Labour Affairs Magazine

This page gives links to PDFs of our magazine, and also gives a summary of their contents.

• Individual articles are also available as web pages:
  • Should Socialists Fear Liberalism?
  • Equality and Socialism. (For fairness, not everyone getting the same.)
  • Kennedy – the end of High Liberalism. (Liberals are only nice when they get what they want.)
  • The British Constitution without Tears. (New Labour as Lapsed Marxist Dogmatists.)
  • The Origins Of Our Freedom. (Against liberal myths of Superior Britons.)
  • Liberal Imperialism Past and Present. (The Iraq War renews old ideas of ‘natives’ being unfit to rule themselves.)

The big event was the invasion of Iraq. But at the same time China was rising. The whole of the Global South was getting more and more concerned at what the West was doing.

More blurb

PDF for LTUR 124 – January 2003

• What is Clare short for ? The members of the Government are at present engaged in a game of moral manoeuvre with the purpose of presenting an appearance of conflict in which Blair is a war-monger and Clare Short is a lover of peace. But Blair and Short both profess to have certain knowledge of the unknown (that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction which the United Nations weapons inspectors have been unable to find).
• No Iraqi threat, says CIA, by David Morrison.  Readers in Pakistan or India or Israel or France or Russia or China need not worry: the US/UK is not going to “take a stand” against your “weapons of mass destruction” — because you have actually got weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them, that is, nuclear weapons.
• Iraq & Israel: Double Standards by David Morrison: Israel is in beach of around 30 Security Council resolutions that demand action by it, and it alone. Even the British Government admits that Iraq is in breach of a mere 9.
  Today, states other than Iraq stand in breach of upwards of a hundred Security Council resolutions. But, strangely, neither George nor Jack is in the least bit concerned that the UN is risking irrelevance by failing to enforce these.
• The Iron Wall by Vladimir Jabotinsky
  (We and the Arabs)(1923) First published in Russian under the title 0 Zheleznoi Stene in Rasswyet, November 4, 1923. Transcribed by Lenni Brenner.
  That the Arabs of the Land of Israel should willingly come to an agreement with us is beyond all hopes and dreams at present, and in the foreseeable future. This inner conviction of mine I express so categorically not because of any wish to dismay the moderate faction in the Zionist camp but, on the contrary, because I wish to save them from such dismay.
  Any native people – its all the same whether they are civilized or savage – views their country as their national home. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. 
  [Jabotinsky died in 1940.  He founded the terrorist organisation Irgun.  Its political wing Likud has led or been part of most Israeli governments since 1977]
• Notes on the News: So Solid Cruse Missile:  `Gangsta Rap’ artists like `So Solid Crew’ are a reaction to existing violence, OK. But a damn silly and self-wounding reaction, just what their enemies would be hoping for. Rather than rejecting the violence of the mainstream society, they manage just a little imitation of the world’s war machines. Black youths are encouraged into gun battles in which innocent die, obviously. In the 1920s and 1930s, Italians and Jews in the USA were the main source of organised-crime gangs. But Jews quickly moved ‘up-market’ and are now the richest group in the USA. Italians have had trouble letting go of macho culture and are doing much less well. Blacks up until the 1960s were shut out altogether, but the way they then handled it did not help.
  The Black Panthers were quite correct to say that violence and guns were the American way. But did they stop to wonder if the American way was not the best way? It was Martin Luther King and his borrowing of Gandhi’s methods that produced major advances, an end to formal and official racism. Doing things the American way did not advance a cause that the bulk of American society was anyway lukewarm about.
  Doing things the American way makes even less sense when you’re living in Britain
  Please murder the journalists (this is a joke): The two parts of Lord Of The Rings we’ve so far seen had much more of a feel for life’s problems than the pretentious asocial slaughter of Gladiator. But violence in a far-off or long-ago context is less corrupting.
  Gladiator is also a remake of a 1964 film called Fall Of The Roman Empire, cloned with Spartacus and with the social dimension of both films reduced to insignificance. The link to Gladiator is correctly noted in the review of Fall Of The Roman Empire at http://us.imdb.com/, but no hint is included in the same database’s review of Gladiator. The change is notable, social struggle replace by mindless violence that is sanctified by pompous empty phrases. Blood spilt on screen rings up cash very nicely at the box offices.
  Roy Jenkins: Mindless Moderation:  “Woy of the Modewates” lived the whole of his long life in a permanent 1950s outlook, with a nostalgia for the era before that, culminating in his far-too-reverential biography of Churchill. The son of an upwardly mobile Welsh miner and trade union official, Jenkins managed to get himself identified with the old elite at a time when the bulk of the population were thoroughly sick of such people.
  Mindless moderation failed in a changing world, because moderates saw no reason why the world should change or why everyone should not be content with what they’d got. And I’d not give Jenkins much credit for the reforms on divorce, homosexuality and abortion that occurred while he was in office: these things happened throughout the Western world regardless of whoever happened to be in charge.
  What he could have done, what he might ‘have done had he been more true to his roots, is to have organised a second wave of radical reforms, on the lines of what Labour did in the 1940s, further empowering ordinary people. The demand was there, Workers Control was assumed to be the next step forward, until it was sabotaged by a mix of mindless militancy and mindless moderation. But support for Workers Control was hardly likely from a Welsh miners’ son who spent his whole life trying to get away from what he actually was. Much that might have been has been wasted, what a pity.
  Iraq: guilty even if found Innocent:  The long-suffering people of Iraq can expect an American Valentine some time in February. I’m sure the actual date will be avoided—though if Al Capone had had a better spin doctor, he could have made out a much better case for ‘pre-emptive self-defence’ than George Bush can claim. [It actually happened in March.]
• No Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 125 – February 2003

• The success of inspection: the story that can’t be told.  You do not hear that inspection success story from Bush and Blair today. The reason for their silence is obvious: (a) an Iraq disarmed of the bulk of its proscribed weapons can hardly be said to be a threat to the US/UK, and (b) the past success of inspectors would encourage the view that disarmament could be achieved without the spilling of blood and that inspection should be allowed to continue indefinitely.
• Bush & Blair: Two thugs on the UN route by David Morrison.  The Council never authorised the establishment of no-fly zones Iraq, let alone military action to enforce them. Since the US/UK can hardly say that this is self-defence, such action is contrary to Articles 2.3 and 2.4 of the Charter. And the Iraqi firing on LIS/UK aircraft in response is legitimate self-defence under Article 51.
• The British Labour Government’s Dilemma.  A bitter struggle is taking place in the imperialist camp, One side are the wogbashers. Their solution to each and every problem with poor or weak countries is to rain death and destruction. They came to the fore in the United States over Vietnam and Panama. The terrorist attack on the New York Twin Towers gave the wogbashers a new lease of life.  The thick majority in the USA wanted someone to be punished, guilty or not . The wogbashers lead by US President George W Bush, seized their opportunity.
  On the other side from the wogbashers are the shrewdies, ranging from the CIA and MI6 over the whole range of liberal opinion to some self-styled friendship societies and communist panes.. They concentrate on finding out everything about other countries and in particular about the characters and plans of the real leaders and any dissidents. The leaders can then be neutralised or replaced, if necessary.  From the Finsbury Communist. February 2003
• The Anatomy of Evil by Brendan Clifford.  A few months ago, John Lloyd and Christopher Hitchens issued reciprocal condemnations of each other.
  Lloyd confessed to complicity after the event in mass murder. He had been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and he had not known until the late 1970s that large numbers of people had been killed in the course of the establishment and maintenance of the Leninist system in the Soviet Union. That was a truly remarkable feat of ignorance. But, when he finally discovered what pretty well everyone else in the world had long known, he found himself guilty though ignorant and shed tears of remorse.
  But he did not let it all hang out in public until last year, when he began to prepare himself morally for war on Iraq. Then, twenty-five years after the alleged event of his awakening, he relived that alleged event under the stimulus of Martin Amis’s book about Stalin.
  I would have thought it was factually indisputable that the United States is a destroyer of cultures, as Britain was before it. The assumption underlying British activity across the world over many generations was that inferior cultures must be destroyed in the cause of progress and that the superior culture which destroyed them would replace them. That process was called “progress”. And it was frankly stated by a great Liberal ideologue a little over a century ago that not only the destruction of cultures but the actual extermination of peoples was sometimes necessary in the cause of progress.
  Lloyd used to believe in progress. I imagine it was that belief, rather than actual ignorance of facts, that caused him to pay no heed, as a member of the Communist Party, to the destruction involved in the making of the Soviet Union.
  I imagine he still believes in progress and has only realigned himself in the cause.
• Is it Worth a War to Disarm Saddam Hussein of Harmless Sludge? by David Morrison.
• Did the Iraqis Gas the Kurds at Halabja? by John Clayden.
• David Morrison’s Miscellany: EU expansion?:  There is rumour around that the EU is expanding next year from 15 members to 25. The rumour is unfounded. The EU is not expanding. The EU club is not admitting 10 more members under the existing rules of the club.
  What is happening is that 10 states — the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta — are being offered a form of associate membership, on terms that are significantly worse than the terms enjoyed by the existing 15 members. To talk of EU expansion is therefore is piece of fraudulent spin. The new associate members will have about a sixth of the population of the total EU population, but only about a tenth of the EU budget is scheduled to be spent within their boundaries in the first three years.
  Down the Tube:  On 4 February Ken Livingstone reluctantly accepted that the PPP for the London Underground was unstoppable, and withdrew his threat to appeal against the EU Commission’s decision on the scheme to the European Court.
• No Notes on the News or Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 126 – March 2003

