Chemical blame game over Syria disguises the real issues

In the aftermath of parliament’s rebuff to prime minister Cameron’s proposed attack on Syria, Barack Obama has been forced to acknowledge the mass opposition to military action.

The legacy of recent debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and the intervention in Libya continue to haunt large numbers of people, including top military brass.

It is evident that externally-backed regime change in these countries has achieved no benefits, either for their populations or for ordinary citizens in the United States or Britain.

Obama's hesitation about striking Syria is as much to do with popular distaste for war after more than a decade of body bags from Iraq and Afghanistan as it is to do with the timing of G20 summit that takes place in Moscow later this week.

Of course, Cameron and Obama hope to give their tarnished democratic credentials a polish by subordinating themselves to the decisions of elected bodies – parliament and the US Congress.

But meanwhile, the pro-attack faction in parliament – including the vociferous former Lib-Dem leader, Lord Paddy Ashdown - is marshalling forces for a possible second vote. US secretary of state John Kerry is declaring that Obama has the authority to act without Congressional approval.

Much energy is being spent trying to pin down responsibility for the chemical attack in Damascus. Shocking images are published and the US claims to have proof that the regime is responsible.

But the issue of chemical weapons – the “red line that must not be crossed” as Obama put it – is actually a secondary issue to the fundamental question: do the major powers have the “right” to attack Syria?

The debate over who is using the chemical weapons – the Assad regime or those fighting against it – begs the real question: is military intervention

a solution to the misery of the Syrian people? And is it justified in any case?

And does opposition to bombing Assad’s military installations imply support for him?

Absolutely not in response to every question!

The all-important distinction is between the Assad and the Syrian people who have courageously opposed his noxious regime for decades, even while the US, Britain et al were wheeler dealing with Damascus in their power games.

What about the all-important the right to self-determination of the Syrian people themselves? It is as if they don’t exist except as victims whom we must pity.

But a large part of the disposed and poor Syrian people rose up against Assad in the Arab spring of 2011, which undermined autocratic regimes, from Tunisia to Egypt. (How many people know, for example, that in July 2011, the Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page had over 218,000 followers?)

Of course, their hope that the Assad regime would fall quickly was mistaken. It is backed by Russia (which has a naval base in the country). Moscow has been supplied arms to Syria for decades.

Although Tehran would seem to have little in common with the secular Syrian regime, it too has supported Assad, sending him money to pay for Russian hardware, because his opponents are predominantly Sunni Muslims by contrast with the Shia Muslims in Iran.

Underneath the conflict in Syria is a class division in which the state oppresses its people. These divisions are now masked over by the sectarian religious divide, spurred on and armed by Saudi Arabia, the US and Britain and elements of Al Qaeda on the one side, with Iran and Russia on the other. 

The democratic and social aspirations of Syrians, whatever their religious or non-religious allegiances, like those of Egyptians are totally ignored by most media and commentators.

In the meantime, we say an unconditional “No” to any attacks on Syria. This does not mean giving succour to the Assad regime. As Irfan Ahmad has pointed out, in the Arab states, as elsewhere, the urgent need is to encourage and develop a democratic secular alternative.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Dancing to the tune of the far right

Prime Minister David Cameron has chosen the pages of the Sun newspaper to launch a crackdown on immigrants. In what the tabloid calls his “manifesto”, he claims that “Frankly this country became a soft touch”.

Whilst saying that immigration has benefited Britain, his words are a clear bid to win back those voters who have been migrating to the anti-immigration, anti-Europe UK Independence party.

The manifesto is Cameron’s attempt to outflank Ukip leader Nigel Farage, who recently met with the Sun’s owner, Rupert Murdoch for the first time. The PM’s attack on welfare for immigrants mimics proposals put forward by Ukip.

Cameron announced that immigrants would no longer receive benefits if they did not find a job after six months. They would only qualify to be on the waiting list (let alone be given) council homes when they have lived in the UK for up to five years. He said they would not be able to receive free treatment in the NHS.

The entire basis for his attack was that immigrants are an overall drain on the UK economy in general and on housing benefits and the health service.

But on BBC Radio 4 this morning, Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), put the record straight. He said that the Institute’s research for the Migration Advisory Committee of the UK Border Agency has shown that migrants “make a substantial net contribution to UK finance”.

This is because migrants are mostly young people who come to the UK to work and who pay taxes, he explained. They are far less of a burden on the welfare state than the average British citizen. The overwhelming part of UK benefits go to older people who need long-term health care.

While there obviously were some cases of abuse, “the figures tell us that the people from outside the UK are a miniscule cost to the NHS”.

The NIESR is not the only organisation challenging the increasingly shrill anti-immigration rhetoric. On Saturday, the Bishop of Dudley, David Walker, said the tone of the debate was “wholly disproportionate”. Walker, who has served on the board of the National Housing Federation pricked the “fear” bubble. 

“Public fears around immigration are like fears around crime,” he said.  “They bear little relationship to the actual reality. The true threats to our national wellbeing lie not with those who come to visit or make their lives here but with the increasing gap between the rich and poor among us."

It’s clear that Cameron is dancing to the tune of Ukip and the far right, is using the pages of the right wing press to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment based on a fictional scenario.

His stance, however, still fails to match up to that of Labour. Not long ago, Blairite Dan Hodges noted that Labour leader Ed Miliband “laid out some of the hardest policy lines ever drawn on the issue by a Labour leader”. And Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's agenda involved “arrest, incarceration and deportation. Not One Nation, but a one-way ticket out of Britain”. She called for greater powers to be given to the UK Borders Agency.

But that very same agency is guilty of repeatedly breaking the law in its attempts to deport those legally seeking leave to remain in the UK.

