Torture exposes West's hollow claims about democracy

The indictment gets longer. Still wanted over the illegal invasion of Iraq, former prime minister Blair could be open to prosecution over New Labour’s secret collaboration with the Gaddafi regime, leading international lawyer Philippe Sands has suggested.

Ironically, in the wake of the Nato-backed regime change in Libya, it has become crystal clear that British intelligence agency MI6 collaborated in the “rendering” of alleged terror suspects by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and were complicit in their torture.

Under New Labour, M16 tipped off the CIA to help ensnare and transport two leaders of the anti-Gaddafi opposition back to Tripoli where they were promptly imprisoned and tortured. MI6 also told Libyan intelligence about opposition figures who lived in Britain, supplying it with emails and telephone numbers.

As early as 2003 Mark Allen, head of counter-terrorism at MI6, wrote to former Libyan foreign intelligence and then foreign minister, Moussa Koussa on the friendliest of first-name terms.

US human rights campaigners found letters in Koussa’s home showing how pleased Allen was about the “delivery” of Abedelhakim Belhadj then known by his nom de guerre Abu Abdallah Sadiq. Belhadj says that British intelligence officers were among the first to interrogate him when he arrived in Libya and was promptly imprisoned and tortured.

The CIA paid for Belhadj and his deputy, Abu Munthir and their families’

air trips from Malayasia and Hong Kong. But Allen played a double-game, telling Koussa that he would not share information obtained by torture with the CIA – and how he found this “amusing”.

“I have no intention of doing any such thing [sharing information]. The intelligence about Abu Abdallah was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this and am very grateful to you for the help you are giving us,” he wrote.

Mark Allen has since been knighted and is an advisor to BP.

UK Special Forces helped to train the Khamis Brigade run by one of Gaddafi’s sons. The elite SAS forces assisted Libyans in counter-terrorism techniques and surveillance between 2004 and 2009.

M16 also held counter-terrorism courses for them in 2006 to help them fight the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, then headed by Belhadj. The US had added this group to its list of banned terror groups in 2003. Ironically, Belhadj was one of the chief leaders in the overthrow of Gaddafi and is now head of the Tripoli Military Council which currently heads 8,000 troops. He has called for a full apology from Britain.

Although British diplomats tried to shred compromising documents before they fled Libya, they have been discovered in the residence of the British ambassador. They show how Labour PMs Blair and Brown wooed the Gaddafi family in terms of sycophantic flattery.

Using craven religious phraseology, Blair wrote in December 2006: “At this sacred time of harmony and reconciliation, recalling how our passionate God has mercy on mankind, I would like to express my personal wishes to you, to your family and to the Libyan people.”

But working with torturers in Libya was not enough for M16. While the British government made hypocritical noises about human rights in China, MI6 was cooperating with the notorious Chinese State Security Bureau: “We agreed that we would look at how we might engage the Chinese Services on the Islamic extremist target in China”, one letter says chillingly. It is well-known that the Chinese authorities have long been brutally repressing anyone campaigning for Uighur ethnic rights, denouncing them as Islamic terrorists.

Of course, when anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya were inspired by the Arab Spring to revolt, the Cameron-Clegg coalition changed the tune sung by Britain. But the same thinking lies behind this government: flatter the leaders, repress the opposition and above all - get the oil.

But as the evidence found in the ashes of the old regime prove, no amount of flattery or the torture of opponents can possibly guarantee this. Finally, what the revelations show is what we have always known – that fine words about “democracy” from the mouths of British governments are the height of hypocrisy – both at home and abroad.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Coalition will provoke extra-parliamentary struggles

The collapse of the Tories and Liberal Democrats into each other’s arms to form the first coalition government in modern times does not so much signify a “new politics” but the suspension of old-style politics in the face of a calamitous financial crisis.

New Labour was prepared to go down the same road. Its failure to woo the Lib Dems – Britain’s oldest capitalist party – led to Gordon Brown’s late evening resignation and his replacement by David Cameron. Most of the New Labour cabinet – members of Britain’s newest capitalist party – were relieved to be out of office and not having to make the savage cuts that the money markets are demanding.

On entering Downing Street, Cameron accepted responsibility for implementing the demands imposed by an unprecedented financial and economic crisis. Hours earlier the International Monetary Fund (IMF), eurozone authorities and European Central Bank (ECB) came together with the US Federal Reserve in a desperate King Canute-style 750 billion euros/1 trillion US dollars global alliance:

• On Monday the ECB reversed its policy and began to echo the British government in “quantitative easing”, buying up eurozone government bonds and accepting junk debt to prevent a string of state bankruptcies

• 27 European countries created an emergency loan facility of 60 billion euros aimed at stopping the Greek crisis spreading to Spain, Portugal and Ireland.

