How New Labour sat on its hands over Murdoch

Although former prime minister Gordon Brown is rightly upset about the underhand not to say criminal methods used by the Murdoch press to obtain sensitive medical details about his son, the fact remains that New Labour did nothing to upset the applecart while they were in power.

The use of “blagging” by journalists or people working for them as a means of securing information is not exactly a new practice. Pretending to be someone else – in this case Brown himself – to obtain confidential information was actually identified as illegal in the Data Protection Act in 1998.

But the punishment was considered too weak. So the last Labour government led by Brown himself made changes to the law. However, Christopher Graham, the information commissioner who is responsible for checking compliance with the law, said today:

“We really need to get a serious penalty in place to stop this happening ... Frankly, we need to say to people 'You will go to prison if you do this'. The serious penalty that is needed has been on the statute book since 2008 - Section 77 of the 2008 Criminal Justice Act provides for a custodial sentence of up to two years in the Crown Court, but it has been suspended for three years because of a stand-off between the Press and the politicians.”

Inaction was the byword, even though phone hacking was known to be taking place in the early years of the Blair government. In his autobiography, Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, confirms that the cabinet discussed the “failed relationship” between the media and politics as far back as 2002.

He adds: “We discussed the issue back and forth for the next three years, but Tony never felt the moment was right to speak out…Gordon, who was courting the press, had no intention of agreeing to anything that might upset them.”

When the original Metropolitan Police inquiry into phone hacking unexpectedly petered out, many were suspicious why this had happened. Did the government pursue this? To ask the question is to answer it.

Today, Alan Johnson, the former Labour home secretary, told Sky News that the government did not set up an inquiry into phone hacking because ministers would have been accused of exploiting the issue for party political gain! He said:

“If I'd have ordered a public inquiry at the time, I'd have probably been castigated because in the run-up to a general election people would have said it was an attempt to get at Andy Coulson who'd been appointed by Cameron. So you can't take today's knowledge and just apply it retrospectively, you have to look at the information that was available at the time.”

Despite the despicable invasion of his privacy by The Sun in 2006, Brown himself continued to lend his name to Murdoch’s publications. In March 2008, explaining the government’s action during the financial meltdown, he told Sun readers: “My pledge to the British people - to homeowners, to businesses, to households everywhere - is that I will do nothing that puts the stability of the economy at risk.”

A year later, News International’s papers withdrew their support for New Labour after more than a decade and switched their support to David Cameron. It wasn’t long before Cameron too was drawn into the Murdoch web, bringing former News of the World editor Coulson into Downing Street.

After just 14 months in office, the Coalition is staggering from pillar to post, buffeted not just by the scandal but by innumerable economic problems and a widespread hostility to everything it stands for. With the lid now blown off the incestuous relationships between police, Murdoch, New Labour and the Tories, a full-blown political, not to say constitutional crisis, is gathering steam.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Brown's short-term memory

So Gordon Brown is warning that the “world needs to act in concert” to avoid a re-run of the 2008 collapse of the financial system that, you may recall, happened on his watch.

The former New Labour prime minister is busily trying to reinvent himself as the man who saved globalisation from itself. He has written an apparently impenetrable book called Beyond the crash: overcoming the first crisis of globalisation.

Brown is also touted as a possible successor at the International Monetary Fund to that other alleged “socialist”, Dominique Strauss-Kahn who is currently in a maximum security prison in New York (not, unfortunately, for the crimes committed by the IMF itself).

Once Brown was a cheerleader for the global financial system that grew and grew to fund and drive forward globalisation. Who can forget his memorable speech to assembled bankers in June 2007, just before he replaced Tony Blair as prime minister.

The warning signs were already evident. Mortgage defaults were mounting in America, with home loan companies filing for bankruptcy. In Britain, personal debt had more than doubled inside six years, while people were being lent six, seven or eight times earnings by mortgage companies.

At the Treasury in Whitehall, studied ignorance was bliss. Brown’s speech praised his audience for creating an era “that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London”. It was due in part, he said, to the City’s “deep and abiding belief in open markets” and noted how Britain was “a world leader in stability”.

No praise was too high for his audience, who heard: “The financial services sector in Britain and the City of London at the centre of it, is a great example of a highly skilled, high value added, talent driven industry that shows how we can excel in a world of global competition. Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate that is the hallmark of your success.”

But a global economy driven by debt had reached and passed a tipping point. Within weeks of Brown’s speech, in August 2007, the credit crunch began as overnight inter-bank lending stopped. In September, worried savers started queuing outside Northern Rock branches to get their money out. The bank was nationalised by the end of the year.

Brown is admittedly more sanguine now. Writing for the US magazine Newsweek, he warns that “if the world continues on its current path, the historians of the future will say that the great financial collapse of three years ago was simply the trailer for a succession of avoidable crises that eroded popular consent for globalisation itself”.

Rest assured, Brown is not referring to capitalism as the problem here. He is worried that there is no system in place – despite the 2007-8 crash – to chart “volatile and unsustainable wave of speculative capital flows” and no global consensus on capital and liquidity requirements for banks.

He rues the fact that despite the euphoria of the G20 summit in London in January 2009, nothing came of its declaration. The summit, says Brown, “has given way to indecision, to vested interests, and to a retreat into national shells”.

This admission of failure says as much, if not more, about the nature of capitalism than it does about world leaders. Brown, Blair, Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Thatcher encouraged the deregulated growth of the financial sector. Only if people were provided with credit could they buy the commodities the corporations were churning out.

As finance became footloose and fancy free, transcending borders and nation states on the click of a button, and developing unfathomable “products” like collaterised debt obligations, it became impossible to re-regulate. Worse still, the indebtedness that ultimately brought down the banks is still present, an albatross that no one can get rid of. Brown’s fears of another great crash are absolutely justified.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

An epitaph for Bretton Woods

More than 300 economists, policymakers and academics, and a smattering of the politicians who presided over the events leading to the great crash of 2007-8, met up over the weekend at an historic location.

The conference was sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, which was set up in 2009, by George Soros one of the world’s most notorious speculators.

