An ironic message for Nick Griffin: learn from New Labour’s 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

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 after Colombia’s land and skies as well. 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.

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 Tony Blair is about to provide us with the best evidence yet that he’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 the Daily Mail is not 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 simply 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.

EcoLogics is updating its archives

Readers with RSS feeds may notice that a number of old EcoLogics articles will be appearing as new. This is because the blog is being updated, with new categories, the correction of typos etc. Apologies for any confusion caused–but also a chance, perhaps, to read a bit of ‘history’!

The Nimrod XV230 disaster is a metaphor of New Labour’s Britain

Yesterday Charles Haddon-Cave QC published a damning report about the causes of the Nimrod XV230 disaster. The report is as critical of the New Labour government as it is of the Ministry of Defense and of New Labour’s private partners in corporate manslaughter–one particularly prominent partner being the eponymous BAE. For once, we find a review that has the guts to tell it like it is: what killed the RAF airmen, and what is killing the UK, is a combination of managerialism, the outsourcing and privatisation that come with corporate welfarism, and political expediency.

The following are two excerpts that give a taste of the review:

“1. The MOD suffered a sustained period of deep organisational trauma between 1998 and 2006 due to the imposition of unending cuts and change, which led to a dilution of its safety and airworthiness regime and culture and distraction from airworthiness as the top priority.

1998 Strategic Defence Review
2. This organisational trauma stemmed from the 1998 Strategic Defence Review which unleashed a veritable ‘tsunami’ of cuts and change within the MOD which was to last for years.

3. Financial pressures (in the shape of ‘cuts’, ‘savings’, ‘efficiencies’, ‘strategic targets’, ‘reduction in output costs’, ‘leaning’, etc.) drove a cascade of multifarious organisational changes (called variously ‘change’, ‘initiatives’, ‘change initiatives’, ‘transformation’, ‘re-energising’, etc.) which led to a dilution of the airworthiness regime and culture within the MOD and distraction from safety and airworthiness issues. There was a shift in culture and priorities in the MOD towards ‘business’ and financial targets, at the expense of functional values such as safety and airworthiness. The Defence Logistics Organisation, in particular, came under huge pressure. Its primary focus became delivering ‘change’ and the ‘change programme’ and achieving the ‘Strategic Goal’ of a 20% reduction in output costs in five years and other financial savings.”

[...]

“7. The Strategic Defence Review intensified three organisational themes during the period 2000-2006:
7.1 First, a shift from organisation along purely ‘functional’ to project-oriented lines.
7.2 Second, the ‘rolling up’ of organisations to create larger and larger structures as a result of
(a) the drive to create more tri-service ‘purple’ organisations, and (b) a move to ‘whole-life’
management of equipment.
7.3 Third, the ‘outsourcing’ to industry of increasingly more of the functions traditionally carried.”(1)

An epigraph to Chapter 13, the one that details the ‘organisational causes’ of the accident, is worth quoting, as it reveals in a few short sentences what managerialism is all about:

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”

The item is attributed to one ‘Gaius Petronius Arbiter, 210 BC’, but as noted by Haddon-Cave, it is also attributed to Charlton Ogburn Jr. (1911-1998), an American author and free-lance writer who was formerly an officer in U.S. military intelligence. EcoLogics suspects that the latter is the more accurate attribution.

Two questions before ending this post:

1) Is this the kind of inquest that Jack Straw wants to make secret?

2) What New Labour politician(s), and what BAE executive(s), will be taken to court on corporate manslaughter charges?

References

1. http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc0809/hc10/1025/1025.asp

Blair, Mills, Berlusconi and the Neoliberal Bankfia: there is hope, after all

Two of the foremost figures at the heart of the neoliberal bankfia seem to be going down, and going down fast.

Silvio Berlusconi: the fortunes of that ‘thing’ so wonderfully described by José Saramago appear to be in terminal decline. The latest blow to his neo-fascist leadership has come in the form of a ruling by Judge Nicoletta Gandus: in an appeal to British lawyer David Mills’ conviction for bribery, the judge ruled that there is incontestable evidence that Berlusconi did indeed bribe Mills to lie about his (Berlusconi’s) business dealings in the All Iberian and Mediaset cases.

Berlusconi had previously tried to evade justice by passing a law that provided immunity to leading members of the Italian government. However, the Italian Constitutional Tribunal recently struck down the manifestly corrupt law, and so one day Berlusconi may join his servile lawyer where both belong: in jail.

