Attack of the Labour apologists

“Sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It is unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable -- if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.” – Noam Chomsky


-by Christopher Landau

Can you feel it?

The hot sweats and trembling hands. The furrowed brows and clenched fists. Election fever has most definitely struck the Labour party faithful and they clearly feel it’s not too late to offer us their pathetic revisionism. Like a microcosm of the Westminster stage, Facebook and other social networking sites have rapidly become the political pulpit of choice for the many partisan observers preaching their version of the truth.

Like a mirror held up to the party leadership, die-hard Labour supporters desperately scramble for credibility, increasingly dismayed by the "Clegg effect" that transformed this election after the Liberal Democrat leader won last week’s first televised debate. And in so doing so - moved us one-step closer to ending the undemocratic duopoly maintained by the two biggest parties for decades.

This has inevitably led to the awakening of a prickly, nervous and vocal sect of Labourphiles emerging into the bright light of the Media glare. Seemingly hell bent on defending there party, leaders and the status quo with a cacophony of half-truths, exaggeration, lies and spin. Even in Sweden, even over the Rumble of the Volcano - I can hear the faint sounds of hand wringing and teeth grinding. Which got me to thinking - Why should I actually care if Labour loses this election?

Yes, I do worry about what the Tories will do if they get in. But I also worry about what Labour might do if they win another term. And why anyone who genuinely hails from the political left should ever seek the re-election of arguably the most right wing British government since the Second World War - is beyond my comprehension.

Of course the New Labour apologists will try to convince us of there “core Socialist values”, by pointing to some of the redistributive policies introduced over the past 13 years. Examples such as Sure Start, the national minimum wage, a reduction in child poverty, raising the school leaving age, flexible hours for parents and carers, better conditions for part-time workers, the ‘decent homes’ programme, free museums and increased spending on foreign aid.All of these things are real achievements and deserve to be recognized as such. However the catalogue of failures, duplicity, apostatizing and outright destruction is a far longer and more consequential list.


Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown Labour discovered a new role to play on the world stage, one that restored power and credibility in the eyes of the electorate. Instead of delivering our dreams - politicians promised to protect us from nightmares. As Britain and America go around the world 'liberating' oppressed people, and as they try to 'liberate' us from the old bureaucracies of the past, they replace what was there before with a strange kind of freedom; a freedom that bears little resemblance to any notion of freedom we knew before. This is the New Labour project and it is mirrors the Neo-Conservative movement in the U.S.

In the past politicians promised to make a better world. They had different ways of achieving this but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and people lost faith in ideologies - with politicians increasingly seen as mere managers of public life.

Welcome to the Politics of Fear

“Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.” – Naomi Klein

One thing alone destroys the credibility of a vote for Labour. We have a cabinet full of war criminals. That is of course only if you accept the premise that there is such a thing as International Law and that it should be recognised. It is commonly understood but again, seldom reported, that the British government - like most other major world powers, cares nothing for international law until it serves our own interests. Noam Chomsky famously once quipped: “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”

The same holds true for our beloved leaders. The Nuremberg tribunal by the way defined a war of aggression like that inflicted on Iraq as “the supreme international crime”. But in that particular case, the immorality comes not only from the Labour government’s unprovoked massacre of civilians but because it was Labour itself that sabotaged chances of achieving a peaceful resolution. It had already been decided that Iraq was to be invaded in 2001.(3) After the attacks of 9/11 gave Britain and the US a mandate to realise the full ideological potential of the ‘War on Terror'.

The red white and blue elephant in the room

"Somewhere in the modern British psyche there perhaps still lurks the dreamy figure of a prime minister who might, at least occasionally, tell Washington where to get off" - John Harris

As well as being the most right wing government since the war, this Labour government has also been the most subservient partner of the so called ‘special relationship’, since Churchill first coined the phrase in 1946. The dynamic between the U.S and U.K reached entirely new lows as Labour agreed to meet just about every demand from the Bush administration.

This unequal relationship can be demonstrated simply enough. Take for example the one-sided extradition treaty Tony Blair signed in 2003 allowing the US to extradite British citizens without producing prima facie evidence of an offence. In the same year the defence secretary Geoff Hoon announced that he would “restructure the British armed forces to make them inter-operable with those of the United States”(4) ensuring for the first time in our history that our military became functionally subordinate to that of another sovereign power.