• Intimations of Morality The impending American / British war on Iraq is not a war for oil. If there was an actual or potential threat to the oil the West needs, and war on Iraq was a means of dealing with that threat, there would not be mass demonstrations against the war all round Europe.
  During the past 80 years the West — also known as civilisation — has constructed itself in such a way that effective command over the major sources of oil in the world is an absolute necessity to it. That is why the League of Nations and the United Nations set up the Middle East as it is set up — as a Balkanised array of powerless states controlled from the outside by a combination of force and bribery. The oil supply of civilisation is secure.
  Iraq broke out of the system of subordination in the late fifties. The puppet regime of Nuri es Said, put in place by the British re-conquest of 1941, was overthrown. Nuri was undermined by being required to support the British/Israeli/French attack on Egypt in 1956.
  In the 1980s it [Iraq] fought a kind of proxy war for the West against Iran, boxing in the fury of the Islamic revolution. But it fought that war as a free agent acting as part of the West, not as a manipulated agent of the West. Perhaps that is why, at the end of the Iran/ Iraq war, the West, in the form of America and Britain, decided to destroy it; on the grounds that one strong, independent Arab state set a bad example to the others.
  Saddam responded to Kuwaiti provocations in 1990 by invading Kuwait, having ascertained from the American Ambassador that this would be OK. The Kuwaiti Army promptly left the country leaving Iraq in possession of it. But there was no Iraqi annexation of Kuwait, not until after the United States responded with mock outrage to the invasion as an intolerable breach of international law which “would not stand”.
  Clinton is one of the genuine monsters of recent times. He insisted that sanctions should continue, and had his Secretary of State say that the death of half a million children was worth the achievement of—of what? He decreed that Iraqis should die in large numbers because of sanctions while Saddam remained in place, while he did nothing towards removing Saddam.
• The Labour rebellion by David Morrison.  122 Labour MPs rebelled against Tony Blair’s leadership on 26 February, the largest backbench revolt ever suffered by an incumbent Prime Minister.
  That the Labour revolt was unprecedented cannot be gainsaid, but listening to the debate what was striking was how flimsy their position is, and therefore how easily the revolt might melt away over the next few weeks.
• Bevin Society Statement: _Pax Americana: Perpetual War. 
  War on Iraq is inevitable because America and the UK – Ameranglia – needs a secure base-country from which to combat popular anti-Globalist sentiment in neighbouring Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria and beyond. Control of the Middle East underpins the geopolitical pincer movement on the former Soviet Union as well as—with its Pacific strongholds— building power against Asia.
  In the new era, National Sovereignty appears as a brief 40-year aberration—a device to hold back the spread of Communism after World War 2. Now National Sovereignty is to be sacrificed for world Gleichschaltung —for uniformity under Par Americana. Yet National Sovereignty remains the most effective way of protecting and furthering popular rights now, as it has in the past. Maintaining National Sovereignty means that States must have WMD: this is the world as America-Britain want it. The more Weapons of Mass Destruction a State has, the more sovereign it is. The United Nations can never be what in the popular dream it is supposed to be: an international force for good. So long as individual countries vote according to their short-term self-interest—rather than on the true issues in individual cases judged by some general standard—limy can be bribed or intimidated into assisting the imposition of Pax Americana on `rogue States’ —even though that vote runs counter to their own longer-term aspirations.
  The contempt of the Ameranglia for the UN is shown by the way it was made clear that it retains its freedom of action Labour and Trade Union Review 8 to ignore the UN if it does not sanction war—whilst binding the UN to war if sufficient ‘evidence’ of Iraq weaponry can be rustled up.
• Should Socialists Fear Liberalism? by Christopher Winch.  One of the reasons why socialism is struggling is that socialists do not really know who they are and where they came from. Many think that they are a species of liberal. After all, socialism grew up alongside liberalism and both are opponents of conservatism. Both socialists and liberals favour democracy and rights. Surely socialism just means taking liberalism a bit further?
  Despite the apparent similarities there are good reasons for thinking that socialists should resist the excessive penetration of liberal ideas into socialist thinking. There are a number of areas of concern.
  Liberals tend to believe in three interconnected propositions:
  Absolute individual rights,
  The right to private property
  The unconditional sanctity of the market.
  Each of these beliefs support the other.
  Socialists, who are capable of seeing that the market can be an efficient way of conveying some information about preferences and availability, only see it as having conditional value. It is good as long as it delivers the goods and can only do so when kept under control.
• UNSCOM was expelled from Iraq by Blair and Clinton
• Bad Saddam and the Very Moral Lynch Mob
• Why Iraq? Why War? by Pete Whitelegg. 
• Prospects for Reform in Brazil
• 60th Anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad
• Freudian Slips?  The Saudis are technically, religious purists. They are, in fact, seedy hypocrites, and objects of contempt for those who take Islam seriously.
• Notes on the News: Blowing In The Wind: Depleted uranium is a new hazard of war, and one that the US military are wholly responsible for.  As a lump of metal, depleted uranium is mostly threatening as a blunt instrument, no more dangerous than lead. But we now know that lead paint and water drunk from lead pipe are a health hazard. Depleted uranium as debris from exploded shells is much worse, a poisonous chemical and also a source of radioactivity
  Depleted uranium is the stuff left over after uranium has been processed for its more fissile elements. It is ‘depleted’ because it is less radioactive than the natural ore, but that does not make it safe. The US nuclear industry has vast amounts of the stuff with no normal outlet, so they decidedly to make into shells. Heavier than lead. it does more damage on impact.
  Bloody but Green?   Demonstrations are unlikely to stop a war on Iraq. But they may well stop a war on Iran or North Korea. Or an intervention in Arabia if the discredited Saudi dynasty gets overthrown.
  Bury the truth at My Lai; Why hasn’t their been more mention of Colin Powell’s involvement with almost all of the US military’s dirt over the last 40 years?
  Licit Death Tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs prematurely kill about 7 million people worldwide each year and the number is rising,
  Licit Death “Tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs prematurely kill about 7 million people worldwide each year and the number is rising.
  Which doesn’t mean that illicit drugs are safe, just that far fewer people use them. Criminalisation does work, legality is a big barrier for most people. In fact Prohibition was working in the USA. despite the hypocrisy of punishing just the suppliers.
• No Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 127 – April 2003

