Labour Affairs Magazine

Magazines for the year 2002 – Falsehoods About Afghanistan, Iraq, & Palestine

gwydionwilliams
31–46 minutes

The year 2002 saw an apparent US triumph in Afghanistan. We noted how many ordinary Afghans had been killed, and that Western media mostly did not care. And were scornful of their efforts at ‘nation building’, which of course were to fail completely.

We noted Israeli misbehaviour. They were not honouring an apparent promise to allow the Two State Solution that the bulk of the international community wanted. We repeatedly said that this only made sense if the intention was to eventually removed all Palestinian.
We noted that the West had allowed this, rather than make Israel share. That it was part of a general wish to dominate the rest of the world.

Towards the end of the year, a false case against Iraq was made by the USA and Britain, paving the way for the invasion in 2003.

Meantime Labour under Blair remained obsessed with Privatisation, even though it was visibly failing to bring any benefits.

PDF for LTUR 112 – January 2002

  • Western Victory in Afghanistan (in 2001):  A terrible price has been paid for the “great victory”. Not by America or Britain, nor by people with a responsibility for the attacks on America. It has been paid by Afghan civilians who had nothing to do with the events of 11 September, who did not chose to put the Taliban in power or to give Bin Laden and his friends a safe haven in Afghanistan.
    Thousands of entirely innocent Afghans civilians have died. Their deaths have gone largely unreported in Western media and have been entirely unmourned by Western Governments. There will be no official two-minute silence in Britain for them, as there was for the dead in the World Trade Centre,
  • Report From Serbia, by Dragos Kalajic.  Flying in the face of the important Helsinki Final Act, the European Community openly promoted and legalized secessions achieved through violence.
  • “Nation-Building” in Afghanistan, by David Morrison.  Groups which  forced the Soviet Union to withdraw in 1989, then engaged in internecine warfare as a result of which tens of thousands of civilians in Kabul were killed by artillery fire. It was their failure to end disorder and anarchy that paved the way for the emergence of the Taliban in 1994. It doesn’t bode well for the success of the new administration.
  • The Administration Of Ireland (1920):  much that British propaganda of later times attributed to German Militarism or Fascism was to be found much closer to home.
  • Japan, by Sean McGouran.  A defence of their differences.
  • Letters about Lysenko.
  • Why Ernest Bevin?  The Bevin Society grew out of the British and Irish Communist Organisation.  Bevin had answers than actually worked.
    An omniscient brand of Marxism had become the opiate of the revolutionaries. Many of them later cured their habit the traditional way, by becoming born-again – and seeing the light of market capitalism… The conflict between social democracy and bolshevism may have been tragic but it was never entirely mutually exclusive. But each was forced to make choices which entailed them having to accommodate their own characteristic necessary evils.
     The evils of Bolshevism followed from the drastic measures that were necessary to establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in a backward peasant country.
     The evils of Social Democracy were the consequence of having to come to an accommodation with substantial aspects of ruling class power in complex western industrial societies. Scientific enquiry has been successful because it has always had the courage to bear disillusionment.
     Accepting unpalatable facts entails shedding one’s illusions and that is painful.
     In politics this is even more the case. But we held it to be a virtue.
  • Notes on the News: Dust Of Afghanistan: The USA had found a cynically successful approach, pursue your quarrel on Afghan territory, using local quarrels and with copious bribery, and without any ambition to improve Afghans or give them good government. That’s not to say it was safe, regardless. With Russian Roulette, you’d get away with it just over 83% of instances, which hardly makes it safe. And the USA played and won its game of ‘Afghan Roulette’ without obvious disaster.
    The Clearance Of Canaan: Pro-American Arabs have been treated with contempt over the last few months. Israel is intentionally destroying the authority of Arafat, the one leader who could deliver a peace that most Arabs and Muslims would regard as fair.
    There is peace made with Arafat, or there is no peace with Islam. The way things have gone, it seems more accurate to say simply ‘there is no peace with Islam’.
    Israel is only safe when the Islamic world as a whole accepts it. This was happening with the decline of secular nationalism. Weak Muslim rulers would accept Israel as it was in 1968, and maybe a bit extra, if the Palestinians would accept it.
    What is not acceptable is Israel in full control of Jerusalem, and increasingly absorbing the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), a wholesale clearance of ancient Canaan of non- Jewish elements. Yet undermining Arafat makes no sort of sense unless that is the long-term goal    .
    Greater Need Hath The Greedy;  The poor are more generous than the rich when it comes to giving to good causes, according to research which challenges the “Robin Hood” myth of charity as an agent of redistribution.
    New Labour In Vain; `Hooding Rob’ and Argentina; House of Lords Reform
  • No Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 113 – February 2002