The roll of the U.S in shaping British foreign policy is rarely acknowledged in any Corporate Media that I know of. Yet it is the defining factor that has led us into the blood and horror of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. (If anybody wants to pipe up at this point and saying something about Kosovo being a ‘good’ intervention”, I recommend Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk and John Pilger’s excellent reporting on this issue. I could write a whole essay on the Labour propaganda coup that is Kosovo - but it will have to wait).

In 2006 the Labour govenment also helped to block a proposed international moratorium on the use of Cluster bombs. Still resisting an outright ban today, despite the fact that after the 1st of August 2010 Britain will be left as one of the only countries in Europe not to ratify the treaty.(5)

I assert that Labour's foreign policy is as much, or more unethical, than that of Margaret Thatcher's. If we grant that it is possible to say such things at all.
It is the same administration which collaborated with the US programme of torture, extra-judicial kidnapping and targeted assassination. This is the same administration that abandoned our fellow countrymen in Guantánamo Bay and had them tortured in Pakistani prisons and the 'secret' CIA prisons dotted about Eastern Europe and the Middle East - where there may still be many more Britons held in anonymous solitude.

This is the same regime that continues in its resolute support for the Zionist occupation of Palestine. A Labour government which is so infiltrated by Zionist lobbyists they even refused to call for the halt of Israel’s massacre in Gaza at the end of 2008; in which over 1400 Palestinians were slaughtered, over half the dead children, with thousands more were critically wounded and over 6000 homes destroyed. This carnage often inflicted by technology exported from Britain and the U.S. Utilised on the ground by adolescent conscripts who are themselves largely funded by the American and British Military industrial complex.

Confronting Labour mythology head on

“A little rebellion now and then is a good thing”. – Thomas Jefferson

Frustratingly, by its own internal logic New Labour and it supporters actually see themselves as a success. It implemented the project that it set out to implement. Recall that Blair's destruction of Clause 4 was hailed as a masterstroke. And so it was - effectively signalling the end of the party. It was a right-ist coup d'état so successful that by some strange inversion of reason we have Labour sycophants today trying to define the Liberal Democrats as the ‘Right wing’ party and Labour as the party of the people. Neither of them are the party of people, but at least the Lib Dems don’t have to scrub of 13 years of evil taint.

During the past 13 years of Blair and Brown's stewardship, the economic framework laid down by Thatcher has been strengthened. The citizen has been re-regulated and business has been deregulated; as New Labour shifted taxation from the rich to the poor, cutting capital gains tax from 40% to 18%, and corporation tax from 33% to 28%, tried to raise the income tax paid by the poorest earners from 10% to 20% and lifted the inheritance tax threshold from £300,000 to £700,000. Whilst maintaining the cap on the highest rates of council tax, Labour has perversely focused the vast majority of enforcement on prosecuting low level benefits cheats, but has allowed tax avoidance mostly by the very rich, to reach an estimated £41bn.(7) If we look at the ‘Gini coefficient’ which measures inequality, it has increased slightly under Labour –rising from 0.33 to 0.35.

Despite what the Labour hacks would have you think, Gordon Brown was not a competent Chancellor; not if we look at the long-term results from his time at the treasury. It was Brown who notoriously claimed the “End of boom and bust” yet this is the very same man whose short sighted, politically expedient manoeuvres as chancellor have added hugely to our national debt. To take just one example, Gordon Brown was responsible for selling off the national gold reserve at a time when Gold prices reached record lows - cost to the taxpayer £7 Billion. His most damaging action as both chancellor and prime minister however was the forced implementation of the private finance initiative, into almost all of our public services.

PFI’s might not mean much to most people, but this reflects more on the scandalous under-reporting that they have received than their importance. The only real journalist willing to take on such a dry but crucial story it seems - is George Monibot of The Guardian newspaper.

Brown’s privatisation schemes crept into places where previous Conservative governments never dared tread, although they are unlikely to have such qualms today. One example that springs immediately to mind is the recent venue for the Labour Manifesto launch last week. The new hospital used as the venue cost £600 million to build, the final bill to the taxpayer under the PFI scheme will run to £2.5 billion.(8)

A somewhat nihilistic conclusion

What started out as an experiment by a group of young, powerful ideologues in the Labour party - seeking to redefine some sort of shared ‘goal’ for the British people to identify with. Instead became nothing more than the simplistic but powerful notion of the ‘constant war’ that Orwell had foreseen. The Labour government destroyed our hopes. As Monibot writes; “It put into practice Thatcher's dictum that "there is no alternative" to a market fundamentalism that subordinates human welfare to the demands of business. Labour has created a political monoculture that kills voters' enthusiasm, and has delayed electoral reforms that would have given smaller parties an opportunity to be heard. All we are left with is fear: the fear that this awful government might be replaced by something slightly worse. Fear has destroyed the Labour party, but people keep supporting it in trepidation of letting the other side win."(9)