In 1944, at the same Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, the world’s financial leaders thrashed out the architecture of a new order for the world economy to replace the one shattered by the Great Depression and World War II.

They succeeded in creating monetary agreements between nations and organisational arrangements to handle emergency funding that would enable capitalism to set out on the growth path once again.

Last weekend’s aim was to consider whether the international order remained fit for purpose ahead of the annual spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – one of the world level agencies set up following the 1944 gathering.

In summing up the results, Prof Justin O’Brien, director of the Centre for Law, Markets and Regulation at the University of New South Wales, asked the key question, and answered it:

“Following the catastrophic losses associated with the global financial crisis, do policymakers have either the vision or the tools to manage the politics of austerity? The unambiguous answer was no.”

The problem is that in those 67 years since Bretton Woods, capitalist corporations and a global web of financial institutions have outgrown the system of nation-states that came into existence as the result of earlier phases of social, economic and political evolution.

In O’Brien’s wordy assessment:

The crisis, speaker after speaker confirmed, was the outworking of hubris, delusion, commitment to flawed ideological constructs and inattention to history. Moreover, the policy response has legitimated socialised losses on a scale unimagined by the architects of the Bretton Woods system. It has amplified the moral hazard associated with protecting a banking industry addicted to unsustainable and undesirable leverage.

Deemed too big, too interconnected and too complex to unravel without causing systemic failure, banking has emerged as the sole winner from a crisis its funding model helped to cause. Somewhat paradoxically the banking sector has become even more concentrated, making it all but impossible for regulators to control. More perniciously, the sector has a vested interest in curtailing the co-ordination necessary to engineer meaningful change, particularly in the United States but also in Europe, now the epicentre of the financial crisis.

The complexity of the deeply integrated European and North American banks demonstrates the failure of regional and global institutions of power, flawed harmonisation agendas and weaknesses of national regulation. Wariness in advocating radical restructuring risks privileging the symbolic over the substantive. As Andrew Sheng, a senior adviser to the China Banking Regulatory Commission put it, advocating piecemeal ad hoc reform overseen by a fragmented system of national regulators is ‘like asking pygmies to hold down giants’.

Gordon Brown, who, as British chancellor was amongst the greatest enthusiasts for the financiers’ rise to power, claims that "we didn't understand just how entangled things were". This is nonsense. Many warned about the consequences of creating a financial system driven by investment banks and exotic “products”. New Labour was just happy to rake in the tax proceeds to finance its social programmes.

Like fish in the sea, unaware of the water they live in, these academics and policy-makers breathe the air of capitalism. They have had their day. The 2011 version of Bretton Woods was effectively an epitaph for a global capitalist system founded on debt. It falls to the mass of people to create a new “architecture” in the shape of an economic system based on need and not profit

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Time for 'regime change' in Britain

Whatever Tony Blair says or doesn’t say at the Iraq inquiry will not alter the historical record. Blair and George W.Bush went to war on a pretext, pursuing regime change in Baghdad behind the smokescreen of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that existed in imagination only.

“Intelligence” dossiers were, to use that famous phrase, “sexed up” to suggest that Saddam Hussein could launch WMD in 45 minutes and even reach Cyprus with them. Old documents on the internet were cut and pasted and published as gospel. The British passed the Americans “information” about Iraq seeking uranium through Niger that was pure fiction.

The link made by Bush between Iraq and Al-Qaeda was total nonsense, and Blair knew it. Except it is not nonsense now. Where once they had no foothold, Al-Qaeda is now present in Iraq and is partly responsible for the near civil war that exists between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq has devastated Iraq. Apart from an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths since the 2003 invasion, as of May 2007 there were 2,255,000 Iraqis displaced inside the country. A similar number had fled to either Syria or Jordan. In June 2007, 28% of Iraqi children suffered from chronic malnutrition while the unemployment rate in some areas was 60%. Four in ten professionals have left since 2003, including 12,000 physicians. The latest figures available show that 70% of Iraqis have no access to adequate water supplies.

Some have got rich out of the war, notably the US defence industry and private sector corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton. By mid-2009, US taxpayers’ funds spent or approved for Iraq totalled a staggering $800 billion, running at $5,000 a second according to Senator Harry Reid.

Congressional hearings found that Halliburton overcharged the Pentagon to the tune of $1.4 billion. But what the hell! Former vice-president Dick Cheney helped to run the corporation before entering the White House so it was natural his old friends should benefit. Iraq is a privatised war, with more than 180,000 private contractors working in support of US troops. They have killed Iraqi civilians with impunity.

Those responsible for visiting this disaster on Iraq include not just Blair but Gordon Brown and the members of the New Labour cabinet and MPs who voted for the war despite massive public opposition. A good number of them are lawyers and quite well understood that the accepted principles of international law stood in the way of regime change. So they ditched them – or rather got the hapless Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, to change his mind when the military top brass said they wouldn’t invade without legal clearance.

A special word should be reserved for the United Nations and its then secretary-general Kofi Anan. Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, reported that his team could find no WMD in Iraq and in all probability that there were none. A word from Anan querying the legality of an invasion might have just held up military action. Unfortunately, it took him until September 2004 – 18 months after the invasion - to say just that!

Iraq, the continuing occupation of Afghanistan, extraordinary renditions, the secret wars waged by US special troops in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere, all show that international law is powerless to stop the British and American governments. Their actions continue to reinforce not lessen the threat of terror attacks on ordinary civilians.

There is a strengthening case for “regime change” in Washington and London. These are democratic states in name only, playthings of major corporations and financial interests. Creating a real democracy, with economic and political power in the hands of ordinary people, is the best answer to the warmongers. Then we could have the war crimes tribunal that many people are demanding, with Blair and Brown, Bush and Cheney the top four defendants.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Political crisis gathers momentum

The first thing to say about the divisions within New Labour over Gordon Brown’s leadership is that there are no principles involved on any side of the civil war that rumbles on at Westminster. All the plotters without exception are concerned about one thing above all other considerations – their political futures.

Principles and New Labour are, in fact, a contradiction in terms. It came into being precisely to ditch even the mildest of social democratic principles and ambitions about reforming aspects of capitalism that weighed down most heavily on the working population.

