EcoLogics

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The following is an excerpt of a post published by George Monbiot about Sir David Eady, a judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, whom Monbiot describes as Britain’s legal censor. EcoLogics publishes it in solidarity with Monbiot and all those—the Murdochs, Rothmeres and other home-grown or imported oligarchs excepted—who are finding themselves on the receiving end of Britain’s extraordinarily repressive libel laws. To read the full blog, go to monbiot.com to ‘The Hanging Judge‘.

“During the libel case brought by Richard Desmond, pornographer and proprietor of Express newspapers, against the investigative author Tom Bower, who had claimed that Desmond acted on grudges, Eady refused to allow the court to hear evidence that he had done just this in another instance. In July, the appeal court found that Eady’s decision was “plainly wrong” and risked “a miscarriage of justice”(5). In 2004, during a case brought by a Saudi businessman, Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, against the Wall Street Journal, Eady decided that the newspaper’s story that the Saudi central bank was monitoring the accounts of certain businesses in case they were being used (unwittingly or otherwise) to channel funds to terrorists was not responsible journalism(6). Among his justifications was the fact that the US government hadn’t published this information: Eady appeared to see the interests of the state and the interest of the public as the same thing(7).

The law lords decided that Eady was “hostile to the spirit” of the public interest defence and that he had “rigidly applied the old law” in a way that was “quite unrealistic … unnecessary and positively misleading”. In one amazing passage, Lord Hoffmann compared Eady’s approach to that of the Communist Party censors in the Soviet Union(8).

But perhaps the gravest judgements against the Honourable Mr Justice Eady are those made by legislators in the United States. Such is the reach and severity of his illiberal rulings that four states have so far passed what are, in effect, Eady laws(9), and Congress is currently considering a federal bill whose purpose is to defend US citizens from his judgements, and the English law he interprets. The Eady laws arise from his encouragement of libel tourism: allowing cases with only the most tenuous connection with this country to be heard in London, and using them to stamp on free speech all over the world.”

Here’s the funny thing about Eady: according to the Daily Telegraph,

Surprising as it may now seem, Mr Justice Eady was once a leading courtroom defender of red-top journalism, much in demand as a barrister who could be relied on to uphold the freedom of the tabloids to expose the private lives of public figures. It was to David Eady that the Sun newspaper turned when the Coronation Street actor Bill Roache sued over taunts that he was “boring”.

This is EcoLogics’ contribution to Monbiot’s denunciation: how extraordinary that, in a country that is almost second to none when it comes to Rottweiler journalism, with oligarchs such as Rupert Murdoch routinely employing their newspapers to attack uncooperative politicians, or simply to make money by publishing pedling celebrity tat, we have the most draconian press law in the so-called ‘free’ world.

It might be argued that this is precisely the reason why we have these laws. In fact, given the nature of British political culture, it is usually only the rich, and apparently especially the rich on the political right, that can use the law to silence newspapers, and defend their interests. This means that, far from being in the public interest, the law as it stands serves to undermine democracy. According to Monbiot, a key defender of the status quo has been Jack Straw, who as Justice Minister has blocked attempts to reform the libel laws.

The worst offender when it comes to rottweiler journalism is Italy—or rather, Berlusconi’s press. Have a look at this press item, published by Reuters, which reveals that Berlusconi is having one of his TV channels shadow and secretly film a judge who has ruled against the prime Minister in a bribery case. ‘Days after Judge Raimondo Mesiano ordered Berlusconi’s holding company to pay 750 million euros in damages to a rival, the media mogul’s Canale 5 channel aired a video of the judge taking a walk, smoking and getting a shave at the barber. Dubbing the judge’s behaviour “eccentric”, a narrator points to him smoking the “umpteenth” cigarette, calls his turquoise socks “strange” and says: “He’s impatient … he can only relax at the barber’s”.

Amid the growing controversy surrounding the possible, indeed likely appearance of the neo-fascist BNP on the BBC’s Question Time this Thursday, two different, but inter-related issues have scarcely been raised by the Westminster commentariat.

