THE HANDSTAND

NOVEMBER 2003

George Galloway's historic speech - which could change the face of British politics for ever.

.It is a misunderstanding created by circumstances that I am interestedonly in Middle Eastern affairs - notably, the struggle for self determination of the Palestinian people and  against  the horrific effects of sanctions and war on the Iraqi people  during  Saddam's vile dictatorship.

I  have been , of course, passionately engaged in these issues but my interest in opposing all forms of imperialism - including the fashionable neo-liberal version of Mr. Blair - arises from a deep patriotism about my own islands.

Empire resulted in the cruelty and oppression of millions outside these islands but it also helped to sustain the power of a ruling elite whose basic greed and sometimes malice, where it was not mere indifference and incompetence, oppressed its own people first before it turned its gaze on peoples of different hue and faith. 

Caring about the Middle East is merely a reflection of my deep sense of moral responsibility as a Briton for the dabblings in the region by irresponsible, greedy and incompetent officials over many years.

We have opposing us ,  a surprisingly small national elite that hangs on to power generation after generation by capturing every popular movement of resistance and turning it into a junior club member.  In the Middle Ages, Wat Tyler's head was struck off by the King.  Today, he would be put in charge of some regulatory Quango.

Empire builders

It is to the credit of Labour that it took  nearly a  hundred years for its body and soul to be captured so that it could start to expel radicals such as myself, but it is a process that started with the National Government of Ramsey Macdonald and has concluded with that of Tony Blair.

This is the same elite network that once turned its back on Irish Home Rule and  thereby  split these islands into two, that almost bankrupted the nation to keep high the financial profits of empire-builders and that, when empire proved untenable, sold us, the people, out to a former colony as its aircraft carrier.

These rulers of ours would have been on a plane out of the country or deep in bunkers when the rest of us fried as America's forward base if there had been a misjudgement in the sixty year war on communism.   We owe them nothing.

We, in turn, have been complicit in the deaths of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands or millions, of Asians and Africans since 1945 and we have heard not a word of protest from our ruling family, our media proprietors and the profit-takers in the City. 

Harold Wilson did his best and kept us out of Vietnam whereas Tony Blair reflected on thirty years of slow absorption into North American culture, society and economics and responded with his slavish political obeisance to the White House.

Homicidal war

The public is unaware, because it is convenient to some that they should not be aware, that I was condemning Saddam Hussein when he was backed by the anti-communist West in his homicidal war against Iran and using chemical weapons supplied by our Allies.  

I met Saddam Hussein twice, the same number of times that Donald Rumsfeld met him.

The difference is that Rumsfeld met him to sell his regime guns and gas and to give them the maps necessary to target them while I met him to try and avert suffering sanctions and war. 

If I have said words  which  taken out of context have upset some people, I refuse to forget that context. 

If I appeared to flatter a dictator,  I was not. My praise was for the courage strength and indefatigability of the Iraqi people not their dictator - qualities which have had to be demonstrated all too often in the near decade since I made those remarks  I could not oust this Dictator so my first duty was to help his people where I could. 

Sovereignty

Let's not forget that the real crimes of Saddam Hussein against his people were largely committed during a period when he was a client and ally of the west; and when I was protesting against him. Most of the suffering of Iraqis in the last decade and more has been inflicted by the White House and Number Ten Downing Street. 

So what do I believe in? 

Well, first of all, I believe that sovereignty lies in the people and that the  English  Revolution of 1688 lies unfinished. 

Second, that the State should be the servant of the people, transparent and accountable. 

Third, that the Defence of the Realm should mean Defence of the People of these islands and not defence of the State or the promotion of special interests in hock to foreign powers. 

A strong defence force should not be expended on foreign adventures.  No British son should die on foreign shores unless the threat is direct and material to these islands or, as a volunteer, he has signed up to humanitarian action under international law.

Cavalier attitude

These three beliefs alone have placed me on a collision course with a State where monarchical power, cloaked in Parliamentary democracy, has simply been transferred to a Prime Minister whose monomaniacal vision of global intervention, whose cavalier attitude to international law and whose willingness to make sacrifices of other parent's sons is carried out unquestioningly by a loyal State without moral compass.

Politics today can be boiled down to this issue of the morality and legitimacy of the State.

These beliefs, now shared by many others, have been crystallised by a major grassroots peace movement that covered all shades of opinion on social and economic matters within one grand coalition of dissent. 

