EcoLogics

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.

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.”

It seems that this blogger chose a good day to leave The Guardian. The Independent’s Robert Fisk, long a thorn in the side of U.S.-Israeli policies in the Middle East, published a piece with news that may very well have devastating, if long-term consequences for the continued U.S.-Israeli domination of politics in the Middle East and beyond. In his article, Fisk suggested that

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar. [...] Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.[...] The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

World markets responded immediately to what may well be an epoch-making shift in economic and political policy. As reported by the New York Times and other media, a long slide in the value of the dollar gained force as investors migrated and ‘fretted over a report that crude oil could one day be priced in other currencies, hobbling the dollar’s role as a vehicle for global trade’.

Part of the slide has to do with continuing uncertainty over the evolution of the U.S. economy. But as Fisk himself notes in a follow-up article today, the proposed shift has an unmistakably political motivation. For decades now, the U.S. has been the proverbial tiger wagged by its Israeli tail. The implications have been felt the world over: from terrorist reprisals in New York, London and Madrid to the export of the Israeli model of security to seemingly unconnected countries like Colombia, the U.S.’s failure to stand up to the Israeli bullying of Palestinians has cost the world dearly. Now it seems that the countries looking to dump the dollar have found a way of hitting the U.S. where it hurts most.

Of course, one of the factors in this whole process is that there is a new superpower in the making, one whose inexorable rise makes more credible an economic sea-change that the U.S. might otherwise have ignored, or sabotaged. At least part of the reason why the plan revealed by Fisk may actually work is that China is as keen to get its hands on more Arab oil as the U.S. is. We all have much to fear from the politics of the country that will one day replace the U.S. as the ‘evil empire’. The tragedy is that with the Democrats playing essentially the same game as the authoritarian party that they so comprehensively defeated last November, more and more people around the world see no reason for kowtowing to a country whose leader has expressed his willingness to continue the policy of extraordinary renditions, and of course the war in Afghanistan.

Throughout it all, the infamous Israel Lobby continues to flex its political muscles in the United States, and also in Great Britain. This blogger has not forgotten one of the untold stories behind New Labour’s 12 years in power. From the shadowy support provided to the current government by the Labour Friends of Israel to the scandal surrounding Mark Thompson’s biasing of BBC reporting in favour of Israel, Israel has played a significant role in the UK’s internal politics. This means that those of us living in the UK have not only paid the price of increased terrorism, but also of the corruption that is associated with the mentioned lobby. Like the U.S., the U.K. is thus likely to carry the can twice over for its support for a doomed foreign policy.

By way of a postscript, can it be a surprise that, aside from taking lucrative jobs as an adviser to U.S. and Swiss banks, Tony Blair has ended up having an office in Jerusalem, where he has pretended for the past two years to be an impartial envoy of the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations? Or that the money’s on him to become the ‘president’ of the European Union? EcoLogics smells the kind of rat that Fisk himself referred to when he noted that ‘the Chinese believe… that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar.’