  • Prisoners of War? Thousands of civilians have been killed by US bombs in Afghanistan. They had nothing to do with the events of 11 September. They did not choose to put the Taliban in power or to give Bin Laden and his friends a safe haven in Afghanistan.
    Thousands more combatants have been killed, mostly by US bombs but some at the hands of our Afghan allies after capture. Other combatants have been tortured by our Afghan allies after capture. Few, if any, of them had any responsibility for the events of 11 September either.
    In comparison with that, America’s treatment of the few hundred prisoners held in US military custody at Guantanamo Bay Naval base in Cuba is a minor matter. Yet fully paid up supporters of America’s war, like Labour MP, Ann Clwyd, are very worked up about it. The phrase “straining at the gnat having swallowed the camel” springs to mind.
    Furthermore, the prisoners in Cuba are but a small fraction of the people in custody as a     consequence of the war.
  • September 11th: US Master Sergeant speaks Out.  He broke ranks following his experience in Haiti.
    “I don’t think they can get Afghanistan under control. What I’ve come to believe is that really the U.S.’s ability to dominate the entire planet is unraveling.”
  • Enron by David Morrison. The collapse of Enron in the US is just the latest and greatest of financial scandals. We all remember Barings Bank, BCCI, Maxwell, Polly Peck, to name only the most notorious companies, which one day were apparently successful and solvent and the next were bankrupt and worth nothing.
     All of these companies had their books audited by one of the large accounting firms, which didn’t notice anything amiss, or at least said they didn’t.
  • The Holocaust Industry By Norman Finkelstein.  Book review.   Both Norman Finkelstein’s parents were victims of the Nazi Final Solution. They both survived the concentration camps and settled in the USA.
    Until the late sixties the Jewish authorities were at pains to suppress any examination of the Holocaust. This was because they were in cahoots with the US establishment which was supporting Germany against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. They also wanted to distance themselves from the many Jewish radicals who at the time held a favourable view of the USSR because of its role in the war. There had also at this time been little interest shown in Israel on the Jewish left.
    After the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, things changed.
    He goes on to say that the characteristic Holocaust account is underpinned by two dogmas.
    1) The Holocaust marks a categorically unique historical event.
    2) The Holocaust marks the climax of an eternal and irrational gentile hatred of the Jews.
    Furthermore and necessarily such historical uniqueness cannot and should not be ascribed to any other historical event. But to claim this, places the Holocaust beyond any rational apprehension.
  • The Dynamics of Wage Relations in Europe’  Book Review.
  • Parliamentary Diary:  Playing Politics: Kinnock is mainly responsible for the Party being in its present impotent state, with control exercised from the top.The Euro—A Diversion?; A Matter Of Life And Death? (football).
  • Notes on the News: Political Dollars:  Economics used to be called `political economy’. In substance, that’s what it still is. But rich people with the good political connections like to pretend otherwise, and the ‘free’ media has been bought up by such plutocrats.
    Just now US big business is getting bailed out, with September 11th as a good excuse. Argentina another matter, it has no votes in the real centres of power…  Of course there is flexibility. Enron was allowed to crash, because it was huge and because it looks like it was always intended as a massive fraud.
    Afghans:  Peace-keeping run by foreign armies worked in the Balkans, because the various peoples of the Balkans had had centuries of occupation by some outside power, this is nothing new.
    The various Afghan tribes were another matter, either left alone or ruled by someone of similar spirit.
    You Will Fly These Hijackers To Cuba: The trouble with terrorism is that states are always likely to be better at it, and superpowers especially. The USA is showing this, and exposing the total hollowness of International Law. `Unlawful combatants’ is meaningless, an invented concept that allows exactly the sort of thing the Geneva Convention was intended to stop.  [But the USA’s Guantanamo base in Cuba is outside those rules.]
    New Labour Of The Third Kind: On the railways, the ‘miracle of the market’ is even more elusive than a White Christmas. Experience is showing that the old semi-capitalist formula was best. Tax-and-spend is no longer seen as unspeakable, and kin Duncan Smith is now resorting to the interesting idea of taxing less and spending more. Hire a few accountants from Enron to balance the books?
    Peer Pressure:  The semi-reformed House Of Lords could be around for a long while yet.

