Labour Affairs Magazine

The official start of the 21st century, because there was no year zero.

The year of the Afghan War – an apparent Western triumph that was to end in disastrous failure.

Also more about Kosovo, and the New Labour enthusiasm for de-nationalisation.
The Corporate Internet: We’ve seen the future and it’s almost exactly like the past. The Internet and the spread of computer technology has simply ‘shuffled the deck’ for existing corporate power.
Remembering the film 2001 – HAL is a genie, not a computer. Many SF films are magic in disguise.

PDF for LTUR 100 – January 2001.

• Labour’s Free Trade Empire.  In the globalist era free trade is compulsory. Countries are not free to trade or not to trade based on a calculation of their material interests. They must engage in free trade or be outcasts. And what free trade means is that their economies must be market economies and must be open to capital investment from outside.
• Superior Health in Cuba, by David Morrison.
• ‘The Claims and Assertions by NATO About Kosovo Were Lies’, by James Bisset
• Hague Winds Up the Conservatives In Northern Ireland
• Asocialism and Sub-Americanisation, by Gwydion M. Williams.  Old Labour was dead in the water when it stopped talking about `denationalisation’ and accepted the new and meaningless ‘privatisation’.
  Likewise, the unquestioned use of terms like ‘free markets’ and `globalisation’, even by bitter critics of such things, puts the terms of the argument well away from the reality of what is happening. You appear an impractical opponent of necessary change.
• Hell and Polly Toynbee, by Diane Abbott
• Notes on the News: A Fate Worse Than Blair. The year 2001 will see an election that New Labour should win easily. In the end it will be the thought of the alternative that gives Tony Blair his second term.One Nation—And It’s Essex! Tory talk of ‘one nation’ used to mean an acceptance of different traditions. There was a time when Scottish Tories included substantial ministers and prime ministers. All it means now is that they do not recognise other traditions as valid. That their own tradition should be the core and the strongest element is not enough. These characters have such a view of their own superiority that there is no such thing as `enough’ in their eyes.
  Hague; Trucker Protests; European Union; The Internet; Tibet.

PDF for LTUR 101 – February 2001.

• Lockerbie Verdict: Beyond Reasonable Doubt? If the establishment of a functional system of international law became a practical possibility with the ending of the Cold War ten years ago, then the Lockerbie trial marks a decisive shift away from its realisation.
  It may or may not be the case that the individual who was found guilty by the Scottish Court actually played a part in placing the bomb on the aircraft. The evidence did not establish that he had. The judges found him guilty on the strength of the possibility that he could have, while the relatives of the victims who had sat through the whole of the trial were so clearly surprised by the judges’ certainty that their response was tantamount to declaring it a perverse verdict.
• Liberalism, Socialism & Locke, by Christopher Winch.
• Lord Gilbert and Kosovo, by David Morrison.
• Rebels Without A Clue.  Gwydion M. Williams looks at the limits of ‘Anti-Capitalists’ demonstrations.
• Lockerbie, by David Morrison.  A gasp of surprise went round the court when al-Megrahi was pronounced guilty Il because most people who had followed the trial proceedings (including the relatives of the British victims) believed that the prosecution had failed to establish a case to convict either of the accused.
• February 1917: a poem by John Challis
• Parliamentary Diary: Labour: Old and New.   There was a time when Labour backbenchers believed in the public ownership of essential public services, such as energy and transport. But that was swept aside by the Blair revolution, masterminded by Peter Mandelson. It is now an established new Labour principle that public services should be subject to the rigours of the market, deregulated and liberalised. Even right-wing Tories are amazed at the free market enthusiasm of some of their Labour ‘opponents’.Hinduja brothers; Tam Dalyell opposing air-strikes on Iraq;
• Notes on the News: The Blair Whatever Project.  The government has no clear ideas, but is just drifting and hoping to avoid scandals. Which is why Mandelson was thrown out for the mere clumsy appliance of lying
  While Blair lacks all conviction, Hague is full of glib and ignorant intensity, seeking to emulate the success of the US Republicans. When will the Tories notice that you can’t win a British general election by catering to the prejudices and ignorance of the US electorate?
  Then again, when it comes to catering to the prejudices and ignorance of the British electorate, what can they offer beyond what New Labour are already doing?
• As Free As Money Despite growing protests, Yankee- Globalisation or Asocial Globalisation is the official world ideology. A free system, we are told.
  The world runs by many different sort of constraint. Laws, yes. But also community customs (if you have a community). And most people find the real limits on their freedom are lack of money and lack of time.
  2001, A Stress Odyssey. This year, obviously, we are reminded of the film 2001. It is noted that the impetus of the 1960s stopped with the USA getting to the moon first. We could have built lunar bases and space ships like the ones shown, if the will and funding had been there—which it was not, once the lunar landings confirmed US superiority. The Liberal left foolishly attacked the project, arguing that the money should be spent down here instead. As indeed it was, but mostly on weapons and on consumption by the rich.
  It’s also noted we do not have computers like HAL, the machine that holds human-like conversations and then runs amok and murders the crew. That’s true, but that’s because HAL isn’t a computer, he’s a genie. It’s good story-telling, but bad science (unlike the engineering and astronomy, which was the best known at the time.)
  Stockbrokers behave like sheep; Post Office as Consignia [soon abandoned]; Blastocyst Cloning.