• Blair Outlines New Strategy on Europe: Remember 1997! Bambi in office. Niceness in power.
  And what have we got now? Bambi, the frenzied faun. Bambi has become Bombi. He went on what he thought was a cake-walk and finds himself engaged in a slaughter of the obstinate innocents. And he forces himself on, blundering at every turn, and spitting out venomous delusions.
• Is there a ‘European Road to Socialism’?  To go with Europe or with the US is really the only choice that there is and Britain cannot flinch away from it for ever.
  The left in Britain has refused to face up to this issue. For them Europe is capitalist and therefore bad. They don’t ask themselves what is the most favourable environment for the development of socialist policies in the UK.
• Robin Cook: Man of Integrity? While the Prime Minister peddled these lies about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”, and the threat posed by Iraq to Britain, Robin Cook remained in government, sharing collective cabinet responsibility for peddling what he knew to be lies, and for working up war fever against Iraq by peddling them.
• The Attorney General insults our intelligence: Claims Security Council authority for the present use of force against Iraq in a 12-year-old Security Council resolution passed for an entirely different purpose. That resolution, number 678, was passed on 29 November 1990. Its purpose was to compel Iraqi forces to leave Kuwait, a process which was complete 12 years ago and hasn’t been reversed since.
• The First Nine Days: Iraq may soon collapse, which would mean at least one more US war, against Iran or North Korea, with China as the long-term goal. My feeling in the run-up to war have been that only the next war might be preventable. A lot depends on how hard or easy it is in Iraq.
• Cold Warriors In Space: The tragic loss of shuttle mission 113 is causing a rethink of nearly 50 years of space exploration. The human exploration of space could proceed perfectly well with unmanned probes, which have done 95% of the useful work over the last three decades. Do we need to go on spending hundreds of millions on human space missions that can never be entirely safe?
  The decisive moment in the Cold War was the USA’s moon landings. Two rival Modernist systems had gone head-to-head to see who could realise the ancient dream of journeys beyond Planet Earth. But it was not exactly ‘capitalism versus communism’. The USA in the 1960s was still committed to ‘tax-and-spend’, and got its act together with the creation of NASA. Meanwhile the Soviet Union in the 1960s mismanaged an economy that had been hugely successful up until then, damaging it with ‘market reforms’ that were supposed to make it better.
• No Notes on the News or Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 128 – May 2003

• George Galloway and Iraq: The US fully expected that its troops would be warmly welcomed by the Iraqi people, and that in the warm glow of liberation it would be relatively easy to establish a successor state friendly to the US; a state that would permit a large US military base on its territory so that the US could dominate the region and threaten Iran and Syria.
  It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Ba’athists, or one that ti Its toward the Islamic fundamentalists.
  George Galloway is the only leader who has emerged from the Anti-war movement with a deadly combination of charisma married to a deep sense of political reality. The only one with the potential political clout of a Nelson Mandela. And his was a lone voice that refused ( like this magazine) to take the weak way out and jump on the “let’s demonise Saddam” bandwagon.
  He is in total contrast to Tony Blair whose personality is the ultimate triumph of the passive aggressive principle in British politics. It is no surprise that Blair hates and is out to destroy him.
• Who’s Who of the Coalition of the Willing: Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Mongolia, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Palau, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Singapore, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan
• The War to Preserve Dollar Supremacy: The USA precipitated the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 by ending the dollar link with gold. This enabled it to print money to finance the Vietnam war. An effect of this was to devalue dollar reserves all around the world, particularly affecting the oil trade. Yet, when OPEC put up its prices in the early seventies, it had nowhere to put its newfound gains but with American banks.
• Thaw Wars and Vanishing Iraqis: The war on Iraq was so uneven, it’s surprising Iraq lasted as long as it did. It was a war of some 300 million rich people against 24 million poor people who are also fragmented, defending a state that has had less than a century of coherent existence since it was carved out of the Ottoman Empire.
  he resistance of the first couple of weeks might have led the US to seek a compromise, or to retrench and consolidate in the south. Instead the US gambled on a quick advance to Baghdad, risking disaster but hoping for a collapse.
• Achilles Westphalia and Iraq.   Gwydion M Williams reviews Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield Of Achilles: Every aggressor must find an immediate threat to justify the war. Germany in 1914 was not an aggressor and had no wish to claim any part of metropolitan France, never mind Britain. The occasion for the war was the Serbian claim to Bosnia-Herzegovina, not something that present-thy Anglos can safely point to, given the way they treated Serbia in the 1990s.
• Shiite Religious Parties Fill Vacuum in Southern Iraq
• “US Forces Encourage Looting” By Ole Rothenborg
• To The Yugoslav And International Public, by Slobodan Milosevic
• No Notes on the News or Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 129 – June 2003

