In the summer of 1990, by which time the Soviet bloc had collapsed and the Soviet Union itself was in its death-throes, Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded and quickly overran the adjacent southern micro-state of Kuwait, mainly composed of desert but with lots of oil under its sand. By this time too Soviet forces had been pressured into withdrawing from Afghanistan (their losses had contributed to the Soviet unravelling) though the civil war there continued until 1996 when Kabul fell to the Taliban.
During the eighties Saddam had been a close Middle East ally of the United States, despite the aggressiveness of his rhetoric against her even more important ally, Israel, a state which like Ba’ahist Iraq invaded its neighbours and seized their territory, defied UN resolutions, cruelly persecuted populations under its control and possessed weapons of mass destruction (even more devastating ones).
He had been willingly sold weaponry light and heavy by the USA, supplied with intelligence, protected at the UN (and readily forgiven for mistakenly attacking a US warship and killing 37 personnel) for he was at that time engaged in an all-out military assault on the Iranian Islamic Republic, an American bête noire ever since the 1979 revolution which had destroyed Western influence and compromised oil access in a very strategically important area – and was also a sponsor of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Israel’s most effective enemy. The war was immensely destructive both in life and materially, yet Saddam (and the US) failed in their objective and Iraq was counter-invaded, the war eventually ending in stalemate.
Saddam thereafter was a busted flush. The Iranian regime remained in place and no less a source of annoyance to Washington. The Iraqi dictator by now was an embarrassment to his sponsors for his abominable human rights record, but refused to tone down his anti-Israel rhetoric and continued threatening to use force against it as well as the USA’s other Middle East client, Saudi Arabia.
Iraq had suffered grievously from the war, its economy was in a mess, its oil revenues insufficient. Not surprisingly the regime’s attention turned to Kuwait, slopping with oil and effectively defenceless. There was some justice in the argument (so far as these things are ever a subject of justice) that it should have been part of Iraq from the start. There is certainly evidence that the US hinted to Saddam that it would have no objection if he repaired his fortunes by seizing it, knowing well what this would mean and the opportunity it would open up. It is a plausible scenario. In any case, Saddam fell into the trap, whether or not it was deliberately set. He could not then meet the demand for withdrawal without hopelessly losing face.
In early 1991, having annihilated the Iraqi forces in Kuwait, a ‘turkey shoot ‘ as one US officer described it, the elder George Bush failed to follow up by moving on Baghdad, or by supporting the Kurdish uprising in the north or the Shia insurgency in the south. The reason was that the Americans reckoned that popular overthrow of the regime would result in Iraq being dominated by forces friendly to Iran or, in the north, hostile to its Turkish NATO ally. What Washington were hoping for was that Saddam, disgraced by defeat, would be removed in a coup by more accommodating elements in his military. When that failed to occur, the pressure was continued by a regime of economic sanctions and occasional ariel attack, occasioning over the years civilian deaths running into the hundreds of thousands. Meantime an enormous US military base appeared in Kuwait.
The same kind of thing happened in Kosovo, where Slobodan Milosevic’s persecution of the ethnic Albanian community under Serbian rule supplied the pretext for military intervention. The humanitarian justification would look more convincing and less opportunist if another massive US military base had not subsequently been established in Kosovo, on the border of Macedonia.
US success in Afghanistan at first appeared to be comprehensive when Islamist clients it had armed and funded throughout the war destroyed the modernising communist regime. The success was greatly compromised however when these in their turn were replaced by the hyper-Islamist Taliban, sponsored by another US client government, that of Pakistan, or more specifically by its security service, the ISI. The Taliban had their own agendas, and moreover gave sanctuary to the Al-Qaeda network of the Saudi Osama bin Laden, which though also a US creation had turned against its sponsor because of the presence of the latter’s infidel troops in the holy Saudi state.
Then came 9/11. Without any suggestion that the US state itself engineered the atrocity it is nevertheless true that it did for the Bush presidency what the Reichstag Fire did for Hitler, enabling it, under the ‘war on terror’ pretext, to launch a furious attack upon civil liberties in the USA itself, extend the powers of the secret state and generate the public momentum for war in Afghanistan – and Iraq as well, though there was of course absolutely no connection except hostility between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. However the subjugation of Iraq, resulting in a few more hundred thousand deaths, was central to the neoconservatives’ ‘Project for a New American Century’ as well as the Israeli lobby, and they had been advocating it since 1997.
