - when the cause of the crisis is on their doorstep. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, for the first time in two centuries almost no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist is prepared to question the foundations of western actions, let alone interrupt, as DJ Taylor once put it, all those "demure ironies and mannered perceptions, their focus on the gyrations of a bunch of emotional poseurs ... to the reader infinitely reassuring ... and infinitely useless". Harold Pinter and Ronan Bennett are exceptions.

Britain is now a centralised single-ideology state, as secure in the grip of a superpower as any former eastern bloc country. The Whitehall executive has prerogative powers as effective as politburo decrees. Unlike Venezuela, critical issues such as the EU constitution or treaty are denied a referendum, regardless of Blair's "solemn pledge". Thanks largely to a parliament in which a majority of the members cannot bring themselves to denounce the crime in Iraq or even vote for an inquiry, New Labour has added to the statutes a record 3,000 criminal offences: an apparatus of control that undermines the Human Rights Act. In 1977, at the height of the cold war, I interviewed the Charter 77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia. They warned that complacency and silence could destroy liberty and democracy as effectively as tanks. "We're actually better off than you in the west," said a writer, measuring his irony. "Unlike you, we have no illusions."

For those people who still celebrate the virtues and triumphs of liberalism - anti-slavery, women's suffrage, the defence of individual conscience and the right to express it and act upon it - the time for direct action is now. It is time to support those of courage who defy rotten laws to read out in Parliament Square the names of the current, mounting, war dead, and those who identify their government's complicity in "rendition" and its torture, and those who have followed the paper and blood trail of Britain's piratical arms companies. It is time to support the NHS workers who up and down the country are trying to alert us to the destruction of a Labour government's greatest achievement. The list of people stirring is reassuring. The awakening of the rest of us is urgent.

How the Anglo-American elite shares its 'values' by John Pilger

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the origins and 'shared values' of the British-American Project for a Successor Generation, founded in 1983 by Ronald Reagan with support from Rupert Murdoch. Today's BAP meets every year alternately in the US and Britain and includes scientists, economists, community leaders and journalists, a number of them liberals or 'on the left'.

When Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke recently about his government’s devotion to the United States, “founded on the values we share”, he was echoing his Foreign Office minister Kim Howells, who was preparing to welcome the Saudi dictator to Britain with effusions of “shared values”. The meaning was the same in both cases. The values shared are those of rapacious power and wealth, with democracy and human rights irrelevant, as the bloodbath in Iraq and the suffering of the Palestinians attest, to name only two examples.

The “values we share” are celebrated by a shadowy organisation that has just held its annual conference. This is the British-American Project for the Successor Generation (BAP), set up in 1985 with money from a Philadelphia trust with a long history of supporting right-wing causes. Although the BAP does not publicly acknowledge this origin, the source of its inspiration was a call by President Reagan in 1983 for “successor generations” on both sides of the Atlantic to “work together in the future on defence and security matters”. He made numerous references to “shared values”. Attending this ceremony in the White House Situation Room were the ideologues Rupert Murdoch and the late James Goldsmith.

As Reagan made clear, the need for the BAP arose from Washington’s anxiety about the growing opposition in Britain to nuclear weapons, especially the stationing of cruise missiles in Europe. “A special concern,” he said, “will be the successor generations, as these younger people are the ones who will have to work together in the future on defence and security issues.” A new, preferably young elite – journalists, academics, economists, “civil society” and liberal community leaders of one sort or another – would offset the growing “anti-Americanism”.

The aims of this latter-day network, according to David Willetts, the former director of studies at Britain's right-wing Centre for Policy Studies, now a member of the Tory shadow cabinet, are simply to “help reinforce Anglo-American links, especially if some members already do or will occupy positions of influence”. A former British ambassador to Washington, Sir John Kerr, was more direct. In a speech to BAP members, he said the organisation’s “powerful combination of eminent Fellows and close Atlantic links threatened to put the embassy out of a job”. An American BAP organiser describes the BAP network as committed to “grooming leaders” while promoting “the leading global role that [the US and Britain] continue to play”.