• Saving George Galloway:  George Galloway’s suspension from the Labour Party raises a number of questions, not the least of which is why Peter Mandelson and Geoffrey Robinson who undoubtedly brought the Party into disrepute, were not suspended at the time. The suggestion that Galloway is being edged out to make way for Dr John Reid in his revamped constituency is not as farfetched as it sounds.
  Galloway, known as Gorgeous George like the American wrestler from whom Mohammed Ali took his cue, is a colourful character with a penchant for speaking his mind; a trait that is unpopular not just at Westminster. His criticism of Blair and Bush, and his comments about British soldiers in Iraq, followed logically from his position on the `war’.
• Iraq: Occupation Authorised: “A simple way out would make sure, if there is a conflict, that in any post-conflict Iraq there is a proper UN mandate for Iraq and the oil goes into a trust fund. We don’t touch it and the Americans don’t touch it without UN authority.”
  Those were the Tony Blair’s words on MTV on 7 March prior to the invasion of Iraq. They were uttered to scotch what he called the absurd “conspiracy theory” that the US/UK wanted to get their hands on Iraqi oil
  Six weeks later on 9 May, along with the US and Spain, Tony Blair’s government proposed a very different plan for Iraq in a draft Security Council resolution. Now, instead of the UN being in charge, the occupying powers proposed that they rule Iraq until a representative government is established and, in the meantime, they be granted UN authority to sell Iraqi oil and spend the proceeds.
• Euro vision: the Chancellor calls the tune: It is clear that Tony Blair believes that joining the euro is a necessary condition for Britain being in a position to continue to disrupt the development of the EU, and he appears to be prepared to risk all on a referendum on the issue now, which he is certain to lose. Unfortunately, he has been saved from himself by his Chancellor, to whom he foolishly accorded a veto in October 1997.
• Sewell Skewers Blair’s Blarney
• Globalisation and its Discontents, by Joseph Stiglitz.  Review  by John Martin
• Letter on Iraq
• The Project for the New American Century: The organisation behind the letter was a neo-conservative think tank, the modestly entitled Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was formed in early 1997. Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz were founder members, and so was vice- President Dick Cheney.
  As its name implies, the PNAC was founded to establish and maintain US hegemony in the world. Its founders believed that an opportunity had been lost at the end of the Cold War, when the US became by default the world’s only superpower. Then, instead of maintaining or increasing military expenditure to enhance US dominance, and deter rivals, military expenditure was reduced.
• The Guardian Dishes Johnny Foreigner
• Connor Lynch on Spain.
• Notes on the News: Rumsfeld Rewards Terrorism:  Less than two years after September 11th, al-Qaeda received a huge boost in the shape of the USA’s military withdrawal from Saudi Arabia. There were maybe good grounds for less troops, but not the total pullout that occurred.
  I’d decided it was an error several days before the wave of suicide bombings. I had no idea of the state of al -Qaeda, but on general principles, I figured that people aren’t going to go on killing themselves for no visible return.
  The UN-forgiven? The original idea of the UN as a prototype for an ideal Wellsian order is dead, or maybe was never alive. It is much better to view it as a club of sovereign states. This is the best we can have. What is needed is a better curb on the USA.
  The latest UN resolution showed that the US cannot in fact `go it alone’. Also that Russia and France will make unprincipled deals, but that’s hardly news.
  The UN ideal of a global ethical order should be dropped. It’s meaningless when it cannot be applied to the USA, or to any of the other powers with a veto. But it gives the appearance of morality to power-political acts, notably the subordination of Serbia.
  It’s much healthier if the world knows that it has no power to punish the guilty, merely the losers in each particular power struggle. By recognising what the real situation is, we can then work to make it better.
  Euro Visions:  I’ve always found that the scoring was better than the songs on the Eurovision Song Contest. This time it was hilarious, the UK got zero, it was a weak song, but the total lack of votes probably was a reaction to the Iraq war
  Baghdad Crunch Labour got a `Baghdad Crunch’ in the local elections, with the Tories getting a lot more seats than were expected.
  Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam: Senders of junk mail look for one positive result per hundred to make it worthwhile, that’s the economics of ‘snail mail’. But with junk email, the senders’ costs are so low that a response of one in 100,000 can be justified. (Economist, 26th April, Stopping spam). That’s why you receive an E-mail in Britain saying ‘Russian women seek American men’, and why men get offered enlargements to their breast.
  Myself, I’d favour adding a one-penny stamp, paid by the sender. This would not be a significant expense, way below the costs of using the system. And about the cost of ten seconds of the time of someone on the minimum wage in Western countries. You could also have a ‘clear-list’, people you’ll accept free mail from.
  It would of course contradict the libertarian ideals which built the Internet. But libertarian ideals will only work when people choose to confine themselves to just the things that libertarian idealists think proper for them. These limits are not even the same as my own idea of what’s proper, and my view is relatively close to theirs, in global terms.
  Libertarianism will only work if people choose just to use their freedom in narrow and confined ways, which of course they won’t. A small group can bully its own members into conformity, but the Internet is global and totally diverse.
  Matrix: Marketable Rebelliousness:  The ‘coolest’ film just now is Matrix Reloaded. As a film, it’s rather below the intellectual level of the X-Men sequel, which tries to have ethics. The Matrix special effects look exactly like special effects, cartoonish and implausible, making it an extended computer game with a minimum of plot. And it stops in the middle of a subplot, when there was a perfectly decent stopping- point earlier on with the recovery of the `key-maker’.
  Philosophical meanderings about `choice’ are 20 years out of date. It had been thought from the 18th century that a good enough model could predict everything with utter precision. But when computers allowed this to be tried, it was found that even tiny differences could make staggeringly large differences to the outcome. (See James Gleick’s book Chaos for a good account of the process, if you don’t know it already.)
  But what was the appeal of the original? The core notion pf Matrix was that people living in a world very much like our own were actually victims of an enigmatic machine plot, confined to virtual reality, supposedly there as simple power generating unit. This in itself was a bloody stupid idea, why humans rather than sheep? Especially why humans with a technology advanced enough to understand computers, rather than mediaeval?
  Of course the plot is only a pretext, to justify the idea of being liberated by `God the Godfather’, a hacker-drugs-fetishist complex that was somehow the only source of freedom. It’s a plausible myth for some people, in the US there have even been cases (Guardian 19th March) of people getting so obsessed that they commit murder. Matrix: Matricide?
  Marx supposed that capitalism and bourgeois culture were two sides of the same coin. It was his biggest error, one of many false concepts that he took over from Adam Smith. In the West, bourgeois culture has been falling apart since the 1960s. Thatcher thought that an extension of market forces would revive bourgeois culture.
  What actually happened was that selfish desires produced a selfish and a shoddy culture. Adam Smith’s description of capitalism was simply wrong, it was built in a fit of ideological enthusiasm by Puritans, and by ex-Puritans who expressed their enthusiasm in new forms, especially in the 19th century.
  Consumer goods do not satisfy the needs they are tied to. Pop music and drugs do, to an extent. But such feeling are dangerous and self-destructive if not controlled. And the whole dominant ideology is against control, so who knows where it will end?
• No Notes on the News or Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 130 – July 2003

• Honourable Deception?  Clare Short suggested that Tony Blair thought it was honourable to back the US in taking military action against Iraq and that therefore he saw the various ruses and devices he used to get us there as “honourable deception”.
  The first witness was Robin Cook, who proffered the alternative view that “the problem was the burning sincerity and conviction of those who were involved in the exercise”.
  We incline to the latter view: that Blair sincerely believed that he was doing right thing in taking Britain to war against Iraq alongside the US, and that he sincerely believed everything he said in pursuit of that goal, at the time he said it, whether it was true or not. Indeed, he seems capable of believing contrary things at the same time with equal sincerity.
• Iraq & Israel: Double Standards; Iraq suffered invasion, allegedly because it failed to obey Security Council resolutions. By contrast, the roadmap process, like the Oslo process before it, allows Israel to negotiate about the extent to which it obeys Security Council resolutions, if at all.
• EU Kowtows to US on Cuba; The US gained control of Cuba after the Spanish-American war of 1898, and maintained control until the revolution. During its period of control, the US established a military base at Guantanamo, which it still holds on to today, despite the revolution. The base is under US control, but it is not part of the US and therefore not governed according the constitution and laws of the US. It has therefore been an ideal location forholding prisoners without trial.
• The Origins Of Our Freedoms; In the wake of the Iraq War, the USA sees itself as the grand defender of freedom. Champion of the cause since 1776, creator of liberty in Europe and the world. Hero of the 20″ century, thanks to its role in two World Wars and the Cold War.
  This view assumes a single monolithic entity, ‘freedom’. And the discussion is confined to democratic and constitutional structures, which the USA did genuinely pioneer. This is the line of many ex-Marxists who have coincidentally switched from the ideology of a sinking ship.
  The rhetoric of freedom can be traced back into the 18′ century, indeed. But the same name has implied a very different set of rights and duties across the decades. Many of the freedoms that we now take for granted were pioneered in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries—notably the removal of class barriers and the rights of women. On racial equality, global communism was the pioneer— read Nelson Mandela’s account in Long Walk To Freedom, for instance. The USA was very much the tail-ender, promoting segregation and a `democratic racism’ that could easily have become the global norm.
  The USA was the first large country to have governments fully under the control of an electorate of most adult males (though not blacks until the 1960s). The USA also helped with the breaking down of class barriers, not least because their own attempt at a ruling class was clueless and never taken very seriously outside of the US itself.
  The right to work would be the most important freedom to re-impose in what is always and inevitably an arbitrary package of diverse freedoms.
• WMD: the hunt is just beginning, says Tony.
• France didn’t say No to war, just not now.
• Letter to the Editor about UN law, and Reply.
• Norman Finkelstein at the ICA: The circumstances in which the State of Israel was established in the post-Second World War period. It enabled Israel to expel 750,000 Palestinians from the State they established in 80% of the country.
  At the time, forcible transfer/exchange of populations (as between Turkey/ Greece) was a practice condoned by the international community, though that attitude was to change in 1949 with a Convention against the expulsion of populations.
  Since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank after the 1967 War, it was employing the second of the two methods of conquest: the gradual subjugation of the native population. It was whittling away the 20% of the country left to the native Palestinians.
  This eventually provoked the first Intifada after various international initiatives and UN resolutions had failed to produce redress. However, after the first war on Iraq, America and Israel believed that the incompetent Palestinian leadership was sufficiently demoralised to accept an arrangement under the Oslo Accords which amounted to creating a number of ‘self-governing’ Palestinian Bantustans under Israeli hegemony in 10-15% of original Palestine. The number of Israeli ‘settlers’ on the West Bank in this period doubled from c200,000 to 400,000.
• Equality and Socialism: Inequalities of wealth also lead to inequalities of power and thus prevent people from realising their own hopes. The opportunities of some people, if they are backed with disproportionate power and wealth, can stifle those of people who are less well off. If stockbrokers force up the prices of houses through their extravagant salaries then everybody else finds it more difficult to buy a house. If the Conrad Blacks and the Rupert Murdochs finance newspapers with their vast wealth, then it becomes difficult for people of more modest means to make their voices heard. If private patients buy up the best doctors, then these are not available for people who are not so well off.
• Notes on the News: Half Of The World:   With the USA intent on imposing McLunatic Globalisation, it makes sense for the two big Asian powers to stop being rivals. Their long common border means little, it is almost impassable and neither China nor India were ever invaded by that route.
  Kill Iraqis, not foxes?  No one now doubts the broad untruthfulness of the US/British case for war.
  Despite which, there were many more rebels when it came to stamping out bloodsports.
  Meanwhile in Iraq, the `sensitive’ British methods in a region which hated Saddam produced much the same results as Northern Ireland, but much more quickly. Only by comparison with the US troops could British troopers be described as sensitive.
  The army are mostly thugs, which is the proper qualification for joining a peace-time army. If they are not thugs seeking to join the best-respected gang they can find, then just what are they joining up for?
  Affirmative action;  If one racial group in the US are getting less, then either they merit less or they are being discriminated against
  Or both. A majority of Afro-Americans have a self-destructive and anti-intellectual culture. The two processes feed off each other, and ‘affirmative action’ has been the functional means of breaking the vicious circle.
  Harry Potter and Tolkien:  While British literati cherish elaborate books about nothing very much, the literate public ignores them and insists that world does have some sort of meaning.
  So it’s not hugely surprising that Tolkien won several polls among English- speakers for ‘author of the 20th century’.
  There are many differences, but also points in common. Both reject the sleazing-up and dumbing-down of the society, and its massive spread of commerce. Limited commerce in a social context is fine, but only limited. And the Potter saga, at least, is not really about old values, and quite relaxed on sexual matters.
  Britannia Oppose The Waves! People who talk glibly about ‘1000 years of British history’ clearly haven’t checked who it was who was then was ruling. It was in fact Ethelred the Unready, 978-1016, apparently a blunderer who wasted the heritage built in the previous century by Alfred the Great and his immediate successors.
  History is tricky, of course. We get a favourable impression of Alfred from a biographer who wrote for his heirs. Our highly negative view of Ethelred is based on just one source who was partisan. Still, he did preside over a declining kingdom, and after the brief reign of Edmund Ironside, we had King Canute, the Danish-born conqueror of Anglo-Saxon England. Which recovered a precarious independence under Edward the Confessor, but was conquered again by the Normans.
  When I was at school, we were taught to identify with those conquerors. Many people still do, but not all of us. Englishness has been improved by Continental influence over the last half century, and I am all in favour of it continuing.
• No Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 131 – August 2003