Save this government? I would sooner give my money to a charity that rapes badgers. Of all the causes that leftist thinkers might consider supporting New Labour must be one of the least deserving. I have no problem with a tactical vote for Labour to keep out the Tories by the way, fair enough. But to claim Labour occupies some sort of ideological high ground is gratuitous. If you don’t want to believe me that is of course up to you. As the English theologian Joseph Barber Lightfoot put it: “When I speak to you, I speak to myself. If I seem to warn or to rebuke you, it is not so much you, as myself, to whom the warning or the rebuke is addressed.”

I say that because like many of the Labour apologists peddling their ideological claptrap today, I too came from a family of die-hard leftist Labour supporters. But tribal loyalty to the Labour party in 2010 represents the antithesis of truly left wing values. Of course I imagine most Labour partisans will claim my writing is unfair and dismiss it out of hand. So all that I can do is leave you with the opening paragraph of Thomas Paine’s short but enlightened book 'Common Sense'.

“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.” C

References

(1) http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/16/a-war-against-the-peacemaker
(2)http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/11/11/dreamers-and-idiots/
(3)http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/apr/04/iraq.iraq
(4)Geoff Hoon, 26th June 2003. Britain’s Armed Forces for Tomorrow’s Defence. Speech to the Royal United Services Institute
(5) http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/11/07/asserting-our-right-to-kill-and-maim-civilians/
(6)http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/05/20/nothing-left-to-fight-for/
(7). http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200708/ldhansrd/text/80327-0002.htm
(8)http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7583433/Manifesto-reveals-the-scale-of-Labours-failure.html
(9) http://www.monbiot.com/

The Independant Newspaper - sold for a quid

- By Christopher Landau

"[The "liberal media"] love to be denounced from the right, and the right loves to denounce them, because that makes them look like courageous defenders of freedom and independence while, in fact, they are imposing all of the presuppositions of the propaganda system." - Noam Chomsky

On the 25th of March 2010, former Russian KGB agent and Billionaire Oligarch Alexander Lebedev bought The Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers for the princely sum of £1 sterling. The deal was all but inevitable after the Office of Fair Trading declared no further interest in pursuing an investigation into the possible ‘competition issues’ arising from Mr Lebedev’s simultaneous ownership of another British newspaper, The Evening Standard.

What Lebedev’s ownership means for The Independent remains to be seen, but it got me thinking. What should we expect of this kind of corporate media takeover in 2010? As I was unable to find any actual journalists writing about this issue during all the election coverage, I decided to do a little research and try to find some recent historical precedents that might give us a better idea of what to expect from the takeover of the Indy. Ideally I wanted to find another independently funded, widely distributed paper which hitherto to a private takeover had produced high quality fact-based reporting and was considered seriously as an important educator and voice for the people.

What I found was a paper that matched all of my criteria: The Mirror circa 1984. I came across a number of articles and an excellent documentary on the The Mirror's takeover by the notorious business tycoon Robert Maxwell. Maxwell, who incidentally worked with my father very briefly during the eighties and died in mysterious circumstances on his boat, some years after running The Mirror deep into a hole. What the documentary depicts is really the sorry state of the British press today and the anti democratic relationship between our politicians and our journalists. Somthing that is all too relevant looking at the 24hr election coverage which we are forced to endure for the next few weeks.

In June 1988, former editor of The Mirror Sir Hugh Cudlipp, spoke at a memorial service for his late friend and Mirror colleague Sydney Jacobson. The venue at St Bride’s church was packed to the rafters with the journalistic elite of Fleet Street, a testament to Jacobson who had been a highly respected reporter. It must have come as quite a shock to many of those gathered there that day, when Cudlipp used the occasion to describe in visceral and emotive terms the threat to the free press as he saw it in 1988.