UKBA’s monstrous behaviour has led to the deaths of a number of asylum seekers whilst in custody (some whilst in the “care” of global security giant G4S), the separation of children from parents, wives from husbands and many other human rights infringements.

The continuing shift to ever more anti-immigration policies is a bankrupt racist attempt by all the main political parties to make immigrants into scapegoats as the economic crisis deepens. Former immigration lawyer Francis Webber’s call for “a braver alternative vision” in her new book Borderline Justice is spot on. It can help to inspire the development of a new constitution for the 21^st century.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win Secretary

Charities row about venal self interest

The Coalition’s proposal to limit tax relief on charitable donations to £50,000 per year or 25% of a donor’s income has touched a raw nerve within the government’s natural constituencies – so called “wealth creators” and those who back the notion of “the big society”.

At present there is no limit on the amounts that can be donated to charities, thus making it possible to avoid paying tax altogether. One thousand millionaires currently pay 30% or less tax while nearly one in 10 people earning more than £10 million a year pay less than 20% in income tax, according to the Treasury.

Outraged members of the rich list have joined up to complain that the Budget proposal would “deter future donors” in a letter to the Sunday Telegraph. Infringing their “right” to use their wealth as they see fit is a restriction on the “liberties” of the rich and the super rich. To paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies, “they would say, that wouldn’t they?”

The idea that you can appear righteous and generous by giving away some of your wealth to the worthy poor and other selected “good causes” goes back to Victorian times and has long been the foundation of old Toryism as well as liberalism.

Philanthropists like Joseph Rowntree combined Quaker beliefs to build model housing schemes and fund research into social issues. Others raised money for public parks.

But the notion of selfless generosity has gone out of the window in favour of venal self-interest. Offsetting tax by making donations to charity is a convenient way for millionaires to minimise their tax payments. In fact Osborne’s proposal would only affect those giving more than £200,000, so it hardly “punishes” anyone but the super rich.

The web of connections between charities, politicians, corporate and banking interests are more often than not incestuous. Former prime minister Tony Blair, for example, has let it be known that "this is absolutely the right moment for government to do all it can to promote philanthropy; and certainly nothing to harm it."

Not too surprising for a man whose Faith Foundation pays six figure salaries to its staff. And his wife Cherie Blair’s Foundation for Women is backed by top US banks, JP Morgan Chase Foundation and Goldman Sachs.

Behind the pious phrases of “giving back to the community” is not only greed but a deep-seated animosity to the notion of a state that can tap into the income of the rich to provide any kind of benefit to the rest of society including the health service, pensions, education and all the rest.

So why has the coalition made this move? The globalisation of industry and banking combined with tax avoidance, growing unemployment and an aging population has significantly reduced state revenues. So little surprise that the state is desperate to claw back tax money while giving the appearance – and that’s all it is – that “we’re all in together”.

But fear not, ConDem ministers! Shining knight Ed Miliband has come riding to the rescue. Trying to outflank the coalition with a demagogic attack on “big money” funding of political parties he has proposed a £5,000 cap on donations. This makes Osborne’s £50,000 limit on charitable donations look like a tax bonanza to the rich.

Miliband equates trade union donations with those given to the Tories by capitalists and bankers. This is really reactionary and shows what contempt the Labour leader has for ordinary workers. His proposed cap also opens the door for Tories to demand that union members in affiliated unions opt in to paying the political levy to Labour (at moment unionists have to opt out – i.e. make a conscious decision not to pay).

Yes, they are all in together – the major political parties, that is. That’s why so many people are deciding to hold on to their precious votes until there’s something better to use them on.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Populist Cameron trumps pathetic Labour

Interviewing the prime minister for the Sunday Telegraph, Matthew D’Ancona curiously concluded that David Cameron was a man with a mission – “to save capitalism from itself”.

Cameron is acutely aware that the system is in deep trouble and that vast numbers of people are increasingly angry about the widening gulf between them, the rich and the powerful.

A new poll has confirmed that economic fears are by far the greatest concerns. So Cameron is in a bidding war with Labour to fool a worried public that that action is being taken to curb the excesses of the system. With Ed Miliband’s party in practice a semi-detached part of the coalition government, Cameron’s task is made easier.

Cameron’s trumpeted curbs on executive pay, aimed at giving shareholders a direct say in determining salary packages and pay-offs, is aimed at soothing outrage over the earnings of company directors, as is his decision to maintain the top 50p rate of tax.

People are aware that the class divide is deeper than ever. The vast majority, are disgusted at the wealth of a tiny minority. Rising prices and bills combined with rapidly rising unemployment and wage freezes have cut deep into people’s standard of living.

Anger at top people’s wealth is of course totally justified. An independent survey finds that chief executives of 87 of the FTSE 100 firms helped themselves to a 33% rise in pay and perks in 2010-11, taking their average package to £5.1million. Other directors took pay rises of 49% over the year, walking away with £2.7million each.

Small wonder, then, that the Tent City occupation outside St Paul’s, which initially targeted the London Stock Exchange, has continued to strike a chord amongst large numbers of people, including City workers.

For a Conservative leader, Cameron has been harsher in his criticism than Labour of how economic growth and speculation on the markets has benefited a tiny minority. Edward Heath, the Tory prime minister before Margaret Thatcher, once famously talked of the “unacceptable face of capitalism”.

Cameron went one better in outright populist rhetoric directed at big business. He told BBC’s Andrew Marr show, that where “there was excessive growth of payment, unrelated to success, frankly ripping off the shareholder and the customer, [it] is crony capitalism and is wrong. It’s also, and this is the key point, payments for failure”.