The first is New Labour’s role in aiding and abetting the rise in the popularity of the BNP. New Labour, along with the Murdochs and the Rothmeres, is largely to blame for this phenomenon. First, it has so lied to, and deceived its former political base—British working men and women—that it has generated a disillusion and frustration with mainstream politics that is finding an outlet in the hateful BNP. The ‘intense relaxation’ of figures such as Peter Mandelson about the ‘filthy rich’ is in direct proportion to the anger that is being expressed by former Labour voters. Some have responded by going to the BNP; next spring many of the rest will vote for David ‘Janus’ Cameron’s PPP, the new Tory ‘People’s Progressive Party’.

While this aspect is key, it is not enough in itself; the second factor has been the xenophobia which New Labour politicians like Hazel Blears, David Blunkett, Jack Straw and other figures on New Labour’s increasingly far right leadership have promoted by talking up the ‘Islamist threat’ and by promoting anti-immigrant legislation. New Labour has, in this sense, joined the ranks of tabloid papers such as The Sun and the Daily Mail in scapegoating foreigners for Britain’s own social malaise. Even Gordon Brown has dipped his political spoon into this broth, claiming as he did in 2007 that ‘British jobs are for British workers’.

In this context, for New Labour to be suggest that the BNP should be excluded from national television is pathetic. The calls dissimulate the party’s own stance on immigration, and make a mockery of its allegedly progressive social credentials.

The BBC is playing no less sinister a role in the entire process. Let’s be very clear: the corporation has never been unbiased. Talk of impartiality is no more—and no less—than a convenient fiction which has served to maintain a degree aperture in the corporation’s coverage of a variety of events—a whisker of pluralism that, as this blogger has suggested before, is certainly better than the kind of Fox News society achieved in the United States by the Murdoch family. But let us not believe for a moment that this is tantamount to the impartiality that the BBC pretends to adhere to. Anyone who thinks otherwise might want to investigate the role of Mark Thompson, the BBC’s Director General, vis-a-vis the corporation’s coverage of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In this case we find a useful example of the limits of the liberal model of journalism. (For a more detailed critique, EcoLogics includes below an excerpt of an analysis published in 2007, in the post on the British judge, Stephen Sedley, who tried to support the New Labour government’s plans to introduce a universal DNA database.)

No, what we have to fear is not so much the appearance of the BNP on television, as the fact that it will do so in a broadcasting system which has already shown a predisposition to tolerate both manifest and subtle forms of racism. If you missed the controversy surrounding an earlier appearance of the BNP on Radio 1, then read up on it to find out what is likely to happen, if not now, then in the medium term in a broadcasting system that has become subservient to the forces of neoliberalism—the same ones that have contributed, and still are contributing to the renewal of fascism in the UK, and beyond.

From an earlier post, a critique of the BBC’s claims of impartiality:

‘The BBC’s editorial guidelines suggest that the BBC is committed to impartiality. According to the BBC, this means that, amongst other things, the corporation seeks to provide ‘a properly balanced service consisting of a wide range of subject matter and views broadcast over an appropriate time scale across all our output’; to ‘reflect a wide range of opinion and explore a range and conflict of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under represented’; to ‘produce content about any subject, at any point on the spectrum of debate as long as there are good editorial reasons for doing so’; to ‘explore or report on a specific aspect of an issue or provide an opportunity for a single view to be expressed, but in doing so we do not misrepresent opposing views. They may also require a right of reply’. The Corporation aims to ‘ensure [that] we avoid bias or an imbalance of views on controversial subjects’. Indeed, the BBC goes so far as to say that its ‘journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgments but may not express personal opinions on matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy’ and ‘[o]ur audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters’(8).

These guidelines reflect the BBC’s commitment to what might be described as a traditional discourse on the nature of journalism. A good journalist, or rather the news that s/he produces, is accurate, balanced, includes where appropriate a diversity of views, and does so in a manner that is not prejudiced by any bias, or by the personal views of the journalist.

While this discourse has been comprehensively critiqued by a number of scholars (see for example, Stuart Allan’s News Culture), there is still much to be said for it; we have only to consider the alternative posed by Fox News (9) to realise how vitally important it is to try to produce impartial, or something like impartial accounts, in news reporting.