Tariq Ali as long ago as 2002 quoted a former Washington insider, who asserted that ‘Blowback is shorthand for saying that a nation reaps what it sows, even if it does not fully know or understand what it has sown’. Whether the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election will lead to any substantial reorientation is still too early to say, though the signs are not particularly hopeful – but what can be assumed with certainty is that the world financial meltdown of that year marks the end of the ‘end of History’.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Crimes and metacrimes - Pt 1
Everyone (well nearly everyone) would agree that Stalin’s regime represented the greatest disaster of the communist movement and indeed – both on account of what it meant for its victims and its long-term repercussions – ranks among the great disasters of recorded history. Over subsequent decades its record supplied much of the fuel for the relentless ideological offensive conducted from 1945 up to the collapse of the Soviet Union – and beyond – by the West in general and the USA in particular.
What is remarkable is the speed at which matters changed for the better following Stalin’s death, although the USSR remained an intensely authoritarian society with a basically unviable economic system and continued to exercise by force a hegemony over eastern Europe which bitterly affronted national feelings. Still, it ensured to its citizens the necessities of life together with a range of basic amenities, often of a relatively high standard.
How then did the USSR’S record from the mid-fifties onwards compare with its great rival? In terms of average well-being there seems on the face of things – despite large sinks of poverty and racism continuing to exist in the fortunate West, not least in the fabulously wealthy United States itself – to be a situation of ‘no contest’.
On closer inspection though the verdict appears less evident, for while there is no doubting the unprecedented high average living standards enjoyed in the Western metropoles, the indescribable deprivation and near-starvation prevailing throughout the Third World were no accident but a product of Third World relations with the industrialised West, particularly for the societies held in colonial bondage.
The episodes of Soviet malpractice that stand out in the post-Stalinist decades were the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Berlin Wall in 1961 and sponsorship of the 1981 military takeover in Poland, of which communists never ceased to be reminded. Far worse crimes were committed by Mao’s regime during the Great Leap Forward of the late fifties (the Soviets advised against that initiative) and during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the late sixties (by which time the two communist powers were enemies) – but none of that prevented Nixon’s administration from embracing Mao (literally and figuratively) immediately afterwards, nor from a later President, rather than congratulating Soviet-supported Vietnamese for overthrowing the genocidal Khmer Rouge providing instead all possible diplomatic and material support to the guerrilla remnants these pseudo-communist genocides once the latter could be employed as a tool against the unforgiven Vietnamese, meantime ensuring the continuance of various murderous regimes throughout Latin America, especially in Chile Argentina and Brazil, not to mention the discreet underpinning (in spite of platonic verbal condemnations) of South African apartheid.
Back to the fifties. Even as labour camps were being shut down in the Soviet Union worse ones were being constructed in Algeria and Kenya by the US vassals France and Britain. In these, starvation, torture, mutilation and arbitrary murder were all routine. A CIA sponsored coup in Guatemala in 1954 unleashed a right-wing terror that killed innumerable thousands over several decades. The point has been made that Stalin’s blood-lettings in the East European satellites after 1945, were on nothing like the scale, nor nearly so indiscriminate as those practised by ‘our bastards’ (Roosevelt’s term) in Central and South America.
The US atrocities in Vietnam are well remembered (not least because the USA lost). Less so is what was certainly the worst one of them all when in late 1965, under CIA supervision the Indonesian military within a few weeks slaughtered at least half a million suspected leftists – that was the minimum figure; the maximum estimate is two million – and confined the few survivors for decades in horrible gulags.
The grisly record goes on – US administrations seem to have had a particular taste for the most murderous, sadistic and corrupt tyrants they could elevate – Suharto in Indonesia, the Saudi royals, the Shah of Iran, Saddam in Iraq, Mobutu in the Congo, the rebel Savimbi in Angola, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile and his Argentine equivalents, Zia in Pakistan and his creation, the Taliban in Afghanistan – the list goes on endlessly. Beside that record Hungary and Czechoslovakia look almost like petty misdemeanors, and only one Soviet ally post-1956, Mengistu in Ethiopia, came near to rivaling the USA’s array of bloodthirsty kleptocrats.
Overall, it is possible to conclude that after 1953 and certainly after 1956 the Soviet bloc for all its crimes and shortcomings, its lack of democratic institutions and its notably inferior material wealth, had on a global scale a record that was far more positive and humane than that of its Cold War antagonist. A case could even be made for the command economy despite or even because of its gross inefficiencies – for although the actual environmental record of the Soviet bloc was deplorable, in principle if that problem had been adequately addressed the inefficient centralised economy at least gobbled up irreplaceable natural resources less insanely.
