En busca de un sueño

A song by Silvio Rodríguez to mark the last post to be published by EcoLogics. You can hear the song on YouTube. I will continue to update existing posts.

En busca de un sueño
se acerca este joven.
En busca de un sueño
van generaciones.

En busca de un sueño
hermoso y rebelde.
En busca de un sueño
que gana y que pierde.

En busca de un sueño
de bella locura.
En busca de un sueño
que mata y que cura.

En busca de un sueño
desatan ciclones.
En busca de un sueño
cuántas ilusiones.

En busca de un sueño
transcurren los ríos.
En busca de un sueño
se salta al vacío.

En busca de un sueño
abraza el amante.
En busca de un sueño
simula el tunante.

En busca de un sueño
tallaron la piedra.
En busca de un sueño
Dios vino a la tierra.

En busca de un sueño
partí con mi día.
En busca de un sueño
que no hay todavía.

 

David Cameron’s ‘Social Entrepreneurs’: ‘TeePee’ Tories Are No More

And so we come full circle. Last night, in a speech delivered as part of the Scott Society’s Hugo Young Lectures (yet more evidence of the Guardian’s swerve to the Right?), Cameron finally came out and showed his true blue colours, his true face: what we need, he said, is less government, and more ‘social entrepreneurs’, i.e. replacing the tattered remains of the welfare state with a neo-Victorian form of philanthropy.

I will return to this suggestion below. First, a very brief history of David ‘Janus’ Cameron’s progressivism. When I speak of ‘Janus’ Cameron, I refer not so much to the mythological connotation of Janus (in ancient Roman times, Janus was the god of transitions, symbolized by way of gates and doorways), but to its more modern connotation of someone who is two-faced, in the sense of being deceptive. Ever since he managed to get himself elected as Tory leader, Cameron has played a political game that may be symbolized by the image of a two-faced Janus.

When the media limelight has been shining on him, Cameron has been a paragon of conservative moderation, almost to the point of a centre ‘left’ liberalism. Cameron has, in this sense, worked very hard to persuade us that he is a ‘TeePee’ Tory, i.e. a Tory Progressive intent on transforming the Conservative Party from the defender of class-bound privilege into something akin to a ‘broad tent’ party, what this blog describes ironically as the PPP: the People’s Progressive Party. It has often been noted that Cameron has stolen Blair’s clothing, and so he has, in the sense that it was Blair who came up with the idea of swerving even further to right while protesting loudly about the need for more social justice. But whereas Blair and the rest of the New Labour nomenklatura really did force Labour to swing far to the right, Cameron has only paid lip service to liberalism, engaging in backroom deals which, if anything, will push Britain in the direction of a greater authoritarianism than even Blair or Brown have managed.

A case in point, Cameron’s stance on homophobia. In early July, Cameron made headlines when he announced that he was officially ashamed of the Tories’ infamous Section 28, a part of a Local Government Act passed by the Tories in 1988, which stated that a local authority ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.

But just two months earlier, the Westminister commentariat chose to look the other way when, during an unseasonably warm weekend at the very end of May, Cameron flew out to Poland on a semi-secret mission. Having ditched his party’s old alliance on the European scene with the centre-right parties of Merkel and Sarkosy, Cameron went to Poland to seal a new pact with a rag-tag of ultra-nationalist parties, known as the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). The deal was apparently a payment in kind, agreed in the last Tory leadership contest, during which Cameron bought the votes of the farther-right in the party by promising to axe the alliance with ‘federalist’ centre-right European parties.

The result of this deal with the Tory devils is that Cameron now leads an agglomeration of right, and far-right groups, some of which are explicitly homophobic: take for example the Kaczyński twins, the leaders of the hard-right Polish Law and Justice Party. One of the twins, Lech, is the current president of Poland. The other, Jaroslaw, was the prime minister until the current PM, Donald Tusk, defeated him in the 2007 general elections. Amongst other authoritarian policies, the Law and Justice Party advocates strengthening restrictions on abortion, which is already illegal in Poland except in extraordinary circumstances. They also oppose same-sex marriages or any other form of legal recognition of homosexual couples. Jarosław Kaczyński has been quoted as saying that homosexuals should not be teachers, but that homosexuals ‘would not be persecuted’. He has also stated that “The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can’t agree to it”.