The problem is that editorial guidelines such as the BBC’s are of course no guarantee of impartiality—for the BBC, or for any other news organisation. On the one hand, and staying within the logic of the guidelines, journalism is always susceptible to external manipulation, to mistakes or bias incurred thanks to the pressures of time or the limitations of space, and indeed to ‘internal’ manipulation by ‘biased’ journalists. From a more critical perspective, the guidelines are based on relatively naïve understandings of the nature of the production, dissemination, and social reception of knowledge by way of the media of mass communication. Modern societies and the issues that emerge in them tend to be so complex that there may well be far more perspectives than a journalist can ever know, understand, or report in any given case or subject. To be sure, the finite nature of a journalist’s, or indeed of a team of journalists’ knowledge means that s/he/they will necessarily bring to bear a certain perspective to whatever aspects they do manage to cover. Practical constraints to do with generic formulae, the amount of space or time available to produce a piece, the political and economic interests of the news organisations and their bureaucracies are not a matter of exception. On the contrary, they are the structural conditions under which, and with which journalists must work to produce news.

This post is not the place to engage in a detailed critique of journalistic conventions. It must suffice to suggest that, in practice, the aforementioned constraints force journalists to be selective, and thereby reductive with respect to the range and number of points of view that they represent. Those that they do choose will reflect, however indirectly, the ‘biases’ of their own knowledge and/or experience. Put differently, journalists’ representations will always exclude or misrepresent at least some views or perspectives.”

This post is concerned with a neat ideological inversion: isn’t it fantastic that bona fide protestors now only face the possibility of permanent damage to their hearing, or perhaps a fatal aneurysm?

If this comment makes no sense, you may want to read about the news that U.S. police used sonic cannons, also known euphemistically as ‘Long Range Acoustic Devices’, to disperse a relatively small group of protesters during the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.

Four thoughts:

First, we see yet again how a technology ostensibly developed for U.S. military purposes is used against that country’s own civilians.

Second, how appropriate that the Obama administration, which must have sanctioned the use of this politically sensitive technology, chose to literally drown out the protests with noise—sheer, deafening noise. EcoLogics is reminded of Obama’s repeated claims that he is all about ‘listening‘. Nothing like listening with sonic cannons.

Third, U.S. police use of the cannons implies that there is little difference between someone protesting in Pittsburgh, Iraqi insurgents, and someone hijacking a ship near Somalia—the sonic cannons have reportedly been used by the U.S. military in Iraq, and by cruise ships against the Somali ‘pirates’ as well.  Note, though, that this technology-based ‘equalization’ has a rather interesting discursive implication: if protesters can be treated like insurgents or pirates, then insurgents and pirates can be treated like protesters. A government that terrorises dissent does so at its own peril.

The fourth and final thought concerns the representation of what EcoLogics describes as technologies of non-death. Weapons such as the sonic cannon, produced by the blandly named American Technology Corporation, and the more and more widely used TASER, are being represented as being somehow ‘responsible’ weapons—in fact, not weapons at all. The TASER Corporation has developed a discourse that neatly dissimulates the offensive nature of its guns, even as it reveals the economic motivation behind the development of the weapons: the ‘About TASER’ section of its website claims that ‘We are committed to protecting life by providing innovative, high quality products and services that exceed customer expectations every time’. ‘TASER technology protects life’.

As if to prove its earnestness, the company suggests that ‘most employees and all of our senior management have taken voluntary exposures with our various TASER ECD devices. This includes Rick Smith, CEO; his brother Tom Smith, Chairman; Kathy Hanrahan, President; and Dan Behrendt, CFO; as well as all vice presidents of TASER Interational’ (quoted verbatim).

EcoLogics wonders if it wouldn’t be more realistic to perform involuntary exposures of senior management?

Lest there be any claim of facetiousness, ideology is defined in much the way that Cambridge sociologist John B. Thompson proposes: as meaning that serves to develop and sustain relations of domination between, and of course also within, social groups. Here’s a rather easy prediction: as the accountability of governments in Western democracies is eroded more and more by the agents of neo-liberalism, we will see increased deployment of sonic cannons and other weapons of mass silencing.

Here’s a pub quiz question for moral philosophers: what does New Labour have in common with Jeremy Bentham?