Last week’s attempted coup by former cabinet ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt reinforced that understanding. Neither was putting forward an alternative programme or change of direction. They simply wanted Brown replaced by an unnamed candidate. Their plot descended into outright farce as the rest of the cabinet bottled out.

What’s at stake for the plotters is not the outcome of the election – most cabinet members apparently consider it lost (with some even hoping for that result if Brown stays) – but the position after polling day. Those like the Milibands who aspire to leadership want to prevent a rout which they believe Brown is leading them towards yet lack the courage to remove the incumbent.

Since 1997 under both Blair and Brown, New Labour has unashamedly aspired to one thing – to become the political representatives of the economic and financial masters of the universe. And to a large extent succeeded – until the second half of 2008 revealed what a hollow state of affairs the British economy was.

Confidence in New Labour has plummeted ever since the global financial meltdown hit British banks for six. With the government forced into record amounts of borrowing to cover the cost of bailing out the banks, establishment circles fear that the political plotting now dominating government affairs is not exactly what’s required right now of the British state.

The Tory Daily Telegraph, for example, accused Hoon et al of “working flat-out to position themselves for an autumn civil war”, adding: “In other words, the Cabinet is devoting itself to vigorous (but laughably amateurish) plotting at a time when the country is facing terrifying levels of debt, and the Government has no coherent plan to reduce them.” It reminded readers that even the Treasury select committee had poured scorn on the forecasts in chancellor Alistair Darling's pre-Budget report.

With the Telegraph in touch with ruling class circles, this ringing of the alarm bells is serious stuff. It is not as if the Tories under David Cameron are in a better position. Even the supportive Telegraph admits that the opposition has no coherent set of policies either, pointing to the fiasco of a “manifesto launch” at the beginning of last week when tax policies on married couples were out one minute and back in the next.

The paper is right to suggest that Cameron does not strike voters as the “irresistible choice for prime minister, merely the obvious one” and is worried that he could win the election by default against a weakened Brown. “If that happens, Britain could pay a heavy price after the election,” the editorial concludes.

The implications should be stated more explicitly. Britain is facing state bankruptcy and the spending cuts required to balance the books to satisfy those who finance government borrowing are so enormous that only a government with enormous authority could carry them through. That is highly unlikely to be the outcome of the forthcoming general election. An historic political crisis is building in Britain and the shenanigans inside New Labour are just a pale reflection of what’s to come.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Not me, guv'!

Listening to Gordon Brown yesterday reminded you that New Labour is not actually responsible for anything, despite a dozen years in office. Above all, the government has washed its hands of any shared liability for the financial crisis that has overwhelmed the economy.

Brown, chancellor Alistair Darling, and unelected Business Secretary Lord Mandelson are united in once again trying to pass the entire blame for the crisis on to the bankers while absolving themselves for creating the framework for the very same financial system.

"We won't allow greed and recklessness to ever again endanger the whole global economy and the lives of millions of people,” said Darling in Brighton. “Markets need morals” said Brown in his keynote speech, yesterday, pledging that the government would pass new rules covering bankers' behaviour, including disqualifying those unfit to run banks.

Leaving aside the fact that there can be no such thing as a “moral market” in the capitalist system, there is the small matter of Brown’s own role in the financial meltdown that is far from over.

For 11 years Brown was chief supplicant to the world’s financial operators. During that time he willingly and actively encouraged the City of London to become one of the world’s sweetest honey pots for the busy bees in the banks, and the gamblers on the non-bank markets in derivatives.

Ensuring that credit expanded and flowed around the world, turning into debt as it went, was crucial in keeping the profits of global corporations high. Somebody had to do it to keep production churning out the commodities, and consumers buying them.

So in June 2007, just weeks before the credit crunch took hold, Brown declared that the City had entered a new “golden age”, telling bankers: “The financial services sector in Britain and the City of London at the centre of it, is a great example of a highly skilled, high value added, talent driven industry that shows how we can excel in a world of global competition. Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate that is the hallmark of your success.”

But now, apparently there’s going to be “new economic model for a strong economy”, “a new settlement”. While these platitudes were enough to win over union bureaucrats like Tony Woodley, of Unite, Dave Prentis of Unison and Brendan Barber of the TUC, they were just faint echoes of the laughable “birth of a new economic system” conclusion to the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh. And there, dissenters were dealt with severely using tear gas and sonic weapons.

Now, says Brown, finance is going to be the servant of the people, not the other way round. Why then, we ask, did the US and UK delegates ensure that the G20 decided against mandatory limits on bankers bonuses?

When Brown told his conference that “what let the world down last autumn was not just bankrupt institutions but a bankrupt ideology” he could (but wasn’t) have just as easily been referring to himself and the New Labour “project”.

Brown, Blair and Mandelson won the City over to New Labour on the grounds that they would use the state to set business and finance free to compete in global markets. They would resist the repeal of the anti-union laws and create markets in public services. And the City lapped it up and all went out and voted Labour.

Now the game is up. New Labour has lost it and the British state itself is teetering on bankruptcy. The Tories are on their way back with the support of The Sun, which has seen the writing on the wall and ditched Brown’s party. One thing is certain, however: New Labour is not actually responsible for anything!

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Not worth dying for

So Gordon Brown says that British soldiers are on a “vital mission” in Afghanistan. That mission would appear to be about dying for no good reason, leading some relatives of dead soldiers to accuse the government of “having blood on its hands”. They are right.

It’s election week in Afghanistan, and president Hamid Karzai is relying on the American and British occupiers to allow the polls to take place. But these “elections” are like no others you may recognise. Karzai has a unique way of building support. Take the Shia minority, for example.

A bill allowing a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has just become law. The law governs family life for Afghanistan's Shias. It allows a man to withhold food from his wife if she refuses his sexual demands; a woman must get her husband's permission to work; and fathers and grandfathers are given exclusive custody of children.

Definitely not worth dying for.