Another member of the same party, Michal Kaminski, is now the formal leader of the ECR. For those who haven’t heard about him, Kaminiski was recently denounced for his neo-Nazi past by the not exactly progressive David Miliband. As if this were not bad enough, the ECR group also includes Latvia’s ‘For Fatherland and Freedom Party’, which helps to organise the annual celebrations in that country of the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS. So in addition to homophobics, Cameron appears to have allied himself with Nazi sympathizers.

The contradiction between Cameron’s perorations about Section 28, and his alliance with the mentioned parties cannot be spin-doctored away. No truly progressive or liberal politician would ever countenance establishing an alliance with the likes of the Polish Law and Justice Party, let alone the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom Party. We have to conclude that the real Cameron—i.e. the social formation that he really represents—is anything but progressive. On the contrary, his claims to liberalism are no more (and no less) than PR fodder for all those who don’t follow politics closely, and who may be conned into thinking that Cameron is what he has worked very hard to make himself appear to be. Of course, any politician must always be something of a chamaeleon, but in this lizard’s case, it is the iridophores—the layer of cells that reflect blue incident light—that predominate.

Alas, until last night, conservatives with a capital or small ‘c’ might well have dismissed this critique as the figment of a left-wing imagination. But during the speech given in the Hugo Young Lecture, Cameron began to lose the face that he has managed to show the mainstream media, and which the media have so happily agreed to show to their audiences. As he turned to look at the people who attended the Hugo Young Lecture, the people will have seen the monstrous visage not so much of Margaret Thatcher, but of a youthful, 21st century British equivalent of Ronald Reagan, the true modern father of Tory slash ‘n burn policies of the kind that have made the United States what it is today. Cameron spoke of paradox in his speech, but the real paradox is that, just when the United States is waking up to the terrible legacy of Reaganite neoliberalism, England, Wales and Northern Ireland are about to re-elect a party that not only was the chief accomplice of Reaganism between 1980 and 1997, but is now set to take this complicity even further to the right.

Cameron’s big idea is that, instead of ‘big government’, we need ‘big society’. (How does a politician change the size of a society!?) ‘The era of big government’, he said in the speech, ‘has run its course. Poverty and inequality have got worse, despite Labour’s massive expansion of the state. We need new answers now, and they will only come from a bigger society, not bigger government.’ At the heart of his proposal is the idea of using ‘social entrepreneurs’. In case you don’t know what this term means, it’s the buzz word for people who have made careers out of engaging in philanthropic activities that blur the line between charity, and business. Cameron singled out one such entrepreneur in his speech: Debbie Scott, the head of Tomorrow’s People. If you visit their website, you will find the philosophy of social entrepreneurship clearly stated from the very beginning: ‘We help break the cycle of unemployment so that people can take positive control of their lives and build a brighter future’–and in the same breath, ‘We also save employers time and money by finding them the right people for the right jobs.’

Ah, so that’s what it’s about—how clever! Social entrepreneurs make their careers by taking over the roles traditionally accorded to the welfare state, and turning them into charitable or so-called ‘social’ enterprises. Put simply, there’s money to be made from poverty.

To the right-wing New Labourites that Cameron is out to seduce, this may sound like a brilliant idea. But it is only brilliant if you fail to consider two problems. First, unlike state entities, such charities are under no obligation to provide universal coverage for their services. They help whomever they choose to help. They are no different, in this sense, from traditional philanthropies of the kind that were the only palliative during the Victorian era. From this perspective, Cameron is inviting us to return to a Victorian form of social justice, where the disadvantaged are helped only if someone takes pity.

The second problem is that, despite Cameron’s efforts to portray New Labour as the party of big government, what he is proposing is exactly what New Labout itself has been doing for the better part of 12 years. Far from simply expanding the state, New Labour has been pouring money into corporate welfarism. It has outsourced more and more state roles to darling donors such as Capita and the failed Carter & Carter, companies which might well describe themselves as being run by ‘social entrepreneurs’. Sandy Leitch’s Review of Skills was coached precisely in the terms of social entrepreneurship, and it its most recent proposals, New Labour is saying that it will even pay private hospitals to get treatment for patients—perhaps even private doctors might now be called social entrepreneurs!