Anyone answering ‘panopticism’ will only get half the points.

It is indeed true that New Labour politicians are keen as mustard on encouraging people to believe that they are being spied on as a means of exercising social control. We have only to think of the slogan used by Capita, New Labour’s darling donor, as part of its lucrative TV licensing franchise: ‘It’s all in the database’.

But the preferred answer is that both New Labour and Jeremy Bentham are consequentialists. Simplifying somewhat, consequentialism is the ethical theory that the rightness or wrongness of actions depends on the actions’ outcomes.

This is the ethics that has underpinned New Labour’s assault on our civil liberties: the open-ended detention of individuals in Belmarsh prison, the party’s tolerance of the police ‘kettling’ policy, its efforts to hold on to the nakedly authoritarian ‘control orders’ (really house arrest without charge), and the maintenance of DNA evidence of people who have either been cleared by the courts, or have never actually been accused of any wrong-doing are all examples of this ethics. If the infringement of civil liberties has ‘good consequences’ such as the eventual capture and conviction of a criminal, then all is well—or so the New Labour argument goes.

This populist ethics is also part of what governs New Labour’s higher educational policy. This week the Guardian published news that the government is to stop funding ‘pointless’ university research, and that from 2012 onwards it will force academics to prove that their research is relevant to the real world. It is not just any ‘relevance’ that will suffice; academics will have to demonstrate that their research influences the economy, public policy or society in order to secure the largest research grants.

To the unwary reader this might not seem like such a bad idea: surely state money should be invested in research that ‘makes a difference’?

Beyond the ethical issue outlined above, the problem with the policy is that it dissimulates, via vintage New Labourese, a rather more devious strategy.  What will really matter is not whether the research influences public policy or society, but whether private corporations can use the research to make money. The policy is, in fact, another crude expression of New Labour’s economicist utilitarianism, a subset of its more general consequentialism. What New Labour really intends is to further restrict—we might just as well say ‘constrict’—British universities’ fast vanishing relative autonomy by forcing them to dance to the tune of UK Plc. Several weeks ago, George Monbiot put the matter into stark relief when he began an article asking the following questions:

Why is the Medical Research Council run by an arms manufacturer? Why is the Natural Environment Research Council run by the head of a construction company? Why is the chairman of a real estate firm in charge of higher education funding for England?

After the public dissemination of this and other similar critiques, Hefce will fool no one when it disingenuously attempts to hide the government’s market fundamentalism with an appeal to the need to ‘influence’ public policy or ‘society’.

The dilemma that now stares at the increasingly reactionary New Labour party is that the consequences of its own actions will not, of course, always be the intended ones. For all its scheming consequentialism—perhaps Machiavellianism is now a better term—the New Labour nomenclatura faces many years in the political wilderness. It members will have to watch with impotence as the Tories take over, and do more of the same.

Perhaps New Labour MPs know this so well that they are falling over themselves in an effort to promote policies that might secure fat corporate ‘adviserships’ of the kind taken by Tony Blair with J P Morgan and Zurich. EcoLogics imagines a political scene in which the proverbial rats are hastily jumping over the side of a sinking ship—the ship of truly social policies—and into the waiting jaws of corporate sharks such as the ones that are providing patronage for politicians ranging from Alan Milburn to David Blunkett.

Who is behind New Labour’s sweeping policies?

It is well known that New Labour won the last elections (in 2005) with a drastically reduced majority: the party won no new seats, and its share of the popular vote fell by 5%. What is less well known is that only about 9.5 million people voted for New Labour (EcoLogics uses the expression ‘New Labour’ deliberately), which means that the party has governed over the last four years with a mandate based on about 22% of all those who could have voted (it is calculated that at 27 million, turnout was about 61%, which means that some 44 million people could have voted).

While the popular mandate for New Labour was not always as low as this, Britain’s extraordinarily undemocratic first-past-the-post parliamentary system means that New Labour has never actually represented a majority of Britons. Yet we have seen the scale of New Labour’s transformation of our everyday lives: beyond getting us involved in two wars, one of which was illegal and the other which is now supported by less than half of the population, New Labour has engaged in a reformist project whose privatising zeal, panoptical logic, and gross economic mismanagement are unmatched by that of any other postwar government.

