In 1997, the overwhelming majority of the left urged us to vote Labour. In the case of the SWP, members tell us they were ‘ordered’ to vote Labour. Now as the SWP bleats ‘this is not what we voted Labour for’, let us look at what they urged us to support.
In the first place a racist party. Labour never made a secret of its support for immigration laws, or of its intention to enact more oppressive asylum legislation. Its support for Britain’s imperialist interests was equally well advertised. The left was certainly urging us to vote for these, whatever hand-wringing there has been since over Yugoslavia.
The left also told us to vote for a party that is financed by big business and arms companies. The US arms multinational Raytheon is a Labour Party donor. It supplied the Tomahawks that were fired by the British submarine HMS Splendid on Yugoslavia. It also supplies Patriot missiles, and is now heading a consortium to supply five AWACS aircraft for £800m. The last Labour conference was sponsored by British Aerospace. Labour continued to export arms and Hawk aircraft to the Suharto regime in Indonesia as well as to fascist Turkey. Less well known is that it has agreed more than 500 arms export licences to India, and 128 to Pakistan. There is a long tradition of British arms dealers supplying both sides in any conflict, a tradition that Labour is happy to uphold.
Prior to the 1997 general election, FRFI constantly warned of Labour’s totalitarian character, speaking of its ‘social fascism’. In its determination to see Labour re-elected, the left made light of this. Now we see the results:
Labour is even more enthusiastic in its use of ‘gagging orders’ than the Tories were. In its first two years it issued 50 Public Interest Immunity Certificates to prevent disclosure of state information in legal cases, compared to 30 in the last two years of the Tory government. Of these 50, the Northern Ireland Office has issued 28. The Ministry of Defence has issued seven (none in the last two years of the Tories). Robin Cook has just issued one to prevent Paul Grecian suing Customs and Excise for malicious prosecution for his alleged role in the ‘arms-to-Iraq’ affair. In opposition, Cook roundly condemned the Tories’ use of these gagging orders to cover up sales of arms to Iraq.
A Freedom of Information Bill which is more restrictive than the current law. It will allow ministers to prevent the disclosure of information which ‘would prejudice the effective government of public affairs’. A ruling once made could not be contested through judicial review. Parliamentary orders can be used to extend categories of information excluded from disclosure, thereby preventing any debate. The new Information Commissioner will not have the power to order release of information on public interest grounds. ‘Commercially sensitive’ information will be exempt from disclosure, no doubt to the great delight of Labour’s big business friends. Canadian laws were used to reveal that US government officials had passed secret European Community reports on GM foods to Monsanto. Labour’s Bill would prevent disclosure in these circumstances on grounds of ‘commercial sensitivity’.
Labour wants to lock up so-called ‘psychopaths’ indefinitely even if they have committed no crime, despite all the difficulties associated with diagnosis. This has nothing to do with treatment, much more with a return to medievalism. The number of murders committed by those with mental disorders has consistently fallen over the last ten years, and is less than 10% of the total.
Labour’s ‘modernising government’ policies themselves have a strong component of control of the public. FRFI has already pointed out how the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act requires the police, local authorities and the NHS to exchange information. The new Asylum Bill sets up a similar process between the police and the immigration service. ‘Joined up’ government means joined-up information on us all.
Labour announced well before the 1997 general election that it was going to ‘reform’ state welfare. The left chose to ignore this. Harman’s attack on lone parent benefits was the start. Now it is Incapacity Benefit. As a social insurance benefit, it should be universal. The Tories started to undermine this in 1995 by making it taxable and implementing the ‘all work’ test for eligibility. Labour’s intention is to make anyone who has not made National Insurance contributions in the previous two years ineligible, and to means-test it for those receiving an occupational pension of more than £50 a week. The effect of these proposals will be to cut spending by £750m a year, and to redistribute a benefit from the poor to the very poor.
Labour’s class character was not in doubt in 1997, whatever the left said at the time. Labour said what they were going to do, and now they are doing it. When Blair denounced public sector workers in a speech to the Venture Capitalist Association he displayed the arrogance of wealth and privilege. ‘One of the things I would like to do, as well as stimulating more entrepreneurship in the private sector, is to get a bit of it into the public sector as well’ he said. An example of this ‘entrepreneurship’ came the following week, when it was shown that top pay had risen on average 26% in 1998, compared with a 5% rise in average earnings. Meanwhile Volvo was exposed as having engaged in price fixing for many years. Was Volvo fined? Was it ordered to refund what it had stolen? Was the evidence obtained by the Office of Fair Trading put in the public domain? Of course not – we’re talking multinationals here, and all the car manufacturers have been at it.
The left told us to vote for all of this. What does it offer us now? Socialist Review, the Socialist Workers’ Party journal, tells us that ‘Union leaders such as John Monks and John Edmonds are asking whether Labour has moved too far towards the middle ground. There are calls for a return to Labour’s traditional policies from all sides’. So, ‘Forward to Old Labour’, ‘Forward to Harold Wilson’, ‘Forward to John Monks’. What utter bankruptcy.
FRFI 150 August / September 1999