An extract from Cudlipp’s speech is featured at the end of the documentary I found: "Breaking the Mirror: The Murdoch effect". Written and presented by journalistic ubermensch John Pilger - one of my personal heroes. I couldn’t find any written transcripts of the memorial speech so I transcribed it from the film:

“In one particular sense, Sydney Jacobson was fortunate to retire from the Fleet Street scene in 1974. It was the dawn of the Dark Age of Tabloid journalism. The decades still with us, when the proprietors and editors, not all but most; decided that playing a continued role in public enlightenment was no longer any business of the popular press. Information about foreign affairs was relegated to three-inch yapping editorials insulting foreigners. It was the age when investigative journalism in the public interest shed its integrity, and became intrusive journalism for the prurient. When nothing, however personal was any longer secret or sacred and the basic human right to privacy was banished in the interests of publishing profit. When significant national and international events were nudged aside by a panting, seven-day and seven-night news service for voyeurs, on the one-night stand’s of pop stars and teenage delinquents. Some of these foolish things are worthy of mention in the popular press, but now its overkill.”

The rest of the documentary (which is posted at the bottom of the page) is very much still relevant today. It shows some of the most anti-democratic changes enacted under both the Tory and Labour governments in bed with the Media and especially Murdoch over the last few decades. Illustrating how after thirty years of ever-increasing hegemony in our media landscape, the mainstream news continues to depoliticise and subdue us into the desired state of non-critical apathy. A state which corrodes the very qualities in all of us most needed to address issues of social change.

An example of the 'apathy machine' in action which the film explores, is the sexualisation of news - now so ubiquitous as to almost seem cliché. We all expect soft-core porn with our ‘news’ in England right? ‘That how it’s always been!’ Wrong. Pilger’s documentary sheds light on just how recent and rapid the period of decline in the British press has been. Focusing on The Mirror primarily; but also on The Sun and the effects stil felt to this day, after Murdoch's alliance with Thatcher in the seventies; an alliance that helped break the Unions and arguably British journalistic standards. The film also shows the extraordinary relationship Murdoch maintained with the British government under Thatcher, which was then reconfirmed and strengthened by Tony Blair and New Labour.

However it is my personal opinion that the flaws we might be able to percieve in the British news media today, are but a prelude to something much worse if the Conservative party is allowed to regain the majority this May. Thats not to say that the cozy relationship Labour has fostered with the captains of Media industry is not similiarly dangerous and anti democratic. But arguably the Conservatives have always seemed more natural bedfellows for Murdoch than New Labour ever were. It seems fair to say that The Sun and the Torys always had more values shared in common. E.g Targeting the working class and trying to pull them to the right.

But perhaps it is time we ruled out both parties completely if we want to see a new relationship forged with the media. It seems a pretty good bet that as none of the newspapers have a meaningful relationship with Nick Clegg going into this election, the Lib Dems might have an opportunity the other parties do not to enact media reform. It is frustrating to see that now Murdoch has switched his allegiance and his treasure to support David Cameron, an actual opportunity for Labour progressives to seriously tackle reform and anti-trust legislation is both revealed and negated. No longer fearing the awesome 'thwak' of the Murdoch or Labour party whip would have gone a long way to help the emergence of a less one sided relationship between our government and the press.

On the other hand, if Cameron does get in; I predict a new crack down on the increasingly panicked and vunerable BBC. Which might of course merely signal the the beginning, of a new wave of massive Thatcherite style deregulation - just at the time when we need the opposite. Thus pushing us incrementally ever closer towards that fetid screeching ideological clusterfuck known as U.S corporate news.

The fact is though, because almost all the papers decided months ago that Cameron was inevitably going to win this election, they are now invested in his victory in the most undemocratic fashion. They have gone after Gordon Brown in such a deeply personal way that until last week they were certain he was as good as shot.

Just imagining all those prospective Tory M.P’s - all gelled hair, thirty somethings with a degree in political science, fresh faced and donning an ill-fitting suit or two and so eager to enact their long held dreams of unleashing Thatcherism 2.0 on us all. ‘The age of Austerity’ was what Cameron called his vision of Britain for the future. Anybody that understands the history of the Conservative party understands which sections of society that austerity would be forced upon. So what about the third alternative?

David Yelland of the Guardian writes in an article today: "Make no mistake, if the Liberal Democrats actually won the election – or held the balance of power – it would be the first time in decades that Murdoch was locked out of British politics. In so many ways, a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote against Murdoch and the media elite." Well I like the sound of that, and to think it only took one leaders debate (and the entire country going to shit) to crack open the two party political system. Whether or not the Lib Dems can actually hope to win the majority of seats in this election of course, very much remains to be seen.

I will leave you with this notorious description of the 'ideal' media system, as described by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. We would still do well to heed his words, as long as we recognise them as the antithesis to all our striving. “What you need [in a media system] is ostensible diversity, that masks actual uniformity”. You have been warned. C

John Pilger - Breaking the Mirror (The Murdoch Effect)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5005752483917353600#