The BAP’s British “alumni” are drawn largely from new Labour and its court. No fewer than four BAP “fellows” and one advisory board member became ministers in the first Blair government. The new Labour names include Peter Mandelson, George Robertson, Baroness Symons, Jonathan Powell (Blair’s chief of staff), Baroness Scotland, Douglas Alexander, Geoff Mulgan, Matthew Taylor and David Miliband. Some are Fabian Society members and describe themselves as being “on the left”. Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is another member. They object to whispers of “a conspiracy”. The mutuality of class or aspiration is merely assured, unspoken, and the warm embrace of power flattering and often productive.

BAP conferences are held alternately in the US and Britain. This year’s was in Newcastle, with the theme “Faith and Justice”. On the US board is Diana Negroponte, the wife of John Negroponte, Bush’s former national security chief notorious for his associations with death-squad politics in central America. He follows another leading neocon, Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the invasion of Iraq and discredited head of the World Bank. Since 1985, BAP “alumni” and “fellows” have been brought together courtesy of Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Saatchi & Saatchi, Philip Morris and British Airways, among other multinationals. Nick Butler, formerly a top dog at BP, has been a leading light.

For many, the conferences have the revivalist pleasures honed by American PR techniques, with management games, personal presentations, and a closing jolly revue to lighten the serious business. The 2002 conference report noted: “Many BAP alumni are directly involved with US and UK military and defence establishments.”

The BAP rarely gets publicity, which may have something to do with the high proportion of journalists who are alumni. Prominent BAP journalists are David Lipsey, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and assorted Murdochites. The BBC is well represented. On the popular Today programme, James Naughtie, whose broadcasting has long reflected his own transatlantic interests, has been an alumnus since 1989. Today’s newest voice, Evan Davis, formerly the BBC’s zealous economics editor, is a member. And at the top of the BAP website home page is a photograph of the famous BBC broadcaster Jeremy Paxman and his endorsement. “A marvellous way of meeting a varied cross-section of transatlantic friends,” says he.

Union With the Devil By George Monbiot.

The trade unions still rage about the class war, but keep funding their class enemies.

Gordon Brown appears to have tested them. It is as if he wanted to discover how far he can go before the affiliated trade unions - which provide most of the Labour party’s funds - decide that they have had enough. The results must reassure him: they will tolerate any level of abuse. Turkeys led by chickens, they will never stop voting for Christmas.

His government of all the talents has room for no professional trade unionist. But it does contain their sworn enemy. The new minister for trade and investment, now responsible for much of the policy that will affect union members, was not just the head of the Confederation of British Industry; he was the most neanderthal boss the CBI has ever had. Digby Jones campaigned to freeze the minimum wage, neuter the EU’s working time directive, block corporate killing laws, promote privatisation, cripple environmental rules, curtail maternity leave. Of the unions he said, “they are an irrelevance. They are backward looking and not on today’s agenda.”(1) As if to show who the boss is, Comrade Digby refuses to join the Labour Party: he has been permitted to enter the government on his own terms.

To test the unions further, Brown has appointed Damon Buffini to two of the bodies which will help the government reshape the workforce: the Business Council and the National Council for Educational Excellence. Buffini is the target of the GMB union’s most vocal anti-corporate campaign: his private equity company sacked one third of the AA’s workforce(2).

The ragged trousered philanthropists who subsidise this bosses’ party mumble and fumble but they will not strike back. Desperate to believe, union leaders cling to broken promises. They refuse to utter the only threat which Brown will heed: disaffiliation.

It is true that some important victories have been won since 1997. We have a minimum wage, better pension protection, improvements in parental leave, better conditions for part-time workers. The list of defeats is much longer. There is the private finance initiative, doggedly promoted by Gordon Brown, which nows dominates the provision of most public services. There is the creeping marketisation of health and education. The government promised the unions that it would give employment protection to temporary and agency workers(3). Instead, it has obstructed the European directive which would have introduced it; when a backbencher proposed a private members’ bill, a government minister talked it out(4). Tony Blair preserved the opt-out clause in the EU’s working time directive, that allows bosses to blackmail their workers. The government has refused to repeal Thatcher’s draconian union laws. After ten years of broken promises we still don’t have a corporate killing act. Inequality has reached scarcely imaginable levels, tax evasion is rampant, the railways are still in private hands, council housing remains moribund, companies don’t have to publish operating and financial reviews, the minimum wage is far from being a living wage. And there is the small matter of an illegal war in which perhaps a million people have died.

