The state feeds on terror and ignores serious threats to society

Events in Woolwich yesterday show that the state is totally geared up for emergency action when it wants to be – committees meet, officials are called in, politicians focus their attention and insist something must be done.

One is entitled to ask why they can respond so strongly to a lone terrorist event when they are so entirely unable to react to long-term, serious threats to society – poverty, climate change, banking and tax corruption and youth unemployment to name a few? No committees met when it was reported last week that the concentration of CO2 has risen above 400 parts per million!

Cameron says the "British people" will "never buckle in the face of terror" and promised "terrorists will never win". But those who carried out yesterday's horrific attack and others like the Boston Marathon attack, were not aiming to win - they were aiming to die, and to strike a blow against their enemy as they did so.

Yet such acts of terrorism can no more “win” than the NATO powers can win their so-called war on terror. Instead, the world is now locked into a continuous conflict and the state adopts the rhetoric of “crushing” the terrorists, a rhetoric that is easily transferable to crushing all opposition.

The reaction of the state media shows the extent to which even intelligent journalists adopt distorted thinking in order to support the kind of imperialist and colonialist rhetoric that still colours so much public discourse in the UK. In an astonishing article on the BBC website, home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani says:

"For jihadists, it really comes down to the presence of soldiers - and an entire framework of belief that sees those personnel, whatever role they have been given under international law, as the enemy of Islam. That argument is often backed up with graphic images online of the suffering of ordinary women and children. It's all designed to whip up anger and a sense of burning injustice - the kind of injustice that leads people to be convinced that something must be done."

So women and children suffering in the Middle East and Afghanistan are just "images" and only serve to "whip up" a sense of burning injustice. They are not really burning injustices in themselves!  He goes on: "Now, most people who feel a sense of injustice obviously combat it in [sic] purely peaceful means. The point about terrorism is that the sense of injustice becomes a springboard for mental somersaults in the mind of someone who thinks that indiscriminate violence can create justice."

So "most people" obviously combat injustice by peaceful means? Would that include the troops sent to Mali by the French government? Or the first invasion of Iraq, after Saddam fell out with the West and invaded Kuwait? Or the second invasion, when, as Blair now admits, the goal was regime change? Or the invasion of Afghanistan in response to the attacks on the Twin Towers? Or illegal drone assassinations?

Of course not! These claim the sanction of “international law” and fighting to “preserve our way of life”, which, when it comes down to it, means sustaining corporate and financial power over ordinary people’s lives.

The last time the cabinet’s emergency unit Cobra was in almost continuous session was in 2011 when riots broke out in London and other cities – another outpouring of anger at burning injustice. On this occasion it was the injustice of police shooting a young black man and anger at the impact of the economic crisis being foisted on to the young and the poor.

The reaction was ruthless and the justice system was instructed by the government to repress those who were caught. First-time offenders were given long prison terms; young people got four years just for Facebook messages.  

Of course terrorism and rioting are not going to change the state of the world, or the state of the state. The state feeds on such acts and uses them to mobilise reactionary forces and reinforce repression against every community.

So the capitalist state is itself the problem, not the solution. It can never address the grievances that drive people to terrorism or to riot. Only when power is in the hands of ordinary people will the conditions exist for that to happen.

Penny Cole

ConDems tool up for confrontation

Yesterday community shops throughout the UK received a message asking “how community shops have collaborated with each other and other local business to ensure the continuity of supply of products and services when normal routes to market are broken”.

There is surely no coincidence in the timing of this research being carried out by the Plunkett Foundation on behalf of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

David Cameron’s Coalition government is gearing up for an all-out confrontation with fuel tanker drivers who are threatening to strike over the Easter weekend. Cameron today chaired a meeting of Cobra, the civil contingency committee, to discuss plans to limit the effects of a strike over terms and conditions and safety standards. Plans include training military personnel to take the place of striking drivers behind the wheel of commercial tankers.

Horace Plunkett, the man behind the Foundation, was himself a contradictory figure in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The offspring of the Barons of Dunsany and Sherborne, educated at Eton and Oxford, he was a founder of the co-operative movement in rural Ireland, improving conditions for farmers and the quality of food, against fierce opposition from the dairy industry.

His political career made him an Irish Unionist Alliance MP for South County Dublin. He was a proponent of Home Rule and sought clemency for the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising.

In the period leading to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, his rural cooperative movement suffered injury at the hands of British government forces, the creameries alleged to be centres of sedition. Factories were wrecked or burned, stocks destroyed, trade interrupted.

Now they British government is looking to his Foundation for help.

The Cobra meeting may be a knee-jerk reaction to the threatened strike, but in the background, the government is surely preparing for major confrontations as the impact of its unprecedented assault on living standards takes hold.