It was a movement of anger at the pride and arrogance of the State and of the elite behind it, an anger that grew with the contempt shown for its views by Government, with the treatment of Dr. David Kelly and with the sleazy contempt for the facts over WMD. 

This movement expresses the best of Britain - it is tolerant of difference, it is co-operative, it is enterprising, it is internationalist.

The so-called war on terrorism is indicative of the elite's strategy of creating tension between communities but not in an obvious way.  It is to the credit of the Government that it has not and almost certainly will not use the sort of cheap anti-Muslim populism that is common in Europe. 

State terrorism

Instead, it seeks to impose authoritarian and deeply suspect laws to control dissent, freedom of movement and the right to free expression - the war is against the thinking political community, whether Muslim, socialist, libertarian, patriotic, radical or liberal.

These controls on liberty which have been put in place in a time of economic plenty can be used to disturbing effect in a time of economic scarcity.

But let me be clear about this, I condemn terrorism as an instrument of policy. 

But with this caveat that, for me, terrorism is the use of force, violence and subversion against civilians and political activists by whoever is wielding the weaponry.  State terrorism, including illegal war, puts the terrorism of such organised ideological criminals as Al-Qaeda into context, as two sides of the same evil coin.

I will not condemn the just war of populations of occupied territories when they resist, in any way that they can, uninvited invaders on to their sovereign soil - the moral rights of the Sioux, the heroes of Warsaw and the Russian Partisan were and are inviolate in this respect.  It is a right we have not had to invoke on our own soil for some considerable time.

Arrogant war leader

Arguments about bringing progress to benighted savages did not wash in the nineteenth century and they do not wash now.

I  am motivated by  two  other  important beliefs  not always accentuated  because those who joined me in th is anti-war anti-occupation  movement against an arrogant War Leader need not have shared my Leftist ideology.  However, these two beliefs will always guide my political action:

*(1) that working people create their own society through collective action from below; and *(2) that exploitation of labour will always exist and needs community action to correct it through active redistribution of wealth and power.

This was at the root of my throwing in my lot with the Labour Party  more than  thirty years ago and of my distress at its departure from those ideals.  I have fought a losing battle to stay a democratic socialist inside Labour and it is on record that it expelled me and I did not leave it..

But I am not going to hang around outside Labour's door waiting to be let in.  History will not wait.  Times have changed.  Bevan and Foot were expelled in serious debates on policy which they could fight again another day. 

Bloody revolutionists

I was expelled as a result of a manoeuvre by a faction that had captured the Party in a coup and then fixed the rules so that serious policy debate was impossible unless personal permission came from the Wolf's Lair.  I now see that traditional British socialism is not dead but is in danger, being poisoned by stealth. 

My socialism is the same socialism that inherited the radical democratic triumphs of the nineteenth century and, working alongside the great Liberal politicians of the turn of the last century, created the welfare state and a national economic infrastructure that was intended to be in the service of the people.

My socialism  is not that of " bloody revolutionists "  or foreign ideological importations.  It is rooted in this land and in its traditions of liberty, dissent, co-operativism and trades union action and it is open to every freeborn British person , every faith, all men and women on equal terms.

Politics is about schools, hospitals, roads and jobs as well as about grand theories of democracy, rights, foreign affairs and free trade. 

In the drive for the latter on a global stage, New Labour has lost its bearings on national service provision and has turned a vigorous tradition of national democracy into a pale pink ersatz global version for the consumption of foreign elites.  In short, we are in danger of losing our freedoms and rights to help foreign elites join an increasingly exclusive international club. 

This is not good enough.

Bloodless war

The national politicisation of the anti-war movement is now a necessary next stage in our own bloodless war of national liberation.  The reality of the movement means that what we create must operate at two levels. 

The first level requires steps towards a mass unifying movement of grassroots radicals to hobble the State, bring it under popular control and complete an unfinished radical democratic revolution.  This level will unite Muslims, Christians and Jews, socialists, liberal and conservatives, men, women and the disadvantaged of all types in one movement of democratic liberation.

This is the movement launched in the Quaker's Friends House in London's Euston Road on October 29th 2003 and which will fight New Labour in the European elections and the elections to the Greater London Assembly next June.

The second tier is where the battle for ideas and souls will take place in a People's Britain

In that battle, I will remain what I have always been - a radical democratic socialist in the Labour tradition - but until power is decentralised and returned to the people, I will work with anyone who shares those first tier values because we need nothing less than a revolution in our national political life.