• The 16 eurozone countries together with Sweden and Poland have put together a 440 billion euros “special purpose vehicle”, a fund to defend themselves against foreign currency speculation.

• The IMF offered 250 billion euros in loans to stricken countries.

• The US Federal Reserve renewed the emergency measures it used during the global meltdown of autumn 2008 allowing foreign banks to borrow dollars.

All of these actions, promises and offers are conditional on governments old and new ratcheting up the brutal austerity programme that has already precipitated general strikes and street battles in Greece and Spain.

The new coalition replaces an administration which had spent 13 years cultivating the relationship with the financial masters of the universe. New Labour helped create the conditions which resulted in a system crash that began in 2008 and that is still unravelling.

The Cameron-Clegg coalition’s announcement that it will start to reduce the budget deficit by cutting public spending immediately with a £6 billion programme of “efficiency savings” is aimed at reassuring the hedge fund managers and other market traders whose gambling with bonds determines government action throughout the world. Liberal Democratic manifesto intentions to postpone the cuts to avoid a deflationary spiral have been ditched.

The coming assault on services, jobs, wages, pensions and benefits is certain to trigger an avalanche of conflict with millions of workers in education, health, social services as well as in the civil service who together make up the majority of the workforce.

Some say the New Labour project failed and is over. On the contrary, it served its purpose. It held the reins and reorganised the state while the Tories were in crisis. There is no going back to an earlier form of Labour as a reformist party because globalisation and the merger of the state with financial and corporate interests does not allow for this. To think otherwise is to perpetuate illusions about electoral politics when new forms of struggle beckon.

There are no electoral or parliamentary “solutions” to this crisis. If New Labour had won the election, savage cuts would still have been top of the agenda. The struggles immediately ahead will be extra-parliamentary in shape and form, beginning with the British Airways cabin crew strikes planned for next week.

Giving these struggles a political shape and objective means going beyond a parliamentary politics that is in any case in deep freeze. A perspective around the building of a network of People’s Assemblies to challenge the state’s right to make the cuts is the best way to respond the anti-people coalition now in Downing Street. register for our May 22 conference to discuss how we can mobilise to take the revolutionary road with the aim of bringing the Cameron-Clegg regime down sooner rather than later.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

The uncertainty principle in politics

The break-up of parliamentary politics is happening right before our eyes, most dramatically shown in the resignation under pressure of Gordon Brown and the frantic moves to cobble together some sort of coalition before the money markets decide Britain is another basket case.

All the major parties are bitterly divided about who to get into bed with. David Blunkett’s accusation that the Lib Dems were behaving “like every harlot in history” is hardly a term of endearment for a would-be partner in a coalition of the losers. A stable government looks a remote possibility. Political stalemate combined with an attack on the pound could yet produce an all-party “government of national emergency”.

Brown, of course, was the architect with Tony Blair of New Labour, which transformed the old party from a social democratic organisation into full-blown cheer-leaders for globalised capitalism, particularly in the financial sector. Brown’s first act was to create the Financial Services Authority as a hands-off “regulator” which would allow the City to do what it wanted.

Brown once famously declared he had put an end to Tory “boom and bust”. Well, he got that spectacularly wrong. Happy to rake in tax revenue from bank profits, New Labour ignored warnings that a boom based on unsustainable levels of credit would end in crash. Brown’s announcement that he is resigning as party leader reflects the impact of a crisis that has taken the British state towards bankruptcy.

The outcome of 29.6 million people casting their votes (under two thirds of the electorate, but 2 million more than last time) has produced an unprecedented political vacuum. This was not necessarily anyone’s intention. But the result is nonetheless the outcome of millions of individual decisions as voters rejected 13 years of New Labour rule, but refused to endorse other parties in an overwhelming way.

Around the world, scrambles by politicians to form one kind of unholy multi-party alliance or another have been par for the course in politics for a long time, but not in Britain. A vacuum in politics, as in nature, cannot persist for long. As we remarked the day after the election, the top priority for those overseeing the capitalist state at this time of extreme financial crisis is the need for stability:

Just read this account of yesterday evening in the City:

17:41 "A Lib-Lab coalition would be a big negative for sterling," Ian Stannard at BNP Paribas says. "The Government will be unstable and not have the ability to drive through the cuts required."

17:30 Pound is now at $1.4866 against the dollar, compared to $1.5056 earlier in the afternoon. Still falling too.

17:23 Euro has risen by more than half a cent against the pound following Brown's statement. Markets really spooked by prospect of more uncertainty.