It’s not the first time that Cameron and his strategy directors, who include Steve Hilton and Andrew Cooper, have invaded territory which Labour felt it could lay claim to. But that’s not difficult. Shadow Business secretary Chuka Umunna’s pathetic weekend call for a “responsible and better capitalism” hardly set the pulse racing.

The truth is that these political leaders hope to cash in on disquiet with the system simply to keep the show on the road, just as the spectre of uncontrolled financial markets and the greatest debt crisis in history is causing economic havoc.

The notion that the shareholders can somehow regulate the fortunes made out of the system is just as harebrained as the idea of that politicians can control or even influence the flows of capital through the world’s financial market.

Giving shareholders more power will do nothing to change the spots of the capitalist leopard. Institutional shareholders like insurance companies have already presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the majority in society to the minority. And many of them benefit from the same high earnings as the CEOs they are supposed to regulate.

Along with business secretary Vince Cable and the Labour leaders, Cameron is simply cashing in on the oh-so-threadbare but still powerful myth that capitalism can be reformed or tamed by pretending that “fairness” can be spread around. Behind all the rhetoric lies the awareness that they are impotent as the system careers further and further out of control.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Out of work? Cameron has just the job for you

As the dole queue lengthens and living standards fall faster than at any time since the 1930s, you’ll be pleased to know that there is work there for all who want it in a planned new government agency.

The Stop The Anonymous Suspect Immigrant Agency (Stasia) is looking for staff to put into practice the policy announced by prime minister Cameron yesterday when he called on people to “shop” those they suspected might not be entitled to live in Britain.

Applicants should preferably be white British and able to answer questions like who won last year’s X-Factor and who are the judges in this year’s competition. Guidelines for spotting an illegal immigrant are being prepared, but are likely to include people who:

• are not fair-skinned and who have fuzzy hair (especially on the face)
• are heard speaking in a non-European foreign language or with a strong accent
• decline to go down the pub for a drink after work/refuse to buy a round when it’s their turn
• show no interest in the fortune of England sporting teams (especially at cricket)
• do not go for walks in the countryside and/or stay at home a lot
• are spotted sending money abroad to relatives
• work very long hours and perhaps have two or three low-paid jobs
• live in cramped houses or even sheds in people’s back gardens in Southall
• visit a hospital or GP without proving their entitlement
• do not own a car or drive without insurance (a lot of white people do this as well, which is a challenge)
• are unable to say when the Romans conquered Britain, what the Wars of the Roses were and whether the Magna Carta includes the right to a jury trial.

Payment per illegal immigrant shopped is being considered as a way of measuring performance of Stasia staff. Demand for the 10,000 jobs available with Stasia is likely to be heavy because of plummeting living standards.

A new report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that falling incomes will lead to the sharpest drop for middle-income families since the 1970s and will push 600,000 more children into poverty. By 2013 there will be 3.1 million children in poverty in the UK, according to the IFS projections. Some 17% of UK children were already living in absolute poverty in 2009-10.

There will also be 2.5m working-age parents and four million working-age adults without children in absolute poverty by 2013, says the report. Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group, said: "Ministers seem to be in denial that, under current policies, their legacy threatens to be the worst poverty record of any government for a generation. They risk damaging childhoods and children's life chances, as well as our national economic wellbeing from wasted potential and social costs spiral. It would be a catastrophic failure in public policy and political leadership."

For some, albeit a small minority, the crisis simply passes them by. We are talking of chief executives, directors, hedge fund managers, speculators and other assorted masters of the universe. Their role, among others, is to minimise tax payments and maximise shareholder returns.

A new report by ActionAid reveals that of the 100 biggest corporations listed on the London Stock Exchange, 98 use tax havens. Of their more than 34,000 subsidiary companies, joint ventures and associates, nearly one in four is located in a tax haven. The biggest tax haven user overall is the advertising company WPP, which has 611 tax haven companies!

Now, setting up a hot-line to shop a capitalist tax avoider/bankster/speculator/polluter/anti-union employer… Dream on!

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

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

Challenge the hate-filled state

The low level of debate at the emergency recall of Parliament underlines the yawning gulf between rulers and ruled, and the establishment’s poisonous hatred for working class youth.

Prime Minister Cameron claimed the uprising on streets around the country was 'criminality, pure and simple' - an intellectually bereft characterisation in a country where the entire social, economic and political structure is shaking.

MPs bayed for water cannon and baton rounds and censorship of social networking sites. Ed Milliband called for police spending cuts to be reversed and joined blanket condemnation of the rioters.

The police have shown a more sophisticated understanding of events than politicians. And they were also quite afraid of furious gangs ready to fight them. As one young woman said, the aim was to show the police that people control the streets and 'can do what they like' there.

The prevailing mood on the left has been one of ironic comment. It is pointed out that flat-screen TVs were high on MPs' looting lists too. The hypocrisy of condemning criminality when politicians, police and newspapers have been hiding each other's lawbreaking is also highlighted. Others point to politicians weeping over high streets already devastated by out-of-town shopping centres, with one in seven shops empty across the country.

Governments and corporations are desperate to kick start growth by getting people back spending on precisely the goods people were helping themselves to. And yesterday, Chancellor George Osborne was telling MPs that Britain is a 'safe haven' for investors precisely because of the brutal programme of cuts that led to youth clubs in Tottenham being shut.

Alongside this post-modernist irony, it is said that this is a non-political movement without a goal, it has no future, and we must 'condemn the violence'. This takes the appearance of the riots and compares and contrasts it to other aspects, when in fact these are all moving and developing parts of the same violent whole which is the out-of-control capitalist crisis that has the planet in its grip.

These moving parts are not outside of the political realm but inside it. You could say that politically the riots were more realistic than the student fees protests, because the youth were not asking the government or the police to change course - which they won't - but simply fighting them.