So no, New Labour has not so much expanded the state, as used more and more state money to fill the coffers of private organisations run by social parasites that long ago figured out that there was lots of money to be made by criticising the welfare state, and then fulfilling some of its vital functions for profit—or at least, for personal career or political gain.

The one thing that has slightly—ever so slightly—mitigated New Labour’s hell-for-leather push to privatise has been the fact that the party still depends on the unions for votes, and crucially, for money. In this, the blog’s penultimate post, EcoLogics asks readers thinking of voting for Cameron’s ‘TeePee’ Conservatives: what will mitigate the policies of the party of privilege, and indeed, the party which has seen fit to join up with the likes of Michal Kaminski? If New Labour has been so bad, why should the Old Etonians be any better?

Is authoritarianism on ebb in the UK?

Updated 24 November 2009 (scroll the bottom of the post to see latest updates)

If you read this article in the Independent, you might come away feeling relieved that the great tide of authoritarianism that has characterised New Labour’s years in power is starting to ebb. Under the headline “Ministers cancel ‘Big Brother’ database”, the paper says that ‘Plans to store information about every phone call, email and internet visit in the United Kingdom have in effect been abandoned by the Government’, and that the decision to postpone further legislation could be ‘to kill off the plans for years.’

If, however, you read the Telegraph (which you really shouldn’t), a rather different picture emerges. Under the headline “State to ’spy’ on every phone call, email and web search’, that paper suggests that

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.[...] Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.[...] They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.

Which version of events is the correct one? EcoLogics suspects that both papers are right. New Labour probably has decided to shelve plans for a single database, reluctantly realising that it’s a vote looser. Senior New Labour politicians must be having quiet talks with Entrust and other digital security corporations, explaining that they’re very sorry but it isn’t feasible to deliver the promised contracts, at least not yet. At the same time, the politicians will be explaining to Britain’s increasingly deliberative security services that the single database isn’t that great a loss because the information will be there, awaiting to be used, in the databases of private corporations like BT or Virgin. Now isn’t that reassuring?

Even as the two papers make headlines on this subject, if you read the BBC news, you will find out that good ‘ole Jack Straw has got his way with New Labour plans to replace public enquiries with secret inquests. The conclusion has to be that, if anything, that tide of New Labour authoritarianism is in full flow.

By the way, the ‘Part II’ in the title of this post is a reference to the earlier The New Labour Modus Operandi.

Update 24 November 2009: The news media are devoting headlines to the fact that a former police officer has denounced the police for deliberately arresting people in order to obtain their DNA, a policy which is not only illegal, but has had the effect of increasing the proportion of DNA samples taken from ethnic minorities, relative to their actual numbers in civil society. For an account of this practice, which would confirm the existence of a New Labour-Police conspiracy to introduce a universal DNA sample by the back door, see this Reuters account.

New Labour’s Skills Policy: R.I.P.

A short note to say that the news that Peter Mandelson is planning to slash spending on training for young people should come as a surprise to no one. New Labour’s educational policy—which is to say, its ‘skills’ policy, for education has long since become a bad word in New Labour circles—is premised on a species of consequentialism that is particularly susceptible to the wayward fluctuations of neoliberal politics.

Before the banking crisis, companies such as Carter & Carter successfully lobbied New Labour politicians for state ‘donations’ in the form of corporate welfare payments, and money flowed from the state into the bulging coffers of the burgeoning private FE/HE sector. But now that vast sums of state money have disappeared down the sinkholes of banks such as Lloyds and RBS, the claim will increasingly be that there is no money to be had for anything else—not even for projects that were once the darlings of New Labour’s ‘train to gain’ variety of clientelism. (Expeditionary wars such as those of Afghanistan or Iraq will continue to be excluded from the accounting because they make money for the merchants of death, and, like the Trident nuclear subs, have the cover of the sacred for British politicians who still cannot let go of a ‘glorious’ past).

EcoLogics wonders: what will happen in this brave new world of alleged scarcity to stalwart defenders of the New Lab skills faith such as Howard Newby? Will they now be busy stroking the Conservatives, in the hope of securing the continuation of the political conditions required for an on-going spirit of creation in higher and further education?