PDF for LTUR 114 – March 2002

  • The Tube Wreckers. It looks as if the PPP scheme for the London Underground is going ahead. Stephen Byers has decided that it is “value for money” and it only remains for the Health & Safety Executive to say the scheme is safe for final contracts to be signed.
  • Interview with Alice Mahon MP: I consider it was a civil war in Yugoslavia, brought on by external forces. Slovenia and Croatia were allowed, with the blessing of the European Union, to opt out of the Federal State of Yugoslavia, which led to the civil war.
  • The Euro: Not Just a Matter of Notes and Coins, by David Morrison
  • Our Air Was Not For Sale: It Was Given Away, by David Morrison.  Labour opposed Tory plans to privatise the National Air Traffic Service (NATS).  But then carried them through. 
    If ever there was a business that should not be run for profit it is NATS – because running it for profit is a threat to safety standards.
  • A public emergency threatening the life of the nation?  The function of the Order was to enable the UK Government to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights (which was put into domestic legislation by the Human Rights Act 1998). Specifically, it was to render inoperative Article 5 of the Convention on the Right to Liberty and Security, so that the internment measures in the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill then before Parliament could not be held to be illegal under the Convention.
  • Our Man In Espana, by Conor Lynch.  Franco wished to see a monolingual, mono-cultural Spain. for this purpose his instruments were the teachers, the priests and the police. Here he was spectacularly unsuccessful.
    I find the society that has emerged from both the successes and the failures of Franco a very congenial one. And it did emerge from that era. It didn’t come from anywhere else.
    I would not have wished to live in Franco’s Spain. I was getting more than a bit fed up with Ireland as it was by my late teens. But I suspect that it would be infinitely preferable to the sort of repressive, vicious world envisioned by people like Tony Blair, or his friends John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld.
  • Letter to the Editor on Labour and the Soviet Union.
  • The Mittal Affair.   How did an Indian businessman, Laksmi Mittal with only a passing connection to Britain succeed in getting the Foreign Office to back his bid to buy Sidex, a Romanian state steel firm?
  • Notes on the News: Neophiliacs of the ICA.   Neophilia was briefly a fashionable word in the 1960s, and was then dropped. Dropped because it didn’t seem to be describing anything in particular. Everyone took it for granted that any existing system deserved to be radically overhauled.
    Past ways must of doing things must of necessity be bad. A replacement system that works worse is still justified, it is at least not ‘living in the past’. This is a “universal truth” which is also assumed not to apply to religion, ‘family values’ or the electoral system.
    Regarding Modern Art at places like the ICA, my own suspicion is that the verdict of future generations on the official art-world of the late 20th century will be produced nothing of significance.
    Forgiven criminals.  Stories about Nazi scientific experiments in the death camps are mostly just stories, the work was generally amateurish and trivial. The well-known matter of using naked women to revive men who’d been dipped in freezing water showed that hot water bottles worked just as well. That one, at least, could have been readily performed with informed and consenting volunteers: most of the rest was neither funny nor interesting but just tragic and contemptible.
    It was a different matter with ‘Unit 731’, the Japanese project in Manchuria which was the subject of a recent BBC 2 program (3rdFebruary). It was a program of massive biological warfare research, in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese died. And at the end of the war, they killed the remaining human victims and released the infected rats.
    Glad To Be Dull?   After the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, the apparent strength of Japan came to be seen as a threat by the West. Japan was no longer a vital ally in the global struggle,
    It’s always struck me as remarkable that as the Cold War wound down and some in the USA were ready to cast them as the next enemy, Japan promptly went into a prolonged crisis. A situation that worries foreign economists more than it disturbs the Japanese themselves.
    As you sew, so shall you poison. “Farmers who plant genetically modified (GM) rapeseed may be creating new superweeds resistant to all but the toughest herbicides…
     “The plants themselves become weeds in the next crop”
    A nice little treadmill. Plants made tolerant to herbicides become weeds in other crops, besides spreading their genes to conventional weeds. But biotechnology companies have an answer, new herbicides for which their might otherwise be no large market.
  • No Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 115 – April 2002

