02.08.10
Is my MP as bad as Nick Griffin?
I live in Bethnal Green and Bow. That means George Galloway is my MP.
It was recently suggested to me that Galloway is as bad as BNP leader Nick Griffin. At first I thought this claim ludicrous. But it actually requires more work than one might expect to get a handle on why Griffin is necessarily worse than Galloway.
The first charge is that both Griffin and Galloway have previously been adherents of extremist politics.
Griffin spent the late 1970s and early 1980s in the National Front, an overtly fascist white supremacist organisation. There’s little doubt that the National Front glorified Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Galloway has been a member of the Labour Party since he was 13. However in the early 1980s he supported Communist Party affiliation with the Labour Party. In 2002 Galloway told The Guardian that he had always been a supporter of the Soviet Union:
“Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe.”
First, some numbers. Let’s take the Third Reich. It’s estimated that 5.9 million Jews were murdered by Hitler’s regime. In addition, approximately 2 to 3 million Soviet POWs, 2 million ethnic Poles, up to 1.5 million Romani, 200,000 handicapped, political and religious dissenters, 15,000 homosexuals and 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses were also killed, bringing the death toll to around 11 million.
In the USSR, under Stalin’s regime alone the numbers of murdered range from between 15 to 30 million (if one includes the deaths of famine victims in the Ukraine).
Numbers alone can’t really paint a full picture of the horror. But on this simple metric, Galloway’s idolisation of the brutality of the USSR is very hard to stomach.
Of course, Griffin now publicly claims that he abhors Hitler and the legacy of the Third Reich, and during that Question Time appearance he made great play of the fact his father was an RAF pilot during WWII. But there are few who believe that Griffin is anything but a closet supporter of Nazi fascism. (It doesn’t help that his protegé Mark Collett was once secretly filmed declaring that “Churchill was a fucking cunt who led us into a pointless war with other whites standing up for their race”).
But here’s an interesting thing. Knowledge of Galloway’s far-left past (and present) doesn’t seem to have the same subjective impact on ordinary people as believing that Griffin is a supporter of Nazi fascism. But why, when the numbers alone seem to put them firmly together?
There are a few fairly bad reasons, appearing to owe more to popular cognitive biases than anything else.
The first is that Sovietism does not agitate the British consciousness the way Hitler does. Our post-war national myths are constructed around the tale of plucky little Britain standing alone, defying the worst monster ever to have existed, and saving the world.
Mostly this is a load of bunk. Hitler lost WWII because he made the idiotic mistake of turning on Stalin before he’d secured his western front. Russia won the Second World War, the end of which was precipitated by the late-arrival of America. Yet in the post-imperial decline of this nation, the bogey man of Hitler has loomed large as a rallying point of (lost) greatness.
Which is not to deny that Hitler was a monster. But Britain didn’t fight the war to save the Jews (indeed, the lack of action taken to save European Jewry before and throughout the war should be a cause of great shame). Despite the Cold War and the subsequent revelations of the true horrors of Sovietism, even Stalin could never replace Hitler as Britain’s national bête noir. The (entirely justified) visceral loathing directed at Griffin is in large measure a product of our collective national myths. But the upshot of those myths is that Galloway can express admiration for a regime as brutal and horrific as the Third Reich and not be subjected to anything like the public hatred Griffin receives. Yet that’s in no way to Galloway’s credit.
The second bad reason is that Galloway has been a political insider for a great deal of time. A long-serving Labour MP before he joined the Respect Party, Galloway has walked the corridors of power without sending innocents to Scottish gulags or orchastrating famines in Bedfordshire to teach his Tory enemies a lesson. By contrast, Griffin is a political outsider and the thought of his gaining office raises the spectre of the democratic rise of Hitler.
Yet this just indicates that we’re used to Galloway, not that he is fundamentally cleaner than Griffin. After all, if Griffin gets elected as an MP he’s hardly likely to achieve anything at all in Westminster (except for being a symbolic presence for the far right, who are a million light-years from national takeover).
The third bad reason is to think that the BNP – and previously the NF – are a source of enormous on-the-ground unrest, and that they provoke trouble and use violence and intimidation to influence elections. Surely there is no parallel with George Galloway? Yet the 2005 election campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow would indicate otherwise.
So there’s less to differentiate Galloway and Griffin, when carefully considered, than might be presupposed.
There is, however, one important difference. Galloway may be unrepentant about his far-left politics and his Soviet apologism. But he can always claim that the millions of deaths in the USSR were an unfortunate by-product of mistakes, corruption, external pressure and the failure of a fundamentally good dream. Now, I don’t think we should take that as an excuse. When something produces as much tragedy as the USSR did, it’s time to completely repudiate it. Galloway must be severely chastised for his failure to do so.
By contrast, Griffin cannot claim that he formerly admired Hitler and Nazi policies but that this was somehow separate from the fact the Third Reich murdered millions of people purely on the basis of their ethnicity. Persecution of European Jewry and other minorities was a constituent part of the Nazi policy to promote the “Aryan Master Race”.
For sure, modern Britons are more sensitive and attuned to ideologically driven racism than to indiscriminate mass-murder by Communist apparatchiks. That’s partly a product of the Hitler-orientated national myths, but also of the important and highly welcome rise of race equality since the 1950s. But whereas Galloway can claim (however myopically) that there is a difference between Sovietism-the-Communist-Ideal and Sovietism-the-Real-World-Disaster, Griffin and the far right cannot divorce their racial politics and (closet) Hitler adoration from the fact of the Holocaust.
So on that metric, I’m willing to grant that there is some tangible difference between Galloway and Griffin, however thin and qualified I think that should ultimately be.
But that’s not the whole story. We have the little matter of Saddam Hussein to consider.
Whatever Griffin says now, given his past and his party’s racist policies there are few who doubt that he secretly admires Hitler (and indeed fancies himself as the Führer’s reincarnation).
George Galloway went one better than mere adoration. He flew to Iraq to shake hands with a very living neo-fascist tyrant, who had previously emulated Hitler by gassing Iraqi ethnic minorities.Indeed, Galloway was happy to salute Saddam’s “courage, strength and indefatigability“.
Galloway may claim that he was maneouvred into expressing more support than he strictly desired, that he was opposing the “worse evil” of American imperialism, or whatever. But there simply is no excuse. I opposed the war and history has proven myself and others correct to do so. Yet there is a huge distance between opposing an illegal war based on lies, and defending and celebrating a vicious tyrant like Saddam Hussein.
Nick Griffin can only idolize Hitler in the abstract. George Galloway went one better, and paid tribute to a vicious murdering dictator in the flesh.
Which forces one to ask: Perhaps George Galloway isn’t as bad as Nick Griffin. Perhaps he’s worse?
02.07.10
Spinoza on Blair
The Chilcot enquiry rumbles on. Brown is due this week. Alistair Campbell pretended to be on the verge of breakdown this morning when Andrew Marr asked him questions he couldn’t have answered without admitting that Blair misled Parliament.
Of course it’s still Blair that commands everyone’s attention. He was the man at the centre. He is the focal point of all the big questions. Hence a lot of ink has been spilled concerning his actions.
But I can’t help feeling that the reams of print are mostly superfluous. For here is 17th Century philosopher Baruch de Spinoza’s take on things.
“Those who administer a state or hold power inevitably try to lend any wrong they do the appearance of right and try to persuade the people that they acted honourably; and they often succeed, since the whole interpretation of right and law is in their hands. For there is no doubt that they assume, due to this, the greatest liberty to do whatever they want and whatever their desires prompt them to do, and conversely, lose much of this freedom whenever the right to interpret the laws devolves upon others, and likewise if the true interpretation is so plain to all that one can be in any doubt about it.”
- Theological-Political Treatise, Chapter 17
As I’ve remarked before, less changes in politics than we often suppose.
02.05.10
The Docks Are Empty Now
From ‘79 to 1990 the North was starved of air/
They thought that we would lose our voice they thought we’d disapear/
Karma flowers from the hilltops, the guilt of slavery/
Shipyards are haunted by the ghost of industry.
Union power disabled, crushed until bled/
A city held to ransom with a Tory gun against it’s head/
And what was the alternative? It wasn’t Kinock’s left/
Hatton and the militants destroyed what pride was left.
- The Down and Outs, Boys from the Blackstuff
After reading Giles’ excellent re-write of ClimateHate, I’ve been doing some introspection about where my own tribal political allegiances come from.
Because I really hate the Conservative Party. Which doesn’t meant that I hate all members of the Conservative Party. On the contrary, I’ve met two in my life that I actually quite like. They have radically different perspectives to me, but they’re good and decent people.
For the actual institution of the Conservative Party, however, I hold a deep-seated and visceral loathing. Why?
I’d like to say it’s because the Tories are the party of power and privilege. The party which defends the interests of the already prosperous and empowered. The party which does this whilst having the audacity to claim that it works for the interests of all. The party which through its appeals to crass, simplistic, selfish and unreflective ways of (non)thinking preserves the status quo in favour of the few at the expense of the many.
Certainly that has something to do with it. But that can’t explain the deep-seated ressentiment I feel against the Conservative Party. It’s something more formative, more primal, than that.
To get a handle on where my hatred comes from I have to go way back into my past. To a day when I was only 6 or 7 years old and growing up in Southport, a small, relatively well-off town to the north of Liverpool.
I was in the car with my mum. For some reason now lost to me we’d been in Liverpool and we were driving home to through Bootle and Seaforth, two large areas mostly covered by housing estates. Prior to the 1980s, these estates provided the bulk of the labour-force for the Liverpool docks, a centre of world shipping and British industry.
But as we drove through them that day the ghost of industry was more than haunting those areas, it was tormenting them.
Poverty is a little like pornography; very difficult to describe precisely, but everyone knows it when they see it. Being only 6 or 7 years old, the only thing I could compare what I was seeing to was images I’d watched on Newround or Blue Peter of faraway lands where people lived in squalor after some war or catastrophe. The broken houses, the boarded-up windows, the shopfronts smashed and the people hanging around idly on street corners whilst dogs roamed the pavement. I thought we must have secretly travelled to another country. I simply couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
My mum explained to me – and this is one of my earliest memories – that during the 1980s all the people who lived in these parts of Liverpool had lost their jobs, and that the special organisations (the trade unions) that had helped support them before were attacked by Margaret Thatcher and her government. She explained how all the jobs went to other countries, but how the people that were left behind were abandoned by the Conservative Party.
Over the following years I would ask my parents about this history. I can remember my Dad telling me about the 1970s, and about how the Unions had become too powerful and the government needed to bring them under control – but how after that Margaret Thatcher’s government had decided to take revenge on the Unions by virtually destroying them. He told me about Newcastle and Sunderland and Shefield and Glasgow and all the pit villages of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and about Liverpool. About how the people who lived in those places first lost their jobs, and then how the communities that depended on those jobs were abandoned by the Thatcher government out of political revenge.
He told me about men like Norman Tebbit who laughed at the idea that there weren’t any jobs and that families and children were suffering, and just told the parents to “get on their bikes” and find work. Even though there wasn’t any work to be found.
All the while, the memory of those North Liverpool slums would play in my head.
Today, Liverpool is in many ways a city transformed. The back-door poverty relief fund known as the European Capital of Culture project has made a visible and tangible difference. After years of above-average unemployment rates, Liverpool has enjoyed enormous levels of regional growth and (despite the recession) levels of unemployment in the city seem to have eased. But that’s what it took: a massive EU subsidy in the late Noughties to drag the city out of the post-Thatcher depression. But it’s worth pointing out that, in many ways, areas like Bootle and Seaforth remain as poor and deprived as ever. And the spending cuts of the post-recession have yet to take their toll, so who knows what the future holds for Liverpool and its people.
The image of Thatcher’s legacy in Liverpool was burned onto my memory before, I think, anything else of substance. What I later found out about her party, what it did in the 1980s, and what it still continues to stand for, only reinforce that formative experience.
And that’s why I hate the Conservative Party. And why I always will.
02.04.10
Reading between the Lines
No proper post for you all today, because I am busy.
For the tiny minority of people who could possibly be interested in this subject, I’m making an essay I wrote for my MA available.
So, if you ever burned with intellectual fury to discover what’s wrong with the methodological approach of Leo Strauss in the history of ideas, today is your lucky day.
Over here.
02.03.10
Pensions and Public Opinion
Britain’s public sector was recently under rightwing attack. The Times claimed “Public sector pay races ahead in a recession”, whilst The Telegraph intoned that “Public sector workers earn 7% more on average than their peers in the private sector — a pay gulf that has more than doubled since the recession began.”
Ben Goldacre did the statistical demolition here, whilst Mehdi Hasan poked fun at the right for its “politics of envy”.
Misleading rants about public/private pay differentials are new on the scene, however. Much better established is the claim that public sector workers receive cushy risk-free “gold plated” pensions at the vast expense to the ordinary taxpayer. Indeed, that we must end “the pensions apartheid” is a favourite meme of right-wing front organisation The Taxpayers’ Alliance. It’s also one that’s been found in the mouth of David Cameron.
But it’s a myth, as demonstrated by this excellent TUC report [PDF].
In particular, it’s worth noting the following:
- “The mean average public sector pension is £7,000 but the majority of public sector pensioners have pensions of less than £5,000 [per year].”
- “The value of the main schemes in the public sector for new entrants are similar to a medium private sector final salary, at around 21% to 24% of salary on average.”
- “Many reports about pensions would lead you to believe that most public sector workers retire at the age of 60 on two-thirds salary, but in fact this only applies to the very few people who work in public service for forty years or more. The pension age for many public sector workers has always been 65 and this now applies to most new joiners.”
- “The average pension in Local Government is around just £4,000 per year, and just £2,000 for women while in the Civil Service the average is £6,500. The average pension for a female NHS worker is £5,000 but the median pension for women is much less. In fact half of all women pensioners who have worked in the NHS get a pension of less than £3,500 per year”
And loads more. Because this matters.
The right is attacking public pensions quite deliberately. Rather than simply being a “politics of envy” as Mehdi Hassan suggests, this approach acts as a Trojan horse for the right: by instilling the idea that the public sector is bloated, out of control and parasitic on the private sector or ordinary tax payers, the pretexts for ideologically-driven state-slashing are laid.
David Hume remarked way back in the 18th Century that all politics is founded upon “opinion”. At one level, Hume was remarking that because rulers are always outnumbered by the ruled, the former can only govern so long as they have the “opinion” of the masses behind them.
The importance of “opinion” was later picked-up by James Madison after the American founding. Madison noticed that public opinion established the terms for what we would now call “public legitimacy”, or what governments can and can’t get away with:
“Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the sovereign in every free one”
The problem with public opinion, of course, is that it doesn’t always track the facts (something that deeply concerned Madison). If the right – and specifically the Tory Party – can maintain and fuel the common misperception that the public sector is bloated and parasitic, then it will have “public opinion” on its side to begin a slash-and-burn attack.
The best – and probably the only – way to fight back is to shape public opinion in accordance with the facts. We can start with pensions. Read that TUC report. And spread the word.
02.02.10
Important and Moving
I really think that if you’re going to read anything online today, then it ought to be the important and moving piece by Terry Pratchet on the right to die.
At The Guardian.
Progressive London
Following my last post I’ve had an email exchange with Nick Cohen. Unsurprisingly given that I disagree with him on quite a lot, it’s been a little heated (the fact I insulted him in the last post doesn’t help).
But Nick has made me pay attention to a few things about “Progressive London“.
Firstly – and as Sunny had already noted – “Progressive London” is little more than Ken Livingstone’s re-election platform. This in itself might be no bad thing, in principle. It becomes so when we remember Ken Livingstone himself.
I’m not just thinking about the fact Red Ken probably doesn’t have the numbers to beat the abominable Boris Johnson. I’m thinking of the fact Livingstone himself is quite an unsavoury character. A latent authoritarianism in his politics seeped out at the Fabian Conference in his enormous enthusiasm for compulsory national service. His extolling of China and Vietnam as models for Britain added to my concerns on Saturday. And in fairness to Nick Cohen, two years ago he wrote a solid piece casting light on Livingstone’s shady past.
Yet Ken Livingstone himself was not the only problem at the Progressive London conference.
I’ve already noted the presence of his former economic adviser John Ross, a man who likewise extols the virtues of China whilst remaining gleefully silent about the issues of judicial murder, totalitarian dictatorship and suppression of basic rights.
But let’s not forget George Galloway, who just happens to be my MP. Another old leftist who spent his youth in the ultra-hard left, Galloway rose to his 15 minutes of international fame by personally saluting Saddam Hussein’s “courage”, “strength” and “indefatigability”. Now I was very much opposed to the Iraq war, and believe that history has proved myself and those who stood with me right.
Yet there is clear blue water between opposing illegal war and personally supporting a vicious, neo-fascit tyrant who gassed sections of his own population.
George Galloway is a national disgrace. He ought to occupy a pariah status on the left . Not a privileged position on a panel debate for so-called “progressives”.
Also present at the Progressive London conference was Bairbre de Brún MEP of Sinn Féin. Now let me say this loud and clear: I am no supporter of the loyalist cause in Northern Ireland. I am aware of the many horrors perpetrated by loyalist factions, and of the frequently uneven hand of British “justice” in Ulster.
But Sinn Féin remains the political wing of what was a terrorist organisation responsible for the deaths of thousands. Their presence at a conference for “progressives” is simply unacceptable. If a representative of the Irish nationalist cause was desired, the invitation should have gone to someone from the SDLP.
Questions might also be raised about the presence of Venezuelan Ambassador Samuel Moncada, in the light of this Human Rights Watch report. Ken, of course, has long-standing ties to Hugo Chavez. He does not appear to share many on the left’s mounting concern at Chavez’s slide into repressive authoritarianism, however.
Of course, many sensible and respectable people spoke at the event. There were also a few harmless idiots like Ann “North Sea Oil is irrelevant to growth” Pettifor, of the insufferable New Economics Foundation.
But regardless, we on the London left need to look carefully at Ken’s electoral machine, and see who he’s taking along for the ride. Then we need to decide whether it’s something we’re willing to be part of.
Personally I will not be joining Progressive London, nor attending any more of their events.
01.30.10
China: A Very Bad Example
There’s a worrying tendency emerging in some sections of the left. I noticed it in this blog post. Today I saw it writ large. The willingness of some leftists to cite China as a positive example for the UK.
At the appalingly-titled “Progressive London” conference, Ken Livingstone gave a speech in which he declared that the proof that government investment ends recessions lies in China’s staggering rates of state spending, and enormous correlate levels of growth. (He also claimed that British kids should have fewer holidays, so that they can receive the structured educations that will make them good British citizens who are competitive with Chinese children studying “from 7am to 6 at night”. They don’t call him Red Ken for nowt, eh?).
Later, John Ross of Socialist Economic Bulletin (and Ken’s former economic adviser) took some time out from claiming that Britain’s national debt didn’t need to be repaid, that the triple-A rating is meaningless, and that all spending cuts are completely a choice and not imposed by brute economic circumstances, to cite China as proof-positive that government-led investment ends recessions. He waxed lyrical about China’s 9% growth in the last quarter, and how the Chinese government simply told banks to lend and – hey presto – they lent.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for keeping government spending as high as possible to protect the tentative recovery. But citing China as a model for UK growth is idiotic, and deeply troubling.
Firstly, it relies upon deliberate economic simplification. Why might China be experiencing such high rates of growth? The fact it possess enormous and largely untapped natural resources, which it is beginning to put to use, has something to do with it. That China is still in a stage of rapid industrialisation from what was effectively a peasant society, ravaged by the Cultural Revolution, helps too. Britain is incomparable on both these metrics.
Likewise, Chinese growth is in large measure driven by enormous government-led infrastructure projects (as a component of rapid industrialisation). It also has as an enormous manufacturing base, fuelling western demand for cheap consumer goods. Britain, by contrast, relies heavily on its financial and service sectors. The two economies are thus radically different.
So pointing at China and simplistically saying “look, they have lots of government spending and lots of growth, QED” is stupid. You might as well point to Angola and its 12%+ oil-driven growth, and it would tell you as much about the UK’s situation (we, after all, still possess some reserves of North Sea Oil). Indeed, if one wants proof that government spending leads to economic recovery, why not turn to history and take the case of America’s New Deal? That at least tells you something about relatively comparable economies and circumstances – though again one would need to adjust for situation and the complex nature of macroeconomic recovery. (h/t)
But more importantly than all that, let’s remember a key method by which China achieves its phenomenal growth: by systematically denying the civil and economic rights of its domestic population.
Chinese workers have no meaningful rights whatsoever (their right to unionize, for example, means a right to join the union which reports to the Communist Party). They are paid pitifully low wages (averaging around $0.50 an hour in 2006), and have no hope of securing anything better. That’s a key way in which China’s export-manufacturing sector booms: low wages equal low costs, after all.
Another way China grows is by doing what I observed last summer: going to places like 1000-year old Yancheng, raising it to the ground, and erecting a city the size of Chicago in its place. And what do you think happened to the people living in Yancheng who didn’t want to have their homes demolished. Do you think they were consulted nicely and offered new places to live with guaranteed legal redress? Or do you reckon they were forcibly re-located as is the Communist Party’s preferred approach?
China may have very high growth rates. But it has no democracy, no civil rights, and no effective rule of law. It is a totalitarian dictatorship, achieving “economic miracles” at a cost no desirable society would ever contemplate.
Yet when John Ross was pointedly asked why Iceland and Ireland don’t simply adopt the “Chinese approach”, he simply claimed that the political consensus in those countries wouldn’t tolerate a more state-centred economy. He made it perfectly clear that he thought this a mistake: that China was leading the way, and should be followed.
We have been here before on the left. From the 1930s to the 1980s there were many who persistently claimed that Soviet Russia was a workers’ paradise, a successful alternative to capitalism. They were wrong, and millions of graves testify against them.
The left must not repeat the mistakes of history. China is an example of what we must always be against, not what we must aspire to. We forget that at our peril.
–
End Note:
The irony, of course, is that the nutty left are usually the ones blithely decrying “neo-liberalism”. If “neo-liberalism” is anything, it is usually claimed to be an economic approach which privileges growth and profit above the welfare of ordinary people.
For reasons I cannot comprehend, some of those rabidly decrying “neo-liberalism” suddenly forget those concerns about growth über alles when it comes to hailing the totalitarian dystopia of modern China.
–
UPDATE
John Ross’ views on China are well laid-out at this Guardian article. You will notice that NOT ONCE does he mention China’s horrific record on human rights, or the fact of its totalitarian dictatorship.
The comments beneath his piece are almost universally spot-on in calling him out on this matter.
Also, Nick Cohen (and you know it’s bad when Nick can successfully call you out on your shit) made the following observations of this nasty neo-Soviet Apologist two years ago:
“John Ross, Livingstone’s economic adviser on £121,000, is typical. He is so lacking in economic knowledge that he decided that the Russian Communist party was a force for the future in 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His economic advice at the time was for the ruling class to learn ‘that they will be killed if they do not allow a takeover by the working class’.”
01.29.10
Global Delusions
I’ve been mostly ignoring the Chilcot enquiry. Flying Rodent sets out all the best reasons why, so I won’t repeat them.
But today was a day nobody could ignore.
From 2000-2008, we British sneered at the Americans for their dim-witted cowboy President. Yet it seems the joke was on us. For whereas the yanks were ruled by a public fool, for 10 years Britain was led by a man who belonged not in Number 10, but down the rabbit hole.
Tony Blair today claimed that Saddam Hussein was a
“monster and I believe he threatened not just the region but the world.”
Perhaps Blair did believe this prior to 2003. But it now seems fairly incontrovertible that there was no evidence for Iraq possessing WMD (not least because none ever turned up). It also seems beyond reasonable doubt that American and British intelligence knew that Iraq had no WMD prior to the invasion….and that Blair knew this, misleading the British Parliament instead.
So when Blair says that he thought Saddam was a threat to both the region and the world, he’s either alluding to WMD – in which case we know he’s lying or deluded – or he’s referring to Saddam being a threat because he was allegedly a sponsor of terrorism.
The last claim isn’t necessarily insane, taken alone. It becomes so, however, if we couple it with remarks from Blair like this:
“It was better to deal with this threat, to remove [Saddam] from office and I do genuinely believe the world is a safer place as a result.”
For the world manifestly isn’t a safer place. Resentment against American power and British duplicity in the Muslim world was only exacerbated by the 2003 war, as any fool can tell. Whilst we’ll never know if the 7/7 attacks and the spate of subsequent failed terror attempts wouldn’t have happened if the Iraq war hadn’t occurred, one thing is manifestly obvious: whatever else Iraq achieved, it certainly did not make such attacks less likely. Mehdi Hasan argues powerfully that it positvely hightened the terrorist threat.
Abroad, the Iraq war drained resources and attention away from Afghanistan. Whatever you think about that conflict, it is incontrovertible that the Afghan situation was made worse by the huge diversion of resources and attention to Iraq. Afghanistan is now a major problem. Even worse, the conflict risks spilling over into nuclear-armed Pakistan, as the Afghan fuels the rise of radical Islamism over the border.
Yet Blair tells us we are safer.
Even more spectacularly, he claims that removing Saddam means Iran is now less of a threat to global stability:
“today we would have a situation where Iraq was competing with Iran” [both in terms of nuclear capability and] “in respect of support of terrorist groups”.
It’s nauseating to follow the mental somersaults Blair performs to draw this conclusion. Not least because nuclear weapons have somehow crawled back into the story.
But recall that after Iraq was invaded, given the fact Afghanistan was already occupied this meant that Iran’s immediate neighbours to both the West and East were under occupation by foreign forces, and have been ever since. Foreign forces which are statedly hostile to the Iranian regime. And Blair expects Iran to be less bellicose now?
The whopping great irony-cum-paradox is that the disaster of Iraq has however made Iran more of a threat, because the option of a US-led invasion of Iran is actually completely off the cards. In terms of human and financial cost – not to mention further regional destabilization – it’s simply not going to happen. And the Iranian regime knows this, meaning it’s hand has been considerably strengthened. If it is interested in funding terrorism, or developing nuclear weapons, it can do it with greater impunity than ever before.
Yet Blair is so convinced of his grounds that he defiantly told Chilcot that he’d do it all again:
“The decision I took – and frankly would take again – was if there was any possibility that [Saddam] could develop weapons of mass destruction we should stop him.”
It’s been much commented that Blair seems to believe that if he simply repeats the courage of his original convictions then he will therefore be absolved from blame. As though mere good intent will cancel-out the horror of the actual consequences.
After today, I can no longer subscribe to that analysis.
The truth is that Tony Blair is a man completely deluded.
He cannot differentiate between the fantasy of WMD his spin-machine fed to the world’s media, and the fact that no such WMD ever existed.
He believes he has made the world a safer place by fuelling the rise of domestic terrorism, rendering the middle east less secure and more hostile, and increasing Iran’s scope for developing nuclear arms.
And he claims he would do it all again.
Tony Blair does not belong on trial at The Hague, as many have suggested. He belongs under the permanent supervision of trained medical professionals.
01.27.10
Taste of the Future
2009 closed with Lord Mandelson dropping plans to part-privatise the postal service, in the process meaning that its multi-billion pound pension deficit remains in place. As a result, Royal Mail is looking to cut major costs.
Don’t, however, fall into the lazy assumption that the internet has reduced the need for Royal Mail’s services. Or that it’s a dinosaur state monolith whose role could be better fulfilled by the private sector. This article puts a stong case against such easy complacencies, pointing out that many of Royal Mail’s difficulties may stem from the activities of parasitic private companies.
Nevertheless, a couple of weeks ago Business Minister Pat McFadden announced that job losses could be expected in Royal Mail this year.
He might have added that the shedding of jobs has already started. And Royal Mail management are taking no prisoners.
Consider my former home-town of Southport. This week the local press is reporting the sacking of a local delivery worker. The grounds? He put his signature on a recorded delivery for an elderly pensioner, to save her the long trip to the out-of-town depot which is not served by any public transport. It was a first offence, but he got the sack anyway. He has two children to support, and in all likelihood a mortgage to pay.
And that’s not the best part. The postie in question was only sacked after the elderly lady rang up to express her thanks that he had been so kind and considerate. If she hadn’t done that, management would never even have known.
This is not an isolated incident in Southport. Since 2003, 46 postmen have been sacked, suspended or forced off work with stress. The majority of cases have occurred in the last three years.
In particular, two delivery workers were sacked last year for not wearing cycle helmets despite being in areas not designated “hazardous”. Neither had committed any prior offences. Another employee was dismissed – despite having worked for Royal Mail for 25 years – because he left his van unlocked as he delivered mail to an isolated farmhouse on a single-lane track.
Last year Royal Mail boss Adam Crozier Crozier has paid himself almost £1million in salary and bonuses. That’s on top of the £2.4million in performance bonuses and £3.6million in pay since taking over as Chief Executive in 2003. But it seems that pace Crozier, Royal Mail is determined to cut costs.
Southport’s MP John Pugh summed it up pretty well in Parliament the other day:
“It would be quite easy to leap to the conclusion that there is an underlying strategy to find reasons to shed experienced staff, so as to cut costs, replace permanent staff with casual or reduce pension liabilities. How else can we explain the fact that the manager who has sacked the most staff appears to be the most applauded by the Royal Mail? I do not go for easy explanations, but I am not entirely certain what other explanations I should offer in this case.”
MPs from both Labour and Tory benches concurred with Dr Pugh that the same experience is being repeated in other constituencies.
This, however, is only a foretaste of the future. As the public sector spending axe comes down, it won’t just be postal workers bearing the brunt. Today Britain officially – if only barely – pulled out of recession. But I don’t see even 0.1% of light at the end of the tunnel yet.
So strap in, because after the election it’s going to be a nasty couple of years. Just how nasty depends, of course, on just how hard the spending axe falls. And that depends, in all likelihood, on Dave and Chums.
Who’s feeling optimistic?
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Disclaimer: I used to work for John Pugh MP as a Parliamentary Researcher