Or the return yesterday evening to Kabul of warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum from exile in Turkey in an apparent attempt by Karzai to attract ethnic Uzbek voters. Dostum was responsible for the deaths of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners early in the Afghan war. Karzai has now reinstated him as chief of staff of the armed forces,

Dostum's forces placed Taliban prisoners in sealed cargo containers and drove them for two days to Sheberghan Prison, suffocating them then burying them en masse, according to an American State Department report. US special operations troops were working alongside Dostum's troops at the time.

Definitely not worth dying for.

As to the electoral process itself, it is widely believed (just like in Iran) that the electoral commission is in league with Karzai. Reports suggest that as many as three million out of the electorate of 17.5 million have been fraudulently registered.

Definitely not worth dying for.

Then there’s the corruption. Money earmarked for schools and construction projects is usually diverted into the pockets of Karzai’s supporters. David Kilcullen, an incoming advisor to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, admits contractors collude to rig the bidding process and sometimes murder competitors.

Definitely not worth dying for.

As the number of British dead swept past the 200 mark over the weekend, the father of a serviceman killed in Afghanistan accused the government of “ignoring the blood on its hands”.

Graham Knight, whose 25-year-old son Ben was killed in a Nimrod explosion in 2006, said:
“My son died because of failures by the MoD and yet still we are hearing that their kit is not good enough out there now.” He added: “As far as I can tell, it [the government] is ignoring the blood on its hands.”

Anthony Philippson, whose son James, 29, died after trying to fight the Taliban without night-vision goggles, said all 200 deaths were “effectively pointless”. He said the entire conflict had been based on “falsehoods”.

He is right. The war in Afghanistan is nothing to do with making “Britain’s streets safer”, as Brown claims, but everything to do with delusions of imperial grandeur. The more-or-less bankrupt British state can’t even afford to equip its soldiers properly, or look after them when they are wounded.

The Brown government is refighting the Afghan wars of the 19th century, which were part of the struggle with Russia for control of the region. The first Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-1842 ended with the destruction of the entire force of 20,000 British and Indian soldiers and the Afghans have hated foreign occupiers ever since.

Today, British soldiers are dying for the honour of New Labour and the corrupt Afghan government. It is a price not worth paying.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The truth behind Brown's boom

A committee of MPs today blames the “reckless behaviour” of the banks for the financial crisis, which is as neat a way of any of letting the New Labour government off the hook as any yet devised.

The Treasury committee’s view of the collapse of the financial system is partial and one-sided and a bit short on history. If the banks were reckless – and they were – it was because they were encouraged to be so. And no one in government complained as the tax receipts rolled in, especially not Gordon Brown who was chancellor for the decade when the credit-fuelled boom took off.

Why were the banks “reckless” and take extraordinary risks with their lending? That is the question. Why, as the committee asks, did bankers make “an astonishing mess of the financial system”? The answer usually given is that they were “greedy” and simply loved piling up the bonuses and forgot to look out for tomorrow.

That doesn’t really get below the surface, however, and puts the collapse of the global financial system down to a few badly-behaved individuals. The real truth is that the so-called boom Britain has experienced was only made possible by a massive extension of credit (and its opposite, debt) under the direction of the government.

It is not that Brown did not know what was going on. His government actively encouraged London to become one of the centres of fantasy finance, which inevitably contributed to the series of bubbles that have now burst and broken the back of the global economy in the process.

Verification of this comes from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, whose director Robert Chote, shows how the Treasury actually knew that the boom was not what it appeared to be. Between 1998 and 2008, output in the economy was 3-4 per cent above its sustainable level, he estimates, in what he calls “an alternative view of history”.

This view, he said, would “cast a much less flattering light” on Brown’s record as chancellor. “It would certainly suggest that he should have been running a much stronger fiscal position.” In plain English, Brown’s officials suspected it would end in tears, and should have reined in spending, but decided to keep the illusion going in the hope that the days of boom and bust were a thing of the past.

Chote explains how much of the so-called boom actually amounted to an increase in share and house prices, which people cashed in on to fuel consumer spending on imports. Yet this activity was treated as if it were a sustainable growth in the real economy. Apparently, the Treasury is now rewriting history to try and disguise what happened.

Of course, the banks contributed. Why shouldn’t they have? They are in business to make money and if that could be done by recycling dodgy loans as securities, creating more and more complex ways of moving funds around the globe, increasing profits as they went, they knew that the government was behind them all the way, to the point where Brown told them in June 2007 that they had created a new “golden age” in the City.

Ultimately, the banks and the government responded to the fact that the only way that the expansion of the goods-producing side of the global economy could be maintained was through greater and greater amounts of fictitious or fantasy finance. The collapse of one has revealed the massive over-capacity and over-production in the other, which is why trade has collapsed around the globe. Global capitalism as a whole is unsustainable any way you look at it and the best way to mark May Day is to renew our efforts to put it out of its misery.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

R.I.P. New Labour

The humiliating results for New Labour at last week’s local and London elections amount to much more than just a swing to the Tories by people fed up with government policies. The scale of the defeat is a measure of the break-up of a party that once fondly imagined it would rule for decades.

New Labour came into existence in the mid-1990s through destroying its own history and Labour Party origins and by repudiating any notion that it would challenge the economic and financial power of globalised capitalism. In fact, it dedicated itself to managing the market economy in favour of corporate power. It declared that class interests were a thing of the past and that everyone would benefit from globalisation.

In government, New Labour increasingly merged with the state machine and turned itself into a kind of business organisation rather than a party. There is no longer any internal democracy or opportunity for the rank and file (or, for that matter, the trade unions which founded Labour) to influence what happens. Membership has more than halved and few activists have remained in what is essentially a capitalist party in outlook and organisation. Voters began to turn their back on New Labour, as turnout fell to a record low of 60%. At the last election, in the wake of the illegal and monstrous attack on Iraq, only one in four of registered voters gave their support to New Labour.

Now the chickens have come to roost. For New Labour’s disintegration in turn reflects the impact on ordinary people of a growing crisis in the global economy, expressed in the “credit crunch”. That’s why Gordon Brown’s party only polled 24% of the vote last week, compared with 44% for the Tories (who, of course, would fare no better in the current climate).

The “wonder years” of economic prosperity have turned out to be a major con trick and illusion for millions of people. Prices of basic foods are soaring, along with the cost of the petrol they need to drive their cars to work. Public services have declined in quality, milked dry by the private sector, while the government is holding wages down below the level of inflation for teachers and civil servants.