Amicus, one half of Unite, the super-union it recently formed with the TGWU, dismisses such complaints as “the hard left … kick[ing] up a fuss over minor areas of difficulty”(5). What, I wonder, would be a major area of difficulty? When you challenge the unions, they rattle a yellowed parchment and proclaim “but we have the Warwick agreement!” This is the pact they signed with the government in 2004, which persuaded them not to break with the party. But it must now be obvious to anyone who isn’t singing loudly while stuffing his fingers in his ears that the government intends only to honour the easy bits. It has punted the more difficult promises - like fair conditions for agency workers - into the indeterminate future.

Of course there is the perpetual fear of something worse. No trade union, quite rightly, wants to let the Tories back in. But if the unions won’t use their power, the contest between the two parties will be scarcely worth fighting. Perhaps they don’t realise how much the government now needs them. The cash for honours scandal has frightened off almost all the major private donors, leaving the party largely dependent on union funds. So what do they intend to do with this power? To judge by their recent statements, nothing.

In his speech to the annual conference in June the leader of the GMB, Paul Kenny, begged, “Listen to us. Please listen to us. … I say to Gordon, please follow your instincts, not the spin doctors of the CBI.”(6) But he threatened nothing. Two weeks later, Dave Prentis, the leader of Unison, told the government that it was “drinking in the last chance saloon”. But he too imagines that Brown might be sweetly persuaded to “usher in a new era that sees the restoration of real Labour values”(7). Last week Tony Woodley, head of the TGWU, railed against the “outrage” and “disgrace” of Labour’s policies(8). But it was hot air, and the government knows it. I phoned the TGWU and asked its spokesman what might persuade the union to disaffiliate. “Nothing”, he told me. So if the Labour party adopted the swastika as its logo and started holding torchlit rallies in Parliament Square, it could still count on the TGWU’s support? “That’s an extreme example,” he replied. But he did not deny it(9).

Knowing that it can take the support of the affiliated unions for granted, the government can concentrate on appeasing the bosses. The unions’ involvement with the Labour Party is rather like the government’s special relationship with George Bush: their response to being used as a doormat is to become just a little more bristly.

The affiliated unions still rage about the class war, but keep funding their class enemies. When he crossed the floor and was given the safe seat of St Helen’s South, then took his butler on the campaign trail, the multimillionaire Shaun Woodward represented everything they hated about new Labour. But last year the philanthropists in Amicus helped to fund his constituency office(10). The GMB denounces Blair’s war crimes from the conference stage, but gives money to his office in Sedgefield(11). None of the bigger unions will contemplate forming or funding another party.

Two trade unions - the RMT and the FBU - walked out before the last election. Bob Crow, the leader of the RMT, recently told the other unions, “any hope of the Labour Party working for workers is dead, finished, over. I think all you who are staying in the Labour Party are just giving credibility to it”(12). In 2004, Kevin Curran, then the leader of the GMB, warned that if Labour did not change, “we would have to look for a political partner that would advance the interests of people we represent.”(13) His timing was bad: the Warwick agreement, gravid with promise, had just been signed. But as the agreement bursts, the necessary threats have not materialised.

Brown has called their bluff, and they have flinched. He now knows that, out of fear and out of sentiment, the unions will stick with him. He can do whatever it takes to keep big business, Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail onside. The way things are going, the unions might as well cut out the middleman and give their money to the CBI.