• Dialectical Diabolicalism:  The Universalist Totalitarian Ethics of New Labour.  The world is divided between the forces of good and the forces of evil. We are good. That is unquestionable. Others are evil in varying degrees. And evil begins at Calais. That is how it used to be in the days before the complicating influence of the Russian Revolution on the internal affairs of other countries undermined the old moral absolutism of Them (Evil) and Us (Good). And that is how it is again, now that the Russian Revolution has been seen off. And the return to the absolute morality of olden times has been led by former members of the former Communist Party — by former people, one might say, borrowing a term from the French Revolution. Absolutism is simple-minded, and no minds are simpler than those of the refugees from “scientific socialism”.
• The British Constitution without Tears By Brendan Clifford.  The British Constitution is not based on the principle of the separation of powers. It is, if anything, based on the principle that the different functions of the state are combined in the Executive.
  The American Constitution operates through separated powers, Congress has its own business to do in the running of the state. It conducts its own affairs as a Legislature. Since Legislature and Executive are elected separately and have distinct functions, there is a theoretical possibility that conflict between them might cause the breakdown of the state. The working relationship between them rests on the fact that they are both elected by the same electorate.
  In the British system, what is called the Legislature is essentially a rubber stamp used by the Executive. It does not have its own business to transact, as Congress does. It acts in the name of the Executive, under the guidance of the Executive, and largely at the discretion of the Executive.
• Surprise, surprise, Government not guilty [over Iraq]; The Committee found the Government not guilty without examining the factual evidence. It examined for accuracy and completeness only one source of Government information to Parliament — the dossier published on 24 September 2002 – and illogically concluded that the Government hadn’t made exaggerated claims in it. Bizarrely, everything else the Government said on Iraq in Parliament and elsewhere was ignored.
• Film Review: Good Bye Lenin! By Angela Clifford.  A couple of years after the East German Wall came down, I hired a car in West Germany and toured the Fast. Driving along, I was constantly overtaken by Trabants— the East German-made car: the two-stroke technology and plastic body had no trouble taking on the products of modem capitalism. The experience would have fitted into Good Bye, Lenin! The Trabant, of course, is no longer made.
• Clare Short on Tony Blair: TV Interview with Steve Richards
• Kennedy: the end of High Liberalism By Gwydion M. Williams.  High Liberalism ended with Kennedy, and quite possibly would have ended even if he hadn’t been shot. High Liberalism assumes that it can be moderate and generous and still get its own way. This was broadly true in Britain from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 down to the Great War of 1914-18, during which Liberalism disintegrated. In the USA, High liberalism lasted rather longer and was vindicated in American eyes by US dominance and prosperity after World War Two. But by the 1960s, Kennedy faced massive contradictions within the society, plus an escalating war in Vietnam that he could not easily have pulled out of. Whether some other solution could have been snatched out of the fluctuating politics of the 1960s is unknown, but my feeling is that it could not.
• Iraq: Poland joins the occupation By David Morrison: The US (and the UK) are seeking to reduce their burden in Iraq by trying to get other states to supply troops. To date, this has not been notably successful, and in many cases the US has had to promise to foot the bill in order to get the promise of troops. Australia, the only state other than the US/ UK to supply combat troops during the war, has refused to supply any for the occupation.
  However, some states have now made promises. In the van is Poland, which has promised to supply 2,300 troops, and has been rewarded with an occupation zone all of its own in central Iraq, stretching from the border with Saudi Arabia to the border with Iran, and encompassing most of the fertile crescent, including the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
• Boycott Coca-Cola: Stop The Assassinations.  An international boycott of Coca- Cola products was be launched on Tuesday 22 July. Its main aim is to stop the policy of violent treatment that has left eight Colombian Coca-Cola workers assassinated in recent years. The boycott has been called by Colombian food and drinks workers union SINALTRAINAL and has the endorsement of the country’s main trade union federation the CUT as well as the World Social Forum.
• Notes on the News: Reaping the whirlwind:  If the news had been of the US capturing Saddam’s sons, that would have been a victory. In fact they died heroically, rather than surrendering as they might have done. Which didn’t stop Bush and Blair crowing about their deaths (I would not have got personal like that, it is stupid as well as distasteful to turn a political matter into a kind of bloodfeud.) In any case, I was sure from the first uncertain news that the elimination of the dynasty would make the majority Shiites less likely to cooperate with the USA and make a united anti-US opposition easier to form.
  A few biased men: In the current climate, you’d not expect Islamic militants to get a fair trial in an America court or with an American jury. Despite which, the Bush regime has no intention of risking it and is making sure that those detainees who are not blatantly harmless or senile will be tried before a military tribunal.
  A regular jury would be taking a chance if they decided that ‘anti-terrorist’ charges were nonsense and that many of the accused had no more connection with al-Qaeda than Woody Allen has with the Hells Angels. But they might do it, whereas a military tribunal would consist of career military who are much less likely to arrive at a verdict that would enrage their superiors.
  The detainees in the USA ‘s little bubble of lawlessness in Cuba were mostly in the Taliban’s ‘foreign legion’, Islamic fighters for an Islamic regime that was a de facto government, which is not a crime. The Taliban were tolerating al-Qaeda but might have been persuaded to give them up if the US has been prepared to show respect for the Taliban way of doing things.
  California dreaming: Direct democracy in line with the best libertarian principles has given California a vast budget deficit, since there is almost always a clear majority for less taxes and more public services. And when this doesn’t add up, fire the top man for not meeting the public’s wishes.
• Parliamentary Diary: Come Fly With Me:  The Government seems determined to support a huge expansion in air travel in spite of the opinion of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution that aviation’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions will rise to 22% of the UK’s total by 2020Organic Farming: Is the End Nigh? Former Environment Minister Michael Meacher was in Canada recently studying the effect of GM crop planting on organic farms. Not surprisingly he discovered that the organic crops had been contaminated and he concluded from this that the UK should not approve the commercial development of GM crops.