17:14 Reaction to Brown's statement and subsequent fall in pound from Jeremy Cook, chief economist at World First:

“It’s pretty clear that the market wants certainty and that the news that Clegg is dilly-dallying between Labour and the Conservatives have not gone down well. I’m surprised that the markets haven’t hit sterling hard today, the EU plan has taken a bullet for us. As soon as that become old news however sterling is once again in the firing line”.

Due to the effects of globalisation on politics, the electoral base of both Tory and New Labour parties has changed in Britain, while the rise of the Liberal Democrats has destabilised the two-party system at the national level. These complex realities mark the end of an historical era and the opening up of a new political landscape in which the only certainty has become uncertainty.

Despite their differences, Cameron, Clegg, Mandelson and Balls will seek to impose the rule of the corporations and the markets. Forget all this rubbish about a “progressive alliance”. More like an anti-people alliance. We should seize this moment of no government to advocate strategies to achieve a real democracy in place of the Westminster charade.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Election deepens political crisis

The death at the weekend of writer Alan Sillitoe and the looming possibility of a hung Parliament have no direct connection. And yet looking back at Sillitoe’s writings, and reflecting on the latest twists in the election campaign, you can detect a profound shift taking place in British history.

Sillitoe’s brilliant story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner appeared as a film in 1960. The story of a borstal boy symbolised the rebelliousness of an entire generation of young people – and the gritty realities of working class life in post-war Britain.

That world has passed. Communities of factory workers like those depicted in Sillitoe’s writings disappeared under globalisation and the policies of Thatcher and New Labour. New class relations have emerged. Workers are more dispersed and less unionised. Large sections of the community no longer work and live in impoverished conditions in, for example, former mining areas.

The old party loyalties have gone as a result. That, at the political level, can help to explain the sudden rise of the Liberal Democrats and an historic break-up of the two-party system. The choice between first the Tories and the Whigs and later Tories and Labour has dominated British politics for 200 years. Formal coalitions have been reserved for war time only.

That is why the threat of a Parliament without an overall majority for any party signals a moment of instability in which the “known knowns” are – at least temporarily – shattered, and has forced a realignment between those who represent capitalism.

The connection between this political transformation is inseparable from the economic processes of the last 40 years, in which the British welfare state has changed into a “market state” – entirely subservient to the rule of global capital. This process, explained in A World to Win’s book Unmasking the State, has led to a “hollowing out” of the state itself.

As the state’s role has altered, more and more people have lost interest in politics, realising that exercising your right to vote does not lead to any influence over those elected. Clegg’s sudden stardom following the first TV debate was not so much due to his personal charisma as the desire to pin on him the widespread disaffection with New Labour and the Tories.

After all, Clegg is even more ruling class than Cameron, and the Lib Dems are even more pro-banker than Brown and Cameron put together, if that’s possible. Don’t forget that Clegg’s deputy leader, ex-banker Vince Cable was the oil corporation Shell’s chief economist.

As Clegg knows only too well, Both Brown and Cameron’s “love bombing” is just hot air and he is walking a political tightrope. Many Lib Dem voters would see entering into an agreement with Cameron, as a "pact with the devil” and those who want to get shot of New Labour will feel betrayed if Clegg joins with Brown.

Achieving a stable form of government under these conditions could be well-nigh impossible. Some will see the political crisis as simply shadow-dancing while the real power-brokers remain hidden from view in the corridors of Whitehall and the global corporations. In some respects they are right.

But at the same time, to view politics separately form the deep currents underneath is also to miss the real moment of opportunity. The political crisis means that the ruling class is unable to rule in the old way at a time of a serious financial emergency. The strength of those in power is precisely that they are aware of this weakness and will do all in their power to address it.

Our strength must be to see it as an opportunity for those excluded from power to exercise their power in a meaningful way. That is why our strategy of forming People’s Assemblies is a thousand times more realistic than believing we can influence any parliament that will result from the election.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Revealed: the secret debate rules

There were apparently about 80 rules agreed between the major parties about how last night’s TV debate should be conducted. We can reveal some of the rules for the first time – and they go a long to explaining why those viewers who didn’t switch channels had to endure what they did.