  • Iraq: Bush Family Business? If the US had stuck to the policy of not taking sides in Arab-Arab disputes, there would have been no Gulf War. The Arab states didn’t want Western intervention. They wanted to sort out the Iraq-Kuwait dispute themselves. Western intervention was forced upon them.  [The article mentions peace being made with Libya, something later reversed.]
  • Is Labour minster Byers Fixing The Railways?  Railtrack is not going to be renationalised, nor are its functions going to be re-integrated with the rest of the railway system. There is no reason to believe that the new Railtrack will perform any better than the old one or will cost the taxpayer any less.
  • Fred Halliday:  Two Hours That Shook The World. Review By Brendon Clifford.  [The 911 Attacks].  The operative media definition of an al-Qaeda member seems to be somebody found among the Taliban defenders in Afghanistan who was not an Afghan. But Afghanistan is for diligent Muslims what Spain was for earnest anti-Fascists in 1936, and the presence of foreigners amongst the Taliban is no more evidence of a vast conspiracy than was the presence of foreigners among the defenders of the Spanish Republic.
  • Nonsense On Stilts: The Laeken Declaration [on the future of the European Union].  One of the most pathetic sights in the world today is to hear and see all those Europeans who now accept the British fairy tale that Britain suddenly decided in 1939 to oppose evil and launch a war for the good of humanity, rather than see the reality of what actually happened—a rather quick change of tack in the balance of power game.
  • Imperial Guilt: In the 20 years before Leninism collapsed, there had been such a widespead rejection of the Imperialist past that people on the Left assumed that that particular perversion of history was dead. It is true, no one wants to restore the empires as such. But the 20th century is being re-written disregarding Britain’s habit of making and breaking alliances in the vain attempt of saving its Empire and dominant world position.
    The true history of 1870-1939 is a history of how late-Imperial Britain muddled away its Empire. They were not the only guilty parties, but they had the most power and always had had the option to take some other course .It is the supposed virtue of this declining British Empire that underpins the contemporary politics of Globalisation.
    The British Empire was the central concern for Britain’s ruling class. Switzerland and Scandinavia shared in the general rise of Western Europe without ever having any significant colonial possessions while Spam, Portugal, France and Holland were alternative colonial powers. Belgium – at various times attached to Spain, France and Holland – made its own extensive and destructive colonisation in the Belgian Congo.
  • Ernest Bevin By Alan Bullock – Book Review.
  • Letters: The Communist Party of Northern Ireland; Ernest Bevin; new political parties.
  • Spike Milligan, by John Challis,   ” Peter Sellers and I saw ourselves as comic Bolsheviks… We wanted to destroy all that had come before and to create something totally new”
    [Spike Milligan, in an interview in The Observer,1995.]
    Forget George Orwell. Spike Milligan was the man who really articulated for us, the mass of ordinary British workers, what a shower of shit our rulers were [and still are], and how little respect we have ever had for them and their ways.
  • Notes on the News: Africa as Europe’s backyard: the web news service Yahoo accurately reported it as Africa and West at odds over Zimbabwe. African observers said it was as good an election as any African nation could be expected to manage.. The BBC included the same facts, but slanted them. . Climate of fear in Zimbabwe poll. etc. Africa’s view was wrong and the West’s position correct.
    George Bush, anti-globaliser: the most successful economies are the ones that ignore neo-liberal ideas when it suits them. India and China continue to protect their economies. Vicious sectarianism in India is part of an attempt to dismantle the highly successful secular-socialist system that Congress introduced, but India is still much less ‘open’ than the globalisers would wish. Meantime the USA itself ignores globalist dogma when it suits them, especially over steel.
    Global Lynch Law:  BBC Four recently screened a program called The Trial Of Henry Kissinger. Watching it, I found nothing of substance. Obviously Kissinger and lots of other US officials would need to be put on trial, if international law actually existed. Obviously it won’t happen: you might as well fantasise about the Last Judgement on classical Christian lines.
     Kissinger is a Jewish intellectual who is also widely disliked by other Jews, he’s a soft target. No one known to the general public could be a safer target. Would any mainstream media venture     The Trial of Ronald Reagan, I wonder?
    I’ve said before, Reagan only pretended to be stupid. He knew he needed to get the votes of stupid bigots, pretended to be as dumb as they were, and did very nicely at their expense. The rich, whose interest he was serving, could be relied upon to vote for him regardless.
  • No Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 116 – May 2002