No LTUR 132 – September 2003. Not yet scanned.

PDF for LTUR 133 – October 2003

• Cancun Not So Canny  Since the end of the Cold War the international organisations much favoured by the West have been discredited and falling like ninepins. The decent thing for NATO to have done in 1989 was to have wound itself up as its war was over. But no, with the ‘pacifist’ Mr. Solana and the ‘socialist’ Lord Robertson at the helm, it went looking for wars and expanding like mad. But it was all for nought. When the US wanted to engage in war it ignored NATO. Despite frantic pleas from it to join in, the US said thanks, but no thanks. So NATO is now a bit of a joke. Another major international organisation, the UN, will not survive the Iraq war with any credibility whatever, while the EU is now at sixes and sevens about itself. Indeed, the Euro referendum in Sweden shows its credibility is on the line. And, on the same day, the WTO Ministerial meeting in Cancun collapsed.
• The occupation forces in Iraq
• Jonathan Powell’s “bit of a problem”: The September dossier contains on page 19 an assessment of what it calls “Saddam’s willingness to use chemical and biological weapons”. Until just before the dossier was published, this assessment gave the strong impression that these weapons would only be used for defensive purposes — which amounted to saying that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was no threat to anybody.
  But just before the dossier was cleared for publication, the assessment was changed to remove this strong impression and, by so doing, give the impression that Saddam Hussein might use these weapons for aggressive purposes— which implied that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq constituted a threat of some kind to the outside world.
• Report on a Demonstration Against Occupation of Iraq
• Iraq Dossier not justified by intelligence.
• New Labour: The Radish Road.  The present labour leadership are in power because they followed the ‘Radish Road’: red outside, white inside. They were leftists when this was the path to office, helping to defeat the authentic moderates of the Social Democrats, who were eventually absorbed by the ineffective and small-minded Liberals. The ‘radishes’ seemed very red back then, they showed their real characters later on. New Labour has capitulated to New Right ideas in the way the Social Democrats never did, become enthusiasts at a time when the Tories were feeling doubts.
  Article available as a web page.
• Book Review: Sean Moylan: In His Own Words
• The Pension Credit: Means-testing gone mad.
• Parliamentary Diary: In Praise of Blair: Kinnock and Militant had a mutual hatred. Militant members were expelled, or left the Party, and in that sense Kinnock won. But Militant was right about one thing: Kinnock, they said, was a charlatan who would ditch his colleagues and his left-wing views at the slightest whiff of power.Tyrants: Who’s next? Blair’s view that the invasion of Iraq can be justified on the grounds that it got rid of a brutal tyrant (is there any other sort?) is supported, in part at least, by Clive Soley who knows a thing or two about brutality, having served as a Probation Officer before he entered Parliament.
• No Notes on the News this month.