This new part - angry working class youth - has emerged with dramatic force. It will not disappear, but interact with other parts and with the global whole, each changing and conditioning the next phase.

In the meantime, hundreds of youth will be criminalised. A 23-year-old man with no criminal record was jailed for six months for taking bottled water from Lidl. Rioters are being held in custody for charges where they would normally be bailed. Hundreds will go to jails and young offender institutions already bursting at the seams, with inhuman conditions. Others will be stuck with fines they will never be able to pay.

We must not abandon the youth to the tender mercies of a hate-filled state. The challenge is to break decisively from the illusion that the current system of rule can offer us any kind of decent future.

The formation of People's Assemblies to defend communities, jobs, services, education and housing, is the positive way forward. Representing all parts of the community, they can do a better job of protecting facilities and small businesses. Capitalism only wants young people working for minimum wage or spending up credit and store cards. It has no regard for them as individuals. Within the People's Assemblies they can represent their views, enjoy respect, and have a decisive role in forming their own future.

Community gatherings are already taking place in Lewisham, Clapham and Tottenham and other areas. There is a desire to mend the damage to town centres, small shops and people’s homes as well as address the deeper causes of the riots. This offers the opportunity to discuss practical ways to replace the bankrupt political establishment. The development of assemblies for the widest possible debate and action is the order of the day.

Penny Cole

Crisis at the top out of hand

A full-blown constitutional crisis is emerging within the British state, with the country’s top policeman challenging the authority of the prime minister who himself is connected to phone hacking through his former press secretary.

For Cameron to rush back from South Africa, while asking Parliament to meet on Wednesday – it was due to go into recess tomorrow – indicates the ever-increasing scale and scope of events precipitated by the Murdoch news empire’s meltdown.

The latest casualty is deep in the heart of the state – Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson. Although Home Secretary Teresa May poured oil on troubled waters in an unctuous statement, thanking the commissioner for his splendid work, knives are out big time between the police chief and the government.

The Commissioner claims there was nothing untoward in his relationship with ex-News International deputy editor Neil Wallis, But, as the Guardian points out: “The Metropolitan Police chose to hire the former second-in-command of an organisation while that organisation was being publicly accused of criminal activity”. Worse still, it failed to inform Downing Street about its close relationship with Wallis.

The real bombshell in Stephenson’s statement is his thinly-disguised challenge to Cameron. By comparing the PM’s hiring of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson to Scotland Yard’s hiring of Wallis, Stephenson has made a direct challenge to Cameron. Coming from Britain’s top police officer, who has only been in the job since 2009, this has the makings of a constitutional crisis.

The truth is that the media, the police and politicians (including of course New Labour) are all part of the system of governance. They have formed a social glue over a half-century as Murdoch’s media web stretched its tentacles around the world.

From the standpoint of logic, Stephenson is right. Cameron, like his New Labour predecessors, is absolutely tainted – and with him, Blair and Brown who repeatedly turned down opportunities to reopen hacking inquiries. Ed Miliband has also courted Murdoch and hired a former News International hack with question marks hanging over him as his own press advisor.

Stephenson’s resignation reveals a crisis of the state, intensified by the globalisation process and its subsequent crash. Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg yesterday warned of the dangers of another meltdown. A new report out today shows the UK economy is faltering – so badly that some suggest the Murdoch crisis is a convenient deflection from the real crisis.

The departure of the Met chief, under pressure from London mayor Boris Johnson, leaves a leadership gap at Scotland Yard which will grow if – as seems likely - counter-terrorism chief John Yates also resigns. It’s becoming blindingly clear that the Met is like that because the state as a whole is rotten and undemocratic and confidence in politicians as well as the media – and the police – continues to plummet. Now no one believes what they say – even if they are right!

The political turmoil is exacerbated by the plotting of right-wing Tories who see Cameron as too soft. The Telegraph and the Daily Mail are gunning for the Tory leader, believing they can get a more “traditional” one in his place.

So, while we can be pleased that the Pandora’s Box (more like a three-way sewer between Scotland Yard, Downing Street and Media-ville) is open, its secrets out and many involved tearing each other apart, there are many dangers behind the scenes.

Not least is the threat of a national government as the political crisis meets a worsening economic situation. Such a government would undoubtedly introduce emergency measures in “the national interest”.

The whole political structure and its disgruntled counterparts in the police and security services are irretrievably tainted and compromised. We should take up the call from the Spanish Real Democracy Now activists: Don’t vote for them! Build People’s Assemblies instead!

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

The emperors have lost their clothes

Nick Clegg’s statement that "the pillars of the British establishment are tumbling one after the other," should be taken seriously. The question is why now? What is driving the break-up of the institutions that rule Britain? And what follows?

The deputy prime minister has no intention of seriously upsetting the apple cart of British politics, but he has put his finger on an important insight. But the News of the World scandal is part of a wider, systemic crisis.

For prime minister Cameron, his connections with disgraced former News of the World editor Andy Coulson and through him to Rupert Murdoch, have rocked his already unstable government. Peter Oborne’s account of Cameron was drawn into Murdoch’s embrace – after some initial reluctance – is worth reading because it shows how fragile the political establishment is.

Whilst there are separate and independent reasons for flashpoints in the “parts” – the media, financial system, the police and parliament – together they constitute a “whole” which is also known as the capitalist system in Britain (and its relationships globally).

The unravelling of the unsavoury networks which constitute the power structures sheds a powerful light on this interconnectedness. And, crucially, the ruling class’s ability to rule relies on these connections remaining as secret as possible.

Trust - not only in the news media but in politicians and the venal connivance of the police (who had their own fingers deep in Murdoch’s pie) - is sinking at an unprecedented rate.