  • Terror in Palestine: The Jewish claim to Palestine, accepted by the British Government and the League of Nations, is strictly theocratic. Recognition of its validity is the outstanding residue of Christian fundamentalism in the era of secular “human right”. When Balfour was asked in the early 1920s to show how the Declaration which bears his name was compatible with the principles of democracy and the rights of nations which Britain had preached during the Great War, his reply was that the validity of the Jewish claim did not rest on the general ground on which other peoples had to make their claims.
  • Le Pen – Le Futur? By Jack Lane: Le Pen’s success can be directly related to the behaviour of the EU at the present time.  [This was Jean-Marie Le Pen, since succeeded by his daughter Marine Le Pen.]
    One of the Commission’s working assumptions is that Europe will need about 50 million immigrants in the coming decades to cater for its needs. Even though it does not broadcast this very much, it is quite a realistic figure for a continent that plans to go on living off the rest of the world and which is determined to impoverish and if necessary wreck economies anywhere that do not toe the line in its globalisation plans.
  • Barak Arafat and that Peace Deal: No maps were ever drawn up showing who would get what. In the end there was, strictly speaking, no offer. All “offers” were seen as “bases for negotiation” a precursor for further talks.
    According to these bases Palestine would have sovereignty over 91% of the West Bank; Israel would annex 9% of the West Bank. In exchange Israel would hand over sovereignty over parts of pre 1967 Israel equivalent to 1% of the West Bank, but with no indication of where either would be.
  • EU Enlargement, by  David Morrison.  EU enlargement has been talked a bout for many years but the timetable for its realisation has kept slipping. But now there are concrete proposals to admit 10 states by 2004 – the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta – thereby increasing the EU’s total membership to 25.
    Britain has always been keen on enlargement as a mechanism for diluting the EU and putting a brake on political union. It is accepted on all sides in Britain that enlargement is a good thing for the EU and for the candidate states. But the basis on which these states are going to join is rarely discussed.
  • Lockerbie Appeal Lost: It is inconceivable that the three intelligent men who put their names to the judgement last year believed that the prosecution had proved that Megrahi was guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
  • The EU & Globalisation, by David Morrison.  The rich countries of the world became rich behind tariff, and any other, barriers they considered necessary to assist their economic development. And it was only when they had broken through the development barrier and become rich that they began to favour trade liberalisation.
  • David Morrison: Tory Trickery On Health Spending; EU Rapid Reaction Force; Chevez restored in Venezuela.
  • Trotskyism — More Than 57 Varieties? Review of Essays on Historical Materialism, by Sean McGouran.
  • Notes on the News: The Silence Of The Thunderers;  The media in Britain was unanimous that the French Presidential Election would be a very dull affair.
    Then came the dramatic news that Le Pen had come second. The mild resistance that Jospin’s socialist government had offered to Anglo- Globalisation was undermined.
    In France, the Marxist Left has once again missed an open goal. Between them, candidates who were to the left of Jospin scored more than Le Pen. Had they been united behind a single popular leader, it would have been the Hard Left that scored the newsworthy triumph. Always assuming that the media hadn’t sounded the alarm over that particular possibility, which is moot    .
    Queen-mummified:  In accordance with the wishes of much of the population, the BBC was suitably Queen-mummified, with hours of shallow chat about a nice old lady who had died at a very advanced age and whose death changes very little.
    [This was Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, died 30 March 2002.  There had been speculation that her daughter would abdicate for Charles and take  over the Queen Mother role.  It has happened elsewhere, and recently in Denmark.  I’m not surprised it did not happen here.]
    Monarchy was taken seriously when Britain was still seen as a family. That ended with Thatcher, and it’s not coming back. Respect for the monarchy will last for as long as our present Queen is there as an embodiment of nostalgic values. But I couldn’t see Mr Charles Windsor ever winning the same sort of respect. He is all-too-obviously a muddled victim of a muddled age.
  • No Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 117 – June 2002

