EcoLogics

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Actually, it’s the other way around: Brown’s government decided to ’suspend’ Galmo Williams’ government after an enquiry—of a kind not allowed in the UK itself—decreed that Williams was involved in acts of corruption. A British governor will now rule the islands on Britain’s behalf for up to two years.

This blogger wonders: if our own prime minister has just been told to return some £12,000+ which he wrongly charged the state—and if a significant number of members of his party are being told to do the same—then where lies our/their moral authority to suspend local government in the Turks and Caicos Islands? Might it not be argued, on the basis of our own government’s practices, that New Labour (and of course the Tories too) are guilty, as the enquiry in the Turks and Caicos Islands put it, of “systematic corruption or serious dishonesty“?

(Let’s not even begin to discuss what the UK is doing in Turks and Caicos in the first place.)

From today’s Independent:

‘Peter Brierley, whose son Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley, 28, was killed in March 2003, refused to shake Mr Blair’s proffered hand and said: “I’m not shaking your hand, you’ve got blood on it.”‘

The former prime minister was ushered away and afterwards Mr Brierley, from Batley, West Yorkshire, said: “I understand soldiers go to war and die but they have to go to war for a good reason and be properly equipped to fight.”

He added: “I believe Tony Blair is a war criminal. I can’t bear to be in the same room as him. I can’t believe he’s been allowed to come to this reception.

“I believe he’s got the blood of my son and all of the other men and women who died out there on his hands.

“It comes back to me every day, every time I see a coffin come off a plane; it reminds me of what happened to Shaun.”

EcoLogics wonders how many fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, friends and extended family would do exactly the same thing to Tony Blair—and of course Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown—if given half a chance. We can only hope that episodes like this will haunt the New Labour politicians for the rest of their days.

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.’