New EcoLogics

Unless you work in a university, you’re probably unaware that yesterday saw walkouts in some 500 universities across the UK. As I write this post, the news headlines are being dominated by the war on Libya, and by what is being dubbed as the Liberal Conservatives’ Jeremy Clarkson budget. In this post I want to suggest that this order of news coverage is precisely what the Tories were hoping for. Alas, I also want to argue that the bid to manage politics in this most grotesque of ways is likely to backfire—and to backfire spectacularly.

I had planned to begin this post with an analysis of the ethics of David Cameron’s war in Libya, but an excellent article by Seumas Milne has done that part of the work for me; please read that article if you think the Anglo-French aero-expedition in Libya is either a ‘good thing’, or a ‘necessary evil’ (see There’s Nothing Moral about the NATO’s intervention in Libya). Milne’s article means I’m able to focus on the rest of the planned post, namely, on a comparison of David Cameron’s war on Libya, and Margaret Thatcher’s war with Argentina about 30 years ago.

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Soon after the Anglo-French attack on Libya began, the news media carried reports that a mission undertaken by Tornadoes based at RAF Marham had been the longest since the redoubtable Vulcans bombed the Argentine-occupied Falkland Islands in 1982 (most Argentinians would see the British as the occupying force, but that’s another matter). The comparison between the attacks was an apt one in more ways than one. The Falklands War was a godsend to Margaret Thatcher, and David Cameron must be hoping that Britain’s latest war will provide some respite from news headlines that point to a growing opposition to the Liberal Conservative coalition’s ideological crusade—not a crusade against Muslim nations (though Qaddafi is not entirely unjustified in making such a point), but a crusade against the welfare state.

Thatcher’s children—the generation of Brits born in the 1980s—might be forgiven for thinking that Thatcherism (or what I call neoliberalism) was always popular, that Thatcher herself was always regarded as the kind of ‘saviour’ that right-wing revisionist accounts of Britain’s recent history like to portray. In fact, as anyone old enough to vote in the early 1980s will know, by the time that Thatcher decided to engage in full-scale warfare with Argentina, the ‘nouvelle vague’ Tories had just about concluded a war on the British postwar economic and social consensus. While Thatcher also prevailed in the latter war, at the time that the Argentinian dictatorship invaded the Malvinas, things were not going very well on Thatcher’s economic front. Like her hero and ally Augusto Pinochet, Thatcher had decided to subject Britain to the kind of bitter neoliberal medicine which Milton Friedman and other Chicago School economists had prescribed for Chile. The medicine, which still goes by the name of monetarism, effectively consisted in removing the kinds of controls that had hitherto somewhat shielded the poorest people from jungle, which is to say City of London, capitalism.

Direct income taxes were lowered, even as indirect taxes that hit the less well-off were raised. Interest rates were raised as inflation, itself sky high, became ‘public enemy number 1′. At the same time, investment in a variety of public services was slashed; then as now, one of the principal targets was that pet hate of the Tories, an independent and critical higher education. The cuts to HE were so severe that, as I noted in another post on this blog, even Oxford University, that traditional bastion of British establishment, broke all postwar precedent by denying Thatcher an honorary doctorate. By the time that the Argentine invasion took place, unemployment had reached levels not seen since the Great Depression era, and Thatcher survived waves of national strikes thanks to a combination of police brutality, and out-and-out political warfare on the unions—warfare that involved not just the conservative media, but the British intelligence services. The legacy of this repression continues to this day.

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The initial invasion of the Falklands/Malvinas was acutely embarrassing for the British military establishment and for the traditionally bellicose Conservative Party. But it also generated a golden opportunity for Thatcher. Britain’s vastly diminished armed forces would not have an easy time recovering the British colony. But the Argentinian forces were no match for a joint Anglo-American operation (the US played a key logistical and intelligence role in the conflict).  More to the point, once the Conservatives realised the potential political benefits of a ‘proper war’—and conversely, the politically disastrous consequences of a stalemate with Argentina—all the stops were pulled out. Efforts by the UN and by the Argentinians themselves to find a face-saving (and life-saving) compromise were quite literally torpedoed when Thatcher ordered the Belgrano, a WWII Argentinian light cruiser, to be sunk. The Belgrano was outside of the exclusion zone which the British forces themselves had declared. To be sure, its outdated technology (basically anti-aircraft guns and Sea Cat missiles which had been installed by the British themselves in 1968) would have posed no serious threat to the British force. The easy sinking of the vessel by a British nuclear submarine (still the only event of this kind) made patently evident the extent to which, when push came to shove, the Argentinians were hopelessly outgunned, despite their geographical advantage.  No, once Thatcher had set her sights set on a traditional war—a war that was really for the benefit of the increasingly disgruntled public at home—no peace plan was going to interfere with her cunning designs.