This case has reverberations for Britain’s New Labour. Mills is the husband of a member of the New Labour nomenclatura, Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister. As this blog has noted in earlier posts, it seems a bit, well, Olympic that, despite having used the money of the bribe to pay off a huge mortgage, Jowell alleged that she knew nothing about her corrupt husband’s business dealings. And yet, as noted by newspapers at the time, David Mills was well known throughout the European jetset for his marvellous skills in helping the very rich to engage in Houdini-like forms of tax evasion. Are we still to believe that Jowell, herself a steely political operator, was no more than the victim of a deceiving husband?

And so to Anthony Charles Lynton Bliar: The Mills-Jowell axis has implications that go far beyond mid-level New Labour apparatchikery. Let us not forget that it was Tony Blair that not only exonerated Jowell, but spent many a happy day in Berlusconi’s infamous villa in Sardinia. Perhaps this ‘missing link’ (Berlusconi-Mills-Jowell-Blair) will be an additional factor in the Bilderberg deliberations when it comes to nominating a European ‘president’—a nomination that, as noted by George Monbiot, may yet provide us with the best opportunity to make Blair the cell-mate of Mills and maybe, just maybe, Berlusconi himself.

Jack Straw: ‘as slimy as an oil slick’

New Labour cannot evade responsibility for the rise in the popularity of the BNP. Amongst New Labour politicians, Jack Straw is perhaps the man who has most blatantly dipped his political spoon into the BNP’s broth of racist and xenophobic hatred; his infamous, easy go at women who wear veils was a textbook example of the kind of intervention that aids and abets ethnocentrism of an extremist kind. Almost overnight, some of the women most likely to be abused in the UK were transformed by Straw into ‘perpetrators’ of multiculturalism.

Straw is also the éminence grise behind Britain’s scandalous libel laws. And as if that weren’t enough, just yesterday it was reported that Straw has been caught out trying to sneak through a new law that makes it possible for the government to conduct secret inquests.

In this context, it was contradictory, to say the least, to hear that New Labour’s most right-handed man would be in charge of ’standing up’ to the neo-nazis during the BBC’s Nick Griffin Comes to Question Time special. Alas, interviewees on this morning’s Radio 4 Today programe reported that Straw looked distinctly uncomfortable in that role; he would do, given his politics.

EcoLogics is happy to point readers in the direction of two excellent pieces by commentators who tell the Jack Straw story like it is.

The first, by Gary Young, sets the scene with a piece that appears, lamentably, in Peter Mandelson’s rag, better known as The Guardian. But a friend has forwarded it and here is an excerpt (perhaps Young might find another paper to write in!):

The issue of whether the BNP should be given this kind of airtime has been debated extensively elsewhere in these pages. But there is little doubt that once the BNP is on Question Time, Jack Straw – or indeed anyone in the New Labour hierarchy – is in no position to take the fight to it. The same is true for most of the rest of the British political establishment that will be represented on the panel – they have either actively colluded or passively acquiesced in the political trajectory of the past decade. [...] But it is no accident that this happened on New Labour’s watch and no small irony that Jack Straw should set himself up as Griffin’s opponent.[...] Economically, its neoliberal policies have resulted in growing insecurity, rising unemployment, child poverty and inequality that have alienated the poor and made the middle class feel vulnerable. Politically, its lies over the war, stewardship of the expenses scandal and internal bickering have produced widespread cynicism with our political culture. The ramifications of its role in the war on terror in general, and Iraq in particular, were to elevate fear of a racialised “other” to a matter of life and death at home. “Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack,” explains Arjun Appadurai, in Fear of Small Numbers. “Terror … opens the possibility that anyone may be a soldier in disguise, a sleeper among us, waiting to strike at the heart of our social slumber.”

From Gary Young’s  ‘When you watch the BNP on TV, just remember: Jack Straw started all this’ in The Guardian.

Another piece, even more focused on Straw, has just been published by Matthew Norman in The Independent. Here is a quote that gives you a taster of the article:

The one thing we can be sure Mr Straw believes in is Mr Straw. His ambition is unquenchable. When his one serious mistake (deflecting transatlantic glory from Mr Tony Blair by cuddling up to Condi Rice) cost him the Foreign Office, he accepted humiliating demotion just to stay in the game. His transfer of allegiance from Blair to Brown, whose leadership “campaign” he managed (and hats off for winning that one), was comical in its fervency. Even now, be sure that he is scheming to position himself as the Jim Hacker compromise candidate should Labour somehow locate the energy required to ditch the PM.[...]Tragically, there would be worse electoral choices. …he is adept at promoting an image of calmly authoritative blandness, hence his comparative popularity, and a grandmaster of televisual smoothness. He is as slimy as an oil slick, and always quick to move on once he’s coated the vulnerable birdies with filthy tar.