Red Pepper's Election Blues

Regrets, more than a few

The only thing I regretted about Portillo losing in '97 was that it had to be to Stephen Twigg. Over the years he hasn’t given me any reason to regret my regret with his votes for the Iraq war, ID cards, top up fees for students and let’s not forget foundation hospitals. And now he loses to a bloody Tory. FO

Labour MP: I blame Blair

Labour left-winger Bob Marshall-Andrews thinks he'll lose Gillingham. He told the BBC:

"The war has caused a serious haemorrhage in Labour votes.

"There can only be one general reason for that, which will lead sooner rather than later to a shift in the leadership of the party.

"On a very bad night, my going will be one of the very few things that will cheer the PM up."    OR

A 'truth' worse than lying

In drawing a comparison with the war in Kosovo and previous bombing raids on Iraq, Lord Goldsmiths' memo also draws attention to the dubious basis of legality of those conflicts: “[O]n a number of previous occasions, including in relation to Operation Desert Fox in December 1998 and Kosovo in 1999, UK forces have participated in military action on the basis of advice from my predecessors that the legality of the action under international law was no more than reasonably arguable. But a “reasonable case” does not mean that if the matter ever came before a court I would be confident that the court would agree with the view.”

Why has New Labour repeatedly rushed into such conflicts on such a dubious basis? The answer lies in a mix of moral certitude and political constraints. To start with, Blair and his cohorts seem to have take an extraordinarily benign view of Britain's role in the world as a 'force for good'. Blair thinks that 'The spread of our values makes us safer' - a doctrine of international community which he outlined during the Kosovo war, incidentally. In practice, British foreign policy has rarely lived up to such ideals, as Mark Curtis has amply documented.

With the decline of Britain's empire, these illusions have been held together by the myth of a 'special relationship' with Washington. Political commentators have often given credence to this view, although it is worth noting that Blair's powers to influence George Bush seem to extend little beyond the power to agree with him. In the case of Iraq, there is little reason to doubt that Blair wanted a second UN resolution – since the case for a 'moral' intervention requires at least the veneer of legality. But in acting as if this would be possible, and sending troops to the Iraqi border, there was only ever going to be one outcome once Blair realised (some time after the rest of us) that the intellectual basis of his position – which rested on the classic 3^rd way fudge of Britain as a 'bridge' between the US and Europe – was untenable. This strikes me as a spectacular and ideologically-driven misjudgement, rather than an out and out lie – albeit one that quickly necessitated the most dubious of retrospective justifications. But it is no better for that. If there's one thing worse than a Prime Minister lying, its one who is resolutely convinced that he was acting in the name of a discredited 'truth'. OR

Back to Red Pepper

Manifestoes, manifestoes everywhere

I'm in Paris with possibly the most bland collection of holidary reading ever: a complete set of election manifestoes. Is it worth the bother? Judging from new Labour's record in office, the answer is probably not. On 6 May 1997, just four days after its first election landslide, Gordon Brown announced the independence of the Bank of England. It wasn't simply the case that the Party had 'forgotten' to mention this in its manifesto. It had actually promised to "reform the Bank of England to ensure that decision-making on monetary policy is more effective, open, accountable and free from short-term political manipulation." Retrospectively, this could be taken as a hint of what was to come, but I've yet to hear an explanation of how removing large swathes of economic decision-making from democratic control is a recipe for making it more open and accountable.

Nor was this decision unique. In 2001, Labour's Manifesto (in)famously promised "We will not introduce 'top-up' fees and have legislated to prevent them," but this did not prevent the Party from legislating for such fees in its subsequent term in office. Other broken promises are more farcical, such as the commitment to building a "first-class athletics stadium for the World Athletics Championships in 2005." Plans for a World Class stadium in the Lee Valley ignominiously collapsed, Britain lost the right to host the games, and the genius response has been to bid for the 2012 Olympics - with the promise of a World Class stadium in the Lee Valley.

But its the things that weren't mentioned in the Manifesto at all that have been amongst the most debated of Labour's second term: anti-terror legislation, ID cards (aborted, but not forgotten) and, of course, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Events, dear boy, events" - in Harold MacMillan's famous phrase - are the driving force of politics, the Government might claim in its defence. Yet this does not account for the fact that the definition of an event is politically contestable. The shock of September 11th clearly called for some kind of political action - but then how many more sickening and deadly spectacles in recent history have been met with inertia, and treated as non-events? Nor do such events account for the type of action that is taken. Still less do they justify it. The institutions of government have fallen over themselves to legislate in response to the new terror threat, and to legitimate the bombing countries that have, in and of themselves, posed no threat. But what mechanisms exist for engaging the public in these decision-making processes? Or for involving us in these decisions? The answer, sadly, is: very few.   OR

Back to Red Pepper

Counting the costs of consultants

Ever wondered how much the government spends on management consultants? Well, the Department for International Development (DfID) has paid a handsome sum to free-market ideologues the Adam Smith Institute, totalling over £34 million in the past six years (War on Want has produced an excellent report called Profiting from Poverty on this very issue. It is free to download).