Voters have seen the government offering tens of billions to the banks, who themselves are responsible for the financial crisis now engulfing Britain and other countries while, at the same time, hitting the lower paid by abolishing the 10p income tax band. No wonder some New Labour MPs reported that voters were thrusting April’s wage slips in their face on the eve of the elections. At the same time, increasing numbers are facing repossession, unable to meet the payments on their homes and drowning in the debt they were encouraged to take on.

We are now entering the unknown in political terms. Tens of millions of voters hate the Tories and what they stand for; many voted New Labour in the past in the hope things would be different. But Blair and Brown made sure they didn’t turn out that way. As a result, these voters are effectively disenfranchised and disillusioned, denied a chance to exercise their vote in any meaningful way. A few have deserted to the Tories in the mistaken belief that David Cameron’s toffs will solve their problems. Many, many more have stayed at home, feeling that there is nothing in it for them at the ballot box. In the end, only 35% voted in the council elections while 55% of Londoners chose not to vote.

Taken together, these political and economic processes amount to a crisis of the existing parliamentary state system of government in Britain. Clearly, the current state is unable to deliver on basic questions like housing, education, transport and pensions or on wider issues like climate change. Its response is increasingly authoritarian and repressive, as if locking up more and more people will “solve” crime, especially among young people, or detaining people without charge for 42 days will tackle the threat of terrorism. As the decades of credit-driven consumption unravel, the prospects of large-scale unemployment and growing poverty will overwhelm whichever party is in government.

New Labour’s impending demise is not the result of a massive rush to Toryism or a grand triumph of the right, as those who cannot see beyond parliamentarism would have it. Nor is it a defeat for anyone except the careerists and opportunists who have hitched their fortunes to New Labour. Public sector trade unionists and others like the refinery workers in Scotland are ready to defend their conditions through industrial action and rightly don’t give a fig for New Labour’s fortunes. The challenge before us is to build a movement around a leadership that is prepared to challenge and go beyond the capitalist economy as well the market state, to create a democratic sustainable future. A great first step in this direction would be to strengthen the influence of A World to Win by becoming a member today.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Sick plan for the NHS

So Gordon Brown has come up with a novel plan to cut health spending – let the sick treat themselves and also decline to help those who are deemed not to have looked after themselves properly. Welcome to the 60th anniversary of the National Heath Service, New Labour style.

After pouring endless amounts of money into the pockets of management consultants, senior managers, the pharmaceutical corporations, private clinics and contractors, the NHS is in a worse state than ever. MRSA and other infection rates remain high, increasing the chances of coming out of hospital in a worse state that when patients go in. Seven years after the government announced that mixed wards would be abolished, 25% still share a ward or bay with members of the opposite sex. Cancer survival rates in Britain are among the lowest in Europe and a postcode lottery means you need luck on your side to be near the right sort of health care.

As usual, the government’s new plans for self-care are presented as an “opportunity” for patients. Brown hinted at the new policy in a message to NHS staff yesterday, promising a service that "gives all of those with long-term or chronic conditions the choice of greater support, information and advice, allowing them to play a far more active role in managing their own condition". But the real story behind the notion of “personalised service” is that the Department of Health is struggling to meet Treasury targets to cut spending by £8.2 billion over the next three years. The department's "Value for Money Delivery Agreement" – details of which were leaked to the Daily Telegraph - sets out how the NHS could meet the “efficiency savings” target.

In a bid to reduce costs, NHS patients could be expected to administer their own medication and new guidelines could mean people with chronic conditions:
• monitoring their own heart activity, blood pressure and lung capacity using equipment installed in the home
• reporting medical information to doctors remotely by telephone or computer
• administering their own drugs and other treatment to "manage pain" and assessing the significance of changes in their condition
• using relaxation techniques to relieve stress and avoid "panic" visits to emergency wards.

The plans have gone down like a lead balloon among patient groups. The Arthritis Research Campaign said it risked providing health managers with "an excuse for neglecting elderly patients", with a spokeswoman adding: “"Some GPs don't take arthritis seriously enough, and the result of this could be to give them another excuse to tell arthritis patients just to go away and take their tablets." The Patients' Association said it was concerned that “financial pressures will take precedence over clinical needs" while Peter Weissberg, the medical director of the British Heart Foundation, said: "People affected by heart disease need specialist care. Whilst we support changes that empower people to look after their own health, we would be very concerned if they led to any reduction in the availability or quality of expert care for those who need it."

The best way to mark the 60th anniversary of the one of the great achievements by working people is to take action to defend and extend the principles of the NHS as a health service free at every level and totally in the public sector. That would involve, for example, a campaign for social ownership of the drugs corporations and the elimination of the vast bureaucracy that dominates the sector. None of this is possible while the capitalist New Labour government is in power and would certainly be unachievable under the rule of its ugly sister, the Tories. We should take Brown at his word when it comes to self-treatment and act to get rid of his government, working towards a fairer, more democratic society when people not profit come first.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Just not cricket

There’s a striking simultaneity about events in Britain and Pakistan in the last 24 hours. Yesterday in Pakistan, Imran Khan, current Chancellor of the University of Bradford, former captain of the Pakistan cricket team - one of the finest all-rounders the game has ever produced - and a graduate of Oxford University, attended a protest rally against the imposition of emergency rule by US-supported authoritarian military dictator President Musharraf. Within minutes of appearing Khan was seized by religious students and handed over to the police who charged him under anti-terrorism legislation. Penalties under the act include life imprisonment and death.

Yesterday in New Labour’s Britain, as the Governor of the Bank of England warned of increasing threats to the economyfrom the global financial crisis, Gordon Brown introduced new measures to counter the perceived threat of terrorism. These include hardening the physical protection for public buildings, offering guidance to those operating public buildings, strengthening regional counter terrorism units, and “training neighbourhood police teams to deal with radicalisation in their local communities”. In addition, a single senior judge has been nominated to manage all terrorism cases, whilst a single senior lead prosecutor will be responsible for cases relating to “inciting violent extremism”. Musharraf has cited “judicial activism” – opposition from the judiciary - amongst his reasons for locking up all political opponents. It certainly looks as through Brown is side-stepping any future judicial opposition in the UK by selecting those who can be trusted to toe the line.

