News from the Madhouse (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Statistics

The United States, as the most powerful country in the world, must be the world’s leading producer of statistics. But for some reason the US has been very coy about producing any estimate of the numbers of Iraqis killed during the American attack. However, others outside officialdom are less reticent, and according to a Times (10 July) report on Iraq, “a group of British and US academics said that the civilian death toll from the war was at least 6000.” But the lack of official American figures does mean that all that suffering can be brushed under the carpet. An American writer in the Times (3 June) said that the Iraqi war was “pretty-close-to-bloodless”. The 2800 people killed in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre are fewer than half the probable figure of Iraqi civilian deaths. No American writer would ever describe the 11 September attack as “pretty-close-to-bloodless”. Of course, the twin towers attacks killed mainly Americans, while in Iraq it was mainly Iraqis who died. Perhaps that makes a difference.

Solitary confinement

But if you call your dead “victims”, instead of “heroes”, you may find people asking what is the point of supporting a system which results in so many dead victims. Describing them as “heroes”, or so the authorities hope, is a good way of getting people to rally behind the flag, and continue the merciless carnage which is part of capitalism. Private Jessica Lynch, for example, an American maintenance soldier, was in a vehicle at the back-end of an American convoy in Iraq, which lost its way and blundered into enemy territory. In an exchange of fire, she was badly injured, and captured by the Iraqis. She was taken to a nearby hospital in Nasiriyah, and her crushed arms and legs were put in plaster. The Americans discovered she was there, and decided the chance of rescuing a young, good-looking blonde was too good to miss. By that time Iraqi resistance was crumbling, but the desire for a propaganda coup was too strong. So special forces in helicopters, guns firing, stormed the hospital, capturing all the doctors and nurses and not really helping the patients, and triumphantly carried off Private Lynch.

According to the Times (21 June), the press was fed reports about her heroic resistance, fighting and killing Iraqis before being wounded several times herself. There are plans to make films about this exciting story. In fact, it seems, her gun jammed so she didn’t fire at all. Unfortunately, Private Lynch “has been unable to remember anything about the events which have propelled her into the public eye”, and, said the Times reporter, she is now “living in solitary confinement in the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington. Outside her door stands a military guard who prevents anyone except her medical helpers and her immediate family from seeing her. Each lunchtime Private Lynch goes to physiotherapy and works out alone.Other patients are banished from the gym for fear that the press will use them as a way to get to her.” A “hero”, kept in solitary confinement! It makes you wonder if they are helping her to remember what she has forgotten, i.e. all about her heroism. As the report said, “She is deliberately and falsely being portrayed as a hero in a war with few genuine heroes because the Americans would like to feel good about a war that has an ambiguous ending, and the entertainment industry needs to please them.”

Fishy story

In legal circles, there is a well-known story about a barrister, appearing for the defendant, who listened to the other side’s allegations, and wondered how on earth he was going to reply to them. At length his solicitor passed him a note: “No case; attack the plaintiff’s attorney.”

Ten Downing Street is acting on exactly the same principle in the aftermath of the Iraqi war. Much of the media—newspapers, radio, television—has been questioning some of the stories the government put out to justify their action in invading Iraq along with the Americans. Not having a convincing reply to many of these questions, Alastair Campbell (the Prime Minister’s main public relations adviser) decided to seize on one allegation broadcast on BBC television, to the effect that he had “sexed up” some of the information the government got from its so-called “intelligence services”, before issuing it as part of the government’s propaganda drive to persuade people of the necessity of war.

Whether this or that claim is one hundred per cent justified is of minor importance besides the government’s efforts to obscure the basic facts of the matter. America attacked and overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime because it needs to import a great deal of oil to keep its productive and distributive industries functioning. Saudi Arabia, with the world’s largest reserves of oil, is already firmly within the American sphere of influence; Iraq, with the world’s second largest reserves, was hostile to the United States, so had to be brought into line. Britain, and a few other countries, supported the United States because it is by a long way the most powerful country in the world. Some European countries have reacted to this enormous American power by stepping up their attempt to build a capitalist European federation which might in the future hope to rival the United States, and share in world leadership. Others, including Britain, think that a better bet is to go with the country which now has the leadership: in the jungle of world capitalism, the British rulers think, perhaps safety and prosperity lie in cosying up to the most ferocious predator.