PDF for LTUR 102 – March 2001.

• Elections, Democracy and Manipulation: When the strategy of one party is to make itself indistinguishable from the other the connection between democracy and casting a vote every few years becomes very tenuous.
• The Liberalism of John Stuart Mill.  Christopher Winch considers socialism and the harm principle.
• Lockerbie: the untold stories, by David Morrison
• China Blues.  Gwydion M. Williams reviews The Tiananmen Papers
• If you can’t stand the heat…  Sean McGouran examines Westminster culture, and the career of Betty Boothroyd, at that time the Speaker of the House of Commons,
• Index of articles for the year 2000.
• Notes on the News: Little Higher Than The Mice;  Last year, the ‘sequenced’ human genome had been read but not understood. It is still full of enigmas, one of which is that we have not many more genes than a mouse, and are closer to worms than we supposed.
  Humans are only human because culture gives us the fine-tuning. We are not otherwise hugely different from other primates, most of which are social and able to learn new tricks.
  Continuous bad news is not news.  In 1999, 65 people died in rail accidents, 31 in air accidents, 10 in sea accidents and 3,423 in road accidents. (The Guardian, 1st March) Our perceptions of danger are made by the media. And in a competitive media market, it pays them to play up to the public desire for instant perfection all the time (sometimes). This is part of the Liberal model of society, an abstraction made up of swarms of ‘The Individual’; or a sludge of units of The Individual’, all stuck in a traffic jams.  [One eccentric advert put it nicely: You are not stuck in traffic.  You are traffic.]
  Mouth-and-Wallet disease.   The demand for cheap food has led to an Interflesh network’, with live animals stressed and intermingled, and then becoming potentially diseased offal fed back to more animals  [There was a major foot-and-mouth outbreak at the time.]
  Third Way: Blair’s Third Way does not involve any repudiation of ‘unending struggle’ and the need fora’ war against cosiness’. Neither does it take on board the fact that Thatcherism stabilised the culture but did not significantly improve the economy.
  Non-Globalisation: Both Europe and the USA demand that money and goods flow freely through national borders, but that these remain impermeable to people and to welfare responsibilities. They also assume the right to cherry-pick the most useful and trained people from poor countries.
  The Corporate Internet.   We’ve seen the future and it’s almost exactly like the past. Far from realising the Libertarian vision of swarms of The Individual prospering in suburban isolation, the Internet and the spread of computer technology has simply ‘shuffled the deck’ for existing corporate power. Firms like Yahoo and AOL have achieved greatness from small beginnings, as Microsoft did before them.
  Hague: anti-gravitas.

PDF for LTUR 103 – April 2001.