Murdoch’s chief executive Rebeka Brooks, who now faces questioning by the police, was not only a neighbour and family friend of the Camerons, but she is a crucial link in the spider’s web that embraces the Royal Family, the Blairs, and major corporations like the De Beers diamond dynasty and, of course, the media empire that is News Corp.

In the first years of the last decade, while the credit boom was in full swing, the phone hacking was put on the back burner by the police and the New Labour government. It must have seemed secondary to the mountains of “wealth” generated by the financial sector.

The crash of 2008 not only devastated the economy but it also shattered ordinary people’s faith in the market economy. This in turn led to a loss of confidence in ruling circles. The system was shaken and the skeletons fell out of the cupboard at the News of the World in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal, bankers’ bail-outs and bonuses and the resulting stalemate election of 2010.

And while many in ruling political and media circles are working feverishly to restore a modicum of confidence in the British state, the global economy and its financial system is heading for another meltdown.

Still reeling from the near default of Greece, the Eurozone is now staring into a new abyss: the spreading of “fiscal contagion” to Italy, the world’s seventh biggest economy. As one economics writer says: “It’s just too big to bail out. While the Eurozone could perhaps survive a Greek default, an Italian debt failure would mean all bets are off”. In the United States, a $4 trillion cuts package is seen as the only way to avoid a dollar default.

Separating out the political crisis in Britain from the continuing and worsening global debt crisis would be to ignore the reinforcing interactions which characterise the deep crisis of an entire system. That’s why stuffing the ugly genie that the News of the World scandal has revealed back into the bottle could be impossible.

The least we can do is to understand how fragile – ideologically speaking – the arrogant façade that the ruling classes deploy to intimidate those below them actually is. Each side of the crisis – political, economic, ecological – are parts of a rapidly changing whole reacting upon each other to create something quite new.

The rapidly-developing political crisis at the top cannot be patched up, not least because the economy is staggering from bad to worse. Down in society itself, a massive social upheaval, driven by a lack of confidence in the ruling classes, is brewing for which there is no obvious outlet. A heady mix indeed.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Revolution renews itself

The people’s revolution sweeping north Africa and the Middle East has entered a second phase, gathering a momentum of its own in country after country.

In Tunisia, where it all began with the suicide of a stall holder, workers battled in the streets over the weekend and finally ousted prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi. Some died in the streets of Tunis, as police and troops - backed by tanks - use tear gas to disperse hundreds of youths protesting against the caretaker government. The protesters who brought down dictator Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali only weeks ago rightly saw Ghannouchi as part of the dictatorial regime and demanded his removal.

In Egypt hundreds of thousands occupied Tahrir Square once again last Friday as they demanded the resignation of interim prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, a cabinet member under Hosni Mubarak. Military police used stun guns and batons to attack those rallying in the capital. Yesterday, after “apologising” for the violence the ruling generals announced a number of constitutional changes.

In oil-producing sultanate of Oman six protesters were killed over the weekend as they demanded political reforms and better pay. Around 1,000 had blocked the road leading to the main export port and refinery area in a state where strikes are banned.

In nearby Bahrain, crowds today have been chanting “down with the King” and waving flags outside the Ministry of Information in Manama. Others gathered outside the Bahrain Ministry of Education, shouting: “Let the palaces hear, we fear not your prisons." With youth unemployment standing at nearly 20%, Bahrainis have caught the revolutionary fever.

Most dramatic of all, in Libya the anti-Gaddafi movement that began in the east of the country and saw the fall of Benghazi, threatens to become a civil war as Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, his family and his followers continue to hold out in Tripoli and Sirte. In Benghazi, local committees have taken over the running of the city after the collapse of Gaddafi’s state structures.

As we have noted, events in Libya have a particular significance in the light of Gaddafi’s earlier role as a supporter of anti-imperialist people’s movements world wide. Until only a few weeks ago, the Gaddafi regime was obsequiously courted by pillars of the “world community”.

Now Gaddafi and his supporters are out-of-control forces standing in the way of the big power exploitation of Libya’s oil and gas. The British government (Blair and Mandelson in particular) and Italian PM Berlusconi, followed closely by Sarkozy of France, the US, Brazil and Germany suddenly forgot their dislike of Gaddafi. The very same world leaders who are now denouncing him and baying for his blood were only too thrilled to welcome him back into the fold of the “world community”.

It makes your hackles rise to hear Hague and Cameron’s oily tones pontificating that "of course, it is time for Gaddafi to go, that is the best hope for Libya”. US secretary of state Clinton has the astonishing arrogance to condemn the murder of innocent civilians in Libya while the US supports Israel’s state terror against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere. The US, Britain and the EU continue to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The degeneration of the Gaddafi regime over the last 20 years, from anti-imperialist to brutal dictatorship, marks the close of a period of post-colonial history. Now the struggle for democratic and human rights merges with a global crisis of capitalism. The new Arab revolution has only just started and it will have to go beyond fair and free elections to find solutions to the pressing problems of soaring food prices, mass unemployment, poverty and inequality.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

When marching is not enough

The contrast couldn’t be clearer. In Egypt, they gather in hundreds of thousands and strike with the aim of bringing down the Mubarak regime. In Britain, the leadership of the trade unions wants workers to walk through London at the end of March – and then go home.

By March 26, the date of the march called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), up to 200,000 public sector workers will have lost their jobs, as councils – many of them Labour controlled – implement government cuts, wrecking local services.

By then, those keeping their jobs will have suffered a massive erosion in their standard of living as food and fuel inflation takes off.

By then, university and college lecturers will be staring at closures and redundancies.

By then, the astronomical increase in university tuition fees will be a reality facing the next generation.

By then, the Coalition government would have forced through further marketisation of the National Health Service, building on the work of New Labour.