http://www.monbiot.com/

Published in the Guardian 10th July 2007

References:
1. Larry Elliott, 26th June 2006. Sir Digby rides off with all guns blazing. The Guardian.
2. GMB, 11th July 2006. AA roadshow tackles Damon Buffini: Maidstone and Dover. http://www.labournet.net/ukunion/0607/aa1.html
3. Trade Union & Labour Party Liaison Organisation, 2004. Full Employment and Working in modern BritainThe TULO Guide to the Warwick Agreement, National Policy Forum 25 July 2004. http://www.unionstogether.org.uk/articles/employment.html
4. Hansard, 2nd March 2007.Temporary and Agency Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Bill. Second Reading. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070302/debtext/70302-0010.htm
5. Amicus, viewed 9th July 2007. The importance of the trade union link. http://www.amicustheunion.org/Default.aspx?page=1194
6. Paul Kenny, 3rd June 2007. Speech to the GMB conference.http://www.gmb.org.uk/shared_asp_files/GFSR.asp?NodeID=95563
7. Dave Prentis, 19th June 2007. Quoted by David Hencke, 19th June 2007. Change direction or lose election, Brown warned. The Guardian.
8. Tony Woodley, 2nd July 2007. Speech to the T&G section of Unite’s conference. http://www.tgwu.org.uk/Templates/Internal.asp?NodeID=93490&int1stParentNodeID=42438&int2ndParentNodeID=90594
9. Conversation with TGWU spokesman, 5th July 2007.
10. http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/regulatory-issues/regdpoliticalparties.cfm?ec=%7Bts%20%272007%2D07%2D04%2008%3A07%3A49%27%7D
11. ibid.
12. Dave Reid, 5th July 2007. RMT conference: Fighting a thousand cuts. http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/2007/494/index.html?id=pp1508.htm
13. Kevin Curran, 29th July 2004. Quoted by Christine Buckley and Helen Rumbelow, 30th July 2004. Go Left Labour, or face a new party, says union boss. The Times.

Drumming Up a New Cold War By George Monbiot

By signing up to Bush’s missile defence programme, the British government shows it doesn’t give a damn about either peace or democracy


In one short statement to parliament last week, the defence secretary, Des Browne, broke the promises of two prime ministers, potentially misled the House, helped bury an international treaty and dragged Britain into a new cold war. Pretty good going for three stodgy paragraphs.
You probably missed it, but it’s not your fault. In the 48 hours before parliament broke up for the summer, the government made 76 policy announcements(1). It’s a long-standing British tradition: as the MPs and lobby correspondents are packing their bags for their long summer break (they don’t return until October), the government rattles out a series of important decisions which cannot be debated. Gordon Brown’s promise to respect parliamentary democracy didn’t last very long.

Thus, without consultation or discussion, the defence secretary announced that Menwith Hill, the listening station in Yorkshire, will be used by the United States for its missile defence system(2). Having been dragged by the Bush administration into two incipient military defeats, the British government has now embraced another of its global delusions.

Des Browne’s note asserted that the purpose of the missile defence system is “to address the emerging threat from rogue states”. This is a claim that only an idiot or a member of the British government could believe. If, as Browne and Bush maintain, the system is meant to shoot down intercontinental missiles fired by Iran and North Korea (missiles, incidentally, that they do not and might never possess), why are its major components being installed in Poland and the Czech Republic? To bait the Russian bear for fun? In June, Vladimir Putin called Bush’s bluff by offering sites for the missile defence programme in Azerbaijan and southern Russia, which are much closer to Iran(3). Bush turned him down and re-stated his decision to build the facilities in eastern Europe, making it clear that their real purpose is to shoot down Russian missiles.
Nor is it strictly true to call this a defence system. Russia has around 5700 active nuclear warheads(4). The silos in Poland will contain just 10 interceptor missiles. The most likely strategic purpose of the missile defence programme is to mop up any Russian or Chinese missiles which had not been destroyed during a pre-emptive US attack. Far from making the world a safer place, its purpose is to make the annihilation of another country a safer proposition.

This strategic purpose takes second place to a more immediate interest. Because it doesn’t yet work, missile defence is the world’s biggest pork barrel. The potential for spending is unlimited. First a number of massive – and possibly insuperable – technical problems must be overcome. Then it must constantly evolve to respond to the counter-measures Russia and China will deploy: multiple warheads, dummy missiles, radar shields, chaff, balloons and God knows what. For the US arms industry, technical failure means permanent commercial success.