A major, nationwide “hearts and minds” campaign of propaganda emphasising “our shared values” will be launched in every community through schools, colleges, mosques and sports facilities, amongst faith groups and criminalised youth, in fact anywhere where people might be influenced by “ideologues” proposing radical change. After ten years with personal responsibility for the British economy, it is clear that Brown shares his values with his financial friends in the City of London, so “updated advice for universities on how to deal with extremism on the campus” is highly likely to include the identification of students seeking changes to the status quo, and guidance on neutralising them and rooting them out.

Also yesterday contracts were issued for the intelligence infrastructure involving biometric technology and shared databases, to support the UK Border Agency which will have 25,000 staff, uniting passport control, and customs with new powers of arrest and detention. Together with a new legislative assault on the rights to privacy and confidentiality, these measures will enable a huge range of police and other agencies to share up to 90 separate pieces of information on all cross-border travellers. “Airline liaison officers” based abroad will have new powers to cancel visas.

As the global recession begins to hit hard, millions will be radicalised as they lose their jobs and homes. New Labour is in the forefront of governments preparing and implementing a wide range of authoritarian measures to deal not just with suspected terrorists, but all those opposed to the capitalist corporations and the consequences of globalisation. No wonder the government’s response to Musharraf’s suspension of the constitution and the removal of Pakistan’s top judges has been muted.

Gerry Gold

Brown delivers the message

The leaders of the CWU postal workers’ union have waited and waited for the intervention of the government in their pay and jobs dispute with Royal Mail. Yesterday it finally arrived. But it was not what the CWU leadership wanted to hear. New Labour broke its silence – and came down firmly on the side of the employers. Prime Minister Brown and business secretary Hutton denounced the strikes as “unjustifiable”. Brown told postal workers to “get back to work” while Hutton said the union should accept what he described as a “perfectly fair and reasonable offer”.

The postal workers have so far stood steady and firm in their series of strikes for jobs, pay and pensions in the face of an arrogant employer. Yesterday, after the official two-day strike had ended, a management provocation was answered by unofficial walk-outs in Glasgow, Liverpool, London and other parts of the country. The postal workers are up for a fight and have forced their leaders into some fighting talk and a limited strike action.

But the main (and only) strategy of the leadership of their union, the CWU, has been try to get the government to intervene and enforce a “fair” settlement. This was always an entirely hopeless and forlorn perspective. Far from being some kind of arbitrator (as governments were sometimes up until 1980), this government has a different agenda entirely. Not only does the government stand four-square behind the belligerent Royal Mail management, but, behind the scenes, it is dictating and determining the policy and direction of the company. To what purpose? To make it fit to compete with UPS and the other private carriers of mail and parcels, and then to privatise it.

It has become the tried and tested method of governments, Tory and Labour, since the great Miners Strike of 1984-5 to lie about their real intentions and then to rely on the trade union leadership to “believe” those lies and to confine any action to the perspectives and agenda laid down by the government. Behind the statements of Royal Mail about “flexibility”, the “need to modernise” and so forth is the plan to break it up and sell it. They offer below-inflation pay rises and refuse to guarantee jobs in order to streamline and rationalise the business for privatisation.

This all stems from the very nature of New Labour as an outfit that no longer even pretends to protect the interest of workers or their unions, but rather gives total support to the corporations, the banks and the speculators. It is not just the postal service that is facing break-up and the threat of privatisation, leading inevitably to lower wages, pensions and unemployment, but all public services including health, education, local government, the BBC and the civil service. This is not a popular policy. At a rally earlier this week for the postal workers, Mark Serwotka , general secretary of the PCS said the New Labour governments had privatised “more of our work than the Major and Thatcher Governments combined”. He said his union was gearing up for a full-scale battle with the government.

The CWU is now in a fight to the finish with New Labour. This is a political struggle against a capitalist government. If the union leaders were blinded to this harsh reality before yesterday’s statements by Brown and Hutton, their members are certainly aware of it today. The CWU has to mobilise the entire membership in all-out action, asking for the support of other trade unionists in the privatisation firing line. And they should also recommend to the membership that the union should end its financial support and affiliation to New Labour.


Peter Arkell

Running to stand still

So Gordon Brown’s plans to cut and run before the storm of the economic crisis turns into a hurricane have fallen victim to New Labour’s own arrogance and grubby desire for perpetual political power. The self-appointed Leader of The Party of All People (PAP) thought he just had to think the word election and the voters would be overwhelmed with joy. In fact, they were so under whelmed by the prospect of a Brown government that they deserted the PAP in droves.

It’s not difficult to see why. Today, a report reveals that disposable income is at its lowest level in 10 years. While tax on corporate profits (those that are not held offshore) is now at just 28% thanks to Brown’s continuous reductions, wage earners have been hit hard. Taxes, housing costs, phone bills and travel expenses have eaten into salaries, researchers says. In 1997, when New Labour came to power, people were left with 34.5% of their gross income once they had paid taxes, national insurance, mortgage or rent. Now they are left with 32.6%, says a report by uSwitch, a price comparison website. Earlier this year, Ernst & Young, the accountants, calculated this year that the average family had £838 left to spend each month, compared to £899 four years ago.

In the past 10 years, petrol — often the biggest cost for a family after their housing — has increased by 55% and phone and internet bills have risen 77%. The cost of getting on to the housing ladder has more than tripled. Council tax rose from an average of £688 a year to £1,321 — an increase of 92%, or three times the rate of inflation. The cost of food — which for the past decade has risen slower than inflation — is on the increase again and an estimated two million households are about to be hit by increased mortgage payments as they come off fixed-rate deals taken out two years ago. Mike Naylor, at uSwitch, said: "We are working harder, but we are not getting any wealthier — we are just running to stand still."