  • The Criminal Damage to Britain’s Railways.  In the wake of the rail crash at Potters Bar on 10 May, Stephen Byers told the annual conference of ASLEF that something had to be done about the existing arrangements for railway maintenance. He is five years too late. New Labour should have done something about it immediately they came to power. It remains to be confirmed that the Potters Bar crash was caused by poor maintenance on a set of points, which led to four nuts coming off. The alternative explanation, favoured by the maintenance contractor Jarvis since it gets them off the hook, is that the points were sabotaged on two different occasions – a few days before the crash Jarvis employees discovered nuts off, and put them on again without reporting to their superiors. This seems unlikely.
  • Jack Dunn by Conor Lynch.  I saw in the April L&TUR that the Kent miner’s leader, Jack Dunn had died. I first saw him about 1975 when he addressed a group of Workers’ Control activists in London. We had previously had a talk ( or lecture ) from the CPGB industrial organiser, Bert Ramelson. Ramelson’s and the CP’ s line was that industrial democracy was impossible under capitalism and you suspected they wouldn’t be too keen on it under socialism either. And here was Jack Dunn, a lifelong CP member, speaking our language. A bit confusing and very refreshing.
    Jack Dunn dedicated his life to the betterment of the working class.
  • Arms Sales, by Kevin Brady.  The case for arms production and sales, articulated by Defence Minister Geoff Hoon and others, is that it is a net economic benefit to the UK; that the costs of production and government subsidies are outweighed by the revenue from sales. But is it? In July 2001 the Oxford Research Group and Safeworld published ‘The Subsidy Trap’, which showed that the sale of arms is actually a net cost to the UK Treasury.
  • Le Pen, by Conor Lynch.  Jean Le Pen may have driven the final nail into the coffin of the European Social Project. That was the European Union. Its last substantial defender was Lionel Jospin. Jospin stood for a European Federation that stood for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity: for a levelling of society, for protection for victims of capitalism and for curbs on the excesses of capitalist development.
    But by the time of the French election his was a voice in the wilderness. The EU, under the increasing influence of Britain, is standing for untrammelled capitalism at home and abroad, for imperialist foreign adventures, and for the destruction of stable society. France alone could not change this.
  • Land Grab: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank by Yehezkel Lein.  Since 1967, each Israeli government has invested significant resources in establishing and expanding the settlements in the Occupied Territories, both in terms of the area of land they occupy and in terms of population.
  • Letters From Israel by Ran HaCohen.  Curtailing Palestinian freedom of movement has been a central feature of Israeli occupation during the last decade. “Terrorism” has always served as a good excuse for this premeditated policy (and was served by it in turn). Up to 1991, Palestinians were free to move both within the occupied territories and to Israel; in fact, they formed the basis, in terms of a cheap labour force, of the Israeli economy. It was during the Gulf War that Israel for the first time closed its territory to Palestinians. The 1990’s, especially the Oslo period since 1994, saw a gradual routinisation of this measure, for which the euphemistic term “closure” was introduced. At the same time, a massive import of cheap labour force from Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa replaced Palestinian workers.
  • Saving the NHS?  The UK has far fewer doctors and nurses per head of the population than the EU average and most EU countries. The relative position has worsened significantly in the past 20 years.
  • May Day, by Conor Lynch
  • Miscellany by
  • David Morrison.  Afghanistan; No Euro Referendum?; Labour Underfunding Public Services.
  • No Newsnotes or Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 117-118 – July-August 2002

