Labour’s morality is evident for all to see. Even after the government suspended arms shipments to Indonesia, Tony Blair could still tell Labour’s National Executive that ‘the arms issue is not the issue at all. Cancelling the arms sales to Indonesia would result in a bill of hundreds of millions of pounds.’ The implications are clear. Once things have settled down in East Timor to imperialism’s satisfaction, arms deliveries will restart. This is one aspect of Blair’s ‘new moral purpose’: defending the arms multinationals.
Labour’s new high mindedness may be compared to Major’s disastrous ‘back to basics’ campaign. But this would be to miss the point: there are real teeth to this new drive. Blair’s response to news of pregnant 12-year-olds was to say that they ‘should not be on the street at night’. Curfews for children are curfews for working class children. Now sex education will be designed to promote the importance of marriage, stigmatising lone parents, those who choose to co-habit or are gay. It is a moral tyranny, but it is also a form of class tyranny. Jack Straw’s vicious denunciation of travellers, following up his notorious attack on ‘winos, squeegee merchants and junkies’ is part and parcel of this. His instruction to councils to start to use anti-social behaviour orders makes a mockery of any concept of human rights, as do his plans to lock up anyone branded a ‘psychopath’. Straw’s language is designed to whip up middle class hysteria so that any repressive measure, however arbitrary, can be speedily legitimised.
Defending the rich does not just include the arms multinationals even if they do get preferential treatment in the form of huge tax subsidies. Two years ago there was Bernie Ecclestone, Formula 1 and tobacco advertising. Now David Sainsbury can give £2 million to Labour and goodness, what a surprise, his biotechnology company gets a £1 million grant. Gordon Brown has boasted of the lowest-ever corporation tax in history, and now public spending has fallen below 40% of GNP for the first time in over 30 years. Labour is sitting on a public sector surplus of £10-12 billion. Is it going to use this to tackle poverty? Of course not. Alastair Darling, Social Security secretary, in introducing his ‘campaign’ against ‘social exclusion’ told us that ‘poverty today is complex’. So complex, apparently, that he could not tell The Times whether a child should have at least one new pair of shoes per year. In reality, ‘complex’ is Labour’s code for saying that it is not going to spend any money in solving it.
It was the policy of neo-liberalism, the unfettering of the market, that nearly tripled poverty in Britain during the years of the Tory governments. Labour has continued with this, and is intent on doing things which even the Tories were incapable of, such as privatising both the Post Office and air traffic control. Its refusal to implement any transport strategy means that private rail companies continually demand more money for a deteriorating service. ‘Public-private partnership’ is Labour’s mantra: in reality this means the private sector shafts the public. Thus the funding of the NHS building programme through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) will result in new hospitals having 20-30% fewer beds than the ones they replace. This will force huge and unproven changes in length of bed stay and clinical productivity. Meanwhile the NHS is about to face its worst funding crisis ever. Then there is the succession of enormous computing cock-ups, many of them in Jack Straw’s Home Office, all of which demonstrate that the public-private partnership involves huge dole-outs for the private sector with rubbish in return.
And whilst Labour dreams up ever more absurd means of attracting private investment to the London underground, the network falls apart ever more rapidly, whole sections of it closing down on a daily basis.
We have to say again that Labour did not promise anything else. When the left talks of Labour’s ‘betrayals’, we have to ask where they were when Labour set out its stall before and during the general election. We have to ask the left why they told us to vote for Labour. We have to ask them why they failed to denounce Labour during the onslaught on Yugoslavia; why they will not openly oppose Labour but instead speak of building meaningless ‘alternatives’. One can only assume that they still do not believe that Labour is deadly serious about what it is doing, that they will not admit it is through and through a party of the ruling class.
FRFI 151 October / November 1999