But this is not the only respect in which Browne appears to have misled the House. He claimed to have assurances from the US that “the UK and other European allies will be covered by the system elements they [the Americans] propose to deploy to Poland and the Czech Republic”. Browne must be aware that this is a United States missile defence programme. It incorporates no plans for defending other nations. The British government has handed over its facilities, truncated parliamentary democracy and put its people at risk solely for the benefit of a foreign power.

The diplomatic cost of this idiocy is incalculable. It has already required the abandonment by the US of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which is the bilateral agreement struck between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972. It survived both the vicissitudes of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, but not George W Bush. Any hope that it might be revived has now been buried by the facts on the ground in Poland, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom. Two weeks ago Vladimir Putin suspended another long-standing agreement: the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, which limited the troops and military hardware Russia could assemble on its borders. In response to the US missile defence programme, Russia has also been testing a new version of its short-range Iskander nuclear missile, and it has been developing a new intercontinental missile with multiple warheads, called the RS-24. Their purpose, according to Sergei Ivanov, the deputy prime minister, is to “overcom[e] any existing or future missile defence systems”(5). The Iskander missiles will be deployed on the European border and aimed at Poland and the Czech Republic. Intermediate-range missiles will be pointed at Menwith Hill.

Bush’s missile defence programme almost certainly means the end of the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty as well, and the cancellation of any successor to the strategic offensive reductions treaty (which expires in 2012). Asked whether this might be the beginning of a new cold war, Putin replied “Of course we are returning to those times. It is clear that if a part of the US nuclear capability turns up in Europe, and, in the opinion of our military specialists will threaten us, then we are forced to take corresponding steps in response … We are not the ones who are initating the arms race in Europe.”(6) Like the war with Iraq, the US missile defence programme exacerbates the threats it claims to confront.

All this, as you would hope, is of some interest to our members of parliament, who have long been demanding a debate. In February, Tony Blair agreed that they would have one. “I am sure that we will have the discussion in the House and, indeed, outside the House…. When we have a proposition to put, we will come back and put it.”(7) In April, Des Browne told MPs that “the UK has received no request from the US to use RAF Menwith Hill for missile defence-related activities.”(8) That, until last week, was all that parliament knew. Now we discover that the proposition had been made and accepted before MPs had a chance to discuss it. Browne was in the House on Wednesday, where he made some announcements about aircraft carriers and the military budget. These – because they were delivered in person – could be discussed, though (shamefully) neither of them provoked any opposition(9). But knowing that the Menwith Hill decision would be furiously opposed, Browne released it in the form of a written statement, which cannot be debated.

Like everyone on the left in Britain, I wanted to believe that Gordon Brown’s politics would be more progressive than Tony Blair’s. But as he grovels before the seat of empire, I realise that those of us who demand even a vaguely sane foreign policy will find ourselves in permanent opposition. With his appointment of Digby Jones as trade minister and his plans for deregulation, Brown demonstrated that the government is still mesmerised by big business. By proposing that suspects be held for up to 56 days without charge, he appears to share Tony Blair’s distrust of liberty. Now, in one furtive decision, he reveals both his contempt for parliament and his enthusiasm for the neocon project. What, I wonder, is there left to hope for?

http://www.monbiot.com/
References:
1. Colin Brown, 27th July 2007. A good day to bury the bad news that ministerial car use has soared. The Independent.
2. Des Browne, 25th July 2007. Ballistic Missile Defence. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070725/wmstext/70725m0003.htm#07072565000029
3. Patrick Wintour, 8th June 2007. Putin surprises US with missile suggestion. The Guardian.
4. SIPRI, 2006. Russian nuclear forces, 2006: Land-based ballistic missiles. http://www.sipri.org/contents/expcon/Russia.pdf
5. Luke Harding, 30th May 2007. Russian missile test adds to arms race fears. The Guardian.
6. Luke Harding, 4th June 2007. The new cold war: Russia’s missiles to target Europe. The Guardian.
7. Tony Blair, 28th February 2007. Prime Minister’s Questions. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070228/debtext/70228-0002.htm#07022879001973
8. Des Browne, 16th April 2007. Written answer. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070416/text/70416w0032.htm
9. Commons debate, 25th July 2007. CSR and Aircraft Carriers. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070725/debtext/70725-0007.htm#07072570000993