  • Israel’s False Story About the Camp David Negotiations.  Barak’s offer at Camp David fell short of the very reasonable Palestinian position that if there were to be land swaps they should be equitable. (It also fell short of their bottom line as regards Jerusalem and on the right of return of the Palestinian refugees expelled in 1948). As a consequence, Arafat said No to it. That response was entirely reasonable.
  • The Spanish General Strike by Conor Lynch
  • The Pensions Crisis by David Morrison
  • Race Relations, by Sean McGouran
  • Interview with George Monbiot
  • Ernest Bevin and Anti-Semitism, by Brendan Clifford
  • Letter to the Editor on 20th Century Politics
  • Will Hutton’s Misunderstandings, by Gwydion M Williams
  • Enron, WorldCom, Xerox, A tale of conflicts of interests, by David Morrison.  The people who audit the books of public companies should be civil servants. That holds out the best hope that the public will get trustworthy information on the performance of companies (and the state could make money out by charging for the service).
  • Parliamentary Diary:  Euro, Were the UK to join the single currency the decision would be irreversible;  Breaking Labour / Trade Union links.
  • Notes on the News:  A Global Civil War: The USA in 1991 was handed the world on a plate, and knocked the plate over.
    The Cold War had been won by the West, because the Keynesian semicapitalist system had done better than its Soviet rival.
    Habeas Nothing:  The USA makes a big thing of `established rights’ enshrined in the constitution. But the prisoners in the US Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba are in a kind of legal limbo, with no law applicable.
    Genetically Modified:  Almost all the things we eat are cultivated crops and animals, monstrous distortions of the wild originals. A hunter-gatherer of 40,000 years ago might have been terrified of woolly sheep, cattle vastly bigger than their wild ancestors, dogs that diverge hugely from a wolf-like ancestral dog. All of these things seem natural, just because we grew up with them.
    Press Corrupters; Consignia To The Dustbin.
  • David Morrison’s Miscellany: Private Finance Initiative Spurious Figures; Treating Medical Negligence; Free Trade Myth.

PDF for LTUR 119 – Mid-Summer Special 2002

PDF for LTUR 120 – September 2002

  • …and then we take Tehran: The biggest thing that happened in the Middle Fast during the past eighty years was the Islamic revolution against the liberal despotism of the Shah. Iraq, a client state of the West, went to war against Iran—the way it is now put is that it launched an unprovoked war of aggression, but that is not how it was put then. Saddam’s Iraq was the frontier of the West. Certain resolutions were adopted by the United Nations on the understanding that they would be dead letters.
  • Bomb attack On Councillor:  Loyalists Blamed For Device Under Labour Man’s Car
  • IRAQ: What UN resolutions actually say
  • Who appeased Hitler, and why?  Hitler and Saddam Hussein were both helped to power by Western interests. And both were suddenly redefined as monstrous foes, while exactly the same as they’d always been. These are just two of the comparisons that our current crop of `hawks’ are not likely to make.
    Hitler and Saddam Hussein were valued as alternatives to Communism. And both flourished in parts of the world which had been destabilised by the Western powers’ destructive and vindictive attitudes after World War One.  Everyone agrees that once the initial attack bogged down, Germany was willing to accept a peace that would have basically restored the pre-1914 situation. And it was Britain’s ruling elite that decided that the war must be fought to the finish, ensuring the deaths of millions beyond those who had already died.
  • “US A Threat To World Peace” In an interview in Newsweek 09/ 11/02 Nelson Mandela demanded that the UN be allowed to play a mediating role in the Iraqi crisis.
  • Letter on John Lloyd and the B&ICO
  • No Notes on the News or Parliamentary Diary this month.