Despite all the differences, a number of parallels can be drawn between Thatcher’s war with Argentina, and Cameron’s war with Qaddafi’s Libya. First and foremost, like Thatcher in the early 1980s, Cameron is in the middle of an ideological crusade that is going quite badly wrong. Most of the latest economic indicators show that, far from improving, the British economy is sliding back into recession. Unemployment is still going up, and before long it could reach the 3-million plus rates that Thatcherism generated in the early 1980s. Now as then, the Tories desperately need something to distract the British public.

Second, like Argentina in the early 1980s, Libya poses no threat to the UK itself. Indeed, if anything, its forces pose even less of a threat to the British forces than did the Argentinian Army—though the capture of the SAS force a week or so ago shows that nothing can protect even the most hardened of soldiers from good old fashioned political ineptitude.

Third, in Libya’s case as in the case of the Falklands War, the war-mongering is based on the thinnest of moral excuses. In the case of the Falklands War, Thatcher could at least argue that one of Britain’s last colonial outposts had been invaded, and that the ‘natives’ were unhappy with the new masters. In Libya’s case, there is not even this fig leaf; on the contrary, the convenience of attacking Libya is growing increasingly evident. As noted by Milne, “…on the other side of the Arab world, in western-armed Bahrain, security forces are right now staging night raids on opposition activists, house by house, and scores have gone missing as the dynastic despots carry out a bloody crackdown on the democratic movement. And last Friday more than 50 peaceful demonstrators were shot dead on the streets of Sana’a by government forces in western-backed Yemen. [...] Far from imposing a no-fly zone to bring the embattled Yemeni regime to heel, US special forces are operating across the country in support of the government. But then US, British and other Nato forces are themselves responsible for hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last week more than 40 civilians were killed by a US drone attack in Pakistan, while over 60 died last month in one US air attack in Afghanistan. [...] The point isn’t just that western intervention in Libya is grossly hypocritical. It’s that such double standards are an integral part of a mechanism of global power and domination that stifles hopes of any credible international system of human rights protection”.

It is thus clear that in this latest war, as in the case of the war over the Falklands, the real interests lie not in the domain of explicit moral condemnations of repression (let alone territorial integrity), but in the realm of a combination of tactical political needs, and perhaps, a more strategic calculus regarding long-term policy in regard to oil supplies. Here too, there is a parallel to be drawn with the Falklands, whose real significance was always suspected to have more to do with access to resources in the South Atlantic seabed—or so some claimed at the time, perhaps in a bid to rationalise the otherwise purely tactical justifications for full-scale warfare.

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What, the reader may wonder, does all of this have to do with the walkouts in higher education? At a time when the ConDems are arguing that it is imperative to reduce the budget deficit, and when this policy is being used to justify the de facto privatisation of all public services, including higher education, David Cameron is quite happy to spend money on a media war on Libya. I say ‘media war’ in the full knowledge that, for the Libyans, it is anything but a ‘media’ war. But that does not contradict the fact that a simulacrum of morality, with a bellicose outcome, is being used to divert public attention from the real challenges that now face British, and indeed French, politicians. At a time when things are starting to go politically very wrong for both Cameron and for Sarkosy, there could be nothing more convenient than a little ‘light entertainment’ in a country with a ‘known’ baddy.

Even if one does not have a problem with the grotesque immorality of this kind of ‘adventure’, it is clear that the economic contradiction is there for everyone to see. There is no money for universities, no money for the NHS, no money even for the police—that most favoured of neoliberal public services—but there is money for Tomahawk cruise missiles (which cost US $1 million each), plenty of money for the logistical costs of sending Tornadoes on extra-long flights to North Africa, and as much money as will be necessary for the potentially open–ended conflict that now looms in Libya.

The problem for David Cameron, and for his sidekick Nick Clegg is that, unlike the case of the Falklands, in this conflict there is no neat end that can be engineered, a la carte, for the public relations calculus at the heart of the operation. As Milne notes, public support for the Libya adventure is low, and whatever support there is can only be lost as more and more people become aware of the operation’s hypocrisy, and of its failure to secure any of its own stated objectives.

This raises a worrisome question: what stunt will the ConDems engineer next to try to keep the British public in a state of distraction from the real issues of our time?

Update 16.30 March 25: This war on Libya is cheap–honest! You’ve got to read it to not believe it. What is worse: the ConDems spending money on an immoral war, or lying about Britain’s true role in a conflict for which Cameron wants to play the lead as a Semi-Lone Ranger?