• Will Labour’s Luck Hold? New Labour has been extraordinarily lucky. When they took over in May 1997, the UK economy had been growing steadily and continuously for five years. The growth began even before sterling was forced out of the ERM in October 1992
• Ernest Bevin: A brief radio discussion.
• PPP: the foolish public–private partnership, by David Morrison.
• The Enemy At The Gates.  John Clayden on a new film about the Battle of Stalingrad.
• John Major’s comments on Brown’s Budget
• China After Tiananmen by Gwydion M. Williams
• Hayek and Neoliberalism, by Christopher Winch
• Parliamentary Diary: Road Safety, The Government refuses to introduce a mandatory 20 mph speed limit in heavily populated areas, relying instead on local authorities to use their powers to do so if they feel it to be necessary. The effect of this voluntary approach is catastrophic. Of the 3,138 fatal road accidents in Great Britain in 1999, 1,077 occurred in areas with a 30 mph speed limit
  Hinduja brothers; Foot and mouth crisis.
• Notes on the News: Globalist Bubbles.   The same people who demanded that everyone ‘liberalise’ their economic structures are now ‘voting with their money’ and showing that a lot of US prosperity in the 1990s was fictitious. The new technology has a grand future. But big fortunes were made at places like Microsoft, only because no one then saw their work as very significant.
  The same is true of the Internet. Today’s giants—and a lot of forgotten failures—came from an era when the Internet was an oddity. The same idea had been a resounding flop with Britain’s Prestel Viewdata, and a moderate success with France’s Mintel. The only possible fortunes would be made in some technology that’s not just now taken very seriously, but is destined for future greatness. And no one can predict this: the successes in microcomputers, internet etc. were lucky in that their hobby grew into an industry. As was Henry Ford before them.
  The USA in the 1990s got a one-off boost from being first to invent a version of the new technologies that the rest of the world would use. That’ s not likely to be repeated.  [I said this well before US decline became widely recognised.  And treated as mysterious.]Two Strikes And Change The Rules: Labour in 1997 had a commitment to PR. But that was when they expected a small majority and a Tory recovery. With a gigantic majority and with Hague doing his ‘Die Hard With A Tory’ number, there was no reason to change the rules.
  This time it’s more moot. Blair can hardly lose in 2001, but 2005 would be another matter. The US democrats were taken as a model, and they lost to an inept right-winger after eight years of moderately successful government.
  Macedonia:  The difference between Albanians in Macedonia and Albanians in Kosovo is that Albanians in Kosovo were fighting an enemy of the USA. [They remain a fairly content minority.  The country changed its name to North Macedonia, to please the Greeks.]
  Flat-Faced Fellows of Kenya:   The first australopithecines were taken to be our own ancestors. But later they found Homo habilis, and had to accept that the coexistence of these `handy-people’ with the animal-people or australopithecines. Only with walk-tall- people (Homo erectus) were our ancestors particularly widespread or successful. The animal-people vanishing during an ecological crisis about a million years ago, there is no evidence at all the two species were ever in conflict.
  Up until now it was also believed that Australopithecus afarensis—the famous Lucy—was assumed to be the common ancestor. But the newly discovered fossils of Kenyanthropus platyops—a flat-faced human from Kenya—make it clear that things were much more complex.
  We only have the skull, but human-style jaws make sense only if the hand can use tools and substitute for strong animal teeth. Discoveries made so far rather vindicate Engels’ s view of the key role of humans hands, ‘the part played by labour in the transition from ape to man’. False notions of inevitable competition are tied up with what one might call ‘the part played by Tories in the reversion of people to ape-like behaviour’—though New Labour are almost as enthusiastic.
  There’s another interesting point, something no fossil is ever likely to cast light on. We are the only ‘singing hominid’, and few other mammals besides the whales and dolphins can sing as distinct from yelping or howling. And whales and dolphins also share with us an unexpectedly large brain. Birds also sing, of course, without being very clever. Yet maths and music are somehow related, the same people are good at both, much more often than chance could explain. And good singing is a notable sexual attractant, though it has no obvious link with fitness to breed.
  As well as working our way to humanity out of an ape-like condition, maybe we also sang ourselves along the way. As well as nice individual performances, collective song is the best known method for getting people working together and living together peacefully.

PDF for LTUR 104 – May 2001.

• Stop Blair: Vote Tory. The only kind of change New Labour is capable of, or interested in, is further commercialisation and globalisation of public services.
• Lockerbie Trial
• China and the USA – Air Confrontation
• Foot-and-Mouth Crisis
• Internet Commerce
• Parliamentary Diary:  Foot-and-Mouth; Kelvin Hopkins; Clare Short: Defender of Global Capitalism;
• No Newsnotes this month

PDF for LTUR 105 – June-July 2001.

• Second Chance;   New Labour’s achievement of “an historic second  term” with a second massive majority was not an  enthusiastic endorsement by the electorate of their  performance in the first term.
• The Breaking Up of British Rail
• Europe’s New Imperialism
• The Enforcement Of Liberty; Liberalism began with Cromwell  and his political heirs, the Whig or Liberal  Party.
• What Happened At Racak? (A massacre of ethnic Albanians, which was used to start the NATO war against Serbia.)
• Moabite Sonnets (poems from a man executed after the attempt to assassinate Hitler)
• Parliamentary Diary:  Trade Unions and Privatisation
• Notes on the News: Hague Steps Down as Tory Leader; Record Low Turnout; China joins the World Trade Organisation

PDF for LTUR 106 – August 2001.