PDF for LTUR 121 – October 2002

  • Invasion dressed up as inspection: The original excuse for war — Iraq’s alleged possession of non-conventional weapons, and its refusal to allow UN inspectors access to seek out and destroy them – disappeared on 16 September.
    The people in Whitehall who were clamouring for the immediate admission of inspectors to Iraq a few weeks earlier are now refusing to take “Yes” for an answer.
  • NATS by David Morrison.  When the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) was partially privatised in July last year, its debt burden was more than doubled.
    A transformation that was supposed to provide NATS with access to bucket loads of private finance for investment, not to mention untold benefits from private sector management and private sector economic disciplines, began by saddling it with an extra £403m of debt.
  • No Wealth Without Profit?  Old people requiring state-funded pensions are a hideous menace to the developed Western economies. Whereas old people drawing pensions from privately funded schemes add to prosperity and economic health. Or so we are told.
    To someone not initiated into the Economic Mysteries, the two alternatives might seem exactly the same thing—old people getting money on the basis of what they did when they were younger. But this is vigorously rejected by the experts, who only coincidentally stand to make a nice living out of a complex mess of private pension schemes.
  • Scott Ritter’s speech at Stop The War Games meeting
  • Conor Lynch on Spain: Orwell; Morocco. 
  • Nablus Under Curfew – Save The Children, Under Fire !! by Amer Abdelhadi.  [Nablus is a Palestinian city in the West Bank.]
  • Notes on the News: New World Inequality:  “It is nigh on impossible for normal people to put themselves into the minds of the sort who planned or carried out last year’s slaughter” says The Economist in its editorial of September 7th.
    Ask any bomber pilot, I reply.
    September 11th was an act by devout Muslim Arabs reacting to a sustained assault on their religion and their culture. The Western attitude is that they should be grateful for the assault on their religion and their culture, which is going to make them better, happier and more free.
    There is in the USA a genuine inability to understand why anyone should be less than delighted at becoming more and more like small-town America.
    Don’t Let George Do It [to Iraq]:  Unleash the lemmings of war! Or words to that effect, because there is every possibility that the West will be worse off with Saddam gone than they are with Saddam in place
    Zimbabwe; Soham killings.
  • No Parliamentary Diary this month.

Issue 123, November 2002, is not yet scanned.

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PDF for LTUR 123 – December 2002

  • Britain and US Find Iraq Guilty over Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Iraq has pleaded Not Guilty to possessing weapons of self-defence, i. e. weapons of mass destruction. The American and British Governments have stated definitely that they know that it does possess weapons of mass destruction.   [It was eventually admitted that these weapons did not exist or had been destroyed.]
  • Resolution 1441: [The UN resolution on Weapons of Mass Destruction.]
  • Codology by Sean McGouran.  Mike Hume used to be the editor of the Revolutionary Communist Party’ s “Living Marxism magazine, now he produces a weekly column for Rupert Murdoch’s Times.
  • Why is NATO expanding by David Morrison. NATO is expanding apace. At its meeting in Prague on 21-22 November, seven states — Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia — were invited to join, bringing the total number of full members to 26 by May 2004. This is the second tranche of former Soviet bloc states to join— Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary became full members in 1999.
  • The Origins of the ‘Gulf War’ by Sean McGouran.
  • Notes on the News: Japan: Ninja Economics? I always found it suspicious that Japan suffered an odd economic crisis just at the moment the Cold War was over and the US was looking for a new global foe. It’s not in fact that they’ re in crisis, just that they’ve stood still and ceased the dramatic growth that looked likely to make them richer than the USA. Given what happened to Ceausescu in Romania, to Sukarno in Indonesia and to the Socialists and Christian Democrats in Italy, there was good reason to think that the USA had become a menace to old allies who were now unwanted. Even Saddam in Iraq fits the pattern: his invasion of Kuwait was an attempt to fight his way out of an economic crisis, burdened by debts he had built up while doing the West’s work in fighting Militant Islam in Iran.
    None of these countries were conceivably a threat to the USA, Iraq was possibly to Israel. Japan was a different matter, a conceivable threat to US hegemony, for as long as it went on growing. And then growth mysteriously stopped.
    Turkey: Extremists now Muslim Democrat’; Sad to be Nasty: the Tory Disintegration; Ancestry of Dogs;
  • David Morrison’s Miscellany: Peace Prize for Warmonger Jimmy Carter; Why The Treasury Broke Up British Rail; Hansard: A Verbatim Record?
  • No Parliamentary Diary this month.

It was a year when many things changed.