In other words, by then Cameron and Clegg will be halfway to imposing the burden of the capitalist crisis on the backs of ordinary working people.

Last week, the TUC called member unions together to discuss its response to the effects of the spending cuts announced last October. Talked up by the media as a planning meeting for a wave co-ordinated strikes against the cuts, it was nothing of the kind.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber stood on the steps of Congress House and ran up the white flag. Frightened by the existing anti-union laws – and alarmed by the threat of further legislation – Barber and the right-wing led major unions ruled out a confrontation with the government.

All Barber would say was that there could be action around “specific disputes” but none were planned. What are scheduled, however, are talks with the government over planned changes to public sector pensions.



A World to Win supports the TUC demonstration but not simply to register a protest against the government’s policies which are directly driven by the deepening capitalist economic and financial crisis.

We will campaign on the march for a way forward beyond March 26 that is not dependent on the manoeuvres of the TUC leadership. AWTW will urge:

 Leaders of trade unions opposed to the TUC right wing to call their own conference to plan joint action against the Coalition
 Occupations of town halls, universities and colleges to block job losses and the destruction of services
 The removal of discredited local councillors and their replacement by trade union and community representatives
 The creation of a network of People’s Assemblies to build a sustained challenge to the government’s authority.

As the resolution adopted at the weekend National Assembly of Education said, People’s Assemblies can:
 unite students, education workers, trade unionists, community groups and all those resisting austerity and ConDem cuts, as well as climate change activists, campaigners for human rights, migrant support networks and anti-racist groups.
 develop an alternative democratic voice and long-term presence to effectively challenge corporate/financial power and its grip on the existing political system.

A key role for Assemblies would be the development of alternative economic models to the failed profit system. We have to take the opportunity presented by the crisis to set out what we are for as well as what we are against, and to create strategy to put that into practice.

The revolutionary upsurge in North Africa, prompted by worsening economic and political conditions, will make its appearance in Britain. With the TUC on its knees, preparation for that eventuality is everything.

Paul Feldman
Communications 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

All bark and no bite

There was dismay and anger amongst the several thousand trade union members who crowded Westminster Central Hall; some including a large number from the prison officers union, couldn’t get in to the TUC’s anti-cuts rally. People had travelled from Lancashire, Devon, Cornwall, Northamptonshire and around London to take part in the protest meeting and lobby of MPs.

As well as the Prison Officers Association, there were big delegations from Unison, actors’ union Equity, rail and transport workers, public services unions UNITE and GMB, the National Union of Teachers and the Right to Work Campaign. Screen actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Roger Lloyd Pack said they opposed cuts in the arts which will privilege the rich. They all shared a deep anxiety as it emerged that around half a million jobs are to go by 2015.

Tony Woodley, joint secretary of the UNITE trade union, pointed out that for every four public sector jobs scrapped by the cuts, three more would follow in the private sector. He pointed out that the Lib-Con coalition has no mandate for the cuts, and that people “did not vote for the dismantling of their schools, hospitals and communities.”

“Cuts on this scale make no sense,” he said – but they make sense to the coalition, the bankers and the IMF. It’s the survival of the capitalist system that is at stake for them.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber continued the myth that the cuts are just a political choice, not an economic necessity for the ruling class: "They want us to believe....this is economic necessity. Yet economic experts across the spectrum warn us that the cuts are too deep and too rapid.”

Dave Prentis of Unison warned that if the government doesn’t listen, “we will be back. For every one of us in this room today, we will bring a hundred more. We’ll march in our thousands and we’ll vote in our millions,” he said in a fit of demagogy. But vote for what? For New Labour Mark 2?

None of the trade union leaders have any answers. In fact they are determined to hold back any serious movement by workers in the face of the re-shaping of the entire British state. Asked why the British workers were not angry as those in France, Woodley cited the anti-trade union laws making striking difficult. But if they were serious about halting the cuts, trade union leaders would bring every member out and let the law go hang. By directing all their fire towards parliament and the next election nearly four years hence, they hope to act as a lightning rod to defuse and disarm any movement.

And where was Milliband? He was in hiding from the trade union leaders who got him the Labour leadership. The reality is a New Labour government would be doing the same – and it may not be too long before they too are co-opted into this government of desperate decline.

Today’s spending review is not the result of a nasty bunch of old-style Thatcherite Tories. It is a response to the most serious economic and financial crisis of the capitalist profit-based system. As Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, speaking in the Midlands, made plain. Deep tensions underlay discussions at the International Monetary Fund meeting last week, he said.

Global currency conflicts, particularly between the US and China, are evidence of profound disagreements about the way to deal with the crisis. A 1930s-style collapse of business activity and international trade is possible. So much for the cuts being an “ideological exercise”! They are the ruling class’ response to an uncontrollable crisis of the system.

Fighting against the cuts agenda means challenging the ruling class by working for a transfer of power, property and control to a democratically elected and accountable network of peoples’ assemblies http://aworldtowin.net/frontline/BuildPeoplesAssemblies.html. Come to the Beyond Resistance conference on December 11 to make this come alive.

Corinna Lotz and Peter Arkell
A World to Win

Tory right guns for Lib-Dems

When David Laws was forced to resign last month, we asked if the Tory right wing was trying to destabilise the Lib-Con coalition. With the announcement that Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary Chris Huhne is leaving his wife in the wake of gutter press exposure of his relationship with economic advisor Carina Trimingham, the cracks are widening.

Like the former Treasury Chief Secretary, Huhne is a heavyweight inside the Liberal Democrats. Already there is speculation about whether Cameron should ask for his resignation which would seriously weaken the government just as the Budget is due to be announced. The campaign against Huhne, must therefore be seen in a bigger picture.