• What Do We Vote For?  Voting makes a difference to those who are voted for. If it also made a difference to those who vote— beyond the imaginary difference arising from fanciful sympathy with one lot or detestation of the other— then voting could be taken for granted.
• A Parliamentary Voice Against PFI: David Taylor M.P. on the flaws of the Private Finance Initiative
• David Trimble: Peacemaker?;  As violence continues to fill the political vacuum in Northern Ireland Brendan Clifford considers David Trimble’s role.
• Hitler’s Tories; Hitler’s rise would have been impossible if he had not been treated as a normal, and sometimes useful, politician by a large section of the British Tory Party.
• Parliamentary Diary:  Trade Unions against the Private Finance Initiative.
• Notes on the News:  The Demolition Of Britain; Thatcherism demolished the economic structure of post-war Britain, supposing that the social structure would then ‘recover’ and go back to being what it was. The very opposite happened. New Labour accepted the demolition and is quite happy that the whole lot should go.
  Punk Capitalism; Fantasy-crook Was Real Crook… Jeffrey Archer;
  Beijing 2008;  Human rights include such minor matters as eating, education, getting medical treatment and having a job. Only those who feel secure about such things care a lot about free journalism and multi-party democracies.

PDF for LTUR 107 – September 2001.

• New Labour’s Euro Humbug; Joining the euro is out for the foreseeable future, and not because the Chancellor’s famous five economic tests have not been passed.
• World Trade Organization: Doha Failure.  It should never be forgotten that, along with globalisation and all the talk about ‘openness’, there is an array of rules to protect the globalisers when necessary—for example, anti-dumping rules, patents and copyright protection. All these are protectionist measures at the heart of the WTO. And of course there are hundreds of restrictions on movements of people.
• Liberal Egalitarianism?  The false promise of John Rawls.
• Mean And Average; Why New Right Economic Policies Have Been Sub-Standard
• The Corporate Takeover of the Public Sector
• Does Britain’s War Morality Apply to its Slave Enterprise? Nazis were charged with crimes which did not figure even in the most doubtful international law. When they pointed this out, they were told in effect that there was a body of international law which was natural law and did not need writing down. The kind of slavery conducted by Britain, for a century and a half after the Glorious Revolution inaugurated the era of liberty, surely comes under that law.
• No Parliamentary Diary or Notes on the News for this issue.

PDF for LTUR 108 – October 2001.

• US Dumps UN and NATO for its Afghan War; The “war on terrorism” will be conducted by the USA by whatever means if chooses, and with whatever allies it selects for particular operations.
• The US Is To Nationalise Airport Security The basic problem is that, because of the way airport security is organised in the US, airlines can cut costs and increase profits by skimping on airport security.
• Christopher Hitchens and Causality: The bombing of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon must not be understood in causal terms. That would be Fascist. Indeed, it must not be understood at all, strictly speaking. Thinking is fascist. Only emoting is legitimate.
• Anatomy of a Victory: CIA’s Covert Afghan War
• Rights Gone Mad; Robert Nozick’s Libertarianism
• Living In The Free And Democratic World
• Key Livingstone Fights On
• Parliamentary Diary: America right or Wrong
• No Notes on the News for this issue.

PDF for LTUR 110 – November 2001.

• Britain’s Bit Part In The Afghan War
• Against The Iron Consensus:
• Parliamentary Opposition to the War: Thirteen MPs— eleven Labour (Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Tam Dalyell, George Galloway, Lynne Jones, Robert Marshall-Andrews, Adam Price, Angus Robertson, Alan Simpson, Michael Weir and Mike Wood) and two Welsh Nationalist (Elfyn Llwyd and Hywel Williams)
• Would The Removal Of Bin Laden Make Any Difference?
• Authorised Terrorism; The influence of the USA has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished.
  There is still time for the USA to switch back to the UN framework of agreed International Law, rather than each US president making it up as he goes along. The USA has been able to evade or ignore the UN, which cannot be relied upon to serve the interests of the US Overclass.
• Is The War Authorised By The U.N.?
• Parliamentary Diary:  cosy self-delusion in the ‘war on terrorism’
• No Notes on the News for this issue

PDF for LTUR 110a – December 2001.

• U.S. Victory in Afghanistan?  Others had doubts about using the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, lest it establish facts on the ground that would make it difficult to establish a pluralist government in Afghanistan
  Iraq is said to be next on the US target list. Not that it has ever been off the US, or UK, target list since the Gulf War. But the objective being talked about now is the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
• Spanish Politics, by Connor Lynch
• A Not-For-Profit Railtrack?
• Class War: Railtrack and profit
• Tale of Two Feminisms.  John Clayden reviews Feminist Amnesia by Jean Curthoys, a theoretical critique of the feminist establishment
• Letter on the Labour Government’s War in Malaya.
• Parliamentary Diary: An Uncertain Future
• No Notes on the News for this issue

The December issue should have been 111, but was labelled 110. Our 2002 magazines began with issue 112.
There was also no issue 109. All done as part of our politics, by people who mostly had a full-time job as well.