[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Nothing Left to Fight For

[Bill Totten]

The most rightwing government Britain has had since the Second World War
does not deserve to be re-elected.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (May 20 2008)


You can hear the wringing of hands and tearing of cloth all the way down
Farringdon Road. Dismayed by the results of the local elections,
convinced that Labour will be crushed in the byelection on Thursday,
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 when 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 has sustained an unprovoked
war, it also sabotaged all means of achieving a peaceful resolution. In
April 2002 it helped the Bush administration to sack Jose Bustani, the
head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, in
order to prevent him from settling the dispute over Iraq's alleged
weapons of mass destruction {1, 2}. In two separate offers before the
invasion began, 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 {3}.

Cluster bombs can be legally used because the British government helped
to block an international ban in 2006 {4}: it is still holding out
against an outright ban at the current talks in Dublin {5}. 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 {6}: 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
{7}.

Labour appears to be prepared to meet any demand, however outrageous,
the Bush administration makes. 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 {8}.

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 extrajudicial kidnapping and imprisonment, left our
citizens to languish in Guantanamo Bay, and made use of Pakistani
torture chambers in seeking to extract testimony from British suspects
{9}. Until 2005 it tied its foreign aid programme to the privatisation
of public utilities in some of the world's poorest countries {10, 11}.
Last year it held out against reform of the International Monetary
Fund's unfair allocation of votes {12}.

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 {13}. The Chinese judiciary, by contrast, which is
notorious for its willingness to bang up anyone and everyone, jails 119
people per 100,000; Myanmar imprisons 120, Saudi Arabia 132 {14}. The
Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, passed in 2005, contains clauses
which permit the police to ban any demonstration, however peaceful {15}.
It is one of a long series of bills the Labour government has passed
which 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 eleven per cent
{16}: a predictable result of the sacking of 1000 staff at the Health
and Safety Executive and a 24% reduction in workplace inspections {17}.
In 2006 the government instructed the Serious Fraud Office to drop its
corruption case against the arms manufacturer BAe. It has obstructed
efforts by other states to investigate the company {18,19}.

Labour has shifted taxation from the rich to the poor, cutting
corporation tax from 33% to 28% and capital gains tax from forty per
cent to eighteen per cent, and introducing a new Entrepreneurs' Relief
scheme, taxing the first million of capital gains at just ten per cent.
It tried to raise the income tax paid by the poorest earners from ten
per cent to twenty per cent. Labour has lifted the inheritance tax
threshold from GBP 300,000 to GBP 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 GBP 41 billion {20}. Inequality today is slightly worse
than it was when Labour took power (the Gini coefficient which measures
it has risen from 0.33 to 0.35) {21}.

Both as Chancellor and as 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 Margaret Thatcher's tenure an average of 46,600 social homes were
built every year; under Tony Blair the average rate was 17,300 {22}.
Labour is closing post offices, small schools and GPs' surgeries, while
overseeing a doubling of the UK's airport capacity and the construction
of 4000 kilometres of new trunk roads {23}. 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 it has under Labour {24}.

Above all, the Labour government has destroyed hope. It has put into
practice Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there is no alternative" to a
market fundamentalism that subordinates human welfare to the demands of
business. It has created a political monoculture which kills voters'
enthusasism, and delayed the electoral reforms which 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 with
something slightly worse. Fear has destroyed the Labour party: people
keep supporting it, whatever it does, 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.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/16/a-war-against-the-peacemaker/

2. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/23/diplomatic-impunity/

3. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/11/11/dreamers-and-idiots/

4.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/11/07/asserting-our-right-to-kill-and-maim-civilians/

5. BBC Online, 19th May 2008. Forum seeks to ban cluster bombs
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7407631.stm

6. Geoff Hoon, 24th March 2002. The Jonathan Dimbleby Show, ITV 1.

7. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/31/drumming-up-a-new-cold-war/

8. Geoff Hoon, 26th June 2003. Britain's Armed Forces for Tomorrow's
Defence. Speech to the Royal United Services Institute.

9. Ian Cobain, 29th April 2008. MI5 accused of colluding in torture of
terrorist suspects. The Guardian.

10. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/01/06/on-the-edge-of-lunacy/

11. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/05/18/this-is-what-we-paid-for/

12. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/04/17/the-emperor-of-africa/

13. Kings College, London, 2008. Prison Brief - Highest to Lowest Rates.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poptotal

14. ibid.

15. Sections 125-127.

16. Health and Safety Executive, 2008. Fatal injury statistics.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/fatals.htm

17. SchNEWS, 11th April 2008. Issue 628.
http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news628.htm

18. Rob Evans, Ian Traynor, Luke Harding and Rory Carroll, 12th June
2003. Politicians' claims put BAE in firing line. The Guardian.

19. Rob Evans and Ian Traynor, 12th June 2003. US accuses British over
arms deal bribery bid. The Guardian.

20.
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200708/ldhansrd/text/80327-0002.htm

21. Mike Brewer et al, 2008. Poverty and inequality in the UK: 2007. IFS
Briefing Note No. 73. The Institute for Fiscal Studies.
http://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn73.pdf

22. DCLG, August 2007. Table 244. Housebuilding: permanent dwellings
completed, by tenure, England, historical calendar year series.
www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/xls/140912

23. Department for Transport, July 2004. The Future of Transport White
Paper.

24.
www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/globatmos/download/xls/ghg_annex_a_20080327.xls

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/05/20/nothing-left-to-fight-for/


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