Whatever the case, the upshot is that a badly misguided, if not corrupt policy will be replaced by a return to good ‘ole Thatcherite slash—and—burnism. And like the Tory grandees who were ousted from power in 1997, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the rest of the New Labour nomenclatura will be voted out, but will also retire to corporate adviserships, the writing of ‘memoirs’, and perhaps the odd bit of TV presenting for the BBC or ITV, à la Michael Portillo.

The future is bright, isn’t it?

An ironic message for Nick Griffin: learn from Alan Johnson

In the wake of the news about Alan Johnson’s decision to promote xenophobia in the UK, EcoLogics suggests that the neo-Nazis have much to learn from the New Labour politicians. The trick, Nick, is to appeal to ‘common sense’, and to an apparent ‘common ground’, one that makes ‘us’ the normal, the victims, and ‘them’ the abnormal, the perpetrators: say, as Jack Straw did, that you find it difficult to talk to women who are wearing a veil; or say, like Johnson has just done, that ‘There are communities which have been disproportionately affected by immigration, where people have legitimate concerns about the strain that the growth in the local population has placed on jobs and services’.

And New Labour claims to be outraged over the rise of the BNP? As noted by this blog in earlier posts, the rise of neo-Nazi politics in the UK is clearly linked to the racism and xenophobia of New Labour itself.

U.S. Military Bases in Colombia: Uribe’s Constitutional Hopscotch

Updated on 24 November 2009 (for updates please scroll to the bottom of this post)

In one of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels, the narrator explains that the gringos have even taken the water from one of Colombia’s bays. Last week, the U.S. and Colombia signed an agreement that suggests that the gringos are now also after Colombia’s—and perhaps Venezuela’s—land and skies. The signing of the agreement confirms the news, first reported in this blog on 3 July 2009, that the U.S. military will use, and almost certainly acquire operational control over as many as seven Colombian bases (it seems that the number is going up every other month; first it was three, then it was four, then five, and now it is ‘at least’ seven). The bases in question range from the Palanquero Air Force Base near Bogotá to Colombia’s main naval bases on the Pacific and Caribbean.

Alas, the move has required an intricate constitutional hopscotch on Uribe’s part. According to Colombian laws, Congress needs to approve new treaties and any agreement involving the movement of foreign troops through the country. Aware no doubt that members of Colombia’s legislative branch might not approve of U.S. use of Colombia’s bases, Uribe has come up with a legal fiction that is as complex as it is misleading. His lawyers (or the ones provided by the U.S. embassy in Bogotá) have argued that, far from involving a new treaty, let alone the movement of foreign troops across Colombian territory, the ‘Complementary Agreement for Cooperation and Technical Assistance in Defence and Security’ with the United States is no more than a kind of supplement to three or more existing treaties. Aspects of each of these pre-existing treaties allegedly provide the ‘framework treaties’ (‘tratados marco’) with which to implement the new agreement. Of course, the new U.S. bases are not being described as new bases, let alone as U.S. bases. Given that nothing has really changed, or so Uribe’s argument goes, the president of Colombia is entitled to use his powers as the director of Colombia’s foreign policy to give the U.S. military (and its ominous civilian contractors) what is, in effect, free use of Colombia’s military infrastructure.

We owe it to President Lula of Brazil to have cut through this patently absurd argument in the course of the historic UNASUR meeting that took place in Argentina’s San Carlos de Bariloche on 28 August 2009. After Uribe claimed that the agreement with the U.S. did not constitute a significant change to existing policy, and that the U.S. had had access to Colombian bases for decades, Lula posed the obvious question: if that was the case, why was any agreement whatsoever required with the U.S.?

These and other interventions during the UNASUR gathering revealed the extent to which, less than a year after arriving to power, the Obama-Clinton presidency has managed to do what no other leader has done in the 180 or so years since most South American countries obtained their independence from Spain: to unite South American countries in condemning U.S. policy in the region. It was extraordinary to watch live on television (UNASUR had live TV coverage at the insistence of Uribe himself), how leader after leader stood up either to express doubts about, or even to flatly condemn the U.S. bases in Colombia. Even Perú’s President Alan García, the other major U.S. proxy in the continent, was forced to qualify his support for Uribe during the course of the televised meeting. One has to wonder, in this sense, who advised Uribe to insist on wall-to-wall TV coverage; perhaps Uribe is so used to having the Colombian media submit to his iron will that he never contemplated the possibility that Latin American leaders would be playing for rather different audiences.