In the UK real household disposable incomes in 2011 as a whole fell 1.2%, the biggest drop since 1977, said the Office for National Statistics, as it announced that the economy contracted by a greater than expected 0.3% between October and December last year.

From the UK and throughout Europe, across the Atlantic in the Americas, and throughout the world confrontations are building as millions of workers, peasants, small farmers, young and old employed, pensioners struggle with the consequences of the contraction of the global capitalist economy.

Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has promised to present a budget on Friday that will be "very, very austere". Luis Garicano economist at the London School of Economics and head of Spanish think tank Fedea admitted: "We've signed a suicide pact in Europe by agreeing that we all need to make cuts. "Europe has to recognise that this is a downward spiral that's not helping anyone."

Unemployment in Spain is already more than double the European Union average, almost half of young people cannot find a job and poverty levels are rising faster than anywhere else in Europe.

According to El País, the EU is demanding cuts larger than those of Greece, Ireland or Portugal: "There is no comparable adjustment in [our] economic history," says the paper.

Tomorrow, a general strike, which 30% of employed adults say they will join, will see hundreds of planes grounded, public transport reduced to a skeleton service, manufacturing at a virtual standstill, and even fresh bread from the bakeries in scant supply.

According to Katharine Ainger, co-editor of We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism, the general strike will be “a kind of creative laboratory for the indignados who will be exploring new ways to exert social pressure”.

But pressure, however strong, won’t be able to prevent the catastrophic slide of the capitalist system into depression following the bursting of the credit-driven period of growth. Today's strikes in London by teachers and lecturers in defence of pensions show that workers will fight back, even if other unions have left them to fight alone.

Out of strikes, protests, demonstrations, and occupations must come new forms of democracy, a global network of revolutionary people’s assemblies making their own contingency plans, not to rescue capitalism, but to replace it, making Plunkett’s co-operative ideal the foundation for a needs-based sustainable economy.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Spooks muscle in

The result of the toner cartridge bomb plot, as with all such individual acts of terrorism, will be to further strengthen, rather than weaken, the anti-democratic arm of the state to use against its own citizens.

Whatever the true nature of the plot, said to originate from an Al Qaeda cell in Yemen, its exposure will be useful for MI5 chief, Jonathan Evans. Evans wants anti-terror legislation introduced by New Labour – 28-day detention without charge and “control orders” in particular - to remain on the statute books.

Before last May’s election, both Conservatives and LibDems attacked New Labour for this open breach of civil liberties. Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg was particularly outspoken, condemning the “control order regime” and calling for its abolition. Now that Cameron is in office, the spooks have told him they need these laws and apparently he says that if Clegg objects, the coalition is “heading for a fucking car crash".

Cameron yesterday chaired an emergency meeting of COBRA, the committee that takes over in the face of major terrorist or health threats. In parliament he spoke of the need to “cut out the terrorist cancer that lurks in the Arabian Peninsula”.

Evans, along with his fellow spooks in the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism based in the Home Office, are lobbying the government hard to keep the laws on the books so that they can do what they want with terror suspects.

The intelligence agencies are already virtually the only area of government spending not facing cuts – in fact MI5, MI6 and GCHQ have been awarded an extra £65m on top of their existing £2.4 billion budget to run their 5,700-or so agents, much to the chagrin of Defence chiefs. Counter-terrorism and spying on the population is a greater priority than the armed services, apparently.

The reality is that however much they spend, countries across Europe, and the US, are still vulnerable to terror attacks. The toner cartridge bomb exercise demonstrates that it is relatively simple to construct such devices. As long as there are individuals prepared to risk their lives – and terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda to fund and organise global networks – this cat and mouse war will continue.

Hyping their ability to prevent further attacks through big-power co-operation and more cash for spooks, is just whistling in the dark. Innocent civilians in cities like New York, London, Madrid, Mumbai and Nairobi will be the ones to suffer. And the threat is not only in the west – yesterday 52 worshippers lost their lives in yet another Baghdad bombing.

Governments who continue to fight disastrous and hopeless wars like that in Afghanistan, supposedly to root out terrorism, will never succeed in protecting their citizens from terrorist attacks. Quite the opposite.

But will they listen to the advice of former Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev who said last week that victory in Afghanistan was impossible and that the same militants terrorising Afghanistan and Pakistan today were trained by the US? Of course not.

Fighting the so called “war on terror” and protecting populations from terror attacks – real or imaginary, actual or contrived - is one of few important roles that today’s political leaders can lay claim to – as they set about deconstructing the welfare state.

And the spooks lobby will continue to enjoy government support as long as that is the case, not only for the so-called “war on terror” but also to rapidly resurrect the role they played so enthusiastically in the 1980s, of targeting trade unionists and others fighting the actions of the government. For example trade unionists like the firefighters. many of whose personal details including home addresses, were this week mysteriously leaked to the Sunday Mail.


Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary