As Iraq Was To Blair; Libya Is To Cameron

I imagine I am not the only person making this comment, but you know me, as I read in 'The Guardian' yesterday when it was talking about bloggers, 'I would rather be right than read'.  I guess most (political) commentators would feel that.  In a world where I feel, like most people, utterly powerless to alter anything about my own life let alone broader society, at least I can testify that 'I contested, I did not collaborate' and that is probably all we can do in the fixed-up society we live in.

For a brief moment it seemed, last week, that David Cameron had retained some standing, that, at last, he appeared to be a world statesman.  It appears, though perhaps less obviously than Tony Blair (though these are still comparatively early days) that our present prime minister yearns for that international recognition that his predecessor-but-one battled so long to achieve.  In addition, Cameron is from a political party which has always drawn strong support from the armed forces, and, in general, has supported them in return.  It is different at present because of the severe cutbacks in the armed services that are already upsetting traditional Conservative supporters and closes off a source of employment for many young men and women in hard economic times like these.

Soldiers like to have a clear purpose, this does not mean a war, but something that gives them action and credit.  The UK has been at war constantly since 2001 and having managed to extricate ourselves from Iraq after seven years, we are down once again to participating in only one war at the moment, Afghanistan.  The casualties seem tolerable, and keep the public in a military frame of mind.  Public support for injured soldiers and families of those killed has reached an all-time high.  Thus, military action is a good way to distract the population.  Margaret Thatcher did this spectacularly well with the Falklands Conflict of 1982 at a time when unemployment was spiralling out of control and many were suffering from her regime.  The battling won enough of the population to her side that she could increase her majority at the 1983 election.  It seems that prime ministers since then, whether John Major in 1991 or Tony Blair in 2001 and 2003 have sought, in vain, to replicate that experience.


Situations like that in Libya always put liberals like myself in a dilemma.  On one hand, clearly I want to see the end of Colonel Gaddafi's 42-year long authoritarian regime and the installation of democracy in a country which has basically gone from being a colony under the Ottomans and the Italians, through a brief period of constitutional monarchy 1951-69, it fell under an indigenous dictator who has held power ever since.  Of course, it was hoped that Gaddafi would fall the way the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt, lying to the West and East of Libya had done.  However, Gaddafi has managed to retain the loyalty of sufficient forces to bring about the civil war he had warned of earlier.  Of course, western states have complicated the situation.  With Algerian oil effectively under the control of the French, Libya is the key short-haul oil supplier for Europe.  The relationship with Gaddafi has been confused, ranging from bombing of the country by US aircraft in 1986 to Tony Blair trying to foster good relations.  In the meantime the West has often sold arms to Gaddafi, to some extent pleased that he was not an Islamic fundamentalist, much as they were with Saddam Hussain before 1991.  With China's quest to secure raw materials around the world and its willingness to support dictatorships, the situation has changed again and the West might be hoping for a more liberal regime in Libya which will look to the West, despite the turbulent history of the relationship, rather than to China as Sudan has done.


Intervention in civil wars is always complex.  It is always a gamble.  Of course, most people in the West do not want to see the rebels crushed as this week seemed very likely.  There will always be a humanitarian aspect too.  The view of China and Russia is simple, that no outside power should interfere with internal suppression of uprising, even if the peoples being suppressed claim they are not a true part of that state, as the Tibetans and Chechens do.  For the West it is not so simple.  This is why states hang on for a United Nations resolution, a permit for them to intervene.  This allows governments to appear strong, yet spreading the blame if it all goes wrong.  They also adopt a staged approach.  Remember that no-fly zones preceded intervention in Iraq.  To some degree this is fair as it balances the conflict between government and rebel forces.  There is a value judgement.  Imagine if the situation was reversed and, as in 1969 (and, of course, in Spain in 1936), the rebels were authoritarians seeking to overthrow the constitutional government?  Then, I suppose money and oil access would be the judgement.  There seem to be rules, but it is more a kind of shouting match between the various world powers and sometimes it falls one way and sometimes the other.


Stepping back from the international dimension, this posting is focused on the impact for the UK government.  Like Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, it seemed David Cameron was eager for an international distraction from domestic economic difficulties.  Controversy over the US arms company brought in to run the census, revelations that the new approach to local authority funding will shift millions from the poorest councils to the richest, concerns over damage to the National Health Service and ill-conceived ideas in education, meaning Cameron and his government remains unpopular across the board.  A friend of mine argued that allowing local authorities to keep their business rates rather than send them to central government will encourage 'lax' councils to put more effort into generating business in their area.  This is fine in principle, but neglects the uneveness of the playing field.  Business will boom in areas of the South East, possibly the West Midlands and the Manchester-Liverpool and Tyneside regions, but more peripheral regions are going to suffer.  Many parts of South-West England lack even a decent dial-up service for internet connection, let alone broadband, so what company will want to locate in those regions.  Other areas have high unemployment, greater numbers of poorly qualified population, higher levels of asylum seekers, poor infrastructure and other issues that may make it hard to compete with the already rich areas of the South East, this approach will simply widen the divide.

Anyway, Cameron has got the war he was seeking.  It seems to be a 'light touch' affair, policing the skies over Libya to stop Gaddafi's airforce bombing the rebels.  However, as was seen with the US intervention in Somalia (and back in Vietnam) these days pilots are not immune to attack from ground forces let alone fighter aircraft.  What will the UK do when downed aircrew are paraded on Libyan television?  Presumably send in George Galloway to negotiate their release? The first British incursion, the SAS team, failed almost immediately, the soldiers being captured, ironically, by the rebels.  Will the UK, France, the USA be able to resist having ground troops sent to the country as well?  It seems likely even if the rebels win, that foreign troops will go in to establish some form of stability.  Islamist groups must already be looking to expand their influence in the country, the one thing the western powers fear.  Once there are ground forces there, then it will just be like Iraq all over again and sometime in 2018 we will be able to bring UK troops home from Libya.

A no-fly zone does not guaratee a rebel victory, and at the end of last week it appeared as if the rebellion was about to be crushed.  Gadaffi controls the bulk of Libya and has extensive armed forces at his command.  Foreign troops above or in the country will play to his propaganda, allowing him to portray the conflict as patriotic.  A victory for him will not only mean the end of the rebellion and presumably refugees fleeing into Egypt, but it will mean that the UK will be spurned by Libya.  In many ways that is no bad thing, I feel we have been too close to Gaddafi in the past decade achieving very little for the UK except more arms deals to equip him with the weaponry to suppress rebellions.  It seems like Gaddafi will turn to China who will have secured their first major supply of oil despite its distance from China.  It will reinforce China's 'footprint' in Africa another level.  As members of the Security Council of the United Nations, China and Russia need to be challenged more.  They need to be involved in peace-keeping, not constantly supporting dictators, pleading poverty (I found it incredible a couple of weeks ago when the Department for International Development said it was ending aid to China; why were we giving aid to the second largest economy in the world anyway?) when they go in afterwards and find a new source of raw materials and yet another market.

I accept that the situation in Libya has put many governments in a difficult position.  However, Camerons bullishness in approach, puts him at the forefront of the blame when things begin to go wrong as so many cases have shown they will.  Remember the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and how that was supposed to bring Hussain's regime in Iraq to an end?  No, it simply led to even more brutal suppression of Iraqi people exacerbated by sanctions that cut necessary supplies to them.  I can certainly see Cameron before a committee of inquiry in 2019 shuffling awkwardly as Tony Blair did in front of Chilcot.  I guess Cameron saw that and thought 'well, he got off lightly'.  Blair spent a short time answering questions about the intervention in Iraq, got useful publicity for his autobiography, 'The Journey' (2010) adding to his already vast wealth (and he gave £4.6 million to a charity for rehabilitating injured soldiers); he charges US$250,000 (£157,000; €182,000) for a 90-minute speech.  In 2010 it was estimated that Tony Blair received at least £14 million in earnings of all kinds and he bought one house in London for £4.45 million and one in Buckinghamshire for £5.75 million, and, quite accurately is estimated to be the wealthiest former prime minister in British history.

That is the kind of penalty that Cameron can expect when everything goes wrong with the intervention in Libya that he has led.  No charges for war crimes; apparently no cause to regret the ongoing links with yet another regime which has been persecuting its citizens for decades.  The regret will come from those British aircrew and soldiers who are killed or maimed or detained in appalling conditions.  Yet again young British people are going to be sent to die for some ill-thought out cause, poorly planned and even more badly executed.  Yes, it is probably morally correct to intervene in states to help democracy thrive over dictatorship.  However, as yet, the world has not found a method of doing this which does not involve even greate loss of life and hardship lasting for years.  There is an assumption now that the dictatorships of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula will tumble the way that the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell so quickly in 1989.  However, while we remember the 'velvet revolution' of Czechoslovakia and the fall of the Berlin Wall, so quickly have we forgotten the model of Romania, which suffered bloodshed in its effort to shake off the regime.

In some ways I am glad Cameron has blundered so badly in this way.  It will provide something to haunt him with throughout this decade.  He has been so active in wrecking so many people's lives in the 11 months he has been in office, it will be good to have something to point the finger at him for, that he cannot squirm out of.  I resent the fact that the intervention will probably do little of benefit for the Libyan rebels.  That will continue to be the case until the United Nations has the funds and the force to oversee countries having experienced regime change, and that is very unlikely ever to happen.  I mourn the ruined lives of British, Libyan and other citizens that can be the only outcome of this current policy.

Cameron's Blunder with the Electorate

It seems very few people voting in the May 2010 election were aware that the Conservative Party, if it came to power, even as part of a coalition, was going to pursue a hard monetarist policy that makes the policies of the Thatcher years look bland.  I complained on this blog that there was very little in the party leader, David Cameron's statements on policy before and during the election and now it is apparent why that was the case as his intentions were clearly to smash the public sector, stimulate the unemployment of millions, crush demand and find many more opportunities for his friends and potential future friends to make money providing previously state-provided services.  The borrowing taken out by the Brown government 2008-10, following Keynesian principles, though ironically to buoy up only the banking sector (who without a gram of gratitude to us tax payers who saved them have continued to take huge salaries and bonuses), rather than stimulate the whole economy, has supposedly given Cameron as prime minister the right to smash up the British economy on the basis of ideology rather than any real practical economic approach.

Of course, we have seen this before.  Margaret Thatcher was a convert to New Right monetarist views in the mid-1970s and they caught hold in different degrees of virulence in both the Conservative and Labour parties in the late 1970s, assisted by interest groups, notably in the UK's case, the International Monetary Fund.  Consequently we saw in the economic policies of the Callaghan government 1976-9 the foundations of what Thatcher would pursue more vigorously 1979-90.  The approach was echoed especially in the USA but also large parts of Europe and was seen as the path all the states coming out of Communist control towards the end of this period should follow.  Thatcher's approach was to reduce direct taxation whilst increasing indirect taxation (i.e. VAT on goods) and severely reduce the public sector through privatisation in order to reduce the supply of money in the economy and keep down inflation.  It was not applied that clinically and Thatcher also took revenge on certain sectors of the economy, notably coal mining and also embraced ideological, not only economic elements of the New Right, such as crushing trade union power, which, it was argued was an inflationary pressure too.  Many supporters of Thatcher benefited, having their companies take over everything from collecting refuse and cleaning hospitals to running the major utilities, though railway privatisation was not to come until John Major succeeded Thatcher.

Thatcher's policies led to mass unemployment.  People do not seem to realise/remember the way that unemployment was measured during the Thatcher years; the figures excluded numerous people who these days are counted as unemployed.  Thus, when official figure in 1982 was 3.072 million there were actually hundreds of thousands more people out of work.  In 1997 the new Labour government moved towards ILO figures which are more accurate, yet continued to massage their figures to an extent.  You can see the gap when looking even at Labour figures in 2001 which claimed unemployment was below 1 million when, in fact, on ILO measurements it was 1.535 million.  With such errors we can estimate that in 1982 unemployment was probably at least 3.5 million if not 4.5 million, anyway between one eighth and one fifth of the working age population was unemployed, depending on the region you were in, even under official Conservative government figures.  The UK which had moved to have service-sector industry as the largest contributor to the economy over manufacturing as early as 1974, now rushed headlong into shedding much more of its manufacturing and primary industry, i.e. coal mining, agriculture.  Of course, this was part of the European trend at the time but it was done sharply and far faster due to government policies.

Despite hitting record levels of unemployment, Margaret Thatcher kept on being voted back into power, being the longest serving prime minister since 1827.  Her government had a 44-seat majority in 1979; 144-seat majority in 1983 and 102-seat majority in 1987.  She was removed from power by her own party in 1990 so never actually lost a general election as leader of the Conservative Party.  Her successor, John Major, who continued her policies, but tried a more 'human face' to them won a majority of 21 seats, though ironically receiving the highest number of votes any party had won up until that date, scoring over 14 million (of course rising population levels made this easier, but Major got 1 million more votes than the Labour Party scored in 1951 when it actually lost the election despite getting more votes than the Conservatives: this is a consequence of the distortion of the popular vote in the British system).  Now, Cameron has no majority, he can only remain in power either with the acquiesence of the Liberal Democrats, or what he was fortunate to be able to do, having them in a coalition with the Conservatives.  I doubt even if he manages to limp to the end of his (hoped-for fixed) term of office, he will not win the next election.

Why do I think this?  Cameron has learnt from George W. Bush('s adviors) that if you use something so apparently scary, then you effectively get a blank cheque to carry out whatever extreme policies you want to.  I have already outlined what cutting 25% from the Department for Education will mean to your local school in terms of teacher numbers, let alone what it will mean for prisons, social workers, health care professionals, job centre staff, etc.  To reach that figure you could easily wipe out whole departments of government and their employees, e.g. laying off all teachers and all prison staff only scratches the surface of the cuts.  Thus, all of us, even if we use private education, private health care and drive our car everywhere are going to see the impact.  Have you tried telephoning a tax office recently?  Will you dispose of all your own refuse when the dustbin collectors come once per month?  Will you feel safe when every prison has lost a quarter of its staff and the police have lost a quarter of theirs and there are literally no social workers in some towns?  Yes, Bush's policies work to a certain extent, but they do not buy you or your ideas longevity, you can see that the US electorate preferred a (half-)black President over more of Bush.

While Cameron may have learnt from Bush, he does not seem to have learnt at all from Margaret Thatcher.  What enabled her to come back to office time after time, despite her running down so much of the British economy and so throwing people right across the social spectrum out of work, was that she worked on building a core constituency across the country.  There has always been the 'working class Tory' in the UK, i.e. someone from an ordinary background who may not have had many opportunities in life but adheres to the aspirational aspects of Conservatism, driven by patriotism and a belief that personal problems are not shaped by impersonal factors like the economy or society but by personal effort.  Thatcher knew that beside the big business people who went round gathering the fruits of lower taxes, deregulation of working environments and privatisation, there was another constituency to attract.  These were the people enabled to buy their own council houses and who bought a few shares in British Gas.  These were the people who were told it was the trade union at their workplace causing the unemployment not the employer making cuts to reduce costs and re-employ the same people at lower wages.  These are the people that won John Major the 1992 election and bolstered Thatcher's majorities.  These are the people who went over to Blair who seemed to speak their language, had a bit of the tawdry glamour they like, was not going to reverse the Thatcher policies and Thatcher bigotry against 'laziness' that they love.

Cameron is not addressing this constituency.  Instead, he has gone for his 'big society' which sounds painfully like a Liberal Party policy from the mid-1970s.  It may be based in Christianity, but these days it seems rooted in a kind of wishy-washy hippy approach to things.  Of course, Cameron sees charities and volunteers as stepping into the void left by sweeping aside huge swathes of national and local authority provision.  However, he does not realise, since Thatcher declared there was 'no society' people feel absolutely no obligation to help their neighbours, and their sense of 'community' is very narrow, excluding a large range of people in their district on basis of class, ethnicity, age, even which town they were born in.  They have no interest in helping these people and feel uncomfortable in being pressed to do so.  They never despised 'the state' in the way Thatcher did, because in fact through the 1980s it was the state which gave them the fruits.  In addition, the state, takes away from them all the things they would otherwise have to worry about, like where the young people of their district will live.  In fact, they want a stronger state with more police and stricter rules about who lives where.  Cameron's big society depends on shared vision and a willingness to help the less fortunate, this is not what the Thatcher supporters want, they favour segregation and their 'fair share' of state provision.  Just look at the schools they have flocked to, faith schools with selection.  Cameron, and especially Michael Gove, in contrast, tell them to set up their own schools, something they do not have the time from watching sport or going to the tanning salon, to do.

Cameron's problem is that he has been far too distant, all his life, from mainstream society.  Thatcher came from a grocer's family and went to grammar school.  John Major worked in a garden ornament business, for the electricity board and in a bank.  Cameron and Blair were clearly part of the elite and for much of their lives never mixed with ordinary people.  Even though Thatcher and Major were certainly above working class, they met and saw people who were far worse off than themselves.  They may have then seen it as the way to get on was through your own efforts, but they saw people who were less lucky or did not have the inclination to 'pull themselves up'.  Thatcher knew that out of the batches of the ordinary she had to engage and get political support at least from the people like herself who ended up somewhere better than they had started.  Cameron has no idea how to do this; I doubt he has any real understanding of such people, and unlike Blair, the prime minister he most resembles, he lacks the simple charm and good advisors to enable him to approach the interests of such people.  Blair also had 'Old' Labour members still around to keep dragging him back to contact with ordinary people; Cameron seems to lack even the small business person connections, let alone any route into the views of the Disraelian-style working class Tory, whose watchword is not monetarism, but 'decency'.  Cameron is too much like Bush when he told the ultra-wealthy that they were his core constituency.  With the electoral college system and some jiggery-pokery that was sufficient for Bush to win twice.  However, the British political system, even without proportional representation will not be that forgiving to Cameron.

