15th February 2002

This is a time when we should be thinking very hard about what is going on before we are swept forward into another war and the acceptance of policies that could damage the whole fabric of our society and destroy what it has taken many years to build up.

This week Vice-President Cheney has been in London explaining to the prime minister why, when and how President Bush is planning to attack Iraq and to instruct him as to the role that Britain must play in support, including the provision of up to 25,000 troops for that operation.

We now know that in addition to the so-called "Axis of Evil" - Iraq, Iran and North Korea, listed by Bush a few weeks ago, the White House has actually decided that China and Russia should now be identified as suitable targets for nuclear attacks.

Indeed it is beginning to become apparent that the greatest threat to world peace may not really be individual terrorists but the United States Administration itself, yet, judging by the statements issued by Downing Street, the Prime Minister is offering his full support once he can persuade the public to back this war, which is why the media is now busy brainwashing us into the acceptance of the bloodshed still to come by publishing and broadcasting all the propaganda supplied by the Pentagon.

Indeed, despite our own relatively minor military strength the prime minister himself appears to have persuaded himself that if he does everything he is told to do by Bush he can behave as if he was in charge of a revived British Empire, and must have influenced the Prince of Wales to criticize President Mugabe for the way he has conducted the elections in Zimbabwe, without mentioning the fact that he himself will become King by inheritance.

Perhaps the most serious piece of self-deception is the prime minister's belief that he exercises a restraining influence on the President which is a complete illusion since Bush has no intention of allowing anyone - neither the UN, NATO nor the European Union to tell him what to do.

All this despite Britain's treaty obligations to the Charter of the United Nations, the opposition of Kofi Anan the Secretary General and Mr Blair's own commitment to the UN in the revised Clause Four of Labour's constitution, forced through in 1995.

Before we believe what we are told we should note the recent report from Washington that the Pentagon has set up a covert unit to wage an information war that could include feeding false stories to foreign media and one senior official is quoted as saying that the propaganda battle "goes from the blackest of black propaganda to the whitest of white" which should alert us to the likelihood that what we read and see may just be a deliberate lie invented and intended to deceive us.

Labour opposition to this war is strong and growing and those MPs who have signed a motion against it almost certainly represent a clear majority in both the party and the country, and when the killing starts the Peace movement has a crucial role in building up a really strong campaign, just as is happening in America where a Peace march on Washington is planned for April 20th.

But it is not only against the war that Labour is stirring as we know from John Monks who, in a major speech last week, warned the government that unless it took trade union concerns about manufacturing industry, privatization and pensions seriously its support could hemorrhage with fatal damage to its prospects of re-election.

Steel jobs in Wales are already threatened by the new US tariffs on imports from Britain, the privatization of our public services is proceeding fast and many pensioners now face poverty in old age after a lifetime of work that gave us the security we now enjoy.

In Germany almost half the local authorities are being forced to sell off hospital clinics, libraries and swimming pools to pay their bills, driven by budget deficits running into billions of pounds and this is what Mr Blair wants here too.

So great is the gap that has opened up between New Labour and Labour voters that the Liberal leader Charles Kennedy and even John Bercow the Conservative front bencher have spoken of ways in which they could fill the role of being friendly to the Unions.

It is true that the Radical Liberals or old One Nation Tories were, in some respects, far more progressive than New Labour is and the present opposition leaders might decide to move to the Left for tactical reasons, just as the prime minister moved to the right as soon as he became party leader in 1994.

This possibility needs to be kept in mind when we are threatened with letting the Tories in if we do not accept everything the prime minister wants us to do because that is not the real alternative which would be a Labour Government.

Over the last few days, a handful of Labour MPs have been quietly talking about what that would mean and how it could be achieved, so it is worth remembering that at the time of the Suez war in 1956, when Nasser was being compared to Hitler, Hugh Gaitskell, then the Labour leader, denounced Sir Anthony Eden for his aggression against Egypt and, when it failed, Prime Minister Eden was driven out of office and replaced by another Tory.

Could it happen again ?

15/2/2002