A rotten government and a rotten state
The increasing manipulation and direction of state forces by New Labour emphasises this regime’s relentless march down an authoritarian slope and the abandonment of even the most ordinary of constitutional norms.
Earlier this month, despite Scotland Yard's apparent misgivings, ministers insisted that the police mount a massive and futile raid on innocent families in Forest Gate, in East London. The raid was praised by prime minister Blair, even after the police were compelled to release the two brothers violently seized at the time.
Now anyone – not just the Muslim community – is fair game for an armed raid on the basis that you can’t be too careful if you want to stop another suicide bombing attack. Wound up by the government’s preposterous “war on terror”, the police now shoot first and ask questions later, as one of the young men arrested in Forest Gate testified. He was more fortunate than Jean Charles de Menezes, executed on the Tube last July.
The way the raid was organised and justified bear all the hallmarks of a police state. The government now bids the police do its sordid political work. Norms of due process are abandoned, and whole communities terrorised, in the need to hunt down “evil people bent on destroying our way of life”, as Blair puts it.
Then this week the new Home Secretary, John Reid, decided it was time to try and whip the judiciary into line and attacked a specific sentencing decision. The ex-Stalinist Reid was backed up by Blair, who is fed up with judges challenging his government’s attack on human rights with a series of rulings. So the obvious logic is for ministers themselves to decide how long people should be sent to prison. Why bother with tiresome judges or expensive trials?
Since 1997, New Labour has passed no fewer than 60 pieces of legislation dealing with criminal law that have made Britain’s already oppressive penal system even harsher. As a result, the numbers jailed have soared to 78,000, the highest rate per head of population in Europe and almost a third higher than when Blair won his first election in 1997.
The gloves are off in Britain. Democratic norms established over centuries are being swept aside by New Labour and the forces of the state. There is growing opposition – from judges, from soldiers who have deserted in droves over the illegal invasion of Iraq, from campaigners who demonstrate in defiance of the new “exclusion zone” around parliament, from whole communities and from professionals like doctors who say they and other NHS workers should run the health service instead of the government.
This is a rotten government and a rotten state, which not only oppresses people but has no answers to pressing issues like pensions, housing, transport, health and the eco-crisis. As such, both the government and the state have lost their right to rule over us. To protect and enhance our rights, we need to think seriously about opening a new chapter in the long struggle for rights and create our own, alternative, truly democratic system.
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17 June 2006
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