As predicted by this blog, even before the agreement was formally signed, it was already providing further incentive for a beefing up of Colombia’s neighbours’ armed forces. In late July Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez went shopping for fighters and helicopters in Russia, and in September Brazil announced an agreement in principle to buy France’s Rafale fighters. For its part, Ecuador has accepted an offer by Venezuela to donate six of its older Mirage fighters to the Ecuadorean Air Force. While not all of the purchases can be attributed directly to the establishment of the U.S. bases in Colombia, there can be little doubt that the bases will fuel the concern of leaders throughout the region. Many will calculate that, at the very least, they must make it as difficult as possible for the U.S. (or its Colombian proxy) to launch the kind of strikes that Reagan launched against Libya in 1986. The hope must be that current or future U.S. leaders will hesitate to launch such attacks if there is a likelihood of U.S. casualties. Venezuela and Ecuador most also be hoping that, if Uribe knows that his neighbours can strike back at him, he may be less eager to follow the instructions of his U.S. masters.

Unfortunately, this means that the U.S. bases are already paying rich political dividends for the Obama-Clinton presidency: whether this was the plan or not, precious resources that Venezuelan and other regional leaders could have poured into improving the lot of the poor are being devoted to the acquisition of advanced weapons systems. It seems likely that, sooner or later, arms traders will succeed in tempting one or more regional leaders with multi-million dollar bribes of the kind that have made Britain’s BAE notorious. If or when this happens, then the right-wing opposition of Chávez and other progressive leaders in the continent will have their work cut out for them.

Asked in a recent BBC World Service interview what he thought of President Obama, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa politely suggested that Obama was a very nice man, but that he was not in control of the U.S. military ‘machine’ or of the CIA. EcoLogics suggests that Obama is as much in control of these as any other U.S. president has been (which is not to say that he is completely in control); when it comes to the United States, it has always been the case that perorations of democracy on the home front have tended to be flatly contradicted by policies vis-à-vis countries that the U.S. considers to be a part of its ‘sphere of interest’.

Obama confirmed this practice when he effectively reversed his policy vis-à-vis Colombia’s appalling human rights record. In a speech given to the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia on April 2nd, 2008, Obama said that he would ‘oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements’. Despite evidence provided by Human Rights Watch that Uribe’s government continues to tolerate, if not itself engage in murderous actions against left-wing activists, Obama now appears to have changed his mind about Colombia: in his remarks after a meeting earlier this year with Uribe, Obama was quoted as saying that

We discussed, most prominently, the interests of both countries in moving forward on a free trade agreement. This is something that has been discussed for quite some time. I have instructed Ambassador Kirk, our United States Trade Representative, to begin working closely with President Uribe’s team on how we can proceed on a free trade agreement. There are obvious difficulties involved in the process and there remains work to do, but I’m confident that ultimately we can strike a deal that is good for the people of Colombia and good for the people of the United States. […] I commended President Uribe on the progress that has been made in human rights in Colombia and dealing with the killings of labor leaders there, and obviously we’ve seen a downward trajectory in the deaths of labor unions and we’ve seen improvements when it comes to prosecution of those who are carrying out these blatant human rights offenses.

Obama’s comments came hard on the heels of the news of the new ‘complementary’ agreement. We can only deduce that Obama’s increasingly complimentary disposition towards Uribe is a function of a quid-pro-quo involving the U.S. bases in Colombia.

Updates (most recent first)

24 November 2009: Anyone who has watched Uribe’s rise to power will know that he will stop at nothing–he even changed the constitution during his presidency to allow himself to get re-elected not once, but twice. The fruits of this change, which has involved political corruption of the crudest kind, are finally becoming evident to Colombians themselves. Uribe is now trying to put an end to Colombia’s centuries-old system of checks and balances by brow-beating the one institution that has refused to shut up: the Supreme Court. After the court failed to rubber stamp Uribe’s choice for a prosecutor general, Uribe has engaged in a war of words with the leading supreme court judge, accusing him of lying. The equivalent in the United States would be for Obama to accuse the chief justice of lying, an act with the greatest political and constitutional consequences. What next? Will Uribe accuse supreme court president Augusto Ibañez of being a ‘terrorist’ and sick the paramilitaries on him?