PDF for LTUR 134 – November 2003

• Selling off Iraq, with a little help from the UN.  Resolution 1511 was passed unanimously by the Security Council on 16 October. It (a) paves the way for the occupying powers in Iraq to privatise state assets, and (b)transforms the occupying forces in Iraq into UN forces in all but name, and authorises them to use force to put down resistance to the occupation. The chief opponents of the invasion – France, Germany and Russia — voted for these measures, and so did Syria and Pakistan.
• Liberal Imperialism Past and Present: The repercussions for today’s Middle -East.  By Brendan Clifford.
  [How Imperial Liberalism laid the ground for fascism.]
  Liberal Imperialism was not a term of abuse applied to the Liberal Government of 1905-1915 by Liberal opponents of imperialism. It was the position frankly adopted by the leading stratum of the Liberal Party.
  Three decisions [made during and after World War One]; on Ireland, Austria and Germany, launched Europe into its Fascist phase. (Italian Fascism had its source in British encouragement of Italian irredentism in 1915, and in its welshing in 1919 on the deal about the share-out of the Hapsburg Empire which had brought Italy into the war).
  The fourth decision is still awaiting its consequences.
  Britain embarked in 1914 on a straightforward conquest of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. There was then very little in the way of Arab nationalism — a handful of intellectuals in Damascus and a chieftain in Basra.  The deal was that there should be an Arab State in the Middle Fast when the Ottoman Empire was overthrown. Then Britain made a secret treaty with France in breach of this deal. And in 1917 it offered a large stretch of the Middle East to the Zionist Organisation.
  The whole of this article has been posted as a webpage.
• Iraq: Kenneth Clarke speaks: “I think that the decision to go to war in Iraq was the worst military decision taken by this country since the Suez invasion, and history will judge that it poses several of the same issues: a bogus reason was given to the House of Commons for embarking on the war in the first place; no clear forethought had been given to what would happen in the event of our being militarily successful, which was strongly likely in both cases; and when we are sufficiently far from now and able to look back properly, it will pose quite big questions about what the role of this country is in the modern world.”
• Whom to believe? Well…
  The Israeli army’s credibility problem, By Uri Avnery
  The world believes Hamas and does not believe the IDF spokesman. The Israeli public believes Hamas. Even cabinet ministers and Knesset members believe Hamas and do not believe the army spokesman. The crisis of confidence was revealed in all its harshness by a series of events last week in the Gaza Strip. According to the Palestinians, the army fired air-to-surface missiles at a car in which there were two Hamas militants. When people from the neighbourhood crowded around the smashed car to see if they could help the victims, they were attacked by another missile. All in all 14 Palestinians were killed, among them a doctor who had rushed there to help, and dozens of others, including many women and children, were wounded.
  [Sadly, the same bad pattern lasted for another two decades, and is still defended by Western governments and mainstream media.
• Judicial Inquiry? [False stories about Saddam’s Iraq.]
• Review of Eric Schlosser’s “Americans” by John Clayden.
• Hitler’s English Inspirers, by Manuel Sarkisyanz, Ph.D.  Reviewed by Gwydion M. Williams
• Notes on the News: Two Black Hawks and a Chinook: Iraq has been used as raw material for New Right fantasies. Keynesianism was able to reshape Western Europe and much of East Asia while confronting a rival superpower, because Keynesianism worked for as long as people wanted it to. The New Right is floundering in Iraq, because New Right ideas are bloody stupid. They work only as an excuse for plundering existing wealth, as has been happening in Russia. But in Russia, people were at least fooled for a while and did elect Yeltsin and his bunch of crooks.
  Plundering Iraq’s wealth has so far proved difficult. The administration of Bush Junior has been notable for ‘Pork- Barrel Libertarianism’, state power used to help the rich while the needy are ignored.
  At the time of writing (7th Nov) the biggest news is that a second Black Hawk has been brought down, a hattrick of American military helicopters.  More striking than the downed helicopter was the Iraqis celebrating
  Save A Soldier, Kill A Child: I don’t suppose that the makers of cluster bombs will be using my slogan to sell their products. Because that’s exactly what it does. They may express it as ‘reducing battlefield losses’, but nothing is without a price.
  Iraq, the never-ending story: Rather than developing weapons of mass destruction, Saddam knew that he faced defeat and was arming a highly structured guerrilla force. It suggests that the resistance is far more orchestrated than was previously thought and could take longer to destroy.  [‘Longer’ turned out to mean ‘never’.  But it also became sectarian.]
  Democracy: Iraq Says No: It’s clear now that there were no `Weapons Of Mass Destruction’, and that Bush must have known that there were not. So we must assume that the USA there in the hope of teaching Iraqis that they have no right to be any different from the USA.
  Ghost Stories: On the 31′ October, there was a large anti-US demonstration in Baghdad in which posters of Saddam were carried. Reality like that offends even liberal critics of Bush’s war, so the matter was carefully buried in obscurity.
  Mclslam and Normal Islam: There was a time when Islam seemed to be fading into history. In the 1950s and 1960s, the basic fight over the direction of the society seemed to have been settled in favour of secularism and modernisation on either the Leninist or the Western model. But Third World nations behaving as sovereign bodies was not always convenient for the USA. And Islam of a rather backward sort seemed a convenient weapon to use, especially in Afghanistan. The `fundamentalists’ of the US Christian tradition had never let the Bible get in the way of worship of the Golden Calf. Why should Fundamentalist Islam be any different?
  But capitalist industrialisation was an outgrowth of the very Protestant- Nonconformist faith that spawned the Christian `fundamentalists’, and the ‘fundamentalists’ are the detritus after the thoughtful, the educated and the powerful have gone elsewhere. These ‘fundamentalists’ are fanatical about recent human origins in the Garden of Eden, but Jesus’ s rejection of money and wealth is ignored. Various forms of Protestantism had tried to rule in the 17th century, and failed. Three centuries of struggle and diminishing power had left the Christian ‘fundamentalists’ quite ready to be running-dogs for Big Business—and Big Business was also visibly part of their own culture.
  None of this applied in the Islamic world.
  Fragging By Proxy?: The current round of Iraqi Resistance began with an impressive attack on an US headquarters at the Rashid Hotel. It killed a US Lieutenant-Colonel, and came very close to Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. It would be elementary security to keep secret the exact location of your top man. The US can be amazingly arrogant and careless at times, but I can’t believe they failed to do this. And yet the Resistance knew exactly where to hit. They got within yards of him, and must have had inside information from someone the US thought trustworthy.
  Third Way Ends Sadly: Saddam’s Iraq was solidly secular, tolerant of small number of surviving Middle-East Christians—people whose traditions are a direct continuation from the Apostles, without the distortions that the creed acquired after passing through Greece and Rome.
  Saddam had a place for them, but if Iraq ever gets together again, it can only be as a hardline Islamic state
  Thieves robbed! Shock Horror in Western Eyes: Russia in 1991 thought it was selling its ideals for a better life. This wasn’t the case: they got nothing like the USA’s generous rebuilding of Western Europe and non-Communist Fast Asia in the 1950s. Those countries were built up thanks to trade barriers and state intervention, the very methods that the USA itself had used in the 19′” century. But by the 1990s, ‘free markets’ were the rule. Both the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries saw a sharp drop in their living standards, as the ‘miracle of the market’ was tested. The ‘miracle of the market’ faired no better than King Canute’ s attempts to hold back the waves.
  The Warsaw Pact countries are now being incorporated into the European Union. What numerous French or German ruler tried to do has now been achieved by a functional French-German alliance.
  From Khrushchev onwards, Russia’s various attempts at improving themselves through market forces have gone badly wrong, generating corruption and damaging real wealth. But this was never worse than under Yeltsin, where Privatisation meant corrupt officials becoming legal owners of oil and other wealth than existed already.
  When the US government finally moved against Enron, the main complaint was that they hadn’t acted long before. But though a general pattern of fraud and tax evasion is known to be normal in post-Soviet Russia, the arrest of Mr Khodorkovsky for fraud and tax evasion charges is treated as monstrous by all of the Western media.
  Rational Economics: In the USA, unlike Britain, the working mainstream of the society has been losing out ever since the 1980s. Thatcher was able to squeeze the poor and sell off state assets, mostly because anyone with a decent job and a little property was doing fine. It’s quite different in the USA, where a century or more of paying workers well has been reversed by `Reaganomics’.
  Since most people know that only a small minority are gaining, how do the Republicans keep winning elections? It’s simple really—vastly more people aspire to the elite or identify with the elite than can ever hope to be in it.
  19% of American taxpayers believe themselves to be in the top 1% of earners. A further 20% expected to end up in the top 1%. (Economist, September 6th 2003). With beliefs like that, America is going to get a lot more unequal before public opinion revolts.
  The New Space Race.: The USA putting men on the moon was the key victory in the space race. The initial Soviet advantage in space seemed to justify the Marxist vision of a non-capitalist future. But the program was mismanaged: part of the general deterioration of what had been a highly successful economy before Khrushchev `reformed’ it.
  In China, Deng managed to do what Khrushchev failed to do. Perhaps because he never demoralised the society by denouncing Mao in the way Khrushchev denounced Stalin. And also because Deng allowed enterprise in controlled areas, rather than expecting solutions to magically appear thanks to market forces. The revival of the whole `miracle of the market’ notion began with Khrushchev, at a time when the West would have denied that it was capitalist and was actually practicing a kind of Democratic Corporatism. Khrushchev also blundered by letting the USSR be seen as an equal to the USA, which it was not. China has so far been wiser, acting as one of several powers on the second rung of power, along with Russia, Japan, the European Union and maybe India.
  A basic space program is almost an automatic offshoot of being a nuclear power. Intercontinental missiles are the safest way to be sure of hitting your enemy, or letting any potential enemy know they could be hit hard, which is more to the point. Missiles big enough for that are not hard to adapt for putting people into orbit—though France and Britain chose to avoid it and opt for a European space program with no manned flights.
  China’s Long March rockets are home-grown and began under Mao. Manned flight cost much more and plans for it were dropped in the 1980s. (More than pride, October 14′, Financial Times) The program was restarted in 1992, after China had been through the Tiananmen crisis of 1989. Maybe more significantly, it was after the Gulf War showed just what sort of a future the USA was planning.
  Actual human-flight aspect draws heavily on Soviet technology, which was tested and reliable in a way that the Space Shuttle is not, and which by then VMS going cheap. However “Shenzou is not so much a copy of the Soyuz as the next evolutionary step”. (New Scientist, 25th October 2003).
  There isn’t in fact any huge need to put humans into space, nothing much for -them to do for the foreseeable future. But China now has the third manned space program and the second or third overall space program (given that Russia is now dependant on the USA). This puts it well ahead of India or Japan, on a level with Europe. Which, historically, is where it normally belonged. Adam Smith in the late 18`” century saw India and China as equal to Europe, China maybe richer. It was only in the 19th century that Europeans imagined that the gap was enormous and unlikely ever to be bridged.
  Harry Plotter & the Quietly Ignorant Troll: Alas Poor Duncan (but what a fool). No one now cares about the little trouble over [Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith’s] wife’s job. Still, before he was voted out, the worry was he might have to go under even worse circumstances.
  The issue was not whether his wife did some work. It’s whether she actually did the 25 hours a week she was being paid for. And it’s also about how a man at the top of politics could have left himself vulnerable. A striking contrast to Clerk, who openly and legitimately gets an income for promoting cancer and ill-health in the Third World on behalf of the Tobacco Barons.
  I’m also not surprised to learn that IDS is also a thriller writer. A thriller is fantasy that can pass for reality, and is exactly what a politician should not be thinking.
  After John Major, the Tories chose a balding leader who wasn’t taken seriously outside of the Tory Party. When he lost, they sensibly replaced him with a balding leader who wasn’t taken seriously outside of the Tory Party. And now with IDS fell, they rallied round a balding leader who isn’t liked or taken seriously outside of the Tory Party.
  Can Howard the Dark Lord make them any more electable? I really doubt it. The Ministry for Magic Circles is long defunct. Portillo is leaving Parliament to spend more time with his vanity. The rest are more Bumblebores than Dumbledores, reflecting a party with an average membership of 65 and a dwindling existence outside of South-East England. I don’t see anyone lasting long at Defence against Dark Arts. Or even Artful Ducks.
  [The Tories actually had a brief recovery with David Cameron, who seemed a new sort of Tory.  But he wrecked the country by promising a Brexit referendum, and allowing it to be won with a simple majority rather than a super-majority.  Cameron looks rather like a blip on a road downwards.]
• No Notes on the News or Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 135 – December 2003