Privatising zeal: even as New Labour has poured money into certain public services, it has engaged in a far-reaching policy of full or partial, and often covert privatisations. From city academies to foundation hospitals, the selling off of Royal Mail’s most lucrative aspects to the outsourcing of Job Centre Plus activities, New Labour has fatally undermined the old Labour principle that some services must remain in the public sector in order to prevent greedy corporations from exploiting the most vulnerable groups. Even in those cases where some public sector agencies nominally remain under public control, they have been reorganised as de facto private sector businesses if only because their practices have been made to obey markets, and not a public service ethos. The BBC is but one example of this process, and Higher Education is increasingly another. If there is one thing that New Labour has done astutely, it’s the manner in which it has literally poured money, ostensibly for the public sector, into the coffers of private firms: the complaints about millions given to private consultants are only the tip of the iceberg.

Panoptical logic: New Labour’s laws have given virtually all public sector, and part-privatised government agencies the power to spy, almost at will, on any aspect of our private lives. Any of us can now be thrown into jail and kept there for the longest period of time in any industrialised democracy, without charges or due process. As I have explained in a series of posts about New Labour’s Spiral of Terror, the true justification for these extraordinary changes is not, as is widely believed, to be found in 9/11 and subsequent attacks; to name just one example, the RIPA 2000 legislation was developed before 9/11, but it is this legislation, as amended by David Blunkett, that now even gives town councils the right to spy on people who allow their dogs to fowl the country’s streets and parks. Anyone familiar with the history of governance must know that unpopular governments, or governments without a true mandate, have typically resorted to brute force, or at least, some form of policing coercion, and New Labour is no exception to this rule. Perhaps its one claim to innovation is the extent to which it has relied on a panoptical logic to secure its interests. However, as the crisis over the G20 policing demonstrated, it may now be the case that this same logic is being applied against the police by camera-wielding activists. And if the crisis in parliamentary standards revealed anything beyond the expected conflation of public and private interests, it was that MPs own privacy is now under threat. The proverbial chickens have finally come home to roost in Westminster itself.

Gross economic mismanagement: we should be thankful that the Tories are not in power just now, because they would be busy slashing and burning public services as per the older, less astute Thatcherite model, and this at precisely the moment when massive state investment is required to keep us from sliding into an economic depression. But this verity must not allow us to overlook the fact that it was New Labour’s incestuous relationship with London City financiers that got us into the economic pickle in the first place. Blair, Brown and their acolytes have fallen, and are still falling heads over heels to please especially the big financial corporations; little wonder that Blair landed plum jobs as an ‘adviser’ with J P Morgan and with Zurich, and that Gordon Brown (and the Obama administration) have just managed to stop any efforts on the part of France and Germany to cap bankers’ bonuses. Will Brown also cash in when he’s gone? And has Mandelson done so already?

All of this, and much, much more on the basis of an electoral mandate that is nowhere near a majority of the popular vote. Who then, or what, gives New Labour the right to engage in these far-reaching changes?

New Labour’s policies are almost certainly the result of a complex mixture of highly centralised decision-making, and some local input via direct and indirect consultation processes. While there is evidence that some of the policies are the result of long-term planning, others are the result of purely tactical decision-making, frequently in response to a media panic, or a tabloid attack. As always, it would be a mistake to assume that there is one big conspiracy at work. I nevertheless suggest that there are three forces that have more than taken up the slack of meaningful democratic participation in the UK, and are responsible for many aspects of the changes outlined above.

The first of these involves the media, with two groups—Murdoch’s News Corporation, and Jonathan Harmsworth’s (aka the 4th Viscount Rothermere) Daily Mail and General Trust—leading the proverbial pack. The process that began at least as far back as the time when Murdoch bought the Sun and transformed it into a Thatcherite rottweiler has had extraordinarily important implications for politics in the UK. Murdoch—or rather, now the Murdochs—have reached a position of such political power that they may even be king- or queenmakers. Little wonder that prospective party leaders from Blair onwards have been so eager to secure meetings with Rupert Murdoch, frequently in far away places. From European policy to economic practice, from the spying on people (as in the case of the News of the World) to the promotion of the idea of permanent insecurity, the Murdochs and the Rothermeres have doubtless played a huge role in promoting the kind of political culture we have in Britain today.