GEORGE GALLOWAY MP

The Fall, THE Rise, Of Liberal England
By John Pilger

(In his latest New Statesman article, John Pilger describes how the public arbiters of liberal England embraced the Blair 'project', notably the four wars he has engaged Britain in, and how their message, like Blair himself, has now been shunned by the majority. In their place, there is an awakening as millions of Britons have broken their customary silence to rescue the noble ideas of freedom and democracy from Blair's diminishing court.)

An epic shame and silence covers much of liberal England. Shame and silence are present in a political theatre of frenetic activity, with actors running on and off the national stage, uttering their fables and denials and minor revelations, as in Ibsen's Enemy of the People. From the media gallery, there is a cryptic gesturing at the truth, so that official culpability is minimised; this is known at the BBC as objectivity.

Shame and silence reached a sort of crescendo during the recent conference of the Labour Party. Hundreds of liberal people stood and clapped for the Prime Minister, it was reported, for seven and a half minutes. Choreographed in their pretence, like the surviving stoics of a sect, they applauded his unctuous abuse of the only truth that mattered: that he had committed a huge and bloody crime, in their and our name. It was a shocking spectacle.

For those who cling to Blair, the last resort is to make him seem Shakespearean: to invest him with tragedy and the humanity of "blunders" and "cock ups" that might divert the trail of blood and conceal the responsibility he shares for the slaughter and suffering of thousands of men, women and children, whose fate he sealed secretly and mendaciously with the rampant American warlord.

We know the fine print of this truth now: and we are a majority. I use "we" here as the Chartist James Bronterre O'Brien used it in 1838, to separate the ordinary people of England from "the vagabonds" who oppress "what are called our colonies and [which really] belong to our enemies".

The criminality of Blair and his diminishing court is felt across this country. It is sweeping aside those in the Labour Party who still plead, "Listen to us, Tony" and "Please have more humility, Tony."

The silence of famous liberals is understandable. Remember the division they skilfully drew in 1997 between "new" and "old". New was unquestionably good for "us". New was a "modernised" system called neoliberalism, as old and rapacious as its Thatcherite model.


Their propaganda suppressed every reliable indication (such as the venerable British Social Attitudes survey), which left no doubt that most of the British people had "old" priorities and rejected Blair's ruthless refusal to redistribute the national wealth from the rich to the poor and to protect public services, the premise of so much of British life, just as they rejected his embrace of the City of London and American dominance and warmongering.

The Blair myth was that he was "untainted by dogma" (Roy Hattersley).

The opposite was true. For Blair, the issue was always class. When times were more secure, the liberal wing of the middle class would allot a rung or two of their ladder to those below. The ladder was hauled up by Margaret Thatcher as her revolution spread beyond miners and steelworkers and into the suburbs and gentrified terraces, where middle managers suddenly found themselves "shed" and "redundant".

It was to people like these that Labour under Neil Kinnock, then John Smith, then Blair, looked in order to win power. Middle-classness became the political code, as the middle classes sought, above all else, to restore their status and privileges. An ideological Scrabble was played in order to justify the Blair project's true aims. The "stakeholder" theory was briefly promoted, and there was chatter about "civic" society. Both were new names for old elites. The archaic word "governance" was used to obfuscate real social democracy.

There was enthusiasm for the ideas of an American "communitarian" guru who wrote books of psychobabble that impressed Bill Clinton. A "think tank" called Demos filled up the Guardian tabloid on slow days with vacuous chic. Out of this was promoted something called "Middle England", a middle-class idyll similar to that described by John Major when he yearned for cycling spinsters, cricket and warm beer. That one in four Britons lived in poverty was unmentionable.

When Blair was elected with fewer votes than Major received in 1992, liberalism's principal organs were beside themselves. "Goodbye xenophobia" and "The Foreign Office says 'Hello world, remember us?'", rejoiced the Observer. Blair, said the paper, would sign the EU Social Chapter within weeks, push for "new worldwide rules on human rights and the environment", ban landmines, implement "tough new limits on all other arms sales" and end "the country-house tradition of policy-making". Apart from the landmines ban, which was in effect already in place, all of it was false.

Then it was "Welfare: the New Deal". The Chancellor, said the Observer, "is preparing to announce the most radical welfare Budget since the Second World War". On the contrary, what Gordon Brown announced was a "welfare-to-work" scheme that was a pale imitation of failed and reactionary schemes already tried by the Tories and the Clinton administration. There was no new deal.

