International Policy (Socialist Campaign Group News)
British politics, uniquely, has been dominated by international politics for the past five years. The attack on the World Trade Centre was a uniquely awful event; it obviously attracted mega publicity around the world.
Most Governments expressed sympathy and support and called for restraint by the USA. Tony Blair went further and faster than any other leader in rushing to the USA and promising George Bush full support in anything he wanted to do, and later, ominously, offered to pay a blood price for this support.
Four and a half years later that blood price has been paid for via the deaths of over 100 British soldiers, 2,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The detainees of Guantanamo Bay have suffered an abuse of their basic human rights and torture in a legal void.
It does not end there, as 5,000 British troops are going back to Afghanistan to free up Americans who continue to occupy Iraq. Their mission is to try and control southern Afghanistan: a mission that failed in the nineteenth century and the twentieth and could well lead to a long and bloody conflict, with Britain once again on the side of the USA to ensure the Project for a New American Century survives.
Blair’s obsession with Iraq and his support for Bush has forever damned him in history as the Labour leader who turned his back on the Party’s internationalist traditions. However much he might claim, bizarrely, to the Australian Parliament, that he will tough it out, it is the Labour Party that has been hurt politically by this.
Having been involved in every Parliamentary debate and vote on Afghanistan and Iraq, the most depressing thing is the three party consensus that exists most of the time.
The Tories, then led by Ian Duncan Smith enthusiastically supported Blair in the key vote on March 18th 2003. Indeed it would be hard to forget Tory MPs blinking with disbelief as they were out-done in the phony patriotic stakes by New Labour.
The Liberal Democrats have made much of their “opposition” to the war. It is true they did vote for the amendment saying that “the case for war has not been made” in 2003, but they failed to vote against the principal question a few minutes later. In the months that followed they supported the presence of British troops and have not supported calls for their withdrawal since then.
The Stop the War coalition has become a huge force in British politics, and it is a coalition which includes all Left groups, Labour Against the War, and some Liberal Democrats.
In Parliament the main anti-war voices have been Labour, and some of the PC and SNP MPs.
The Tories actually propose a new generation of nuclear weapons, and so far the Liberal Democrats have not managed to say that Trident should not be replaced.
The Labour Party has suffered from the war, and overwhelmingly ordinary members are opposed to it, as are the vast majority of Labour voters. But if voters and members walk away in disgust, what is the consequence? It is not a Left alternative Government or Council, but handing power to the Right in the form of the Tories or the Liberal Democrats to pursue their own agenda.
The Tories, despite the Cameron soft focus image, are the party of social division and privatisation. The Liberal Democrats have never been of the Left, are anti Trade Union, and under Campbell are in favour of privatisation of the Post Office.
The danger to Labour is not from the other parties, but from a pro war leadership and the refusal by that leadership to listen to ordinary people.
The Pensions dispute is based on a dangerous myth that an increasing elderly population is a good pretext for abandoning a fundamental principal that the society as a whole should care for people, and that in employment the employer, as well as the worker, should pay for occupational pension schemes.
The Socialist Campaign Group exists to campaign for social justice and for the Labour Party to be true to its roots. By winning the policy arguments on peace, social justice and economic power, the Party will get the leadership it deserves.