The second force is made up of other powerful private sector corporations without access to the public forms of pressure brought to bear by the Murdochs or the Rothermeres. Some of these are huge transnational conglomerates like the Royal Bank of Scotland or BAE, companies which have the power quite literally to stop government action in its tracks (as was the case with the Serious Fraud Office’s decision to ‘discontinue’ its investigation into BAE corruption) or to bend it in the direction of one or two directors’ personal interests (Fred Goodwin’s pension agreement comes to mind, despite New Labour’s strenuous efforts to persuade us that its hands were tied).

Many other corporations may engage in less spectacular interventions, but their practices may have equally nefarious consequences for public policy. Here EcoLogics has in mind for example the role that Entrust may have played, and may still be playing via David Blunkett in policy matters involving centralised, all-encompassing databases such as the proposed ID card scheme. Or consider, for another example, what happened to the UK’s adult education policy, thanks in part to the relationship between New Labour and the failed automotive repair company turned adult education provider, Carter & Carter. As EcoLogics has noted in several other posts, Carter & Carter attempted to gain a foothold in higher education by way of a partnership with Howard Newby, the former vice-chancellor of UWE who is now vice-chancellor at Liverpool University and has tried to close down progressive departments such as philosophy and politics.

We might also point to Bridgepoint Capital, the £13 billion private equity firm which has been recently associated with Alan Milburn, a former New Labour hopeful for party leadership who is now widely believed to represent private interests in the context of so-called NHS ‘reform’. And let us not forget Capita, which is perhaps the most infamous of the New Labour corporate darlings. Capita controls the television licence fee (the operation of which has made headlines thanks to Capita’s brutal enforcement procedures); the management of call centres for government initiatives such as the London Congestion Charge; the provision of IT services, including web hosting and helpdesk support, to many county and city councils, many LEAs, as well as the Driving Standards Agency and National Rail; the management of the Criminal Records Bureau for the Home Office;  SIMS.net, the School Information Management Software which is used in virtually all primary and secondary schools across the UK in order to record many aspects of student data… the list goes on and on, and is derived from the Capita Wikipedia entry, which is worth a read. Beyond the scary concentration of private information in the hands of one private corporation, the Capita Wiki illustrates the point made earlier about the not-so-overt privatisation, via the figure of ‘outsourcing’, of a host of public service activities. Lest we forget, Capita first came to public notice when its CEO Rod Aldridge had to resign over the New Labour ‘cash-for-peerages’ affair, a scandal which confirmed the extent to which the New Labour’s party-economic fortunes hinged on political favours. EcoLogics says ‘confirmed’ because of course, the Ecclestone Affair provided the first glimpse of this reality. (By way of an aside, does Aldridge still have a stake in Capita?)

Beyond these especially big fish, it is difficult to know how many additional corporations are involved in what aspects of government on what level, and how many act in concert, or on the contrary, compete with each other for influence. It is also difficult to assess, given the behind-the-scenes nature of their interventions, the extent to which such corporations must vie with more local interests when they attempt to shape New Labour’s policies. We have seen, for example, how easy it will apparently be for Tesco to get around local wishes in Machynlleth.

EcoLogics nonetheless suspects that the group of most influential corporations is actually rather smaller than expected, and involves a great deal of collaboration, to not say economic and political incestuousness. Part of what allowed Carter & Carter to grow in the spectacular way that it did prior to its CEO’s death was an injection of capital from Bridgepoint. At the same time, the skills policy that Carter & Carter would have benefited from was authored by Lord Sandy Leitch, one of the Lloyds Banking Group’s leading directors, who in turn is said to have given money towards Gordon Brown’s virtual leadership campaign. Brown, for his part, looked the other way in regard to questions regarding competition law when Lloyds embarked in its fateful takeover of HBOS. It is, in this sense, not difficult to imagine that, as the title of this post suggests, New Labour’s world is in some respects rather smaller, or at least rather more tightly knit, than one might have thought, and thus perhaps rather more precarious than many might assume. What would happen if any of these players (or one of their employees) were to blow the whistle on the New Labour government?