Under New Labour, inequality has soared while exploitation at work has intensified dramatically. These are the joys of the market economy so enthusiastically championed by Brown. Problems are then reinforced by more market-led “solutions”. House prices are out of the reach of most new households. So what does the government propose? State help to take on a mortgage that would otherwise be beyond people’s means! What lunacy.

While Brown dithered and lost his nerve about calling an election, the economic news goes from bad to worse. Rodrigo Rato, outgoing managing director of the International Monetary Fund has warned that the seizure in world financial markets will make substantial inroads into forecasts for economic growth. In an interview in today’s Financial Times he says: “Policymakers should not think that the problems will stay at the desk of the bankers. Problems are going to come to the real sector, come to the budgets – that is something we keep telling people.” The credit crisis was “not a storm in a teacup,” he added. Its impact would be felt “more quickly” in the US and to some extent in Europe and Japan rather than in the rest of the world. No wonder Brown wanted an election sooner rather than later. Now his wounded regime will have to face the music.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

One Nation, One Party under Our Leader

A serious question: What do you get if you put together a nationalist-patriotic, socially conservative, free market, business-worshipping, authoritarian, religious political leader? Answer: a highly dangerous, heady political cocktail with echoes in 20th century history. Who needs the Tory Party, or even the far-right British National Party when you have the Brown movement? Who needs political opposition of any kind when you have The Party that represents The Nation as well as everyone and everything? Who needs discussion and debate, or the casting and counting of votes when The Leader has already decided everything?

Welcome to New Labour 2007, the movement that has Tories, big business and military gentlemen as members of the government. Celebrate with The Party as it puts an end to nasty, “adversarial”, “divisive” conference politics in the name of Unity and the interests of the British People. Hear its Leader refer to Britain or Britishness no fewer than 71 times in an hour-long speech to The Nation. Stand up and cheer when Our Leader says: “I reach out to all those who work hard and play by the rules, who believe in strong families and a patriotic Britain, who may have supported other parties but who, like me, want to defend and advance British values and our way of life." Feel proud when you are told that in future there will be “British jobs for British workers” and that nasty foreigners who don’t behave will be shown the door (after being sent to detention camps first). Know that those who oppose Our Leader also reject the British Way and face the wrath of The State.

Thankfully, the Bournemouth Rally saw it that way too. How thrilling that those present voted in Stalinist fashion by 85% to put an end to conference resolutions and votes. Why, even the trade unions endorsed a motion to abolish their own role in the conference in exchange for zero, zilch, de nada. Lest we forget, their predecessors had actually set up The Party, then known as Labour, over a century ago. Few dared oppose the move, so important is Unity at this time for Our Nation. One brave soul, John McDonnell MP, rejected the move to create a monolithic Party, suggesting that the last person leaving the hall “turn off the lights please, they will be the lights of democracy”. The only dissenting voice on the floor came from Michael Meacher, who asked: “What is the point of conference if it is merely a talking shop and there is no way we can seriously influence the party leadership and the government into changing course?” There is no point, Michael. So let us hear no more rubbish from the left about reclaiming the party. There is no social democratic, reformist party to reclaim. It has been incorporated lock, stock and barrel into the process of corporate-driven globalisation.

The financier-philanthropist George Soros once said: “Perhaps the greatest threat to freedom and democracy in the world today comes from the formation of unholy alliances between government and business. This is not a new phenomenon. It used to be called fascism…The outward appearances of the democratic process are preserved, but the powers of the state are diverted to the benefit of private interests.” Brown did not quite get round to promising to make the trains run on the time, but the logic is there for all to see. Globalisation has dissolved the old, bourgeois-democratic parliamentary state and with it the parties that subscribed to that process. The alternative to the Brown nightmare has to come through extending democracy beyond the limitations of the decayed parliamentary state. A democratic choice would put people in charge of their workplaces and communities, giving them ownership of economic and financial resources presently misused and abused by the ruling elites. There is no time to lose in building a movement that can realise these aims and objectives.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Reality comes calling at the TUC

Those who inhabit a world of illusions and fantasy can get a nasty shock when reality comes calling. So after Gordon Brown addressed the TUC yesterday, union leaders staggered out into the sunlight to confess that all was not how they thought it was or should be. Gordon, it was claimed beforehand, was different to that nasty Blair. He was closer to the “movement” and what the union leaders like to refer to as “our people”. Unfortunately for the TUC, the movement that Brown is actually close to has nothing to do their members’ interests. As he made clear in his speech, Brown champions the global market economy. And if that means that public sector workers have to take a pay cut, then so be it. The union leaders sat in silence as Brown told them: "So let me be straightforward with you - pay discipline is essential to prevent inflation, to maintain growth and create more jobs - and so that we never return to the old boom and bust of the past."

This was all too predictable for anyone who cares to follow politics. For the union leaders, however, it was all too much. They expressed “disappointment” at Brown’s speech but still couldn’t quite face up to what had happened. Tony Woodley, joint leader of Unite, who is on record praising Brown, was unhappy that he offered nothing to improve the conditions of agency workers. Paul Kenny, leader of the GMB, warned that his union's members could "walk away" from New Labour unless relations improved. "We sign a cheque every year for £2m for Labour, yet we can't get basic rights for agency workers." Why wait Brother Kenny? There is absolutely no chance of relations improving, and you and your fellow union leaders know that. Hanging on to Brown’s coat-tails is simply a sign of desperation and fear.

Meanwhile, Brown’s government is now shaping up as a combination of pro-globalisation policies combined with a heavy dose of nationalism and the politics of the one-party state. Yesterday, Brown pledged 500,000 “British jobs for British workers” – a slogan that the extreme right-wing BNP has had for years. This came a day after the home secretary pledged to force immigrants to speak English. The docile media described these moves as part of the new PM's determination to “occupy the centre ground”. There was too much even for Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political correspondent, who wrote in his blog: “Ponder for a second how exactly the same policies or phrases would have been written up had David Cameron delivered them. A ‘lurch to the right’ anyone? Or, even, ‘language normally associated with the far right BNP’ Few things better illustrate the strategic confidence of Gordon Brown. He spots the territory - immigration, Britishness... etc - which the Tories are nervous of occupying and plants his flag there. This increases pressure on Cameron from the Tory press and right-wingers to move onto this territory. If he does so, he's accused of, you're there already, ‘lurching to the right’.”

