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New Labour and the Big Lie

The legislative programme announced by New Labour this week is another piece of scaffolding in the police state edifice that the Blair regime has been building since it came to office. There are eight "safety and security" Bills in the programme and a further eight in draft form. Taken together, measures like ID cards, a British-style FBI and trial without juries for terror suspects, will give the state unprecedented powers of surveillance, control, arrest and incarceration.

In its crude approach, New Labour lumps together terrorism, crime and "anti-social behaviour" as if they were the same issues to justify the new powers. This totalitarian thinking is reminiscent of the lying propaganda used by Stalinist regimes and dictatorships the world over.

New Labour, like magicians, conjure up a fantasy world to justify the lurch to authoritarian rule. Britain is painted as a country overrun by terrorists, criminals and people getting drunk late at night and disturbing their neighbours. The Blair government has no evidence for this. Instead, it uses focus groups which draw on people's perceptions to help them paint this lurid picture. Many of the perceptions in this house of images are, in turn, the result of the government's own unrelenting propaganda.

This approach is consistent with the Big Lie nature of the Blair regime. It lied its way to war against Iraq and has lied ever since about its intentions following the illegal occupation. Now it is lying about various "threats" - to browbeat the electorate and obscure the real issues confronting people in their day-to-day lives.

The impending collapse of the housing market, the inability of ordinary people to find affordable accommodation, the commercialisation of the health service, the collapse of many areas of state education, the appalling and expensive transport system and intolerable pressure at work - these are the issues that New Labour wants to avoid.

Market-led solutions so favoured by New Labour are clearly not working and increasing numbers of people are turning away from its kind of corporate-driven politics. The Blairites desperately need to get voters back into the fold by the time of the 2005 general election and are using a mixture of scaremongering and populism to do so.

Peter Hain, the leader of the Commons, was himself once framed by the state when he was an anti-apartheid campaigner. Now he is part of the same sinister circle, playing the card that George W. Bush played to defeat John Kerry - that his government and his alone could protect the country from terror. Hain told BBC Radio 4: "I believe the risk would be lower under Labour because we are bringing in the measures - including massively increasing the staff and resources of the security services - to deal with terrorist threats."

Yet there is no evidence of a massive terror network poised to strike at Britain. Just like the "case" over Iraq's phantom weapons of mass destruction, the anti-terror propaganda is undoubtedly laced with a huge dose of fiction. And what is real can be attributed to a reaction to the imperialist policies pursued by the United States and Britain, especially in relation to Israel and Iraq.

So a vote for New Labour at the next election is a vote for a police state which will drive through the requirements of global capital in terms of conditions at work and market-driven public services. The Movement for Socialist Future will renew its campaign not to waste your vote on New Labour. Instead, we should build a mass challenge to the power and nature of the capitalist state with the aim of creating new truly democratic bodies that will encourage co-ownership and self-management in place of the ruthless rule of the market.

Movement for a Socialist Future
24 November 2004