Each group of capitalists, ruling in a particular country, does whatever it thinks is best for its own interests. Lots of advice is given, but the decision rests with each country’s ruling class. In Britain, there was a lot of feeling against going to war. Tony Blair, in his present role as right-hand man to the British ruling class, and administrator of British capitalism, ignored the widespread anti-war feeling, and did what he thought the British capitalist class would want him to do. So he went along with the American rulers, hoping that it would help to ensure the oil supplies which British industry needs and will need in the foreseeable future.

Whenever anyone makes an open, honest decision, he adds up all the possible reasons for and against, and arrives at a conclusion. When anyone reaches his conclusion first, and then has to make up his reasons afterwards, there are often a lot of problems. Tony Blair couldn’t announce that he was going to send British soldiers to fight in Iraq, which would involve killing and injuring Iraqi soldiers and civilians, as well as deaths and injuries among the British invading force, simply because he thought it was safer in the modern world for the British ruling class to ally with the single world superpower, and at the same time make sure British capitalism didn’t run out of oil. So reasons had to be made up afterwards. Hence the sudden discovery that Saddam Hussein is a nasty man, running a barbarous regime. Quite true, of course, but not enough to excuse a war which was almost impossible to square with capitalism’s own “international law”. The problems were, firstly, that the British government has supported and traded with this barbarous regime in the past, and, secondly, if that was the reason behind the war, Britain would have to attack many countries round the world, which have regimes just as tyrannical and murderous as Saddam’s. If only the “enemy” country would attack first, then the excuse for war would be obvious—resistance to aggression, which was trumpeted as a complete justification throughout the Second World War. But that wouldn’t do in this case, since America and Britain were going to be the ones committing the aggression. And it wouldn’t be very convincing to claim that Iraq, economically feeble after the Gulf War and the years of sanctions since then, was somehow going to get powerful enough to send an invasion fleet down the Persian Gulf and round the Arabian Sea, up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal, then through the Mediterranean and past Gibraltar, and across the Bay of Biscay before finally invading Cornwall.

What could be done? So in comes the killer excuse—Saddam has weapons of mass destruction: nuclear or chemical or biological weapons which could be sent on a rocket across Europe to land on Basingstoke or thereabouts—and which would be ready for action in only forty-five minutes! (Exactly forty-five, apparently—not forty-four or forty-six minutes: or, as W. S. Gilbert put it, “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”.) All this is jazzed up in two official-sounding dossiers, which seek to prove the imminent danger. In due course awkward facts start to emerge—some of the material was taken from an ancient thesis which a student had submitted for his degree (and put on the internet), borrowed without acknowledgement and improved to make it more exciting; and allegations about Saddam trying to import uranium from the Niger republic in West Africa, which turn out to have been based mainly on forged documents.

When all this comes out in the newspapers and the media generally, no wonder Ten Downing Street try to defend themselves by picking out some uncertain bits of the criticism and demanding apologies. But since the Labour Party convinced millions of voters at the last two elections of the gigantic lie that they could run the capitalist system for the benefit of the working class—the great majority of ordinary people—then perhaps these other terminological inexactitudes seem to be very small beer.