Part 2 will look at the record since 1991.
What is remarkable is the speed at which matters changed for the better following Stalin’s death, although the USSR remained an intensely authoritarian society with a basically unviable economic system and continued to exercise by force a hegemony over eastern Europe which bitterly affronted national feelings. Still, it ensured to its citizens the necessities of life together with a range of basic amenities, often of a relatively high standard.
How then did the USSR’S record from the mid-fifties onwards compare with its great rival? In terms of average well-being there seems on the face of things – despite large sinks of poverty and racism continuing to exist in the fortunate West, not least in the fabulously wealthy United States itself – to be a situation of ‘no contest’.
On closer inspection though the verdict appears less evident, for while there is no doubting the unprecedented high average living standards enjoyed in the Western metropoles, the indescribable deprivation and near-starvation prevailing throughout the Third World were no accident but a product of Third World relations with the industrialised West, particularly for the societies held in colonial bondage.
The episodes of Soviet malpractice that stand out in the post-Stalinist decades were the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Berlin Wall in 1961 and sponsorship of the 1981 military takeover in Poland, of which communists never ceased to be reminded. Far worse crimes were committed by Mao’s regime during the Great Leap Forward of the late fifties (the Soviets advised against that initiative) and during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the late sixties (by which time the two communist powers were enemies) – but none of that prevented Nixon’s administration from embracing Mao (literally and figuratively) immediately afterwards, nor from a later President, rather than congratulating Soviet-supported Vietnamese for overthrowing the genocidal Khmer Rouge providing instead all possible diplomatic and material support to the guerrilla remnants these pseudo-communist genocides once the latter could be employed as a tool against the unforgiven Vietnamese, meantime ensuring the continuance of various murderous regimes throughout Latin America, especially in Chile Argentina and Brazil, not to mention the discreet underpinning (in spite of platonic verbal condemnations) of South African apartheid.
Back to the fifties. Even as labour camps were being shut down in the Soviet Union worse ones were being constructed in Algeria and Kenya by the US vassals France and Britain. In these, starvation, torture, mutilation and arbitrary murder were all routine. A CIA sponsored coup in Guatemala in 1954 unleashed a right-wing terror that killed innumerable thousands over several decades. The point has been made that Stalin’s blood-lettings in the East European satellites after 1945, were on nothing like the scale, nor nearly so indiscriminate as those practised by ‘our bastards’ (Roosevelt’s term) in Central and South America.
The US atrocities in Vietnam are well remembered (not least because the USA lost). Less so is what was certainly the worst one of them all when in late 1965, under CIA supervision the Indonesian military within a few weeks slaughtered at least half a million suspected leftists – that was the minimum figure; the maximum estimate is two million – and confined the few survivors for decades in horrible gulags.
The grisly record goes on – US administrations seem to have had a particular taste for the most murderous, sadistic and corrupt tyrants they could elevate – Suharto in Indonesia, the Saudi royals, the Shah of Iran, Saddam in Iraq, Mobutu in the Congo, the rebel Savimbi in Angola, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile and his Argentine equivalents, Zia in Pakistan and his creation, the Taliban in Afghanistan – the list goes on endlessly. Beside that record Hungary and Czechoslovakia look almost like petty misdemeanors, and only one Soviet ally post-1956, Mengistu in Ethiopia, came near to rivaling the USA’s array of bloodthirsty kleptocrats.
Overall, it is possible to conclude that after 1953 and certainly after 1956 the Soviet bloc for all its crimes and shortcomings, its lack of democratic institutions and its notably inferior material wealth, had on a global scale a record that was far more positive and humane than that of its Cold War antagonist. A case could even be made for the command economy despite or even because of its gross inefficiencies – for although the actual environmental record of the Soviet bloc was deplorable, in principle if that problem had been adequately addressed the inefficient centralised economy at least gobbled up irreplaceable natural resources less insanely.
Part 2 will look at the record since 1991.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Current discontents
Margaret Thatcher once declared, when asked what she considered to be her greatest political achievement, that it was New Labour. And she was absolutely right. New Labour meant Thatcherite Labour; the electorate voted in 1997 to dispose of Thatcherism and what they got – apart from devolution, the minimum wage and some improvement in cultural repression – was Thatcherism intensified. As Jon Pilger has written, ‘Since Margaret Thatcher, British Parliamentary democracy has been progressively destroyed as the two main parties have converged into a single-ideology business state, each with almost identical social, economic and foreign policies’, or as Malcolm Burns put it, ‘they were voting against 18 years of dismal Tory misrule … they are now about to vote against 13 years of Labour misrule’. Labour and the Tories were not two distinct competing parties offering alternatives, they were different wings of the big-property party.