.Published in the Guardian 31st July 2007

Bush's Zombie Shuffles Off, Adieu, Blair, Adieu By TARIQ ALI

Tony Blair's success was limited to winning three general elections in a row. A second-rate actor, he turned out to be a crafty and avaricious politician, but without much substance; bereft of ideas he eagerly grasped and tried to improve upon the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. But though in many ways Blair's programme has been a euphemistic, if bloodier, version of Thatcher's, the style of their departures is very different. Thatcher's overthrow by her fellow-Conservatives was a matter of high drama: an announcement outside the Louvre's glass pyramid during the Paris Congress brokering the end of the Cold War; tears; a crowded House of Commons. Blair makes his unwilling exit against a backdrop of car-bombs and mass carnage in Iraq, with hundreds of thousands left dead or maimed from his policies, and London a prime target for terrorist attack. Thatcher's supporters described themselves afterwards as horror-struck by what they had done. Even Blair's greatest sycophants in the British media: Martin Kettle and Michael White (The Guardian), Andrew Rawnsley (Observer), Philip Stephens (FT) confess to a sense of relief as he finally quits.

A true creature of the Washington Consensus, Blair was always loyal to the various occupants of the White House. In Europe, he preferred Aznar to Zapatero, Merckel to Schroeder, was seriously impressed by to Berlusconi and, most recently, made no secret of his desire that Sarkozy was his candidate in France. He understood that privatisation/deregulation at home were part of the same mechanism as the wars abroad. If this judgement seems unduly harsh let me quote Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former senior adviser to Blair, writing in the Financial Times on 2, August, 2006:

"A spectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud's. This one, unusually, seems to live and breathe. Perhaps it comes from the Central Intelligence Agency's box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent...

Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago. In the past 100 years--to take the highlights--we have bombed and occupied Egypt and Iraq, put down an Arab uprising in Palestine and overthrown governments in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf. We can no longer do these things on our own, so we do them with the Americans. Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself: who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?..."

This, too, is mild compared to what is said about Blair in the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. Senior diplomats have told me on more than one occasion that it would not upset them too much if Blair were to be tried as a war criminal. More cultured critics sometimes compare him to the Cavaliere Cipolia, the vile hypnotist of fascist Italy, so brilliantly portrayed in Thomas Mann's 1929 novel 'Mario and the Magician'. Blair is certainly not Mussolini, but like the Duce he enjoyed to simultaneously lead and humiliate his supporters.

What much of this reveals is anger and impotence. There is no mechanism to get rid of a sitting Prime Minister unless his or her party loses confidence. The Conservative leadership decided that Thatcher simply had to go because of her negative attitude to Europe. Labour tends to be more sentimental towards its leaders and in this case they owed so much to Blair that nobody close to him wants to be cast in the role of Brutus. In the end he decided to go himself. The disaster in Iraq had made him a much hated politician and slowly support began to ebb. One reason for the slowness was that the country is without a serious opposition. In Parliament, the Conservatives simply followed Blair. The Liberal-Democrats were ineffective. Blair had summed up Britain's attitude to Europe at Nice in 2000:

"It is possible, in our judgement, to fight Britain's corner, get the best out of Europe for Britain and exercise real authority and influence in Europe. That is as it should be. Britain is a world power."

This grotesque, self-serving fantasy that 'Britain is a world power' is to justify that it will always be EU/UK. The real union is with Washington. France and Germany are seen as rivals for Washington's affections, not potential allies in an independent EU. The French decision to re-integrate themselves into NATO and pose as the most vigorous US ally was a serious structural shift which weakened Europe. Britain responded by encouraging a fragmented political order in Europe through expansion and insisted on a permanent US presence on the continent.

Blair's half-anointed, half-hated successor, Gordon Brown, is far more intelligent (he reads books) but politically no different. There might be a change of tone, but little else. It is a grim prospect with or without Blair and an alternative politics (anti-war, anti-Trident, defence of public services) is confined to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. Its absence nationally fuels the anger felt by substantial sections of the population, reflected in voting (or not) against those in power.

Tariq Ali's new book, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, is published by Verso. He can be reached at: tariq.ali3@btinternet.com

CounterPunch May 10 2007