Putting a Price on Peter Mandelson

This blogger’s first reaction to the news that Mandelson is banging on again about ’student consumers’ and university courses that need to provide ‘economic benefits’  was to stifle a yawn almost as big as Mandelson’s ego. Vision? What vision?

But then this sequence of ideas crossed EcoLogics’ bloggerly mind:

1) Mandelson, like the rest of the British neocons before him, is saying that education is a matter of consumption. Ergo, education is a commodity like any other, and can and should be given a price.

2) If education can be commodified, then so can anything else–including, of course, politics. Politics, and by implication politicians like Mandelson, can and should be given a price.

3) Here’s the deal: What’s your price, Peter? And how should we calculate your exchange value: by way of what lecturers and students would be willing to pay for you, or what oligarchs have been willing, or will be willing to pay for your invaluable services?

The possibilities for corruption, if you really stick to New Labour’s partitura, are endless.

Rupert Murdoch’s Times vs. David Nutt

You can always tell when Rupert Murdoch, or one of his proxies, needs to undermine a view that runs against his/their right-wing ideology. It’s what this blogger describes as rottweiler journalism. For a good example, see the headline below:

Murdoch doesn't like David Nutt

Note how the picture is not only at the top of the article, but actually implies, by way of the caption, that the photo is of Nutt himself, ergo Nutt is a drug user. It doesn’t get less subtle than that, does it? For an analysis of similar tricks over at the Guardian, see The Guardian and Peter Mandelson.

Blair’s Peace Initiative: Tesco would have helped to pacify the Middle East

Here’s a mathematical expression with which to characterise Tony Blair: T=Po/M+P

If the Daily Mail isn’t lying through its teeth—which it may well be doing—then news about Tony Blair provide us with the best evidence yet that Blair’s nothing but an apparatchik for big business.

According to the Daily Mail,

Tony Blair has been in talks with Tesco about helping them open supermarkets in the Middle East – allegedly in return for up to £1m. It is believed the discussions between the supermarket chain and the former PM ended after the two sides failed to agree terms.

Two thoughts on this. First, how naive of us to think that Tony Blair only got himself named as a peace envoy in order to pretend that he still mattered. We always knew that it was a bit rich for the man to pretend he was a peacemaker after he got Britain into two wars, and after it became clear that his power owed much to his shadowy relation with the Labour Friends of Israel lobby group. But to be honest, this blogger’s corruption radar never even contemplated the possibility that Blair might find a Middle East angle for the money side of his greed. It was bad enough that he was anything but a neutral figure in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations; to seek to make a fast million bucks on the back of his dubious role as peacemaker is truly emetic.

The second thought is that anyone who has done their homework will know that if indeed the Daily Mail isn’t lying, then the news not only confirm, but add proverbial insult to the injury of a pattern that began to emerge almost as soon as Tony Blair got into power. That pattern can be expressed by way of a simple mathematical equation:

Let T=Tony

Let P=Politics

Let M=Money

Let Po=Power

Here’s the equation:   T=Po/M+P. Put in less abstract terms, Tony is power divided by a combination of politics and money.

We first saw the curve of this equation during the Ecclestone Affair, when Blair welcomed to 10 Downing Street two characters who have since been revealed to have, shall we say, a Fascist sense of fun. We saw it again during the Iraq War, or what might be renamed the Cheney-Haliburton Conflict, when Tony not only bent right over for Cheney-Bush but then cashed in by taking a role as an ‘advisor’ with J P Morgan, part of the bankfia that did rather well from the Iraq war and whose bonus culture is still ripping off people across the world. And even now that Tony’s gone, the UK is still paying dearly for Tony’s cash–for–honours scandal. Witness, for example, Capita’s on-going role as the giant of government outsourcing of public sector IT.

So no, knowing what we know about Tony Blair’s and indeed New Labour’s corruption, it should not be surprising at all to confirm that Blair has indeed used his office in Jerusalem to drum up new business opportunities for himself in the Middle East. You can almost imagine him on the phone: Tescos! BAE! Capita! Join the Crusade!

No wonder that, shortly after it was announced that he would be making millions off his relation with the bankfia, Tony said that

Nowadays, the intersection between politics and the economy in different parts of the world, including the emerging markets, is very strong.