The Euro elections were not the predicted catastrophe – they were much worse. Only in one region, the North East did Labour come out ahead, though with a nine percent drop from 2004. In Cornwall they came out behind even the Cornish nationalists, and overall behind UKIP. The worst calamity of a calamitous night was that the collapse of the Labour vote permitted the successful election of two neonazis, even though those candidates’ vote was itself somewhat down on 2004. The prime minister’s survival, in question for some time, became even more so.
Not that any sympathy should be wasted on Gordon Brown, largely the author of his own misfortunes. Away back in the 1980s when Labour was still in opposition the leftist journal London Labour Briefing used to run a feature entitled ‘Class Traitor of the Month’ (which I thought at the time was rather absurd). On one occasion it treated Brown and Blair together and combined them into a cartoon animal with a head at either end. It was a perceptive insight. Much was made at the time of personal rivalries and explosive arguments between the pair, but in political outlook they were joined at the hip and Brown, despite occasional rhetorical flourishes pretending to distance himself, followed Blair in every particular in their descent into the lethal swamp of authoritarian unregulated global capitalism, dragging the Labour Party behind them.
His first action as Chancellor was to remove government control over the Bank of England, followed shortly thereafter by authorising cuts in benefit payments for single mothers. He set about piratising every amenity that Thatcher and Major had overlooked and which could be sold off. For those which couldn’t he went on to extend the Tory-invented PFI policy when public financing would have been immeasurably cheaper, thereby pouring unnecessary billions into the pockets of speculators, bankers, insurers and legal firms and saddling the said amenities with mountainous debt into the indefinite future. Above all, Brown was certainly the one individual in the country who, by threat of resignation, might have put a veto on Blair’s determination to drag the country into the Iraq war. If he had any reservations he kept quiet about them and instead set about organising the financial measures needed for the criminal act. Now he appoints the unelected Alan Sugar to his government. It is truly beyond parody
It has been suggested that Brown’s problem is that he is dour and Scottish, insufficiently salonfähig, therefore unacceptable as prime minister among the higher reaches of the British establishment. There is probably a measure of truth in this, but were he presiding over policies which favoured Labour’s natural constituency and the mass of middle-class electors rather than the super-wealthy, working to improve the infrastructure of public amenities and making them democratically answerable, then the crises besetting the country would be containable, establishment attitudes would be a matter of indifference and the BNP nowhere.
Instead, one insider is reported as saying that he lacks the qualities to appeal to ‘middle England’. It seems somewhat unlikely that middle England is panting for a NHS which is falling apart and its pieces being thrown to the financial wolves, mass closure of post offices and the end of a universal service, a rail system where the passengers are ripped off in order to rides in extreme discomfort, an educational structure being steadily removed from any vestige of democratic control, financial starvation of local authorities so that essential services are progressively run down, an extending Orwellian bureaucratic society and merciless persecution of unemployed and disabled people, to be treated as suspected criminals the moment they apply for benefits. At any rate if there have been mass demonstrations demanding the imposition of these things we haven’t noticed them. What we do have is mass voting abstention by an electorate which in 1997 saw its hopes at the time embodied in Labour and subsequently found utter disillusion.
A collapsed party with scarcely an activist to be found anywhere, the total squandering of the unprecedented public acclaim of twelve years ago, the worst electoral performance since the First World War, a lame duck prime minister dependent on the grace and favour of the unelected and toxic Mandelson, and certain electoral annihilation within the coming year – New Labour’s legacy.
The Euro elections were not the predicted catastrophe – they were much worse. Only in one region, the North East did Labour come out ahead, though with a nine percent drop from 2004. In Cornwall they came out behind even the Cornish nationalists, and overall behind UKIP. The worst calamity of a calamitous night was that the collapse of the Labour vote permitted the successful election of two neonazis, even though those candidates’ vote was itself somewhat down on 2004. The prime minister’s survival, in question for some time, became even more so.
Not that any sympathy should be wasted on Gordon Brown, largely the author of his own misfortunes. Away back in the 1980s when Labour was still in opposition the leftist journal London Labour Briefing used to run a feature entitled ‘Class Traitor of the Month’ (which I thought at the time was rather absurd). On one occasion it treated Brown and Blair together and combined them into a cartoon animal with a head at either end. It was a perceptive insight. Much was made at the time of personal rivalries and explosive arguments between the pair, but in political outlook they were joined at the hip and Brown, despite occasional rhetorical flourishes pretending to distance himself, followed Blair in every particular in their descent into the lethal swamp of authoritarian unregulated global capitalism, dragging the Labour Party behind them.
His first action as Chancellor was to remove government control over the Bank of England, followed shortly thereafter by authorising cuts in benefit payments for single mothers. He set about piratising every amenity that Thatcher and Major had overlooked and which could be sold off. For those which couldn’t he went on to extend the Tory-invented PFI policy when public financing would have been immeasurably cheaper, thereby pouring unnecessary billions into the pockets of speculators, bankers, insurers and legal firms and saddling the said amenities with mountainous debt into the indefinite future. Above all, Brown was certainly the one individual in the country who, by threat of resignation, might have put a veto on Blair’s determination to drag the country into the Iraq war. If he had any reservations he kept quiet about them and instead set about organising the financial measures needed for the criminal act. Now he appoints the unelected Alan Sugar to his government. It is truly beyond parody
It has been suggested that Brown’s problem is that he is dour and Scottish, insufficiently salonfähig, therefore unacceptable as prime minister among the higher reaches of the British establishment. There is probably a measure of truth in this, but were he presiding over policies which favoured Labour’s natural constituency and the mass of middle-class electors rather than the super-wealthy, working to improve the infrastructure of public amenities and making them democratically answerable, then the crises besetting the country would be containable, establishment attitudes would be a matter of indifference and the BNP nowhere.
Instead, one insider is reported as saying that he lacks the qualities to appeal to ‘middle England’. It seems somewhat unlikely that middle England is panting for a NHS which is falling apart and its pieces being thrown to the financial wolves, mass closure of post offices and the end of a universal service, a rail system where the passengers are ripped off in order to rides in extreme discomfort, an educational structure being steadily removed from any vestige of democratic control, financial starvation of local authorities so that essential services are progressively run down, an extending Orwellian bureaucratic society and merciless persecution of unemployed and disabled people, to be treated as suspected criminals the moment they apply for benefits. At any rate if there have been mass demonstrations demanding the imposition of these things we haven’t noticed them. What we do have is mass voting abstention by an electorate which in 1997 saw its hopes at the time embodied in Labour and subsequently found utter disillusion.
A collapsed party with scarcely an activist to be found anywhere, the total squandering of the unprecedented public acclaim of twelve years ago, the worst electoral performance since the First World War, a lame duck prime minister dependent on the grace and favour of the unelected and toxic Mandelson, and certain electoral annihilation within the coming year – New Labour’s legacy.
Monday, May 4, 2009
'Social Fascism'?
‘Social Fascism’?
It was fascinating, if at the same time nauseating, to listen to such as Jack Straw and John Prescott pronouncing in radio interviews that Labour Party members and ministers should ‘stop complaining and start campaigning’. If only there was something worth campaigning for. These two in particular might have made a start when they were in a position to do so by implementing the pre-1997 promise which Jack Straw broke, to abolish private prisons. In Prescott’s case returning the railways to public ownership when he had the opportunity would have been immensely popular and far cheaper, as it has turned out, than conducting criminal wars or stuffing with money the mouths of bankers responsible for the current financial meltdown.
Instead as the government and the party leadership unravels all we have is the announced determination to continue with a worse-than-Thatcherite agenda, in particular the intention of James Purnell, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (who even looks like Alan B’Stard) to load intensified grief upon the victims of the government’s policies. The expenses claims scandals, the antics of Damien McBride and Derek Draper, hypocritically denounced by the leaders who hired and promoted them in full knowledge of their habits, are no aberration but indicative of the systemic rot and corruption at the heart of a so-called ‘Labour’ government. They are a bunch of scoundrels and conscienceless liars, total strangers to truth and integrity. As Lenin was fond of saying, the fish rots from the head down, or as Trotsky described the Tsarist court, a ‘leprous camarilla’ (though that is most unfair to lepers). In comparison they make Ramsay MacDonald look like a leader of exemplary principle.
Nor are these things, the foul economic policies and the festering corruption, by any means the worst of it. There is now a widespread recognition that Britain has been turned into a police state, characterised by arbitrary arrest, imprisonment without trial, official intimidation of political protest, creation of a general climate of fear and insecurity over mythical terrorist plots and the quiet establishment of CRS-style police units of professional sadists.