Alwyn Edgar

Greasy Pole: Two brains? (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

When a prime minister takes over after winning an election victory, what are the jobs awaiting attention? There is the triumphant waving to the crowd, there is the speech saying how humbly proud they are to be given this sacred trust which they will keep by running a government of all the people. There are the ministerial jobs to be dished out, to award faithful acolytes on the one hand and to pay off old scores on the other. Then, very soon, there is the business of planning the next election. Because that must never be far from their mind. Alastair Campbell, the spin doctor supremo of this government, recently told the magazine Vanity Fair that every morning he and Tony Blair get up thinking “Right, how can we lose the election”. That may not be exactly true but it does illustrate the fact that any government must be persistently pre-occupied with pulling off at the next election the same kind of confidence trick which succeeded before.

As the election gets nearer the matter takes on a greater urgency. We are subjected to a kind of electoral auction, in which Tories and Labour make bids to buy off votes with extravagant promises to solve economic and social problems, as if it was all suddenly blindingly obvious and simple.

Criminals and Immigrants

An ever-popular subject of the electoral auction is crime, with each party bidding to outdo the other with schemes which are presented as the final, all-consuming remedy. No more drug addicts mugging old ladies for their pension. No more burglaries while we sleep in our beds at the dead of night. No more stolen cars. The inhabitants of inner city slums, of high rise housing estates, will learn to live with their misery without taking it all out in offending. The last Tory Home Secretary, Michael Howard, was a past master at thinking up such schemes and his Labour successor has carried on where he left off and beyond.

Since the Fifties immigration has been another item at the auction. From the first Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 both parties have rolled out laws to cut immigration which have had the effect of pandering to, or stimulating, some of the ugliest of racist prejudice. In the Nineties the immigrants have become asylum seekers, who are often characterised as “bogus” or “economic”. Ace auctioneer Jack Straw has been most active here, restricting the income of the asylum seekers and forcibly dispersing them around the country, often to places where they have no family or friends. Straw’s Tory rival, Ann Widdecombe, has tried to outbid him with her call to slap all asylum seekers into detention centres—a sort of “lock up first and ask questions afterwards” policy.

Pensioners

At one time it seemed that this government had written pensioners off as a significant source of votes so it didn’t really matter if they upset them, for example by upping the basic pension by the staggering sum of 75p a week. There had to be a re-assessment when it became clear that this miserly rise had provoked a lot of anger and then when the Tories saw that there were votes in the issue. Pensions, like most state benefits, are not simple. A pension starts at a basic sum which can be increased or reduced according to the pensioner’s circumstances. In addition there is an extra £10 a week at Christmas, which would not even buy a bottle of whisky and each winter £150 to pay for extra fuel. Anyone over 75 gets their TV free of a licence fee. Taking everything into account, it needs a mathematically alert brain and a calculator to work out exactly how much a pensioner should get.

The Tories put the matter into the auction with William Hague’s bid to raise the basic pension by between £5 and £10 a week—at once, if the Tories win the next election, which could mean next April. This may have sounded pretty tempting to anyone eking out a spartan existence on their pension but when Labour ministers had got their breath back they were able to show that Hague was not really offering a rise because his offer was intended to replace the £10 Christmas pay-out, the fuel payment, the free TV licence and a few other things. The Tory scheme was based on the argument that pensioners don’t like being forced to accept a bonus for Christmas, for winter fuel and so on and would prefer a straightforward increase to spend how they like. Anyone who thinks that people who struggle to get by on a state pension are able to spend their money how they like—blow it all on a luxury cruise instead of on food, perhaps—is seriously out of touch with reality.

How Many Brains Have You Got?

The person responsible for the Tory bid was not William Hague but his social security spokesman David Willetts, who is known as “Two Brains” Willetts because he is so much cleverer than normal people.

He went to Oxford, where they know when they are in the presence of a great mind so they gave him a first class degree. After Oxford he became one of John Major’s earliest gurus, which would mean a lot more were it not that Major was famous for making disastrous choices in the people he promoted. In the 1992 election Willetts was elected as MP for the safe Tory seat of Havant. His progress in penetrating into the world of the brash and brilliant was illustrated when he became a regular at Peregrine Worsthorne’s lunches at the Sunday Telegraph, where they may well have discussed clever ideas like raising pensions with one hand and lowering them with the other. Willetts was welcome at these exercises in pretentious futility until his overbearing conceit got on everyone’s nerves—which, since none of those present were short of self-esteem, is saying quite a lot. The crunch came when he put his feet on the lunch table and began lecturing Michael Howard on how to run his ministry—something which Howard, who was hated by his civil servants and a few million other people, did not need. “No further invitations,” recorded Worsthorne, “were forthcoming for Mr. Willetts.”