Cameron is offering nothing to those people who will tip the balance between him winning or losing the next election or in fact, if the coalition chooses, to go for an election before then to boost the Conservative majority.  The only thing we keep hearing is about cuts and even for those voters who like to pride themselves on being self-made, they will begin very soon to see the impact of those all over in terms of the condition of the roads, how long they have to wait in government offices, the level of crime and so on.  Cameron could win them over by stealing more ideas from the UKIP, because one thing that this constituency likes is to bash Europe and foreigners in general.  However, Cameron has backed away from even the kind of bigotry and high profile complaints over immigration we heard around election time.  They have shut off immigration of the kind big business likes, i.e. low-paid, but I imagine they expect to fill those jobs with the growing domestic unemployed.  The failure of the BNP at the last election and banning of English Defence League marches is taking some pressure off Cameron from the right, but the 'soft' bigotry of UKIP supporters and sympathisers is still a force out there.  I am glad he is not tapping into it, but I think as a consequence he has lost the one tool for connecting with that constituency that Thatcher won and held for so long.

I imagine part of the problem is that Cameron's thinking is so distant from the middle classes let alone the working classes of Britain.  Edward Heath raced yachts but had come from middle class background, not too different from Thatcher.  You have to go back to Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who only managed one year as prime minister to find someone so far away from even the well-off in Britain let alone the ordinary people.  Cameron, like Bush, moves in such high wealth and privileged circles that he finds it difficult to engage with people who in fact got him into power.  Fortunately for the moment in Britain, money does not entirely match votes and Cameron needs to find a way, as Thatcher unfortunately did, of engaging the 'ordinary Tory' if he wants to stay in power for any length of time.  I do not think he has the capability of doing it.

Ed Miliband: A New Hope?

With all the gloom happening in my life at present, another job rejection on Friday; further steps in disposing of my house before it is repossessed and simply having a cold, I actually got quite excited this weekend when it was announced that Ed Miliband has been elected leader of the Labour Party.  I have labelled myself a democratic Socialist and certainly adhered to Labour Party policies in the 1980s, but was very much turned off by New Labour and have not voted for the party since 1992.  Of course, to the 'mainstream' of British society with a centre ground in politics far to the right of anything I (like most people) would have considered acceptable in the 1970s, I must appear like some revolutionary.  Though I have lost my faith in the particular electoral system the UK uses I certainly support democracy and in fact feel in all its aspects it was damaged by both Thatcher and Blair.  Ed Miliband was an unexpected winner.  Since Tony Blair succeeded so well at the 1997 election it seems that no political party can accept a leader who does not look incredibly like him.  David Cameron, Nick Clegg and David Miliband look like clones created from cells of Blair with a little different input.  Ed Miliband, in contrast, reminds me of the US actor, Ray Romano, though more cheerful in demeanour.  David Miliband seemed to adhered to the politics of what Labour was in 1994-2008, the Blairite Party.  Blair and Mandelson are hovering in the wings trying to keep Labour as the Blairite Party and not go back to anything resembling the Labour Party before 1994 or, in fact, anything more modern.  Blair was very much a Thatcherite and was unwilling to at all address the immense power the wealthy were continuing to accrue through his terms of office.  This left a basis on which Cameron could come in with the smokescreen of the national debt, to implement a harsh New Right monetarist policy of a severity which would have even made Margaret Thatcher hesitate if it had been proposed in 1979 or even 1983.

The Conservatives believed that they could not have won against a Labour Party led by David Miliband and to some degree are probably a little relieved by the unexpected outcome of Ed coming to the role.  However, if David had been chosen, then the Labour Party would have received another nail in the coffin and the Blairite Party would have been reinvigorated after the brief interlude of Brown.  Of course, the Conservatives and their allies in the media will present Ed as a tool of the trade unions and as dangerously 'red'.  However, as he has noted very vigorously in his first interview as leader, wanting social justice and for the bulk of the population not being compelled to serve the interests of the ultra-wealthy is not left-wing policy.  So many commentators forget that the current Labour Party including Ed Miliband is far less Socialist in its outlook than the Conservative governments of Winston Churchill or Harold Macmillan; they oversaw and economy which was 20% nationalised, had a large, robust and growing welfare state and civil service, oversaw social house building and limited the removal of capital from the UK, all things that would seem radical if proposed these days.

What gave me some hope seeing Ed Miliband being interviewed yesterday is that he is willing to challenge the inequalities of British society.  Of course, he is going to emphasise that he is his own man, every party leader does that, but I think no matter what support he got, he can bring not only the Labour Party but its broader support in the country together.  He seemed far less unafraid than either his brother and certainly Blair, of saying things which sound hard.  We know he would take on the banks.  I thought it was utterly disgraceful of Baroness Warsi to come on the BBC and say that Ed Miliband had been disgraceful in not using his first speech to apologise to the nation for the economic mess that she believed Labour had got the country into when in office.  Would any political leader have started their career that way?  It shows how much contempt she holds for the Opposition that she patronises then that way as if they are not fit to be considered a proper political party.  The other thing, of course, is would the Conservatives have done anything different if they had been in office?  Would they have allowed banks to have collapsed?  No.  It would have caused immense hardship to millions of ordinary voters.  The fact is that Blair, adhering to the Thatcherite creed of deregulation, had allowed merchant banks and speculators to gamble with the UK's money.  They knew that if they lost the state would be compelled to bail them out or risk a wider crisis.  They take such aid for granted and have won triply: they had their banks saved, they now have a government following the monetarist line they love and they are back to paying obscene bonuses and salaries backed once more by the state.

Ed Miliband certainly seems to be a leader for which policy is more important than how it is represented in the media.  For Blair the portrayal of things was always more important than the policies themselves.  This is why so much of his time in office saw the government paralysed, not only concerned about how the policy would work, but even more focused on how it would appear; hence the terribly slow progress on constitutional reform.  Of course, he is shifting more to the 'centre' as to win the next election Labour must not only secure the votes of the unemployed, but also of the 'squeezed' middle class.  Reference to housing and tuition fees plays well to this set of society who thought, from the vague policy statements that Cameron put out before and during the election they were going to get another Blair, but have found instead someone who makes Sir Keith Joseph appear to have been caring.  Unlike the ultra-wealthy, the middle classes, however, they may struggle against it, are in fact dependent on a robust state, and, in fact, because they statistically engage more with things like higher education and will live longer than working class people, they often need its support in a wider variety of aspects in their lives.  Miliband is personable, but from the outset, what has won me over to him, is that he has presented simple messages that are about making the UK a more fair society, not classless, but reducing what we have seen in the past two years, people being rewarded for being reckless out of the pockets of hardworking people.  Even the daily headlines about 'dole cheats' will not convince most of us, that the bulk of the people around us, are like us, wanting to simply house themselves, feed their families and work in a reasonable job.

I suppose I like Ed Miliband because from the start he is talking about things that I get upset about on this blog, primarily the inequality, in terms of opportunity in particular, which is being sharpened in our society.  While I would probably still be considered middle class, as I lose my house and I return to the rental sector and the income in my house is now so low the child living in it is entitled to free school meals, I am sliding into not even the working class, but the bottom end of that.  Of course, I have thrown away the aspirations of a couple of years ago and know I will now never get promoted; never will own property again and, may be jobless for years to come, but, it would be nice if I could still believe the boy in my house does not face the same fate, and, perhaps, even go to university one day.  Naturally, if the destruction of the UK economy continues at the pace it is at the present, then he will not even get the opportunities currently available to teenagers and most likely will be in classes of 45+ pupils before he gets to leave school.  His only hope would be to emigrate, but given how education is to be slashed in the coming years, he would be so much less skilled than foreign rivals, assuming he has not died of some illness hospitals cannot afford to treat or through contracting a superbug in unhygenic health facilities.

One thing the Conservatives have won on is to get everyone obsessed over the deficit as if this was evil and has to be eliminated immediately.  Of course, any Conservative MP of the Churchill and Macmillan years would see it differently, knowing that in crisis the state borrows, this is basic Keynesianism, the economic policy followed from 1941/8-1972/6.  However, monetarism has been so engrained in UK thinking as the only, 'rational' way of viewing the economy that no-one yet can challenge it.  However, even in this context Miliband can refer to Alastair Darling's plan for halving it in four years with cuts in public spending but not to the severity the current government is adopting.  The illusion that Cameron has created is that his economic policies are necessary for tackling the debt.  In fact, he would have pursued them even if he had come to power before the banking crisis.  The debt is a smokescreen for the harsh monetarist policies it is clear he always dreamed of implementing.  The only use of the Liberal Democrats in the coalition is actually, finally, someone is making a fuss about tax avoidance by the wealthy, seventeen times more damaging to the economy than the estimated level of benefit fraud, but something Blair and even Brown did not tackle.

Commentators are right.  Labour is already as popular as the Conservatives and once the cuts really hit, they will become immensely popular.  At the time, I disagreed with Polly Toynbee that Brown should have stepped down before the election, but now hold the opposite opinion.  If a Miliband had come to lead the party, then the outcome would clearly have been different.  Sensibly he is drawing a line under the New Labour era, which he cleverly portrays as being old fashioned.  In fact it allows him to recapture good elements from the history of the Labour Party.  Doing this in 2009 could have spared the UK from the horrific experience it is now going into.  People talk of a 'double dip' recession.  This analogy is wrong.  To have a second dip, means you have to have had a peak of some recovery in the middle.  As yet we have had no such recovery. We are on the 'downward staircase' recession, depression in fact, with some plateaus of things not worsening, and then a further fall as the next batch of government cuts kick in.  Labour is the party of hope and I think it is ironic that Ed Balls referred recently to the Attlee Labour governments of 1945-51, because if Labour return to power in 2015 (hopefully it will be sooner), then they will be facing an economy dealing with many of the same difficulties as when the Second World War finished.  Hope will be like gold dust in those days and strong policies to revive the country will be necessary.

I know many years of hardship, for me personally, and the bulk of my friends and relations lie ahead, but this week at least I feel there might be someone who understands and is seeking to bring forward policies which will at least ameliorate the worst of it.  I know I am putting a lot of store by the new Leader of the Opposition, he may fail, he may be marginalised, but for a small moment, I do feel at least a little ember of hope.

Getting Through to Blair?

Having seen that Tony Blair has been compelled to cancel signings of his autobiography due to anti-war protests not just in Britain but also in Eire, I began to wonder what it will take to shake his self-view that he was God's gift to this country?  I remember back to the time of the Bernie Ecclestone scandal of 1997 when the leading promoter of Formula One racing had given £1 million to the Labour Party and then his sport was was exempted from the ban on tobacco advertising.  Of course, being immune to scandal this did not compel Blair to step down, not even to apologise.  The perceptive impersonator and satirist Rory Bremner did an excellent impression of Blair at the time being forgiving to us, the public.  He said that he accepted that we made mistakes about what was right and wrong, but this time he was willing to understand that we were fallible and to forgive us and move on.  That sketch was incredibly perceptive of Blair's character.

I suppose you have to have utter self-confidence to succeed in politics and those prime ministers, like Major and Brown have suffered for it.  However, Blair's attitude seems completely untempered by any recognition that he is fallible and has made grave mistakes that have led to the death of thousands.  It seems ironic that he moved from a Church of England stance, which though not really fully Protestant has some truck with those elements of Christianity which believe in predestination such as Calvinism, more prevalent in Scotland than in England.  Under such a creed Blair could believe that his greatness was all part of God's great plan.  One would expect such an attitude from George W. Bush in a USA which still adheres to the myth of its 'manifest destiny', i.e. that it was always going to be the size and as powerful as it has turned out, hence their dislike of counter-factuals.  However, Blair is now a Roman Catholic and that brand of Christianity is one which is very aware of fallibility (if not always of the Pope) and allows more regularly for contrition and foregiveness.  Unlike Protestantism which has only grace by belief, i.e. you will get into Heaven if you believe in God; Roman Catholicism needs you to have both belief and to do good works if you are to get into Heaven.  However, as Graham Greene noted in much of his writing the ability in Catholicism to confess and be absolved regularly, can lead people to do bad things in the confidence that if they pay up quickly on Earth it will not affect their entrance to Heaven.

Blair did lots of things wrong in his premiership but the one that continues to haunt him is his compliance with George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq simply to control the fifth largest oil reserve in the World.  There were spurious claims about what a threat Saddam Hussein was to the planet, or more particularly the USA, but it was forgotten that a large part of his weaponry was sold to him by western powers when fighting Iran.  In many ways removing him was like the Americans removing General Noriega, he was one of their tools that they had tired of or for political reasons no longer needed.  It is certain that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 actually increased terrorist activity across the World and whilst it freed the Iraqis from one dictator it simply plunged them into a different kind of violence and depridation.  As I noted at the start of this blog, Blair has never waivered from his self-belief that everything he has done is right.  He was very fortunate that he was able to mutate the Labour Party into the Blairite Party.  His dislike of Brown was because he was of that previous party rather than being a Blairite.  On that basis he could never have reconciled with him.  No wonder Blair found Brown 'maddening' as he says in his autobiography, he would simply not accept that Blair was the best thing ever to happen in British politics and be a true believer in the Blairite cult.  It seems like that David Miliband will be the next leader of the 'Labour' Party and so the Brown phase will be seen in retrospect as an aberration from the growth of the Blairite Party.  I have regularly given examples of this, Gaullism and Peronism being two that always come to mind; Blair with his Christian Democrat approach is very much in that mould.  It is interesing that we are so concerned with 'fundamentalists' but forget that with Bush and to a great extent Blair, we had them already in power.

Right-wing commentators have argued that the protests against Blair have been orchestrated by political groupings.  They, like Blair, still do not understand how unpopular the Iraq war was and that it has lost supporters every month.  They forget the huge and the persistent protests against it.  Blair was the favourite Labour leader of the right-wing press and wealthy because he was so like them.  He did nothing to shake the Thatcherite legacy and avoided policies which actually helped what should have been the natural constituency of the Labour Party.  The cutting out of the ordinary people has continued under Cameron, in fact, as I will analyse next month, has sharpened and accelerated.  Again, looking back from fifty years in the future I am sure we will put Blair in the same category as Major and Cameron, Thatcherites who gave some superficial elements to the policy but continuing with what Thatcher established in the 1980s and not repairing any of the damage she inflicted.  Brown tried to reverse that trend, but the hostility to his attempt is apparent in the still virulent attacks in the media on him even now he has left office.  Their fear, of course, is that with Ed Balls or even Ed Miliband will come to lead Labour, so they keep trying to scare Labour supporters and the general public so that the Thatcherite-Blair trend can continue.  In many ways Thatcher has achieved in her legacy what she set out to do as part of her mission in the 1980s, was to move to a situation where the two main political parties would be close together in policy the way the Republicans and Democrats were in the USA, though these days many Americans might dispute their proximity.

Tony Blair's self-confidence is unnerving.  It is the kind of self-confidence generally found in dictators rather than rulers of democratic countries.  I suppose winning repeatedly in elections and seeing his successor just about fall has added to Blair's ego.  However, I also believe it is a real flaw within him and the fact that he was able to run Britain and believe constantly that only his view was the correct one, shows how vulnerable the UK is to dictatorship.  I kept hoping that he would see one day that he could be wrong.  However, it does not seem to be the case, and I am coming to conclusion that only when he is turned away from Heaven will he finally realise what he did.  Then, he will probably blame someone else.  I would certainly use Blair as a model for children warning them of the dangers of such arrogance.  As yet, he may not have paid the price (though interestingly on the 'Daily Telegraph' blog there is someone threatening to assassinate him), but I hope that these protests which stop him lording around bookshops, squeezing out just that little more adoration which he clearly needs like a drug, may begin to penetrate.  I hope in time that he will be disgraced and ignored, because the danger of Blair is not only what he wreaked on people, but the fact that he has become too much of a model for other politicians and the UK and the rest of the World cannot live safely when we have politicians who believe that their personal decisions are the work of God and thus beyond even questioning, let alone challenging.

The Dark Days Return

When Margaret Thatcher was kicked from office as prime minister by her own party in 1990, I really hoped that we would have seen the last of the nasty, selfish, hopeless days that we had seen when she came to power in 1979.  Throughout that period and as a direct result of her policies, Britain faced the highest unemployment it had ever seen, many industries disappeared and many people lived in poverty and others lost their homes.  Society became sharply divided and this was expressed by the numerous riots the UK experienced in the early 1980s.  Public service deteriorated as local authorities were compelled to take the lowest bidders for any service and they achieved this by paying poor wages; public bodies like utilities were broken off and sold off to the great benefit of speculators and already wealthy business people.  The rights of the individual were seriously eroded and it took almost another decade to even get some of these back.


Of course, after Thatcher we had seven years of John Major.  Whilst also a Conservative he did not pursue the assiduous campaign to undermine the UK.  He did not deny that society existed in the way Thatcher had done and for much of the time he had too small a majority to introduce forceful policies, though railways were privatised much to the detriment of the British economy and society.  Some of us hoped that he would fall in 1992, the last time the UK ever had a chance for a Socialist government, but through scare tactics and electoral irregularities the Conservatives remained in power until replaced by the Christian Democrat, New Labour Party which came to power in 1997.  Of course, by then the 'centre' of British politics had moved far to the right of where it had been in 1975 and now privatised utilities, even an independent Bank of England were seen as acceptable.  New Labour did introduce the minimum wage and signed up to the Social Chapter provided by the European Union but its other policies such as electoral reform and removal of the unelected House of Lords were soon dropped.


Now we have a coalition government, but as William Hague, the new Foreign Secretary noted, the 'bulk' of the Conservative election manifesto will be put into effect.  Tactical voters like myself who voted for the local Liberal Democrat candidate they thought might keep the Conservatives out of a seat now feel utterly stupid.  Effectively anyone wanting progressive approaches has no voice in this country.  Of course, that is precisely what the wealthy like Lord Ashcroft and other corrupt ultra-rich want.  The election of New Labour in 1997 was no restoration of democracy, given the deals Tony Blair had to make to get into power, it, in fact marked a further step in the erosion of the influence of ordinary people on politics.  With David Cameron in charge control of politics and the economy is now more blatantly in the hands of the elites than it has probably been since Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a former lord, left office in 1964.  Cameron is far less 'ordinary' than even Margaret Thatcher.  Fortunately a number of his 'babes', young, glamorous, privileged candidates parachuted into constituencies did not get elected, but there are are tens of MPs who owe their position to Cameron and will follow him devotedly the way Blair was able to build a large coterie of devotee MPs around him when he came to power in 1997.

Even with my fear of the Cameron government I was startled at how fast he has moved to further damage democracy, by moving to 5-year fixed term parliaments and making the dissolution of parliament require a 55% majority rather than a 1 vote majority.  Yes, of course, this brings stability in the way that a dictatorship brings stability by doing away with those tiresome things called elections.  It is interesting that even Conservative MPs are opposing this step, barely days into Cameron's government.  I just pray they give him a hard time over this threat to our polity.  Cameron seems to combine all the worst of Tony Blair with the worst of Margaret Thatcher.  This means not only will he pursue policies that will put millions of us out of work and hundreds of thousands to lose their houses, but he will expect thanks for all the suffering he is putting us through and like Blair be surprised when we complain about what he has done. 

I hope that my expectations do not come true.  I hope the Liberal Democrats and even Conservative backbench MPs can rein in Cameron's Frankenstein's monster of New Labour media manipulation, Thatcherite economic policies and an elitist focus on carrying out policies that benefit the already highly privileged.  However, what I see at least is a return to the 1980s with mass unemployment and as a result social discontent leading to increased racism and rioting.  I hate to think of how many wasted years we have ahead of us in which the average person is going to have to battle week after week just to keep a job and somewhere to live.  People have analysed how much the people born just before and during the Thatcher period have suffered throughout their lives.  I really pity the children of today who from this week onward will have their lives blighted as education and health funding is slashed.  In the course of a day, the opportunities of millions were closed down.  From now it will be the privileged who get the job, who get that place at university, not the average young person who will be marched into whatever schemes Cameron and his lackeys think up, notably the military-style national service for 16-year olds that he has already promised on numerous posters.  Cameron seems to have been raiding Mussolini's handbook for policies.  I can only hope that the day will come when I am among the crowd cheering as Cameron is strung up by his feet in Westminster.  In the meantime we have to mourn yet another lost generation blighted by economic and social policies aimed at benefiting the very rich and in particular enabling them to deny opportunities and exploit the average person in the UK. 

Emigrate now.  How many people wished they had left Nazi Germany sooner? Leave now before the UK is turned into an utter wasteland populated by a bullied people struggling just to survive as the privileged literally lord it over them as we take step after step to an authoritarian regime.

Invading Iraq: Unwavering Politicians Are Dangerous

Strangely, seeing coverage of Tony Blair's testament to the Chilcot Inquiry into the UK's involvement in the war in Iraq, the one which is still going on, I found myself believing in divine vengeance.  I have noted in the past that many elements of the Bible as they have been filtered and interpreted by those in authority in the Middle Ages encourage a stable society.  The emphasis that vengeance is God's is a good way to stop vendettas and people taking the law into their own hands, but this week I recognised that it can also be a bit of a consolation to people who feel wronged.  The sense that 'well, I can do nothing to get back at him for what he has done, but he still has to face God's judgement'.

I suppose what brought me to this kind of last resort when seeking justice is how unwavering Blair was.  I had always expected the politicians wheeled in front to the enquiry to say what they had done was right, and have actually been heartened by the legal officials and even Lord Goldsmith showing the confusing and uncertainty around the legality of the war.  What cut most deeply with Blair, however, was his total lack of regret for anything he did.  We always knew that he was arrogant, but this emphasised that now, even out of office and earning millions of pounds, he will not concede he has ever made a mistake.  I once attended a speech by former prime minister (1970-4) Edward Heath in which he reflected on his term in office, a very troubled period in British society and wryly he argued that it might have been bad but was nothing compared to what came later under Callaghan (1976-9) and Thatcher (1979-90).  Blair seems to believe that he ruled over a golden period in British history in which we, the public might have got things wrong but he was perfect in every way, and our problem was that we did not listen to him enough.  Blair is supposed to be a Christian.  He is now a Catholic, so I suppose he has been able to confess his sins and get absolution for them.  However, surely to be a Christian of any sort you must be able to reflect on what you have done and see your errors in order to repent and seek absolution.

Blair can argue that invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussain was the 'right' thing to do.  No-one would argue that Hussain was not evil and was killing many of his own people and using torture.  However, so are many other leaders around the world and we seem to be taking no efforts to depose them.  Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe would seem a good place to start as we know he does not even have the suggestion of weapons of mass destruction.  Yet, Blair does not take this line, so we end up with fudged explanations around misunderstandings about nuclear or chemical or biological weapons, some partial legal approval from the United Nations and the UK's connection to the USA.  Perhaps the motivations were this confused mish-mash.  However, if they were, this seems to suggest a weak, confused prime minister, that Blair certainly does not portray himself as.

Saying this, the concessions that Blair has allowed are that he never expected Al-Qaeda to become involved in Iraq after the USA had conquered it and neither did he expect Iran to destabilise the state either.  A student of GCSE level International Relations, could have told you to expect these things.  First of all, one of the reasons why George W. Bush emphasised the need to invade Iraq was because he felt it was a base of Al-Qaeda activity.  Of course, Hussain, was in fact an opponent of the movement, whereas Saudi Arabia, the USA's ally in the region has always been a place where Islamist terrorists have thrived.  The second point is that there was the example of Afghanistan.  When that had been destabilised by the Soviet invasion and occupation (1979-89) it opened the door to the Taleban to take power and created a regime in which Al-Qaeda was able to operate, probably not as this supposed international terrorist structure somehow resembling the fictional SPECTRE, but as an association of small radical groups connected by a desire for promoting Islamist regimes through terrorism.  In Afghanistan they were labelled the 'foreign fighters' and in many cases would be simply volunteers looking to fight to defend what they saw as the correct form of Islamist state that the Taleban had established.  So, there was a clear example of what was liable to happen in a primarily Muslim country once a superpower had invaded; it encourages religious fundamentalists rather than weakens them.

As for Iranian intervention in Iraq after the US invasion, again, a teenager who had read 20th century history, could have predicted this.  Even if this had not been a correct prediction, it was something the USA and its supporters should have prepared for.  Iran and Iraq were at war 1980-8 and have continued to have border tensions since.  Iran, itself a dictatorship, would never pass up the chance to keep Iraq weak and then to create a regime sympathetic to Iran if not a puppet state.  Knowing the Iranian regime as well as the USA does due to its bitter relations with the country since 1979, surely it could have been foreseen that the Iranians would not have stood by passively.  Their pursuit of nuclear technology suggests that the regime is not currently adopting a passive stance.  From the Iranian perspective, look at a map and see that Iran has Afghanistan to its North-East and Iraq to its West, two places that by 2003, the USA was militarily involved with.  Iraq under Hussain had been supported militarily by the USA, so is it no surprise that when the Americans are running it the Iranians would feel that they might be next on the list for invasion.  If Barack Obama had not won the US presidential election, perhaps they might have been.
 
What has not come out in the Chilcot Inquiry are the real motives for the war, rather than the mixed up approaches that were supposed to win public support.  This comes back to US concern about oil resources especially in the light of China's aggressive search for control of raw materials and a regime in Venezuela, the USA's prime short haul supplier of oil, that was unfriendly to US imperialism.  I think George W. Bush probably believed, as he was told that Al-Qaeda, the imagined organisation that gave so many of his authoritarian policies some form of perceive legitimacy, was in Iraq.  However foolish Bush was, as a former oil man, I imagine he must have seen the value of the USA holding Iraq.  Of course, this explanation for the war is the least palatable to the public of all of the excuses put forward and this is why it will not be heard at the Chilcot Inquiry or anywhere else public.

This then brings us back to Blair and his mish-mash explanation. for going to war.  He said there was no plot or conspiracy to bring about war, but the problem with the approach that was adopted was that it was a shabby collection of reasons.  At least, to some extent, admitting that neither the USA and especially not the UK was ready to go to war in terms of forces and equipment, he said a military build-up could not have begun without alerting Hussain to the potential of invasion.  I think Hussain probably had already seen the UN resolution and the weapons inspectors.  His country had been invaded by the USA and UK back in 1990-1 and it was clear they had been disappointed that he had not fallen at the time once they had expelled him from Kuwait.  So, Hussain was as ready as he could have been to face the invasion. This issue about trying to keep preparations low key, is something that Blair can be blamed for directly as it meant the UK forces were ill-equipped and this has meant far higher casualties than needed to be the case.  If you are going to be a militarist state in the way the UK has been in the 2000s you need a strong military and not to be involved in two wars on the cheap.  Skimping on equipment means paying a higher price in casualties.  For the British public this is on charge that Blair really needs to be held accountable for, because unlike with US global political approaches, he had direct control over it.  The excuse that decent preparation could have given the game a way is pathetic.

In fact, a strong, visible military build up would have helped remove Hussain.  By making him feel under threat and so keeping his military expenditure at a maximum, the West could have brought down the regime through economic chaos the way the USSR dissolved after years of sustaining its side of the arms race.  However, that would not have served the USA as there was no knowing who might have got control of the oil, possibly the country with the greatest foreign currency reserves in the world, China, though effectively supporting Hussain's regime financially as they are backing those regimes in Sudan and Zimbabwe.  All superpowers, including the USA, prefers to deal with dictatorships than democracies; China, however, has fewer qualms over human rights records.  Of course, ironically the USA's invasion of Iraq moved it into an era in which it adopted torture as an approach it was happy to use.

So, what we got from Blair, was probably what we expected, though, I, like many headline writers was stunned by how unwavering Blair was in seeing himself as having done precisely nothing wrong.  I suppose unrepentance is the luxury of retirement.  The fact that he has gone on to be a Middle Eastern envoy on the basis of his career is sickening.  Blair's attitude is very like that of the politician he most resembles in policies and attitude, Margaret Thatcher.  She famously said 'this lady's not for turning' and saw any critics of her sledgehammer policies as 'moaning minnies'.  The UK likes politicians of this ilk and they serve long in office, whereas their more human successors, John Major and Gordon Brown are portrayed as weak and vacilliating.  However, for one, I would rather have a politician aware of his flaws because that means s/he is aware of their humanity.  Humanity is what connects them with not only the entire electorate, but more broadly people across the world.  It is fine to admit you have made mistake, but for some reason we want politicians who will never do this.  As a consequence we end up with policies, which may appear needful and strong at the start but usually end up leading to years of suffering for ordinary people.  To anyone who favours unwavering politicians, with no regrets at all, just like Tony Blair, I would point to the politician who took this to the extreme, who continued to blame everyone else for what ruin he had brought to his country and the world, right until his death: Adolf Hitler.

P.P. 01/02/2010: An interesting twist in this story comes from former minister Clare Short who is apparently going to claim at the Chilcot Inquiry that Gordon Brown, long Tony Blair's rival in government, was kept out of the inner circle that decided on the UK's involvement in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Short believes that on the back of the glory of the expected quick victory Blair would have moved to remove Brown from his position as Chancellor of the Exchequer effectively marking a coup against his rival and ultimately his successor.  We know that Blair postponed stepping down as prime minister as long as he could and went much later than Brown had been led to expect.  Brown did become prime minister, in 2007, as Blair had promised him back in 1994, but in harder circumstances and with the troubles in Iraq dragging on after the war and the UK still suffering casualties.

For Blair it seems the invasion of Iraq had the potential for a 'Flucht nach vorn', in the style of Fritz Fischer's explanation of the domestic reasons for the German triggering of the First World War, i.e. using overseas success to resolve domestic political pressures.  I was very suspicious when in his testament to the Chilcot Inquiry last month, Blair's henchman Alastair Campbell emphasised that Brown had played a full part in the discussions about war.  I did not see why Campbell made this emphasis and assumed he saw it as a chance to get a bit of revenge on Brown.  This may explain why Brown is happy to testify to the Inquiry before the election. 

Even if Short's accusation is exaggerated, it seems that Blair's arrogance was straying into a whole other field, and he saw domestic political gain to be had from the war, no matter what else he got from backing the USA's approach.  Perhaps it anticipated receiving the large popularity boost of the kind his heroine, Margaret Thatcher had received after the Falklands Conflict of 1982.  It shows that not only was he willing to play with Iraqi lives for personal political gain but British ones too.

Are Britons Only Socialist in Times of Crisis?

Many people argue that the British population is inherently conservative and for most of the time, Conservative, i.e. supporting the policies of the Conservative Party.  I suppose that most people who are generally comfortably off, no matter where they live have a tendency not to want that disrupted and to keep out others from enjoying what they and their families have.  It is a trend even in states such as China, which is Communist and founded on revolution and in which a lot of things still need to change, let alone countries, that whilst suffering from a recession currently, are far better off than those countries where the bulk of the world's population lives.  Recently I have noted people who whilst they want to reduce pressure or upset for themselves actually want other people to suffer more 'for their own good'.  Of course, the standard thing about pressurising unemployed people to take low-paid work and uproot and move right across the country or face punishment have been wheeled out again as the level of unemployment has risen.  However, I have encountered people saying Sweden is now lagging because its policies of equality means there is no 'edge' to drive people to work harder.  These people love having the whip cracked as long as it is on other people not themselves.

You might ask, well, 'what has this to do with Socialism?'  You may ask 'what is Socialism, anyway?'  It is a term that even the Labour Party dropped more than a decade ago.  The wealthy actor, Alan Cummings, when interviewed recently listed it as the extinct thing he would like see revived.  A lot of people equate it with Communism and they think that died the day the Berlin Wall was knocked down in 1989.  Of course, saying all Socialists are Communists is like saying all Conservatives are Fascists: inaccurate and ignorant of how the political spectrum works.  Of course, that was how many people have liked it.  In particular, Margaret Thatcher (British prime minister 1979-90), who, on more than one occasion said she wanted the elimination of a spectrum of political parties and preferred to have simply two very close to each other as is the case in the USA, often equated not only Socialism but the Labour Party (which often had more Liberal than Socialist policies) with the Communist.  In that way she could portray them as a the 'fifth column' or 'the enemy within', in league with the USSR to undermine democracy in the UK during the Cold War.  Of course, Socialists are passionate defenders of democracy as are most Conservatives.

What is Socialism? Well, the key word is 'social', it is a political philosophy which sees the benefit of the whole of society as the key driving force.  Of course, Margaret Thatcher argued that there was 'no such thing as society' and emphasised that it was individuals' desires and units no greater than families who should drive what happened politically and economically.  Socialism argues that people are different, they have different needs and abilities but they should be looked after when they cannot look after themselves (such as when ill, pregnant, unemployed or elderly) but also that they have responsibilities to the rest of the community and that whilst they are free to make their own way in the world and make profits (this is crucially where Socialism differs from Communism) they should not do so by exploiting people whether in their own country or in other countries.  This means employers should pay decent wages, have reasonable working hours and conditions and listen to the people that they are employing.  A key objective of Socialism is that everyone has equal opportunity, whether it is in terms of access to health care or education or to get on in their lives.  Vitally Socialism is against people being barred from certain jobs or other opportunities simply because of what social class they come, what gender, age or ethnicity they are.  In the 1960s this approach, seen with the creation of numerous new universities to allow people greater opportunity to go into higher education, was condemned as 'meritocracy', i.e. that people with ability could succeed.  Of course, this has been turned around from a negative term to a positive one.  As I have noted regularly on this blog since the 1980s we have moved too far away from a meritocracy to too many people simply getting good positions because of what family they were born into or which elite school they attended.  Opportunity is now less than it was thirty years ago.

A lot of Socialist principles overlap with Liberal ones and probably the most Socialist governments in British history, those under Clement Attlee 1945-51 actually pursued a Liberal policy.  Rather than having a controlled economy in line with what Socialism advocates, after 1948 they used Liberal Keynesian approaches, manipulating rather than directing the economy, notably through shifting interest rates.  In terms of health and social welfare, though they created the National Health Service, they permitted private, fee-taking doctors to continue practising and rather than funding a lot of health and social welfare from direct taxation as you would expect a Socialist government to do, they widened welfare insurance, which had been introduced in the 1910s and created National Insurance in line with what the Liberal, William Beveridge had advised during the war.  The idea is that you pay into national insurance as you would any insurance so that you build up a fund that you can draw upon when you need it, for example, when ill or elderly or out of work.  Of course, as with all insurance, some people never make a claim whereas others claim often, but that reflects the diverse needs of our society and that is not something we should try to restrain.

The most Socialist element was nationalisation of key sectors of British industry.  The focus was on the 'commanding heights', i.e. those sectors of the economy that fed through into many others.  Thus, coal mining and the railways were nationalised.  The fact that these industries had been run poorly or inefficiently before was a good reason for the state to take over.  Gas extraction and provision; electricity generation; water supply; coach transport; airlines; freighting and later steel manufacture were all nationalised; though some steps, such as with airlines had been taken before the war.  Other countries, notably France did the same kind of thing.  The British, however, even with nationalisation, tempered Socialism with Liberalism and had a very 'arms length' control by the state of these industries and did not direct them in the ways they should stimulate the economy the way that even right-wing governments in France did especially with the largest state-owned company in France, Electricite de France (now EDF Energy).  Often, as with the example of gas and water supply what we saw in the UK was really just grand 'muncipalisation'.  Many suppliers had been established by city councils in the 19th century and the regionalised approach to gas and water supply (and some water regions, such as City of York, were very small) was continuing this 19th century approach rather than moving to a really Socialist method. 

In later years nationalisation in the UK was not used as a way to try to stimulate the economy but rather to bail out failing companies such as Rolls Royce in 1971 (nationalised by Edward Heath's Conservative Government), British Leyland car manufacturers in 1976 and British Aerospace made up of a number of aeronautical manufacturing companies and British Shipbuilders, the same for that industry, in 1977.  It is unsurprising that nationalised industries that had failed continued to suffer but it meant that nationalisation was now seen as a failed economic policy and this was at the time when New Right ideas were rising both in the USA and the UK emphasising the reduction of all state control or even regulations and clearly nationalised industries were an anathema to such thinking (notably the economic viewpoint held by Margaret Thatcher).  Ironically Thatcher's government nationalised collapsed chemical company, Johnson Matthey in 1984. 

Despite the emphasis on nationalised industries the state sector was never larger than 20% of the economy compared to 90%+ in Communist countries.  In the 1980s and 1990s the nationalised industries were sold off by the government which brought revenue to the state.  The idea was ownership would be held by numerous small shareholders but generally they were bought out by large companies and increasingly ones from abroad.  Whilst there have been regulators of these former nationalised industries control over prices and profits and trying to keep up quality has not really worked; many have a near monopoly and as has been seen in the past couple of years attempts by government to stop them charging high prices and providing poor service have failed.

Conservative propaganda about Socialism has always been pretty successful.  In 1992, Labour did not win the election after a successful campaign arguing that its policies would lead to higher taxation, a view that even Labour supporters seem to come to believe.  In the 1950s the Conservatives argued that Labour's nationalisation was akin to a command economy and though Winston Churchill shot himself in the foot in 1945 likening the Labour approach to the Gestapo by the 1950s the Conservatives were successful in portraying themselves as the party of freedom against Labour's restraint and austerity.  In the late 1940s, of course, the public had been used to both restraint and authority so that argument had little impact.  In addition, Labour does seem to offer solutions to ingrained problems and in 1945 the public had been really voting on the problems of 1931 rather than the post-war era.

The reason why Tony Blair was so focused on manipulating the media was because he knew from history how long it had been manipulated against anything Labour had done.  However, he went so far in making the Labour Party seem acceptable to the media that he sheared it of the bulk of its Socialist principles.  Clause 4, the part of the Labour Party constitution which advocated nationalisation, was scrapped in 1994.  On coming to power in 1997, Labour in fact went further than the Conservative governments by denationalising the Bank of England and so giving up even Keynesian control over interest rates.  I believe that Tony Blair was neither a Socialist or really a Conservative, he was a Blairite and created a personal party out of the shell of the Labour Party; using Christian Democrat principles as the covered, but really based on his own ambitions and simply what he felt was 'right'.  This is why people feel Socialism is dead in Britain, but in effect we probably have not even seen a mildly Socialist government in Britain at least since 1976 if not since 1970 and that is the way company bosses like it.

The key problem for Labour, aside from the fact that the financial sector always tries to make a run on the pound and destabilise the economy, in fear of what constraints they will be put under, is that trade unions see an opportunity to get the deals that they have battled to achieve under a Conservative government.  Now, as in 1978/9, they are busily undermining the Labour government with demands and strikes that make it appear to voters, ironically most of whom will be workers, that the government has no control.  Of course, part of the problem is that no British government has been able to tackle the greed and huge profits of those who run business, so it is unsurprising that workers want more.  If the utility companies had been compelled to pay a windfall tax and bankers to limit their vast bonuses, ironically I think we would be seeing less industrial action.

Anyway, having cantered through Socialism, you might be thinking why is that relevant now?  Well, it is my suggestion that the British population while Conservative most of the time, turns to Socialism when things are going wrong.  In 1945 Socialism was seen as the way to avoid a return to the Depression of the 1930s and the economic slump that had followed the First World War.  In 1964 Socialism was seen as the way to stop Britain's industrial stagnation, unwillingness to modernise and thus its slipping competitiveness from worsening.  In 1974 Socialism was seen as a way to heal the sharp rifts in society and especially in industrial relations.  Of course, there has always been ambivalence as the elections of 1951, 1964 and 1974 showed and the wealthy always pull out the stops to prevent the advent of a truly Socialist government.  This is one reason why Gordon Brown who, unlike Blair, is a Labour leader, has come under sustained media attack throughout his term in office.  However, it is clear that the British public is drifting back in a Socialist direction once more.

Of course, it is not pure, unadulterated Socialism, there are other trends such as blaming problems of immigrants, which are an anathema to Socialism but almost seem to have become a norm in much discussion.  However, adherence to the National Health Service and a national innoculation programme to combat swine flu is one characteristic of a more Socialist outlook. People do not seem to realise that in the USA they would have to have health insurance for things they currently get for free and once they were elderly they would find it difficult to get cover.  Most likely they would be paying for innoculations.   I know prescription charges have risen but no-one pays for innoculation and the elderly and people like me with a lifelong condition, diabetes, who need constant medicines, do no pay.

There are, in fact, demands that the NHS expands it role and does more to provide treatment for the elderly, and for example, one-to-one care for premature babies.  Such things are costly and perhaps people are unwilling to tolerate the tax to pay for these.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whilst re-inforcing pride in the military among the British population, are seen increasingly as hopeless and people are calling for an exit.  The Conservatives argue that Labour has not provided the military with the equipment it needs, something I agree has been a problem, but how does anyone expect David Cameron with all his emphasis on cutting public spending to be able to afford to send even one more helicopter to Helmand province? 

The key area where we are seeing a return of Socialism is, ironically, in terms of the previously most controversial aspect of the ethos, nationalisation.  We now have a larger nationalised sector in the UK than at any time since about 1986.  The British government took over the Docklands Light Railway in 1997 and effectively the railway track of Britain is run by Network Rail a company without shareholders but underwritten by the government.  In 2008 Northern Rock building society and the mortgage lending part of Bradford & Bingley building society were nationalised. The government took over 60% of the Royal Bank of Scotland and 40% of the HBOS-Lloyds-TSB banking conglomerate giving it a large slice of the British banking sector, especially in mortgage-lending which has always been a key element in shaping the British economy.

It is unlikely that even Clement Attlee would have been able to control such a large aspect of the financial sector.  The closest we came was when Roy Hattersley, deputy leader of the Labour Party said around the time of the 1992 election that the investment group 3i would be nationalised under a Labout Government to form the basis of state investment in private industry.  The uproar was such that the idea seems to have been entirely forgotten almost immediately.  Interestingly, this year, finally, the government is compelling credit card companies to raise the minimum repayment level on the amount people owe.  This should have come in at least 10 or 15 years ago and could have restrained some of the overheated consumption and massive debt that amounted during the late 1990s and early 2000s that has distorted the economy in an unhealthy way.

All of these steps have been taken with no dismay from the general public.  When there is a crisis they expect the government to step in and sort it all out for them.  The rest of the time they whine about over-regulation, the 'nanny state', that taxes are intolerable and so on, not realising that lack of regulation has led to much of the crisis we are now in and that expensive bail-outs can only be funded by taxes.  Again nationalisation, which seems such a dirty word in most years, is seen as the solution.  Again, however, as in the 1970s, it is being used to catch falling businesses.  This is the wrong way to approach the economy.  Northern Rock should have been nationalised before it started its mad approach to mortgage lending.  I would have taken it over in 2005 at the latest and then, rather than it being a drag on the British economy it could have been used to stabilise house prices and provide stimulus to new business. 

With the first £1002 train ticket for the journey from Newquay in Cornwall to Kyle of Lochalsh in western Scotland, a distance of 2,720 Km (a round the world air ticket can be bought for £800 and you can travel from London to Zurich on the luxury Orient Express for £1000 or from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railway - 5,806 Km for only £995) and most inter-city rail fare prices having trebled in the past 15 years, a period in which inflation has been below 3%, it seems apparent that if we want a mobile population using the greenest form of transport around, i.e. electric trains, then we need the whole rail system back in state control.  You find that the only people who praise the privatisation of the railways are people who never travel on trains.

So, are we seeing a Socialist conscience developing among the British population, wanting a tax on bankers' bonuses, limits on the pay of the wealthy, better value public transport and a health service expanding its scope combined with a tolerance, possibly even an enthusiasm for privatising what are now the controlling sectors of the British economy?  People would argue, as historian Corelli Barnett did in the 1980s that the British have become too used to the 'teat' of state intervention and would be traumatised to have it taken away from them and left to fend for themselves.  However, of course, with Thatcherite policies a great deal has been taken away and yet there are still billions of pounds of benefits that people who are entitled to them do not claim.  Britons are an independent people that still like to make their own way as best they can, despite all the propaganda about benefit swindlers and dole scroungers.  Ironically no-one goes after the tax defrauders who owe millions in total to the British economy but they have taken out to tax havens.  We need to go after these people and make them contribute the way I and the large bulk of ordinary British people do.  We have no choice about paying or not paying tax, so why should the wealthy get to make that choice?  Hopefully people are beginning to realise that only a tiny fraction of the population are ever going to win the lottery or set up a business we can sell for millions or become a pop star or some other kind of celebrity, so instead of thinking it is alright for the rich to get away without pulling their weight because one day we might be one of them, more of us need to make sure there are opportunities for a decent life for all.

The veteran Socialist politician Tony Benn often recounts when he was on a train that broke down and how it suddenly seemed as if people were becoming Socialist, sharing out the food and other supplies they had, working together to make the best of a bad situation.  When the train was running smoothly of course they did none of this.  People often refer back to the 'wartime spirit' when people supposedly collaborated in the way that Benn saw them do on that train.  Historian Nick Tiratsoo has shown that a lot of that was exaggerated and we know that 'outsiders', often Jews, were kept out of air raid shelters and whilst the bulk of the population was struggling to feed their families on rations, those who could afford to, could eat unrationed food in restaurants.  However, though it might have been exaggerated it does seem that, possibly counter to what you might expect, in crises Britons become less rather than more selfish.  It is a shame that they cannot maintain that attitude in the better times.  I know David Cameron thinks he will walk into being the latest Conservative prime minister but the recession has reawakened the dormant Socialist tendencies in the British population and if Labour appeals to those rather than trying to be a pale version of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party, it may win at the next election.

The Crooked Road to UK Dictatorship

As you will know if you read this blog with any regularity, my key fear for the UK at the moment is that it is steadily becoming an authoritarian state in which our civil liberties are stripped from us, supposedly in order to defeat terrorism. However, despite the claims many of the new powers the government and local authorities have are simply to keep the ordinary UK population in line. I was interested to read that next Tuesday (6th May 2008) there is a programme showing on BBC4 in their 'True Stories' series called 'True Stories: Taking Liberties' and it looks at the reduction of civil liberties in the UK during Tony Blair's premiership. It is presented by a man called Chris Atkins. It is always heartening to learn that your analysis of developments is shared by others and obviously I recommend you watch it if you can.

One thing that irritated me in the preview of the programme in 'The Guardian' was that they feel that Atkins 'overstates' his case when relating the developments in the UK to those that led to Nazi Germany. Now, this is always something that annoys me. For some reason people seem to think that the Nazi state appeared fully formed when Hitler came to power on 30th January 1933 with death camps, the Waffen SS, the fully system in place. Of course that is nonsense. It always takes time to develop a dictatorship. In fact democracy had ended in Germany in 1930 when President Hindenburg began ruling through presidential decree. Elections continued but they had little bearing on who became Chancellor of Germany and Hitler was effectively invited to become Chancellor. So, an authoritarian system had been three years in the making when the Nazis came to power.

The Nazis moved fast with legislation especially after the Reichstag Fire at the end of February 1933. However, it was not until 1935 that the Nuremburg Laws were introduced making Jews no longer Germans. It was not until 1936 that the German police force was centralised and rearmament began in full. It was not until 1942 that death camps for the industrial killing of Jews, Roma, Soviets, homosexuals, et al were established. This was nine years after Hitler had come to power. This is not to say the Nazi regime was not horrific, it is to say that even with its rush to carry out its terrible acts it took time. It is essential that we remember the ultimate activities of the Nazis, but often this leads people to overlook each step which took the country closer and closer to the Holocaust. In 1970 Karl A. Schleunes wrote 'The Twisted Road to Auschwitz' which explained how erratic the individual Nazi steps were, even if they did have an overall goal of reaching the most extreme.

Now, what it is vital to note for people living in a democracy is to be able to recognise those early steps that allowed the more extreme ones of the 1940s. We need to be able to tell when laws are being introduced like those of 1930-35. These laws in themselves were unacceptable though there severity is now overshadowed with what came later. I am glad to say that I do not anticipate the UK ever carrying out a genocide, but what may happen is that we end up with a form of state like Germany 1930-2 or even slightly later on. Thus, it is wrong to say that Atkins is misguided when talking about the crumbling of British civil liberties to refer to Germany in the 1930s. Germany was an industrialised state in western Europe which had a democratic system, so similar to the UK. Every element of the destruction of civil liberties in Germany after 1930 is to be abhorred just as every reduction in UK civil liberties now needs to be noted and opposed.

Why they are Trying to Drive Brown Out

As readers of this blog will know, I am not a big fan of Gordon Brown, I think he is more honest and far less egotistical than Tony Blair was and whilst he still seems to be following New Labour's policy of moving to a semi-authoritarian state he is doing it with far less speed than his predecessor. However, it is clear that Brown is not acceptable to the super-rich and others in the so-called Establishment who actually run the UK. This seems to be the only reason for why there has been such massive fuss about the local elections. So, Labour lost seats and a handful of councils, but show me a mid-term party in government who does not. Local elections are never a good indication of national flows anyway, especially, as Thatcher demonstrated you can rule for years only attracting a minority of the general votes. Another issue is why replicate Labour on 26% and not Ken Livingstone on 47% which would mean a far closer election. The reason is, because those who want Brown removed are using any stick they can find to beat him with. 'The Guardian' is supposed to be a liberal paper which you would imagine would be sympathetic to the Brown government, but no it is talking about the 'dusk' of Labour on its front page even though the general election is not until 2010.

The super-rich could cope with Blair. For a start he did not head the Labour Party, he headed a personal party, which as I have noted before was tied to its head as tightly as the Peronists were to Peron and probably even more than the Gaullists were to De Gaulle. Blair could always control Blair by flattery. In addition, his desire to manipulate the media and to make the public feel somehow guilty when they disagreed with him, fitted with these influential people's desires. Blair would go to war when the USA commanded it and he totally toed the line over the threat of terrorism which is the first piece in threatening the populous to accept the authoritarian laws the super-rich seem so keen to have imposed in the UK.

It is clear that those with real influence dislike Brown because he is too cautious, too curious, too much his own man. They want the 90-day detention without charge in place, they want Brown involving himself in more wars they can profit from, they want him selling off Northern Rock cheap so they can buy it up, repossess houses and make more money. They do not want a prime minister who actually nationalises things and raises income tax even if it is on a sector of society they despise (loss of the 10p tax band upsets their servants, don't you know?). They tried it last year when they called Brown a coward for not having a general election and they are now going to hound him until he finally goes. The trouble for the UK is what is the alternative? The Conservatives should be snatching the initiative and drawing up vote winning policies. No, they are sitting back even smug than before. They have allowed a clown, Boris Johnson, a man who regularly parades how many people he has offended and how silly he is, to become London mayor. What are those coming to work on the 2012 London Olympics going to think of this buffoon. Even the Conservatives had better candidates than him. In fact I cannot believe he will even serve his full term of office, some major gaffe will force him to resign. Yet, the fact that he was the candidate indicates the contempt that the Conservatives have for the electorate.

The Conservative lead David Cameron is amenable, but like Johnson is another old boy from Eton, one of the public schools which admits such a small slice of British society. He is of a social category of the kind that we saw with Lord Douglas-Home and Sir Anthony Eden back in the 1950s and 1960s. His social class is so far removed from that of 93% of the UK population, but then again, he is like George Bush in the USA, the elite are their core constituency. I could even forgive Cameron all of that if he actually had some policies. Though I despise Thatcher you could never say she lacked a clear vision of what she wanted to do and the policies to achieve it. Cameron, in contrast, is content to assume that the premiership will be gifted to him in 2010 and he will just keep the country steady in order to benefit the wealthiest. He will adopt a reactive policy with the limited economic tools the Treasury seems willing to consider. What I envisage in the 2010s is very similar to the UK of the 1930s under the National Government, just encourage the public to keep their chin up while they are crushed beneath the pressure of the global economy. Unlike 1939 there will be no move in 2019 when China goes to war, because the uber-wealthy are more than happy to let the Chinese government to kill and torture millions of people if they choose, just so long as China keeps exporting the cheap goods and provides the cheap labour the wealthy like to use.

As happened in the 1980s when the media brought Thatcher in and kept her in despite the bulk of the population abhoring her and voting against her, Brown will be removed by the campaign against him which started in full force this week. He will probably be the last politician to be in charge of the UK. After him it will be figureheads of the rich just as Bush is in the USA, so Cameron will be here, a man without any political impact or any sense of direction beyond what his wealthy masters command. What we are seeing the dusk of is not so much Brown's premiership, but of the last dose of democracy the UK will have.