In the late twenties and early thirties the then Communist Party was – quite properly ¬– denounced for terming the Labour Party and government ‘social fascists’. Today the designation would be a lot more pertinent. The ultimate beneficiaries are likely to be the real fascists.
It was fascinating, if at the same time nauseating, to listen to such as Jack Straw and John Prescott pronouncing in radio interviews that Labour Party members and ministers should ‘stop complaining and start campaigning’. If only there was something worth campaigning for. These two in particular might have made a start when they were in a position to do so by implementing the pre-1997 promise which Jack Straw broke, to abolish private prisons. In Prescott’s case returning the railways to public ownership when he had the opportunity would have been immensely popular and far cheaper, as it has turned out, than conducting criminal wars or stuffing with money the mouths of bankers responsible for the current financial meltdown.
Instead as the government and the party leadership unravels all we have is the announced determination to continue with a worse-than-Thatcherite agenda, in particular the intention of James Purnell, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (who even looks like Alan B’Stard) to load intensified grief upon the victims of the government’s policies. The expenses claims scandals, the antics of Damien McBride and Derek Draper, hypocritically denounced by the leaders who hired and promoted them in full knowledge of their habits, are no aberration but indicative of the systemic rot and corruption at the heart of a so-called ‘Labour’ government. They are a bunch of scoundrels and conscienceless liars, total strangers to truth and integrity. As Lenin was fond of saying, the fish rots from the head down, or as Trotsky described the Tsarist court, a ‘leprous camarilla’ (though that is most unfair to lepers). In comparison they make Ramsay MacDonald look like a leader of exemplary principle.
Nor are these things, the foul economic policies and the festering corruption, by any means the worst of it. There is now a widespread recognition that Britain has been turned into a police state, characterised by arbitrary arrest, imprisonment without trial, official intimidation of political protest, creation of a general climate of fear and insecurity over mythical terrorist plots and the quiet establishment of CRS-style police units of professional sadists.
In the late twenties and early thirties the then Communist Party was – quite properly ¬– denounced for terming the Labour Party and government ‘social fascists’. Today the designation would be a lot more pertinent. The ultimate beneficiaries are likely to be the real fascists.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Malice in Plunderland
The intention to privatise – or, as I’d prefer to say, piratise – Royal Mail, contrary to manifesto promises, comes as the culmination of a quarter century of laying waste the public services. As to be expected, the postal affairs minister Pat McFadden, when interviewed last Monday on the Today programme dodged all the questions put to him and didn’t even attempt to explain why a private company could do what public resources could not.
A day later at a strategic moment it was declared that a massive deficit exists in the pension fund, and government support will be dependent on acceptance of piratisation.
Ever since the first piratisations went into effect in the 1980s the outcome has been the same – from BT, water, gas, electricity, through municipal bus services, hospital catering and cleaning, etc. etc. to the railways – deteriorating services, price hikes and megaprofits for the pirates. Slowly, bit, by bit, the same is being done to the NHS and education as well.
In spite of its manifest failure what Thatcher began Blair and Brown have continued on the same course with, if anything, even greater enthusiasm. No surprise that the current piratiser-in-chief under Brown is the notorious Mandelson, twice disgraced and sacked for unethical conduct, a dogmatic exponent and promoter of predatory capitalism and all its grisly manifestations.
Meanwhile David Freud, formerly chief adviser to James Purnell, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and author of the latest project for further immiserating the least fortunate members of society, suddenly morphs into a Tory frontbench spokesperson in the Lords. That just about says it all.
A day later at a strategic moment it was declared that a massive deficit exists in the pension fund, and government support will be dependent on acceptance of piratisation.
Ever since the first piratisations went into effect in the 1980s the outcome has been the same – from BT, water, gas, electricity, through municipal bus services, hospital catering and cleaning, etc. etc. to the railways – deteriorating services, price hikes and megaprofits for the pirates. Slowly, bit, by bit, the same is being done to the NHS and education as well.
In spite of its manifest failure what Thatcher began Blair and Brown have continued on the same course with, if anything, even greater enthusiasm. No surprise that the current piratiser-in-chief under Brown is the notorious Mandelson, twice disgraced and sacked for unethical conduct, a dogmatic exponent and promoter of predatory capitalism and all its grisly manifestations.
Meanwhile David Freud, formerly chief adviser to James Purnell, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and author of the latest project for further immiserating the least fortunate members of society, suddenly morphs into a Tory frontbench spokesperson in the Lords. That just about says it all.
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