1. All the leaders will be pompous white males in shiny suits with ludicrous ties that relate to their party’s colours.
2. All the questions will be so anodyne that they wouldn’t frighten a pussycat.
3. The Big Three will decline to inform viewers about the scale of the cuts in public spending they would make if in government.
4. All three leaders will pledge to protect front-line services, while knowing that the budget deficit makes this impossible.
5. Each leader will have a go at immigration levels, trying to steal votes from those thinking about voting for the neo-fascist BNP.
6. No one will mention the word capitalism or criticise the system in any way that links it to the economic and financial crisis.
7. No one will acknowledge that that the British state’s debts are larger in proportion to gross domestic product than Greece’s.
8. Tory leader David (call me Dave) Cameron will talk about creating a “Bigger Society” when he actually wanted to say a “Big Society”.
9. He will bang on about “efficiency savings” when he means cuts.
10. New Labour leader Gordon Brown will speak like a programmed robot and wear a stupid grin from time to time.
11. He will hector Cameron and viewers whenever he gets the chance.
12. Brown will accept no responsibility for anything New Labour has done in 13 years in office.
13. Cameron will sometimes look bewildered, wondering what he was doing in Manchester for the debate and thinking about the playing fields of Eton.
14. Cameron will talk about “change” in such a vague way that he could be talking about what you get back after going to the local shop.
15. Nick Clegg will boast that his party is different from the two “old parties” because it is new.
16. Clegg will omit to say that the Lib Dems come out of the Liberal Party, which was one of the two major British parties from the mid-19^th century until the rise of the Labour Party in the 1920s.
17. He will also refer to the number of admirals there are relative to each warship (as if anyone cared) and the cost of a new police car.
18. From time to time, the three leaders will agree with each other totally to show that when it comes down to it, there’s not much between them on policies.
19. None will give a hint that behind the scenes they are secretly negotiating the terms of a coalition/national government that could well prove necessary after May 6.
20. At the end of the 90 minutes (thank goodness there’s no rule about playing extra time), all three will shake hands.
21. Cameron and Clegg will wander off the platform together, while Brown approaches frightened members of the audience.

For the masochists amongst you, there are two more of these events to come before polling day. Now you can see that our policy of hanging on to your votes is the only one guaranteed to keep you sane.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

A future unfair for most

Once upon a time in the 18^th century, a Frenchman wrote “the style is the man”. Studying New Labour’s election manifesto published yesterday, it is wise to keep this in mind.

The garish-kitsch-retro design of the manifesto cover is a ham-fisted attempt to refer backwards to Old Labour with lashings of Stalinist Socialist Realism. The “vision” it presents is of a white family looking out over green fields towards a radiant sun emblazoned with the words “a future fair for all” (whatever that means).

From where most of us live in large or small cities and towns, this is not a Britain we would recognise, except when we might be on holiday. Likewise the bizarre fake cornfield projected behind Gordon Brown at the launch – has Britain suddenly turned into a rural idyll?

The appeal is directly to the middle classes, as confirmed by Brown: “We are the party of everybody of middle income and modest incomes in this country. We are the party appealing to middle class voters in every constituency.”

New Labour’s hope is that it can keep the real issues and its real plans in the shadows. Behind all the tinsel and promises of crumbs, the real strategy is “to encourage a culture of long-term commitment to company growth”. There is not an instant’s reflection on what has taken place since 2007, when the financial meltdown got under way.

New Labour’s corporate-friendly “high growth” policy of the last 13 years will continue if it is re-elected – as if there has been no evidence that the financial and economic crash was the direct result of giving free sway to the interests of the banks and global corporate capitalism.

That’s why Lord Mandelson said that “the spirit of Tony Blair smiles down on New Labour today” and described the manifesto as “Blair plus”. Helping the corporations to maintain their growth and profits will remain at the heart of New Labour, however great the suffering this will wreak on all but the super-rich.

New Labour intends to recover the staggering £900 billion national debt by huge cuts in public spending, including £20 billion-worth in the National Health Service and attacks on public sector pensions – punishing the very people who keep the country going – fire-fighters, NHS and council workers.

The manifesto boasts: “We will take a tough stance on public-sector pay, saving over £3 billion by capping public-sector pay rises at one per cent in 2011-12 and 2012-13. We have agreed tough reforms to public-sector pensions.”

Meanwhile, immigrant workers, young people and “problem families” are effectively blamed for social problems and crime. The manifesto proudly announces its primitive attitude: more punishment and medieval-style “shaming”: “We will ensure a total of 96,000 prison places by 2014. More EU and other foreign prisoners will be transferred abroad….For offenders not sentenced to prison we have brought in tough new ‘Community Payback’: hard work in public, wearing orange jackets.”

The database surveillance state will be breathing down our necks and prying into our lives. CCTV, DNA profiling and databases, biometric ID schemes (i.e. passports) will be “offered” at high prices. DNA data will be kept for six years for “serious” offenders.

A vision? New ideas? Quite the opposite. The manifesto is a tawdry and shameful attempt is to hoodwink the middle classes and whip up anti-immigration sentiments. Meanwhile, the need to pour money into the black hole of debt to pay for the banking bail-outs will consign lower-paid and public sector workers, the poor, the young, the disabled and pensioners to an impoverished and insecure fate.

And yet, you still meet people who tell us that you have to vote New Labour to keep the Tories out. Surely they are just joking?

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary