Labour Affairs Magazine

Yugoslavia was broken up, often with regional Serb majorities in anti-Serb states, because Tito had defined six Republics as sovereign entities. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars for details.

Kosovo was autonomous within Serbia. But the USA through NATO waged a war to give it independence, in defiance of what it had demanded elsewhere. (Crimea, for instance.)

PDF of LTUR 81 – January 1999.

• Hang Together… Or Separately,  “New Labour, having remade the Labour Party on Thatcherite policy foundations, now finds it necessary to excuse various deficiencies in its administration of the country by maintaining that they are a carry-over from the ‘eighteen wasted years of Tory Government’.”
• Sorry, Mr Brown, but EMU Entry is Political.  By David Morrison.  “On 1st January, a single European currency came into being with 11 of the 15 states of the European Union, including Ireland, taking part. The UK has exercised its right under the Maastricht Treaty to stay out.” 
• [The EMU was destroyed by speculators, with George Soros becoming famous by being part of it.  Later successfully revived as the Euro.]
• “Merry Blitzmas” by Brendan Clifford.  “When Michael Howard was Home Secretary he summed up his scheme of moral improvement for the nation with the slogan, ‘Prison Works’.   [Labour minister] George Robertson want one better. He summed up his plan for peace and harmony among the nations with the words, War Works’…
• “Clinton had strong reasons for wanting to distract the attention of his nation from a domestic affair with a foreign affair. And so George Robertson was finally able to go to war. He gave the Iraqis a “Merry Blitzmas”, as The Mirror put it.  Bombing Iraq.[Saddam Hussein in Iraq lasted until he was dishonestly blamed for keeping the illicit weapons he had long discarded.  The attack on the Two Towers by the sort of Islamic extremists that Saddam had successfully supressed in Iraq was also used as an excuse.]
• Review of False Dawn: the delusions of global capitalism, by John Gray. Socialist Education Association saved from New Labour
• Stormont Stalemate David Morrison considers whether David Trimble and Tony Blair will succeed in their high-risk strategy of re-writing the Belfast Agreement in defiance of Sinn Fein
• Hurricanes in Latin America
• Mugged Illusions: Wilson John Haire describes a recent holiday in Cuba which provided its own form of consciousness raising.
• Fairness At Work by David Morrison
• Clinton’s Impeachment: Blame The Women?
• Parliamentary Diary: Ending of tobacco sponsorship; Peter Mandelson; Fuel Duties; Fair Rents?
• Notes on the News: Monica’s War- Baghdad Front:  “The Iraqis called it ‘Operation Monica’, which it obviously it was, and done clumsily too. One might also call it ‘Desert Cigar’, or ‘The War of Monica’s Mouth’… [President Clinton’s reported games with Monica Lewinsky.]
  “Denouncing ‘repression’ makes for good rhetoric. But when the results suits, it’s not ‘repressive’ but `progressive’. The difference is often hard to spot, but Anglo politics has no trouble finding that two highly similar modes of politics are really quite different. Even the same mode of politics can be redefined overnight. Iraq and the Baath Party were ‘progressive’ for as long as they defended the West against first, Arab Communism, and then Iran’s anti-Western version of hard-line Islam. Nothing much was said publicly, but somewhere in the covert chambers of the Anglo establishment, a decision must have been taken that with the end of the Cold War, various former allies were now ‘surplus to requirements’.
  “Ceausescu in Romania was one example, and he was indeed neatly toppled. But not Saddam. Done more openly, it could have been managed if they’d decided to ignore the legalistic double-talk and said they’d support a replacement within the same structure, provided Saddam went into exile. But … lying and evasion are not some flaw in the system. They are the system.
  Monica’s War – the Washington Front:  “America is a nation that was founded on treason and rebellion, that grew by land-theft and genocide, that built itself on slavery and then on denying the slaveowners the rights of self-government that had been the justification for their revolt against Britain. And it’s got moral principles that have to be imposed on the rest of the world (though no independent forum may ever judge the US).”
  Monica’s War – the Home Front.  “ Having talked about Britain at the heart of Europe, Blair chose to move to the peripheries by backing a war that has achieved nothing beyond killing some innocents and making Saddam look good again.”
  Glad to be Gladstonian? “ One morning over the Christmas holiday, I heard Paddy Ashdown putting forward Gladstone as his nominee for BBC Radio 4′ s British Personality of the Millennium competition… Ashdown favoured Gladstone, because he presided over the British Empire at the height of its powers. I found this odd, because a chief executive who leaves his organisation in a state of slow unavoidable decline would not normally be rated very highly.
  “Victorian Britons in general were Imperial spendthrifts who wasted the grand legacy of Georgian empire building and industrial revolution. By letting the Irish starve in 1845-8, they threw away one of their biggest assets. A people who could have been a bridge to the wider world became a Fifth Column instead. And that was the moment Gladstone chose to switch from Tory to Liberal, and become a loyal supporter of a government that allowed market forces to massacre millions!”

PDF of LTUR 82 – February 1999.

• Forward To The Past The Liberal- Imperialist Revival
• Bereavement Benefits.  David Morrison considers the Government’s plans for new legislation on bereavement benefits due to come into force in 2001.
• Labour Election Leaflet from 1937 – a very different set of demands.
• Positive Thinking On Europe.   Instead of leading from behind on Europe Max Anderson suggests that Tony Blair might take advice from Stuart Holland
• Alistaire Darling’s Welfare proposals.  New Labour are often accused of having no principles. That is not true. They have one: it is that everybody must work. Compared with them, Norman Tebbit was a moderate on the issue. Never mind that there are a few million people looking for work at the moment and failing to find any.
• America fathered the euro.  Reprinted from Prospect , Jan 1999
• Parliamentary Diary: Selling arms to Indonesia, used against the East Timorese people;  Justice Denied; police officers taking early retirement to avoid disciplinary proceedings over corruption;   A Waste of Energy? The commitment to reduce 1990 greenhouse gas emission levels by 12 per cent by 2012.
• Notes on the News:  New Labour, Hard Labour? Tony Blair is trying to persuade ordinary working people that they now belong to a ‘new middle class’: a concept that sounds worryingly similar to the American notion of a middle class which includes lorry drivers and electricians, indeed almost anyone who had a job;
  Hague remains vaguely posh.   With Blair trying to define New Labour as middle class, William Hague had the chance to pitch in and say that the Tories had always been a party for the working class.
  China’s Gitic: who pays? “Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corp (Gitic) has been forced into bankruptcy, with debts totalling 36.17 billion yuan (HK$33.86 billion). It is one of the mainland’s biggest corporate crashes. Beijing, in a move likely to damage relations with international banks, has refused to bail out the company.
  Euro Sleaze? If your house has mice, you can put down traps and block a few holes. Or you can be heroic and burn the entire house down. This will reliably rid you of the mice, though it will also leave you without a home.  (They eventually did just that, with Brexit.)

Issue 83, March, has not yet been scanned.

PDF of LTUR 84 – April 1999.

• Europe Bows To American Militarism: NATO’s Drive to the East
  A Balkan crisis, serious problems about the latest answer to ‘the Irish Question’, a radical government at Westminster and a decision to make war in Europe. These are common elements between the situation in July/August 1914 and the present situation. The world was never the same again after the British decision to make war in 1914, and many of the greatest problems of the present day arose directly out of that decision. And it seems likely that the world will be `improved’ for the worse as a consequence of the present war.
• New Labour’s Training Strategy.  Christopher Winch explains that there are no plans to fundamentally alter the Tories’ structure for training.
• Alex Salmond on NATO’s war on Yugoslavia.  Andrew Bryson introduces the statement made by Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, warning about the war.
• The Dalai Lama, by Sean McGouran.  “Tibet in 1959, with the flight of the Dalai Lama and much of his ‘court’ was presented as a virtual Shangri-la, a place of timeless virtue and peace. It was actually an undemocratic theocracy, where a huge proportion of the male adults were part of the non-working priesthood, which leeched off the toil of the largely landless peasants.”
• Brown’s Budget Trickery, by David Morrison.  It is driven by the New Labour fetish for changing things—and announcing the changes several times to give the impression of even more changes and thereby increase the number of favourable newspaper headlines.
• Parliamentary Diary:  Due to the war against Yugoslavia, Parliamentary Diary is this month taking the form of a reprint of the anti-war contributions from Labour MPs in the Commons debate of 25th March.
• Notes on the News: The War of the Kosovo Secession.   In the New World Order, an authoritarian leader who has several times been endorsed by free elections is either `the people’ s choice’ or ‘a dictator’ . Likewise, a military campaign by the armed forces against armed secessionists is either ‘police action’ or else ‘tyranny’. Nations behaving as nations is either natural or monstrous, depending on short-term power politics.
  In 1914, the Serbian claim to Bosnia-Hercegovina was seen as so utterly fair and right that Britain was happy to start the Great War in Serbia’s defence.
  New World Chaos: I did take note and make my own small protest [many years ago]. when Serbian nationalists originally deprived Kosovo of its autonomy. Decisive action then might have preserved the status quo, with Kosovan autonomy respected but secession ruled out. It would have been a sane solution. But the New World Order has never been interested in the status quo. It wants constant turmoil and it generally gets it. In the New World Order, there is no consistency and no true morality. Serbs have been driven out of territories that they have held for centuries, yet Reduced Serbia is still treated as if it were expansionist power.
  General Custer, Ethnic Cleanser: Ethnic cleansing is the cry [about Kosovo]. It comes oddly from the USA, land of the shyster and the home of the last slave plantations in the English-speaking world. A nation which got rid of most of its unwanted people, the original Native-Americans. And which also has been hopelessly bad at integrating its former slaves and other minorities that are unable to blend in with the all-white norm. Britain’s record is very imperfect. But Britain’s non-white minorities are not living separately from the white majority, as is increasingly the case in the USA. It took Britain a lot longer than the French to accept a multiethnic identity, but we have done it.
  Testing times: If the bombing was meant to help the Kosovo Albanians, then it was a crazy concept. In a crisis, nations must be expected to act like typical nations. The Serbs have rallied round the only available leader. They have hit out at the only available targets.  [Mass expulsions – but they got back after Serbia was bombed into submission;
  Boss of Benevolence: The USA holds out against any US citizen ever being tried by any foreign court. They are refusing to sign up to various treaties that might make them liable. Nato’s role is being promoted as being to ‘upholding international law everywhere’…
  International law has been intentionally kept vague and biased, and a US President can do anything he likes. Bush decided that Iraq must be punished, and the rest of the world came into line.
  Justice for All:  A US pilot who was flying too fast and too low and kills more than a dozen people in a ski-lift is found not guilty of manslaughter. That’s why the US don’t want a proper system of international law: only courts in the US could be relied upon to deliver a verdict like that.
  Good Muslims:  Mr Anwar Ibrahim was trying to play the same game in Malaysia that Slobodan Milosevic did successfully play in former Yugoslavia. He was out to emphasise the rights of the largest fraction of the mixed population. But when the existing Malaysian leadership try to supress him, he becomes a hero to the West.

Issue 85, April, has not yet been scanned.

PDF of LTUR 86 – June-July 1999.

• Memory vs. The Media: Yugoslavia: Back to1941
  “The German Army is returning to Yugoslavia. “This time, however, they will be welcomed by the populace”. That is what we were told in the Independent Television ‘news’ report of the event on June 12th.
  “It is implied that the last time the German Army drove into Kosovo it was not welcomed by the populace. The historical truth is that the German Army was welcomed into Yugoslavia in 1941 by the grandparents of those who are welcoming it in 1999. The German strategic position was anti-Serb under the Kaiser in 1914 and under Hitler in 1941, and it remains the German position.”
• Northern Ireland: Law or Vengeance?
• The Messiah and the Message: Kosovo. “Blair builds the ‘soft’ side of his case for the war on a potent metaphor— refugee camps=death camps—in order to milk people’s deepest emotions about the Second World War.”
• Vengeance Called Law, by G. M. Williams.  “Henry Kissinger, Colonel Oliver North, President Tujman of Croatia and Benjamin Netynahu are among thousands of world leaders who are in no danger whatsoever from the procedures now being used against the entire Serbian leadership.”
• Two short articles on the legality of the bombing.
• Mary Robinson & Clare Short on Kovovo: “I suppose, at the moment we are saying that Serbia itself will get no assistance while Milosevic is there. If you have an anxious Serbian population in Kosovo, and a deprived Serbian population inside Serbia itself, what does that bring?”
• Parliamentary Diary:  The Future of Kosovo (Serb rights ignored by Tony Blair.)
  Money, Money, Money!   At £47,008, MPs’ salaries are more than twice the national average, yet they continue to claim they are underpaid compared with elected representatives in most European states
  New Labour, Old Housing: £20,000 million or so needed to renovate and repair social housing in England and Wales alone.
  GM Crops: Will they feed the world?  The people of the third world are hungry, because they are poor. The real root of world hunger, therefore, is economic and political. lithe big agrifood businesses can’t make a profit out of food production and supply, they won’t do it; it is as simple as that.
• Blair the Underboss: (or The Callousness of the Long-Distance Bomber).  Nato did not bomb its own headquarters—as far as we know. Bombing the Chinese embassy was even worse for their reputation than bombing their own headquarters would have been. 
  The only lesson America learned from Vietnam is that it is not wise to ask their own people to suffer. It is still utterly callous when it comes to the lives of mere foreigners.
  [The USA was lukewarm in saying sorry.  It is now widely cited as a major spark to growing Chinese patriotism among young Chinese.]
• Notes on the News: Devolving Britain: Both the Labour and Tory parties are increasingly Greater Essex Nationalists, ignoring much of England, and the entire Celtic Fringe, in favour of the richest and most numerous part of the population.;
  The Rape of Reason: The Kosovo Crisis has rekindled the old arguments over the Morning After pill.  The Catholic hierarchy have been promoting an untruth when they Morning After pill as causing abortions. It is correctly said that it works for as long as no pregnancy has started.
  Maniac School Killers: Part 87. Guns don’t kill people—it’s the bullets you have to watch out for. Except that an unarmed person has no realistic defence against someone with a gun, not even running away. And an armed person has no defence except to shoot first, or perhaps shoot a prankster or an innocent or someone who might not have been serious about firing. Britain crushed the gun culture after Dunblane, and was quite right to do so.
  Blessed Are A Few Millions The Financial Times on May 17th reported that the wealth held by individuals with more than one million dollars grew 12% last year. And there are a surprising number: an estimated six million, with the bulk in North America and Europe.
  Twelve per cent is much more than the general wealth of the world has ever grown. The fact is that this class has done very well at the expense of everyone else.
  There are no blue roses in nature, and none from Genetic Engineering so far. “
  Loose talk of ‘freeing Tibet’ ignores the complex reality of hundreds of overlapping minorities in modem China.   Just as Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims and ethnic Albanians all found themselves at war with each other once Communist Yugoslavia was broken up, hundreds of millions of intermingled peoples with very different languages and traditions might drift into civil war if Communist Chinese control were ever removed.

PDF of LTUR 87 – August 1999.

• Europe Bombed: Left Wing Imperialism: a new disorder.
  So where does the bombing of Yugoslavia leave the world? Where it leaves the Balkans is where they were before it, but with their enmities aggravated. Where it leaves the world depends entirely on the United States in the short term and on the moral effect on Russia and China in the longer term. It depends not at all on Britain—or on Europe.
• Condemned Out of Their Own Mouths.  David Morrison examines the systematic misleading of the public by Robin Cook and George Robertson in their efforts to demonise the Serbs and unite the country behind their war.
• Hollywood Heretics.  Gwydion M. Williams reviews the latest addition. to the Star Wars saga.  “  Orthodox Hollywood gives the world Virtuous Sleaze and the Importance of Being Rich, even, on occasions, Consumer Spirituality. In Ghost, which was quite entertaining, it seems that all Yuppies go to Heaven, unless of course they’re laundering drugs money.
  What the critics also hate is any reminder that there are things much bigger than they are, things deeper, stronger and older than the entire framework of Anglo culture. It’s my own culture and I like it. But I like it as a young, hopeful and flexible culture that has sometimes absorbed wisdom from much older human societies. Anglo culture as the ‘end of history’ would be a nightmare and a monstrosity. Yet that seems to be some people’s vision of life.
  [At the time, I failed to be offended by the racial and sexual bias. It was normal for the era.  See Star Wars: the Nordic Generation.  https://www.quora.com/q/pwgwxusqvnzzrlzm/Star-Wars-the-Nordic-Generation.%5D
• An Alternative To Politics Peter Brooke, the author of Ulster Presbyterianism , offers a rarely expressed view of how to survive in the new American world order.
• Are the residents right? David Morrison looks at the role of David Trimble in creating the poisoned atmosphere associated with a church in County Armagh called Drumcree.
• Mr Blair’s Failure In Northern Ireland, by Andrew Bryson
• Parliamentary Diary:  Great Strides?; Warning to Labour; Water Charges; GM crops in Norfolk.
• Notes on the News: An Indecisive War The Kosovo War occurred because the West’s original ‘peace plan’ set out as Rambouillet included impossible demands. Madeleine Albright bears an especially heavy personal responsibility for the consequent deaths. She took it on herself to award independence to the Kosovans.
  Air Terrorism:  Air power won a limited victory, indeed. But not by military means: “Nato troops and journalists entering the Serbian province have not found the burnt-out tanks Nato had said it was hitting…  oil refineries, factories, bridges, the television network and the electricity distribution system
  Yugoslav Riddle: When is a war crime not a war crime? When the victims are Serbs. At least this applies when Serbs are officially designated Bad Guys for the latest American overseas adventure. It is remembered (sometimes) that they were among the Good Guys in World War H, and that quite a lot of them suffered as a result.
  No one would expect Jews to live happily under a government that proudly flew the swastika. Even though the swastika is a much older and more culturally neutral symbol than the Croatian flag—a flag that most Serbs associated with the pro-Nazi Croats who had massacred them.
  Turn On, Tune In, Rat Out:  Timothy Leary, the counter-culture guru of the Sixties, who urged his generation to ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ informed on friends and helpers in order to get out of jail early
  

PDF of LTUR 88 – Sept-Oct 1999.

• Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Out of Kosovo.  Vengeance On The Serbs Continues
  On 11th August the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, published a report on the situation in Kosovo in which they estimated that at least 170,000 Serbs, out of a population of between 180,000 and 200,000, had fled in the eight weeks or so since Yugoslav forces withdrew.
• Working Families’ Tax Credit, by David Morrison.
• Iraq: the punishment continues.
• Reflections On The Nanny State by Gwydion M. Williams.  You, as a human individual would not be alive at all without a mother who looked after you. The first nine months in the womb, and then several more years of being fed, taught to speak and walk, civilised and humanised. Civilising and humanising doesn’t have to be the work of the biological mother. It may be delegated to a servant or nanny. And, in a class-based society, sneering at nannies was polite cover for hostility to mothers and to the gentler side of life.
  Our idea of Liberty is supposed to derive from the Classical Greeks. All of them were slave-owners, all of them supported aggressive wars against their neighbours. Most of them allowed and even idealised homosexual love between grown men and youths under sixteen. Population control was achieved by infanticide, exposing the unwanted newborn to die of cold and hunger.
• New Labour ‘Ideology’ Christopher Winch reviews Anthony Giddens’ The Third Way: the renewal of social democracy.
• Tony Benn in Conversation with Max Anderson
• Parliamentary Diary:  Freemasons in the police.  Jack Straw has acquired a reputation as a tough Home Secretary, “Tough on crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime”. His toughness is being put to the test by Norman Bettison, Chief Constable of Merseyside, who is defying the Home Secretary’s call to set up a Register of Freemasons within the police force.
  Organic Farming.   Over the last three years the number of farmers with land registered as organic or in conversion to organic farming has almost quadrupled, from 292 to 1,165. This is significant progress but it still represents a tiny proportion of the total farming land.
  Nuclear Targets: Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) for BNFL.
• Notes on the News:  Be careful how you reincarnate. One week after his return to Tibet, the Beijing-appointed Panchen Lama has urged Tibetan Buddhists to obey President Jiang Zemin, official media said yesterday
• All Buddhists believe in reincarnation – as do Hindus and some traditional religions. But the Tibetan faith is based on the idea that at least two senior religious figures, the Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama, are able to control their reincarnations. As they see it, the same person is carrying on life in a new body. So that they can and should resume the same authority.
• Whose Holocaust? The Nazi Party came to power as an openly racist party, just as both Democrats and Republicans were racist parties in the United States of America, and the Nationalist Party campaigned for and won on the basis of Apartheid in South Africa. Racism against Blacks and racism against Jews tend to fall into different categories, but should not be. In the 1930s, a mass slaughter of Jews by Germans seemed no more likely than a mass slaughter of Black Americans by White Americans.

Issues 89 and 90, November and December, have not yet been scanned.