Apart from the cardinal sin of being a Liberal Democrat in the first place, Huhne has opposed expanding nuclear power and is in favour of carbon capture technology. Last week the Coalition announced that the £80 million loan needed to make the castings for nuclear reactors was to be cut, which has enraged the pro-nuclear lobby.

As with Laws, the allegations of sexual or marital “impropriety” are simply a smokescreen for far more serious and sinister matters.

The real issue is: what forces are guiding the snooping hacks of the News of the World, whose stories were immediately picked up by the Daily Mail and the Sunday Telegraph? Who tipped them off to tail Trimingham to Huhne’s constituency home in Eastleigh and follow the couple on the train all the way back to Waterloo, tracking their movements and phone calls? Last year Huhne demanded an inquiry into the News of the World phone-hacking saying: "It strikes at the heart of the privacy any individual can expect in a civilised society."

Is it payback time, or is it possible that they are being helped by operatives in one of the intelligence agencies, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ? Richard Aldrich, the author of a new book about the GCHQ spy centre in Cheltenham, which absorbs the largest chunk of the £2.4bn budget, says that GCHQ holds “enormous surveillance powers”. The frightening truth, he says, is "no one is in control" of these powers.

As Cameron’s coalition comes under strain, he is singing the praises of the military. The Prime Minister wrote yesterday that it was the whole nation’s “social responsibility to put servicemen and women “at the front and centre of our national life”, adding “I want to see an explosion of red, white and blue all over the country”.

As the 300th soldier is killed and when the majority of citizens are opposed to the hopeless war in Afghanistan, the pressure is on to re-legitimise the armed forces. The ruling class need to put down a marker in the wake of the Saville Report which proved beyond question that British troops deliberately fired on innocent civilians. This explains why even General Sir Richard Dannatt has backed Cameron in saying that the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry 38 years ago were “unjustified and unjustifiable”. That event must be firmly put in the past so that the troops can now be seen as self-less heroes who need “our” unstinting moral and financial support.

On the eve of what will is likely to be the most ferocious budget in history there are serious fears of civil unrest as the whirlwind of cuts hits jobs, services, pensions and pay.

No wonder that the media drums are beating to get support for the Armed Forces Day this Saturday. It’s time to join the campaign to build People’s Assemblies as the democratic alternative to these increasingly authoritarian state forces.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Britain - a failed state

A system that produces a government intent on forcing people to cut their own throats is a failed state and we ought to find a democratic replacement for it as soon as possible.

The Conservative-led coalition of public school-educated ministers wants to make the whole of the British electorate party to decisions that will “change our way of life” over the next few years.

Cameron and Clegg’s already damaged coalition – together with the entire media circus – are engaged on a campaign of attempted mass hypnosis. If they had their way, they’d draw the entire population into a self-inflicted tsunami of devastating cuts in wages, jobs, pensions and public services on a scale never seen before. This is change for the very worst.

As the government’s new “independent” Office for Budget Responsibility will reveal, the economy is on much shakier ground than previously thought. Treasury growth forecasts which, if true, would have cut the budget deficit, are pure invention by the outgoing New Labour government. The OBR, by the way, is headed by Sir Alan Budd, who, in 2005 became a director of IG Group, which trades in financial derivatives and spread betting. Very “independent” then!

Attempts to restart economic growth through the printing of money inevitably came to nothing, both in Britain and in the United States. The crisis of the capitalist system has not gone away. Far from it, as John Authers writes in his new book for the Financial Times, "The fearful rise of markets”:

“The financial disaster of 2007 to 2009 … has not cured any of the underlying factors that led markets to become intertwined and overinflated and to endanger the world economy. This does not mean that another synchronised bubble followed by a crash is inevitable, but it does mean that such an event remains a distinct possibility.”

The global capitalist system has failed – economically and politically. So what follows is a short list of the changes to the social relations that define “our way of life” we think are worth considering.

First to go should be the profit-based financial system and all the associated wasteful, absurd activities that turn reasonable, well-educated, clever, potentially socially-useful people into crazed traders and wild-eyed speculators. They have gambled with everyone else’s pensions, savings and futures, and now hold governments around the world to ransom. Sure we’ll need a system of credit and money, but why not run it as a not-for-profit community service?

Then there’s the system of land and property ownership. This has survived more or less intact in Britain since the Middle Ages. It ties millions of people into paying the major part of their income as rent or interest in exchange for temporary occupation and use or the mirage of security as a house owner. It’ll be better, much better when all property is held in common. Socially-owned land and housing for all!

And that also applies to the ownership of capital – factories, offices, machines, tools, knowledge – all the durable things we’ve created that help us to produce what we need to live. As Marx explained, capital is value accumulated from many workers’ labour. For little more than 350 years the ownership of capital has given employers control over their employees.

Life will be better when private ownership, production for profit and the wages-for-labour employment contract is ended, and capital is under the control of the people who do the work that produces it.

We’ll need a new democratic process to make this happen. When Cameron’s campaign of persuasion meets popular opposition, he’ll either resort to force or the coalition will be driven out of power. Let’s build a real, much more democratic system of Peoples Assemblies that can make this new “way of life” a reality.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

End of 'old politics' is our chance

For all its outward appearance of partnership and harmony, the Lib-Con coalition government is an inherently unstable regime. Patched together solely to impose the burden of the economic and financial crisis on the backs of ordinary people, the coalition is a high-risk operation.

Far from ushering in a “new politics”, the coalition only operates by rejecting politics altogether, setting aside not just party differences but their parties as well. As we noted last week, we are witnessing a very British coup by David Cameron and Nick Clegg, which is already producing internal resistance.

