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New Labour, lies and spies

The fact that the New Labour government lied about Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction in order to provide a pretext for invading and occupying that country should surprise no one. After all, being economical with the truth comes naturally to Blair and his ministers.

From the early days, when Downing Street lied about getting money from FI boss Bernie Ecclestone in exchange for going softly on tobacco advertising, the scene was set for a government of outright dishonesty. To Blair and his ministers, a manufactured image of what they are doing is everything while the reality is quite the opposite.

For example, foundation hospitals that will open the door to a privatised health service, are presented as a way of setting the NHS "free" from central control. "Modernisation", a favourite New Labour term, seems a harmless enough concept. In practice, it means the undermining of the fire and other public services and running them along commercial lines.

New Labour said it would provide "opportunities for the many, not the few". Yet after six years in office, the gap between the rich and the poor has grown to what it was under Thatcher and child poverty levels have not changed. This alone is proof enough that Blair's is a business government, which favours the élites at the expense of working people.

As for Iraq, anyone with an ounce of interest could see that Bush and Blair decided at the end of the summer last year that they would invade Iraq and overthrow the Saddam Hussein government. Going to the United Nations provided the US and Britain the time needed to ready their military attack. The issue of weapons of mass destruction was concocted to try and fool hostile public and political opinion, especially in Britain. The real reasons were to do with oil and the interests of global capitalism.

Blair used the intelligence agencies to produce a fictional story that was enough to ensure his survival. The scare about WMD was enough to get the Tories to back the government in parliament and neuter the effect of the massive backbench Labour rebellion. Thus Blair is now dependent on the same agencies for his future - and they are not about to let him forget it.

The intimate connections between the Blair regime and the secret, sinister spy agencies in this direct political way is significant. For New Labour, the state and the party become more identical each day. Home Secretary Blunkett pronounces on judges and sentencing policy, while Blair gets the spies on board to help justify an illegal attack on Iraq. By all accounts, MI6 was falling over itself to tell the prime minister what he wanted to hear in the run-up to the attack.

Anthony Sampson, one of the most respected analysts of how government works, noted in 'The Observer' (June 8): "Behind the fierce current questioning of Blair's use of intelligence lies a deeper worry running through Whitehall: that the Prime Minister has so centralised foreign policy that the key decisions have become much more politicised, without looking objectively at alternative advice or information.

"Intelligence is only part of the problem, but it has inevitably attracted unprecedented political exposure because the Iraq war was, very unusually, a pre-emptive war, where the Government had to depend heavily on intelligence reports to justify the invasion of a sovereign state."

As for foreign policy, that is also decided by Downing Street. Sampson explains that Blair has surpassed Thatcher in establishing his own diplomatic staff at Number 10, and promoting his own favourites. "The traditional diplomats within the Foreign Office are exasperated by the alternative centre of foreign policy run from Downing Street, which they call 'Cosa Nostra'. They see that the road to the top is no longer through the steady promotion through embassies abroad, but through catching the attention of one man, the Prime Minister."

Sampson notes: "The ... concentration of policy-making in Number 10 - linked to real centres of power in Washington - is undermining the crucial distinctions between objective information and subjective policies on which serious decisions in Britain depend: and those thin partitions and adjoining doors are being dismantled, whether in covert or overt diplomacy."

What this tells us is that Blair has built a thinly-veiled dictatorship at Downing Street. The Cabinet decides nothing while foreign secretary Straw is an irrelevance. Like Thatcher before him, Blair is a running a regime which is dependent on big business and the secret state. The vast majority of Labour MPs support this; after all, only 11 voted for an independent inquiry into the WMD lies when they heard that to question Blair's integrity might cost them their seats at the next election.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi people suffer under the heels of the occupation, without proper food, health, water or security. Only the oil fields are protected. Many are suffering from disease, the result of a decade of sanctions and the untold destruction inflicted by the American and British attack. They are denied the right to elect their own government because it would not bring the results that Washington and London want.

There are surely enough reasons in all this for anyone seriously opposing this regime to campaign to bring down this deeply reactionary Blair government. To hide behind the absence of a ready-made alternative is not acceptable. By joining battle with the government, we create the conditions for going beyond New Labour, and the business-secret state interests it rests on.

Movement for a Socialist Future
9 June 2003