That said, a third source of policy influence—and support— takes the form of the intervention of foreign governments, with the U.S. doing most of the backseat driving. Few people realise the extent to which U.S. foreign policy, and the interests of its different political and business groups, dictate Britain’s international and even national affairs. Few people know, for example, that the U.S. military would have to both approve, and do the targeting for any use of our much-vaunted Trident missile system. And there can be little doubt that it was the U.S. that forced Tony Blair to walk down the Iraqi War gangplank; this is something that he will of course always deny because it would show his true stature in the world. But how else to explain that a leader of the Labour Party (in fact, New Labour Party) could ignore the extraordinary two-million person march which occurred in London on February 15, 2003? One gets a sense of the sheer scale of the march when one learns that, on that bitterly cold day, people had to queue for hours just to be able to join the massive anti-war march. Hundreds of thousands of people were jammed on bridges and side roads, still trying to begin the march, even as several hundred thousand more were reaching the end of the route. Alas, as we now know, a deal had already been done, and Tony Blair felt powerless to stop it despite the fact that he must have known, as the Bush administration itself already suspected, that it might well finish off his political career.

The above is, without a doubt, an overly simplistic analysis. But it begins to explain why anyone who claims that we have a solid, and healthy democracy in Britain is deceiving themselves. It is, in this sense, richly ironic that the New Labour government recently felt able to institute direct rule in the Turks and Caicos Islands, ostensibly on account of the corruption of the island state’s ’suspended’ government. The UK’s acting prime minister—the man who has had himself called the First Secretary of State, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council (EcoLogics returns to Wikipedia)—has previously been forced to resign not once, but twice from the UK’s cabinet thanks to conflicts of interest involving British and Indian millionaires (or perhaps it is billionaires). In such a context, one does not accuse other states of corruption. Or perhaps, that is exactly what one does.

Some news in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but will monitor their treatment to ensure they are not tortured, administration officials said on Monday.[...] The administration officials, who announced the changes on condition that they not be identified, said that unlike the Bush administration, they would give the State Department a larger role in assuring that transferred detainees would not be abused. [...] “The emphasis will be on insuring that individuals will not face torture if they are sent over overseas,” said one administration official, adding that no detainees will be sent to countries that are known to conduct abusive interrogations.

There is really not much to say beyond what this blogger wrote in a post published on February 6, and which was titled The Day that Obama’s Hope Died. Hillary Clinton, the head of the State Department, supported the Iraq War, and recently refused to describe the coup d’etat in Honduras as that: a coup. Why should we be reassured that people abducted by the CIA (or perhaps by a private contractor like Blackwater, now renamed as a ridiculous ‘Xe Services’) will escape torture, or as the NY Times has so often called it, ‘torment’?

No, this policy exists because it provides the U.S. government with a way of circumventing its own country’s legislation—legislation that was designed to prevent the illegal abduction and torture of people by the U.S. military, and secret services after the Vietnam and Nixon era excesses—excesses that now seem almost timid by comparison to what is happening today. The Obama policy makes a mockery of the notion of due process, and of the recent U.S. protestations over Scotland’s release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Then again, perhaps it is the other way: if a country feels it can kidnap and torture at will, then of course the head of its FBI would have opposed the application of due process in the Lockerbie case.

The confirmation that renditions will continue means that the slightly ridiculous Reagan era appellation ‘evil empire’ now actually applies to the U.S.. This regardless of the party in power, and the individual who sits in the Oval Office. Doubtless many good people in the U.S. are despairing in much the same way that many of us beyond the U.S. are; the fact nevertheless remains that the Obama administration has effectively sanctioned, and now almost certainly made permanent, the Bush-era authoritarianism. No wonder Obama does not want the U.S. equivalent of a Truth Commission.

How paradoxical—and how tragic—that Obama now inhabits almost exactly the same political place that Bush did: despite his far greater intelligence and worldliness, he too, is but a pawn of the forces that are desperately trying to maintain U.S. ascendancy by recourse to kidnapping and torture.