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

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