Dissembling

It took Willetts rather longer to reach serious fame when, as a junior Tory whip, he earned the severe displeasure of the House of Commons Standards and Privileges Committee. This committee, as its name implies, is supposed to watch over the standards of conduct of those people quaintly called Honourable Members, which means that anyone who deals with them is supposed to tell the truth. In October 1994 the committee were expecting to get a complaint about the conduct of Neil “Cash for Questions” Hamilton. It was an embarrassing episode for the government. It is at such times that whips, especially if they got a first at Oxford, come into their own. Putting both his brains to work at the same time, Willetts came up with a brilliant idea designed to obstruct the work of the committee and so get the government off the hook.

In a note to the Tory Chief Whip, he suggested that the committee should either set aside the complaint against Hamilton until the MP’s libel action against the Guardian had been settled—by which time much of the embarrassment should have subsided—or investigate the complaint as quickly as possible “…exploiting the good Tory majority at present”. Referring to the Tory chairman of the committee, Willetts wrote “He wants our advice”—in other words the chairman wanted to be told the best way of stopping the committee doing the job it had been set up to do.

Unluckily for Willetts the note was leaked and he was hauled up before the committee to explain himself, when he was stupid enough, instead of making a clean breast of the matter, to try to get away with the feeble excuse that his phrase “he wants our advice” really meant “he is in want of advice”. With the media hot on the trail, this attempt to wriggle out of the problem had no chance of succeeding. The chairman sensibly wanted none of it; he described Willetts version of the affair as “astonishing”. Left hanging in the wind, Willetts had to absorb the committee’s censure: “. . . very concerned . . . dissemble on his account . . . substantially aggravate the original offence”.

Comeback

For anyone with fewer brains—or with less arrogance—that might have been a crushing blow. But not so for Willetts, who came bouncing back and is now shadow spokesman for social security—which cannot be reassuring for anyone who depends on state benefits for their survival. But that is the reality of life under capitalism, for the millions of people who do all the useful work in society and whose lot is to be exploited in the interests of sustaining the system responsible for it all—and to be patronised by arrogant, conceited cynics into what might be called the bargain.

Ivan

Doing God (2012)

The Halo Halo! column from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

“We don’t do God,” Alastair Campbell famously said when he had to rein in Tony Blair from voicing his religious delusions from Downing Street. But of course politicians have always ‘done’ God. And as they jumped on the god bandwagon in the run up to Easter he was well and truly done. Done so thoroughly that if he’d actually existed his head would be spinning and there would be steam coming out of his ears.

It started with George Galloway posing for the cameras and thanking God for his victory in the Bradford West by-election. Galloway, it must be admitted, has quite a way with words but by thanking the Almighty it would appear that he is even able to persuade him to cast his omnipotent influence on the election results.

A popular view (among the tabloids at least) was that Galloway won because he was able to convince the largely Islamic local population that because he didn’t drink, he had a beard and he was about to marry his fourth wife, he was in fact almost a Muslim. Whether that had an effect or not is anyone’s guess.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, gave an Easter address to re-assure gullible Christians that he most certainly wasn’t a Muslim. To make sure they got the message he hit them with a sanctimonious speech packed with references to the “redemption at God’s hand”, “the gift of grace”, a “saviour who died so that we might live”, and a “blessed and happy Easter to all Christians celebrating the resurrection.”

An alarming load of codswallop from the President of the United States. But if Americans don’t believe he’s a genuine U.S. citizen even after producing his birth certificate, perhaps they’ll fall for that load of old cobblers.