Yesterday Cameron won his bid to allow government ministers and whips to have full membership of the Tory backbench 1922 Committee, but only by 168 votes to 118. Now plans are already afoot to create a new committee made up entirely of backbenchers. One backbencher said Cameron’s move was “very dangerous”. He added: “We are not lemmings like most Labour MPs – we don’t just do as we are told. It’s as if power has gone to David Cameron’s head.”

Many backbenchers are not enamoured with the joint programme of the coalition published yesterday, which ditches several cherished Tory policies on inheritance tax, stamp duty and abolition of the Human Rights Act. Similar simmering political tensions exist inside the Liberal Democrats too.

The coalition will shortly be involved in conflict on another front – with ordinary people.

The Lib-Con merged programme insists that the need to cut the deficit “takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement”. The £170 billion annual deficit results from a combination of bailing out the banks and the recession that followed the meltdown of the financial system in 2008.

Starting next week, the coalition will start to cut the deficit, which presently funds public services and jobs. Teachers and civil servants were placed in the immediate firing line yesterday, along with postal workers through the privatisation of the Royal Mail promoted by the Lib Dem’s Vince Cable. VAT is certain to rise along with other taxes to reduce living standards.

The insecure nature of the coalition makes it heavily dependent on the capitalist state bureaucracy for its survival. Leading officials applauded after Cameron went through the agreement with the Lib Dems in a public show of support senior civil servants are not normally given to. They, of course, facilitated the creation of the coalition in the first place. There is a distinct Bonapartist air about the two youngish public schoolboys now running the government, balancing between bureaucrats and sections of the electorate, while sidelining their parties.

Things can only get worse for them as the debt crisis which brought down the banks finds its way into governments, particularly in southern Europe. Panic measures have done nothing to stabilise the euro and the continent is on the brink of a major slump. Financial markets are demanding their pound of flesh and governments are no match for the beast they helped create in the first place.

We have to think about what is coming up the line. Serious conflict between public sector workers and the government is certain. Emergency measures against strikes cannot be ruled out. Yet opposing the dictatorship of the markets and the coalition has to have an objective beyond resistance itself.

Halting the cuts is only possible if the financial system and the basis of economic activity is reorganised to replace profit as its foundation with a socially-useful approach to meet society’s needs. Politically, the aim cannot be to replace Cameron/Clegg with a new generation of Blair/Brown type New Labour leaders. That would be just a change of management.

The crisis since the general election, with voters displaying a distinct lack of trust in any party or the Parliamentary system itself, must lead to a truly “new politics”, founded on a revolutionary, democratic transformation of capitalist society. The opportunities for building a people’s coalition against an unsustainable capitalist system are opening up before our eyes.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

A very British coup

The political marriage between David Cameron and Nick Clegg in a ceremony in the garden at the back of Downing Street yesterday is not simply the result of a general election that failed to produce a party with an overall majority. Britain’s first coalition government for 70 years also shows that the process that produced New Labour is still at work.

In 1995, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown persuaded their party to ditch Clause IV of its constitution, which aspired to common ownership of the means of production and popular administration of the economy. Adopted in 1918, the clause was anathema to the “modernisers” who were busily creating “New” Labour.

The Blairites were adapting to a new world order summed up in the term “globalisation”. Where the Tories were divided on the issue, revealed in the splits over Europe, New Labour would embrace the free movement of capital, deregulation, public-private partnerships, the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and promote an “enterprise economy”.

Even before New Labour’s loss of nearly 100 seats last week, voters were turning their back on a government that had created vast inequality, put an end to social mobility and encouraged a casino economy. When a globalisation driven by the banks and corporations finally crashed in 2008, the die was cast and the raison d'être for New Labour was terminated.

With the Tory Party deeply divided between a right-wing that believes that anything not purely Anglo-Saxon is suspicious and “modernisers” who understand the world has changed, the electorate understandably failed to give them a mandate to govern alone when they went to the polls on May 8.

Cameron is astute enough to recognise that the old-style bourgeois party politics – based on some worked-out framework and an ideology related to things purely British – is dying. No single party seems likely to win an overall majority again. The election deadlock propelled this understanding into a swift and dramatic realignment with the Lib Dems. This is, in effect, Cameron’s Clause IV moment.

He and Clegg have in practice staged an audacious joint coup against their own parties, ignoring dissent and rumblings from rank-and-file members who only last week were at each other’s throats as they fought for votes. In some respects, the logic of their alliance might even signal the end of their parties in the shape that we know them now.

Both the prime minister and his deputy, for example, say they have put party politics to one side to govern in the “national interest”. In other words, they have taken the politics out of politics, a process that began with Blair and Brown who reduced government to a grinding form of managerialism.

The spurious “national interest”, as we know, is a not-so-clever mask for the interests that really count. These have everything to do with what the financial markets are demanding and nothing to do with those on the dole and the millions who will join them as Lib-Tory cuts and tax rises get going. New Labour saddled all households with £135,000 in debts. Cameron-Clegg's role is to make sure we make the payments.

As we pointed out yesterday, the global financial meltdown is visiting one country after another. In Spain, the Socialist Party government yesterday rushed through a ruthless cuts package to appease the money markets. Greece’s government – also claiming to be “socialist” – did so last week. Given half a chance, New Labour would have done the same.

In Britain, we now face what amounts to a “government of national emergency”. How will long will it before we are told that all opposition to the cuts is anti-patriotic behaviour? The new boys in Downing Street are a ruthless duo yet their bonhomie cannot disguise their relative weakness and isolation from their own parties. That is what lies behind the rapid march away from what is left of parliamentary democracy with a five-year, fixed term for the government and raising the bar for a no-confidence vote to 55%.

We certainly need a “new politics” and that’s the subject of our May 22 conference, Taking the Revolutionary Road.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

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