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

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Comments

[Oscar]

Red Pepper editor Hilary Wainwright has responded to Peter Hain in today’s Guardian: “The attempt by Peter Hain, my former comrade in the Young Liberals (he was more radical in those days), to whip us into line does not convince. The only way that anti-war voters might consider voting Labour is if those Labour MPs who voted against the war now wage their own independent campaigns, without relying on central office literature or frontbench speakers. And if those who voted for the war follow the example of MPs of the centre-left in Italy, they will admit they were wrong and join the call for the troops to come home.”

[Robin Grant]

Oscar - more reaction here:
http://www.perfect.co.uk/2005/03/labour-in-blair-out