‘Emerging markets’, and ‘intersection’, indeed.

Will the police be taking a DNA sample from Tony McNulty’s cheek?

In some of this blog’s very first posts (see A Social Ecology of the Buccal Swab, or McNulty’s Genie), EcoLogics described the role that former Minister for Policing Tony McNulty played in sneaking in New Labour’s de facto universal DNA database policy. In ‘A Social Ecology of the Buccal Swab; or, When Gattaca came to the UK’, EcoLogics compared the near-future science fiction film Gattaca with the reality of the UK’s then-present political culture:

Gattaca’s future, imagined in our own past, is arguably New Labour’s present. In March [2007], its Home Office produced a document with a magnificently unthreatening title (‘Modernising Police Powers: Review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984’). The document nonetheless paves the way for what might well be described as the Gattacaization of the UK. The document has been put on the internet by statewatch.org(1), and arguably provides a good example of New Labour’s political stealth technologies, a modus operandi that this blog describes in some detail in The New Labour Modus Operandi. One of the ‘suggested areas for consideration’ in Chapter 3 concerns ‘Biometric information and identification procedures’. This section raises the prospect of universal DNA ‘sampling’, to be applied even for what it describes as ‘so-called minor offences’. However, it does so rather elliptically:

‘3.33 The absence of the ability to take fingerprints etc in relation to all offences may be considered to undermine the value and purpose of having the ability to confirm or disprove identification and, importantly, to make checks on a searchable database aimed at detecting existing and future offending and protecting the public. There have been notable successes particularly through the use of the DNA database in bringing offenders to justice.

3.34 Is there scope to populate identification databases and remove unnecessary operational constraints on the extent to which police are able to use fingerprints etc. to prevent, detect and investigate crime?’(2)

That little ‘etc.’ may well be the most loaded etc. in the history of UK policing legislation. A number of commentators have noted how the proposed policy erodes civil liberties to the point that it may well complete the UK’s transformation into what the London Editor of Vanity Fair has reluctantly described as a ‘Police State’.

[...]

Who is behind this proposal? It is, undoubtedly, a part of the New Labour lurch to the right that began as soon as Tony Blair took office, but which looks set to continue under Gordon Brown. EcoLogics is nonetheless interested to note that there is one person who has presented, signed, and fronted photographically the document, but who has so far avoided the media spotlight. That person is Tony McNulty, the UK’s Minister of State for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing, and whose pictures on the Policing document and in the official government website make him look eerily like a character in Gattaca.According to the ‘TheyWorkForYou.com’ website, McNulty has voted ‘very strongly against a transparent parliament’,‘very strongly for introducing ID cards’, ‘very strongly for introducing Foundation [quasi-privatized] hospitals’, ‘very strongly for introducing student top-up fees’[arguably the beginning of the privatization of higher education in the UK], ‘very strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws’, ‘very strongly for the Iraq war’ and ‘very strongly for replacing Trident’[and so for a £20 billion nuclear sub replacement]. If TheyWorkForYou.com is to be believed, McNulty is, from the New Labour point of view, a very safe pair of hands.

Returning to [Henry] Porter’s suggestion that there should be a warning in neon across every town centre, perhaps that warning should come with a name, and should also be placed above the STHF’s (‘short term holding facilities’) that McNulty wants to put into shopping malls, and which will be one of the sites where our DNA samples are to be taken. That name could be ‘the Gattaca Law’, or perhaps, the ‘McNulty Act’.

Today we read that Mr McNulty himself has now admitted publicly to having committed an act that ought to land a cotton swab in his cheek (for the purpose of a DNA sample of the kind he was intent on making everyone else take), and the rest of his body in a long term holding facility, that is to say, in jail. McNulty is one of the many MPs who helped himself to state money when he thought no one was watching. He did so to the tune of more than £13000 in expenses which he claimed against his parents’ home.

Will McNulty actually get his cheek swabbed? Will he actually get taken to a long term holding facility? Of course not. We can only take comfort from the thought that the House of Commons may well prove to be a short-term ‘holding facility’ for this and other corrupt New Labour politicians. If voters know what’s good for them, this man will be out of Westminister by May 2010.