Soon Brown will call a general election and seek a mandate from so-called Middle England, where “fear of crime” is only surpassed by fear of people of a different colour and militant trade unionists. No doubt the same union leaders who expressed dismay at Brown’s speech will be pulled into line by the threat of a return of the Tories and meekly hand over their members’ subscriptions. A World to Win, by contrast, will campaign against a vote for New Labour. This government and the parliamentary state it presides over is undemocratic, unrepresentative, authoritarian and in the pockets of big business. But it’s too much to expect the blinkered, bureaucratic union leaders to understand this harsh reality.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Set fair for hot air in Brighton

The TUC Congress in Brighton this week will hear some angry words and even some heartfelt speeches on the themes of vulnerable workers, trade union rights (or the lack of them), poverty, social housing, casualisation, employment rights, globalisation and other issues. But everyone knows that the words spoken at Congress carry little weight and hardly any influence anywhere. The TUC, far from taking any action against globalisation (and its consequences of poverty, grotesque inequality and privatisation) has ended up as an accessory to the fact.

They have sat back and watched the organisation created by the unions over 100 years ago being transformed into the primary party of corporate interests in the UK. Yet still the union leaders go on pleading with Gordon Brown as if he simply had to be shown the right path. In fact, TUC leaders are pinning all their hopes on the Brown government, even though the prime minister is the main architect of the capitalist policies that they formally oppose.

So Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of Unite, can write in his union journal: “Gordon Brown has shown over the last couple of months that it is possible for Labour to leave behind the increasingly-dismal Blair years and start to forge a new course in office.” He claims to see signs of a new approach, of “a more independent foreign policy, the new commitment to house-building and the calm handling of the attempted bombings in early July”. Which planet does Woodley live on? Is he talking about the same Brown who has reinforced market-driven policies on every occasion, threatened more anti-terror laws, praised the Bush regime, imposed below-inflation pay awards on unions and brought Tories and others into the government?.

Brown, who is due to make a speech to Congress today, will be greatly encouraged by such a feeble, bankrupt perspective, shared by most of the TUC. He wants to reduce even further the influence of the unions and constituency members in the Labour Party, and won’t pay any attention to the lobby by the unions of Parliament in support of the Trade Union Freedom Bill next month. Brown is planning to abolish the right of conference to vote against the government on policy, and to refer controversial issues to the National Policy Forum. As Seamus Milne in a comment piece for The Guardian, put it, “Brown’s proposals would mean the final relegation of their [the unions] federal role to lobbyists-cum-cash cow”.

Brown’s government will also be working hard to head off the possibility that the TUC might vote for a referendum on the question of the new EU treaty. Brown, like Blair, does not want his plans challenged by decisions of his own party or even by results of referenda that could interfere with his vision of Britain as a driving force for the global market economy. That is what this government is about, and his fine phrases about a New Politics, citizens juries, dialogue with the people, participation politics, conviction politics etc, are simply a smokescreen for this agenda.

The class struggle, meanwhile, broke surface, spectacularly, last week, when London Underground workers held a strike in defence of jobs, pay and pensions after Metronet, the private company set up in the wake of Brown’s privatisation policies, collapsed. The workers, members of the RMT, and their leader Bob Crow came face to face with the wrath of the Tory media as well as Brown and Mayor Livingstone. The TUC, as usual, was silent. In truth, union leaders with some honourable exceptions, have nothing to say and no leadership to offer. By going cap-in-hand to Brown, they add insult to injury to their loyal, hard-working members who pay their subscriptions as well as the wages of the privileged bureaucrats whose hot air will dominate proceedings in Brighton.

Peter Arkell

Brown sings Bush's praises

There are those who convinced themselves that New Labour’s close relationship with the most reactionary White House in history was restricted to Tony Blair and that once he was gone, normal service would be resumed (whatever that might be). Gordon Brown’s flattering comments about president Bush show, however, an unbroken continuity. The style may be different, and the emphasis switched to issues like Darfur and trade, but the essence remains the same. New Labour and the Republican White House see eye to eye on almost everything. Brown, after all, voted for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the replacement of the Trident nuclear fleet. He has approved the use of the early-warning station at Menwith Hills near Harrogate as part of America’s plan to build a missile defence shield in Europe. And, above all, Brown is totally behind the draconian measures taken in the name of the “war on terrorism”. On his way to the US, Brown, who has more connections in Washington than Blair ever did, said: “We should acknowledge the debt the world owes to the United States for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism."

Was he talking about the regime that built Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo? Or the CIA practice of kidnapping people and sending them off to be tortured by “friendly” governments – otherwise known as extraordinary rendition (which, incidentally, Britain’s MI5 has been closely involved with). Or the raft of illegal wiretapping and surveillance of American citizens which has created a police-state apparatus in the US. Paul Craig Roberts is no radical. He was an assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He now warns: “The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown.” In a recent blast against the White House, he said that the Bush regime is in such dire straits over Iraq, that it could be tempted to create a national crisis through a provocation of its own or allowing a terror strike to take place. He wrote: “Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of ‘executive orders’ that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, ‘terrorist’ events in the near future.”

Brown, of course, is working on his own plan for a police-state apparatus with his proposals to double detention without charge to 58 days and allow police to question suspects endlessly. He is taking his cue from the unelected and unaccountable group who constitute the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). They came to prominence during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. ACPO set up a centralised command and turned Britain into a series of militarised zones which miners were prevented from entering. Even a cross-party committee of MPs and peers has seen through the government’s plans. A report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) today concludes that there is not enough evidence to justify extending the detention time. The JCHR's report concluded that the law should not be altered because of "precautionary arguments that such a need may arise at some time in the future.” Chairman, Andrew Dismore, said: "As far as we've heard there has not yet been a case where 28 days was inadequate. This is being proposed on the possibility that it might be in future." But New Labour doesn’t give a fig for MPs’ concerns. As a Home Office spokesman countered: "The police believe it is right and proper for the government to address this issue.” So there you have it. The inspector calls and the government jumps.

Paul Feldman, communications editor