Over at Sport England, the bill for consultants has more than doubled in the last Parliamentary term, and now comes in at £1,187,697 for 2004-2005.

The Identity Cards bill may have been scrapped for the moment, but that didn’t prevent the Home Office from chalking up a £5,716,259 bill with PA Consulting Services for “provision of management consultancy for the development of the ID card scheme” in the period up to December 2004.

The overall Home Office bill for consultants rose from around £7.5 million at the start of Labour’s term in 1997-1998 to £21,147,058 in 2001-2002, which appear to be the latest available figures.

The big picture here is a story of the outsourcing of government during New Labour’s two terms in office. That’s worth bearing in mind when politicians talk of cutting red tape (aka slashing civil service jobs).  OR

Back to Red Pepper

La Hain(e)

Tariq Ali’s recent advice to Red Pepper readers and disillusioned Labour supporters – Punish the Warmongers: Vote Lib Dem - has drawn a response from Peter Hain, Vote for the Lib Dems and you will risk a Tory victory, and triggered further debate in The Guardian letters pages. Hain's article laments the disillusionment of Guardian readers (a sociological category, in NewLabourSpeak) with the Government, and attempts to set out the Party's radical stall.

This is not the first time that the former anti-apartheid campaigner has been wheeled out as a token establishment radical. But it is a role that fits uneasily with his staunch defence of draconian new 'anti-terror' laws, which Hain (as Leader of the Commons) tried to rush through Parliament recently. The Government’s new ‘control orders’ resemble nothing more than the banning orders of apartheid South Africa, which affected Hain’s own family and countless others.

Hain now talks of a ‘balance’ between liberty and security, as though the sacrifice of freedom is a price we must pay for community safety. "If we are tough on crime and terrorism," he claimed last November, "Britain will be safer under New Labour." But who is really safer? Within the UK, the likely outcome of anti-terror legislation is to criminalise whole communities. The arbitrary use of detention tramples on individual civil liberties but also has a wider social purpose: to discipline the whole population through the spread of a climate of uncertainty and fear.

UK government support for the War in Iraq, which Hain euphemistically describes as an act of "good faith", can hardly have helped much either. The Iraqi threat to British national security was non-existent, as even the Government now admits, but the UK's war effort can scarcely have gone unnoticed in the caves of Tora Bora.  OR

Back to Red Pepper

Memories of Discontent

The death of former Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan (RIP) means that the Winter of Discontent (WOD) is back in the news – as are the ubiquitous images of binbags in the streets, symptomatic of the bad old days of trade union profligacy. While the mainstream media replays this story, it is worth remembering that the industrial militancy of the period was relatively restrained. Fewer days were lost in strikes in the 1978/9 period than in an average year under the previous Conservative government, and the level of strike action in Britain during the WOD was on a par with instances of industrial militancy elsewhere in Western Europe. The backdrop to all of this was a period of almost unprecedented wage restraint, euphemistically packaged as a Social Contract between the government and trade unions. If anything, it is remarkable that there was not more strike action since, by the autumn of 1978, the average worker’s wage was decreasing in real terms – a situation not seen since the Depression of 1931.

This is a story that will probably not be heard in the tributes to Callaghan, however, which tells us something about the lasting effects of that period on today’s politics. The WOD worked far better as a narrative construction, signalling a ‘crisis’ of the post-war settlement, than it did as a description of industrial relations in the late 1970s. It provided a backdrop against which Thatcherism could ‘make sense’, the ideological accompaniment to an economic shift achieved with the help of Callaghan's government , which accepted an IMF loan and the accompanying condition of public expenditure cuts in 1976.

Callaghan's reaction to the WOD ('what crisis?', as he never said) is remembered as folly, whilst his response to the IMF crisis (if it is remarked upon at all) is recalled as inevitable. In these memories we can hear the echoes of an old Thatcherite story, as it works its way into the pre-election campaign rhetoric of the present.  OR

Back to Red Pepper

New Labour, New Torture

In this month's Red Pepper, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray explains his decision to stand for election against Jack Straw in Blackburn. Britain routinely uses 'intelligence' extracted from torture victims, he says. When he drew attention to this practice in Uzbekistan he was summoned back to Whitehall. "I was told that the British security services valued it as contributing greatly to their overall picture of the war on terror. I was also told that Britain would continue to receive such material. The decision had been taken in person by Straw." Murray was sacked for rocking the boat. Jack Straw is still the Foreign Secretary.

The new issue is in the shops now or you can subscribe to read the full article. OR

Back to Red Pepper website