"A Budget for the people", said the Independent's front page over a drawing of Brown dressed as Oliver Cromwell. This was difficult to fathom. Apart from a few crumbs for the health service and education, and windfall taxes on utilities, which their huge profits easily absorbed, Brown's first budget was from the extreme right, making his Tory predecessor look Keynesian. That was unmentionable, and still is.

Most Labour voters had endured 18 years of cuts in education, social security, disability and other benefits - yet Brown reversed not a single one of them, including a tax base that allows the likes of Rupert Murdoch to avoid paying tens of millions of pounds to the Treasury. Today, nothing essentially has changed. One in four Britons is still born into poverty - a poverty that has hardened under Blair and Brown and remains the chief cause of higher rates of ill health, accidents and deaths in infancy, school exclusion and low educational performance.

"The New Special Relationship" was the next good news, with Blair and Clinton looking into each other's eyes in the garden at No 10 Downing Street. Here was the torch being passed, said the front page of the Independent, "from a becalmed and aimless American presidency to the coltish omnipotence of Blairdom". This was the reverential tone that launched Blair into his imperial violence.

The new prime minister, wrote Hugo Young, "wants to create a world none of us has known, where the laws of political gravity are overturned". In the age of Blair, "ideology has surrendered entirely to values... there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain".

By the time Robin Cook launched his infamous mission statement, putting human rights at the "heart" of foreign policy and promising to review arms sales on "ethical" grounds, not a sceptical voice was to be heard coming from liberalism's powerhouses. On the contrary, the Guardian counselled Blair not to be too "soft centred". Jeremy Paxman assured his BBC audience that even if the new "ethical" policy stopped the sale of Hawk fighter-bombers to Indonesia, their presence in East Timor (where one-third of the population had perished as result of Indonesia's illegal occupation) was "not proved". This was the standard Foreign Office lie, which was eventually admitted by Cook.

Why did Blair go all the way with Bush? Apart from his own Messianic view of the world, the Blairite elite are part of the "Atlanticist" tradition of the party. That means imperialism. All those years of Kennedy scholarships, trade union fellowships at Harvard and fraternal seminars paid for by the US government have had their insidious effect.

Five members of Blair's first cabinet, along with his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, were members of the British American Project for a Successor Generation, a masonry of chosen politicians and journalists, conceived by the far-right oil baron J Howard Pew and launched by Ronald Reagan and Rupert Murdoch. Blair's invitation to Thatcher to visit him in Downing Street might have offered a pointer to what was coming. But no; dissenters were killjoys.

According to Susie Orbach, the psychologist, not taking pleasure in the rise of Blairdom reflected no less than a troubled personality. "It's as though there is something safe in negativity..." she wrote, "you often find [this state of mind] in someone who... can only fight, who can never rest from battle, may be trying to defeat inner demons, hopeless feelings, that are far too frightening to touch directly."

The dissenters have been proved right, and right again. In six years Blair has ordered four bloody wars against and in countries that offered the British no threat, including the longest Anglo-American bombing campaign since the Second World War, against Iraq; and this was before he ordered a land invasion of a country he knew was defenceless.

Andrew Gilligan will probably be pilloried by an establishment tribunal for telling a version of this truth. Lord Hutton (he who sat on the notorious "Diplock" court in Belfast) could and should have recalled Blair for cross-examination, but chose not to. This is a travesty, because the real issue is the criminality of Blair and his coterie. The truth of this is currency now, thanks to the millions who have broken an established silence, with thousands of them going into the streets for the first time and filling the letters pages and shaming the majority of Labour MPs, who chose Bush and Blair over their constituents.

They are the best of this society. They are rescuing noble concepts, such as democracy and freedom, from Blairite windbags who emptied them of their true meaning while claiming to be left of centre. Theirs is an "insurrection of subjugated knowledge", as Vandana Shiva has written.

They are the democratic opposition now, owing nothing to Westminster; and their achievements echo the American playwright Lillian Hellman who, in a letter in 1952 to the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee, wrote: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." It is this capacity for conscience that makes us human, and without millions around the world demonstrating it, Blair and Bush might well have attacked another country by now. That is still a distinct possibility, as the current fitting-up of Iran should alert us.

Remember, the warmongers go to such lengths to deceive us only because they fear, as Shelley wrote, the public's awakening : "...like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number... Ye are many - they are few."

J.Pilger©October 10, 2003All Rights Reserved
LINK: http://www.zmag.org