• Democracy and its Discontents: The people in Iraq are in favour of democracy, according to an opinion poll conducted on behalf of the Occupation Powers. And we were told that that is a good thing and that it justifies the war. But it appeared on the other hand that there was much confusion about what democracy is—which is not such a good thing, and might even mean that democracy could in the first instance take the form of civil war.
  Iraqi opinion was consulted in a matter of which it had no experience. When Britain, after the conquest of the Middle East, threw the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul together for its own convenience and decreed that they were to be the nation-state of Iraq, it held an election to choose a King. It had its own candidate for the post, the son of the Sherif of Mecca—a foreigner who had no connection with Mesopotamia or Mosul. A local candidate also stood for the post: Said Talib of Basra. When it looked to be a certainty that the British candidate would lose, Said Talib was kidnapped and deported to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) by the British administration, with the active collaboration of Gertrude Bell and other dedicated supporters of the Arab cause. And that was done by the first-ever democratically elected government of the United Kingdom.
  Russia became a democracy twelve years ago. On the basis of a decade of actual experience, public opinion surveys during the present election campaign indicated that most Russians have concluded that democracy is something they do not want, and that they will therefore vote for Putin, somewhat in the spirit in which Germans voted for Hitler in 1933.
  A Russian refugee in the financial oligarchy, who is wanted for fraud in Russia, gave an interview to the BBC after the arrest in Russia of a fellow-oligarch. He predicted with utter certainty that Putin would lose the election because capital requires freedom and the power of capital is irresistible. He sounded just like a British Marxist of the 1980s—the decade of the Aaranovichs, Millibands and all the other believers in economic determinism who were guided by their beliefs into the corridors of power. It will be interesting to see whether capital, after a decade in which it has reduced Russian life expectancy by twenty years, can secure the defeat of Putin and prevent the restoration of authoritative government.
  Because this is the era in which democracy is the only legitimate form of government, it is also an era in which the history of democracy cannot be written. It is impossible to write the history of sacred things without undermining their sacredness.
  It has long been a prevailing sentiment amongst right-thinking people that all governments ought to be democratic. This sentiment has now been enhanced into the definite position that all government must be democratic, and that states that do not make themselves into democracies must be made into democracies by outside force—by the Ameranglian militants of the global democratic revolution announced by the President.
• The Case of Martin Hohmann: An obscure German Christian Democrat, Martin Hohmann, made a speech in his home town on ‘German National Day’ (3rd October). It does not appear that he was courting notoriety. Thousands of speeches are made in all corners of Germany and few are reported in the wider world. Hohmann’s speech was not reported. No notice was taken of it until an American, trawling through the Internet with some purpose in mind, found it on Hohmann’s website and drew attention to it in the appropriate quarters. The Israeli Ambassador demanded that Hohmann should resign his Parliamentary seat. It was then demanded that the Christian Democratic Union should expel him. The CDU leader, Angela Merkel, did expel him from the Parliamentary Party.
• Justice For Germany: Translation Of Speech By Bundestag Member Martin Hohmann On German National Day
• Britain in the firing-line: being shoulder-to-shoulder with the US increases the risk that British targets will be hit, at home and abroad. And invading Iraq alongside the US has further increased the risk.
  Blair made those choices for Britain, and unfortunately they were endorsed by Parliament. Those choices will get British targets hit and British people killed.
• Assembly Election Statement from Councillor Mark Langhammer
• Israel & Iran: Double standard on nuclear weapons
• Time to do away with the PA, By Gideon Levy: This farce should have been ended long ago. If the leaders of the Palestinian Authority had been blessed with a greater measure of self-respect, readiness for personal sacrifice and political audacity, they would have long since declared the PA liquidated and left all the responsibility solely in Israel’s hands. If they were more concerned about the subjects they are supposed to be in charge of – the well-being of their nation – they would have resigned and thereby torn the mask from the false impression of the supposed government and the “state in the making.” They would have ceased to be the fig leaf that serves and perpetuates the Israeli occupation. Instead, they cling to the few honors and benefits that Israel continues to confer on a few of them, and they go on lending a hand to the great deception that a sovereign Palestinian Authority and a government with powers exist.
• Notes on the News: Asses kick Americans: There was probably a circular from al-Qaeda to the Iraqi resistance, to hold off during Bush’s visit to Britain because something big was planned. No doubt this leaked and caused the dire warnings about bombs in Britain. And of course they were looking in the wrong place. The Islamists have so far been thinking strategically, and running rings round Anglo-America. Everyone was watching Britain, so they hit British interests in Istanbul.
  I had a strong feeling there’d be no bombs in Britain itself. Reaction to past IRA bombs in London has been to carry on and ‘tough it out’. The English norm is tougher, more brutal and much less flappable than the New York average. Britain not like the USA, where police, military and crime have all been subcontracted to ethnic minorities. In Britain, there is considerable racist resistance to letting them in at all to the police and military. And the population as a whole retains a highly military spirit. Maybe al-Qaeda know, or have been advised by people who know, in any case they have so far avoided doing anything that would damage their cause rather than advance it. Overseas British targets are another matter.
  Turks are also extremely tough. But which side will they be on, if things go on the way they have been going? The idea of Turkish troops in Iraq has been dropped,
  My Country Wrong & Deserving Defeat: Bush in his visit made something of the freedom to protest. But he was making a virtue of necessity: the notion that you could protest at a war while your own country was fighting it is a relatively new one, established by the successful anti-Vietnam protests in the USA in the 1960s. It did not apply in either World War. Before that, USA did not suppress pro-Confederate opinions during the Confederate Secession, but that was maybe because it was too strong to be suppressed. The existence of a right of protest during a war is not luck, it’s a matter of popular protest and past popular disgust at blunderers who caused avoidable wars.
  In Britain, one wing of the Liberal Party protested at the Boer War, facing harassment but no actual legal penalties. A century earlier, in the wars following the French Revolution, the law was manipulated to turn all anti-government opinions into ‘treason’. The British electorate was tiny in those days, excluding most of the middle classes. In terms of real power, a few hundred rich men controlled enough MPs to ignore even the bulk of the electorate. British power in the days of our struggle against Napoleon’s ‘tyranny’ suppressed any sentiment against the war. They had perhaps learned the lesson of the American War of Independence, when free expression of opinions did a lot to undermine the British position.
  In World War One, Lloyd George went from being a pro-Boer champion to being part of the anti-German hysteria. And he became the very architect of British victory—a victory more damaging than most defeats, as it turned out. Lloyd George intentionally stuck to war rather than taking up the German peace offers of 1915 and 1916, which would have treated the war as a stalemate and gone back to the 1914 borders.
  Also in World War One, the US Supreme Court decided that ‘free speech’ did not extend to Socialist protests at the war.
  Turkey: Slaughtering Secularism:  The USA built up Muslim extremism to undermine various left-wing forms of secularism, not realising that they were ruining the only forces able to modernise that society. In Turkey, Ataturk was not so different from Saddam, the big difference being that he had time to hammer secular patterns into the society and leave it secure enough for democracy to be tried without immediate disaster. Turkish secularism includes an assumption that the West will let them in on equal terms. And that isn’t going to happen, regardless of how much Turks may suffer for upholding Western interests.
  Had history gone differently, Turkey might have been absorbed peacefully into a European Community that was less stressed and hence less racist. That is not the way history went, and Turks would be wise to look back to their roots.
  [This was how things went, and are continuing to go.]
• Trade Union Diary: Straw’s Dogs.   The debate on international affairs on 27 November following the Queen’s Speech showed the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, at his most duplicitous. Challenged by Crispin Blunt, the Tory Member for Reigate, about the invasion of Iraq and its effect on terrorism, Straw said “The claim that there is a connection – that the terrorism has been caused by the conflict and that, as a result, the coalition is somehow indirectly responsible for it – I regard as complete nonsense”.
  Straw knows only too well that no one, especially not Crispin Blunt, believes or suggests that the invasion of Iraq is the root cause of the terrorism experienced over the past nine months. But it cannot be denied that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is creating instability on a global scale and is increasing the number of young men and women willing to die a martyr’s death to rid the world of the ‘evil empire’ that is the United States and the UK. It was also the opinion of British intelligence before the invasion occurred; an opinion ignored by Blair and Straw.

Summing up 2003:

The bad habits of the West in 2000 to 2002 culminated in 2003. And stalled: planned invasions of Iran and North Korea never happened.

It left the USA without a clear idea of what to do about China’s rise. New Rightists filled in with a series of false predictions that the Chinese system was just about to come apart. Each year’s false warnings were forgotten about the next year.