Back here David Cameron showed that he, too, can pontificate with the best of them. During his Easter effort he droned on about when “as Christians we remember the life, sacrifice and living legacy” of the invisible man in the sky. And in case anyone was sceptical about this fervent belief, he assured them that he welcomed a “Christian fight-back”.

He also mentioned his disagreement with the Church over their opposition to gay marriage, but he added “If this doesn’t go ahead, to those of us who’d like it to go ahead, there will still be civil partnerships”. And “I hope we won’t fall out too much over gay marriage.”

The American ‘Christian Post’ website honed in on this part of Cameron’s speech. “British Prime Minister David Cameron has pleaded for Christians in the country to stick by him despite his attempts to legalise same sex marriage in the U.K.,” it told them.

Well God takes a dim view of this kind of thing in America. And so, too, do his barmy supporters at the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. These are the people who picket the funerals of gays, U.S. army personnel, and anyone else that God doesn’t like. They’re a strange lot, but at least they’re consistent. The god of the Westboro Baptist Church hates everyone. But especially gays.

They run a number of websites including: GodHatesTheMedia.com; JewsKilledJesus.com; and even GodHatesTheWorld.com. But their favourite seems to be GodHatesFags.com. And no, this is not a heavenly anti-smoking campaign. It’s people’s sexuality that drives God’s pals at the Westboro Baptist Church nuts.

Having politicians interfering with every area of people’s lives is bad enough, but when they want to appease the god squad as well it’s bloody dangerous.

NW

Vanity Blair (2007)

Book Review from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Blair Years – Extracts From the Alastair Campbell Diaries, edited by Alastair Campbell and Richard Stott. Hutchinson. £25 hardback.

Alastair Campbell, former Press Secretary to Tony Blair, has produced a volume of over 700 pages of his diary scribblings that most of the mainstream press has been expectantly salivating over for some time. In approach a hybrid of Richard Crossman’s Diaries and those of Campbell’s long-time friend Alan Clark (while certainly being nearer the latter in tone) it is rarely a dull read, even if there is plenty that has been kept back for fuller, later editions. Whether it met the expectations of the press is a matter for them, though many have been quick to point out that some of the most potentially damaging revelations have been edited out by Campbell for fear of embarrassing the present government, especially particular revelations related to some of the more serious disputes between Blair and Gordon Brown.

Campbell was a man feared by many both inside and outside government, and in truth not all the punches are pulled by any means. Campbell uses his journalistic training to good effect and manages to paint quite detailed personal portraits of the main figures in the UK government over the last ten years and more in a way that has never been done previously. A recovering alcoholic with at least one serious ‘psychotic episode’ as he calls it in his past, Campbell is an emotional man and this makes his diaries all the more readable – and very far removed in most respects from the standard fare usually served up by those deemed to be at the ‘heart of government’.

Apart from the sheer vanity of great numbers of those Blair surrounded himself with over the years (mirroring the vanity of Blair himself), there are at least three other things worthy of comment. First, the way in which an unelected official like Campbell clearly had more authority and power within the government than many – if not most – of the elected politicians, often to the annoyance of both the latter and the civil service. Second, the lack of clarity about how policy decisions sometimes emerged (the discussions and negotiations over Northern Ireland are the most interesting and detailed while the underlying reasons for the Iraq war seem to take poor second place to the military machinations). And third – frivolously if amusingly – the way in which so many of those featured in the diaries appear either partly or fully naked at various points (including Blair himself, Mo Mowlam and several other government officials). Campbell is a former writer of soft-core sex stories, which must have come in handy if you’re recounting heated late night discussions in Downing Street with a Prime Minister sat completely starkers in his office with nothing more than a mug of tea to cover his modesty.

In these edited extracts there were clearly limits to even this though – at no point, for instance, does Gordon Brown ever appear without so much as a tie.

Dave Perrin