Labour’s manifesto recognises the economic status quo can’t be kept going for much longer.

»Ten years ago this month, Tony Blair was going to stand down as prime minister after 10 years in the job, during which time he had won three elections on the trot with his "New Labour" (read "NOT Labour") neoliberal (read Tory) policies. His legacy?
• Britain was in debt
• the public sector was on the brink of meltdown
• the country was trying to play the part of world policeman on the cheap
• the growing trade deficit exposed the perils of allowing manufacturing to shrivel
• then, a month after Blair’s departure from Downing Street, the biggest financial crisis in a century erupted!

Remember, it was "NOT labour" not Labour that brought all this on.

As in 2007, the economy is still over-dependent on the financial sector and on the willingness of households to load up on debt. When the housing market slows--as in 2011-12 and currently--so does the economy. Income and wealth are highly concentrated because not only has growth been slow it has also been unevenly distributed. In the workplace, management is strong and unions are weak, which helps explain why real wages have grown more slowly since 2007 than in any decade since the 19th Century. London is rich and thriving but might as well be a separate country given how different it is from other, less prosperous, regions. Relative poverty, as the former prime minister Gordon Brown has shown, is heading for levels not experienced even under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

Labour’s draft manifesto at least tries to tackle some of these glaring weaknesses. There is plenty of good in the manifesto:
• Employers who whinge constantly about the poor quality of school leavers and graduates will be asked to contribute more to the education budget through higher corporation tax.
• Labour plans to broaden stamp duty to a wider range of financial instruments, including derivatives, which will raise £5bn and help lessen volatility.
• There is a recognition that macro-economic policy since the crisis has been flawed, with far too much emphasis on ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing and too little on tax and spending measures.
• Austerity has been tested to destruction, with both deficit reduction and growth much weaker than envisaged.
• There is a strong case, as the International Monetary Fund has noted, for countries to borrow to invest in infrastructure, especially when they can do so at today’s low interest rates.

It is sign of how much ground has been ceded by the left since Blair's "NOT Labour" took over the Labour party, that these ideas are seen as dangerously radical. They were not radical in 1945 when a mild mannered Labour leader, Clement Attlee, was given no chance of winning against the victorious war leader, Winston Churchill.

Germany and France have higher levels of corporation tax than Britain, but they also have better trained workforces and higher levels of productivity. A group of countries are planning a financial transactions tax. Balancing day-to-day spending while borrowing for roads, railways and superfast broadband, which is what John McDonnell is suggesting, is more Keynesian (the principles applied for the first 35 post war years--until Thatcher in this country and Reagan in the USA abandoned them to give wealthy people even more wealth!--when the Western world had more equal societies and more productive economies) than Marxist--the fake fact the Tory press apply to Corbyn's policies. What’s more, these essentially social-democratic ideas will seem even more mainstream if--as is entirely possible--there is another crisis.

And where we are is that:
• Real incomes are falling.
• Inequality is rising.
• The NHS is kept going on a wing and a prayer.
• The economy is barely rising despite more than eight years of unprecedented stimulus from the Bank of England.
• Personal debt is heading back towards its previous record levels.
• International co-operation has rarely been weaker.
• There is a profound disconnect between the financial markets, where asset prices regularly scale new heights, and the state of the real economy.

Now ask yourself this. As this is so, what is the real fantasy, Labour’s manifesto ideas that income, wealth and power should be more evenly distributed or the idea that the current state of affairs can be sustained very much longer?

We just cannot risk the current state of affairs being perpetuated under May's complacent Tories.«
(Adapted from Larry Elliott, The Guardian)

New Labour Thinking? More Bull from the USA, No Socialism!

Stock Exchange Speech: So, this is Miliband’s “new thinking”:

A responsible capitalism is a resilient capitalism… Predistribution is about saying that we cannot allow ourselves to be stuck with permanently being a low-wage economy. Our aim must be to transform our economy so it is a much higher skill, higher wage economy. Think about somebody working in a call centre, a supermarket or in an old people’s home. Redistribution offers a top-up to their wages. Predistribution seeks to offer them more. Higher skills, with higher wages, and an economy that works for working people.

We've heard all that baloney about a high wage, high skill society 30 years ago. He added that “the move toward a more responsible capitalism is actually being led by many business people”. The Labour leader is importing US jargon that baffles most people in Britain. What do predistribution, the squeezed middle, and responsible capitalism mean?

Predistribution was dreamed up by US academic James Hacker. It actually means no more than that people would not need benefits (redistribution) if they were paid a decent wage (predistribution)! Who are the “squeezed middle”? Despite the sound of it, it means the working people are the ones who are squeezed. US politicians speak of the “middle class” when they mean the working class to kid workers into thinking they are not the bottom rung of society.

Responsible capitalism? To whom is it responsible? Business leaders are responsible only to shareholders, the people who get the dividends if any profit is made, or handouts from our taxes otherwise! Have we already forgotten the banking crisis? Capitalists have only one interest—themselves.

Miliband’s speech at the Stock Exchange confirmed that New Labour remains the New Labour of Tony Blair, an alternative capitalist party to the Tories and Lib Dems. There can be nothing socialist in the principle that only the private sector can run the economy. Miliband has noted that ConDem ministers have been loudly booed in public, but still does not get it. He should pledge to expand public ownership.

Who are the “Mindless” Ones?

UK Students Protest Vigorously Over Political Liars

Yesterday the Liberal Democrats in the UK’s Con-Dem coalition government voted to increase university tuition fees by 100 to 200 percent. Some did vote against and a few abstained, and even a few Tories voted against the outrageous measure, but sufficient members voted for it to ensure a government majority of 21 in the House of Commons. The Tory House of Lords, newly packed by Tory leader, David Cameron, with a load of Tory time servers, will back the motion.

Students are so outraged at this that they have started a campaign to register their utter disapproval by confronting the state, and particularly, that section of the coalition, the Liberals who solemnly pledged before the election that they would not support the Tory proposals for higher university fees under any circumstances. Liberal leader, Nick Clegg, says the pledge was a mistake because the Treasury is worse off than he and his party had reckoned. It therefore cannot be honored.

Indeed, there can be no honor among thieves and Clegg had his own excellent education because he is from a long line of them. His family are among the country’s rich, he had a private education at Westminster school, and went to one of the UK’s best universities, Cambridge, because his father was a banker, and his varied family background includes Ukrainian nobility. He is, in short, not without a few quid to his name.

Now, having joined the coalition government led by another rich Tory, David Cameron, he has decided that the country can no longer afford free, or even cheap, university education because the Treasury is deep in debt, and the country has to fill it and meanwhile service its borrowing requirements—we have to borrow from the banks to pay the interest on our debts, and so we cannot afford public services like free education any more!

The Banks—Robbers!

The students, however, unlike many trades unionists and Labour Party supporters are intelligent enough to realize the public purse is empty because we have given all our money and more to the banks to bail them out of insolvency when they were on the verge of collapse two years ago through speculative investments meant to further enrich already super rich financiers, and line the pockets of their agents the bankers simultaneously, through the enormous bonuses they paid themselves for robbing the rest of us.

All of this done under the innocent and admiring gaze of the pathetic supporters of the criminal New Labour Party of one T Blair, otherwise known as T Bliar, who is now coining it for his neoconservative takeover of the British traditional trades union and socialist party on behalf of the big criminals who bribed him to support the US Bush administration in its greedy adventures, and are now faithfully rewarding him with their spare change.

Students know it, and are young enough and angry enough to want to do something about it, unlike most of the British working class who are gulled into a zombic stupor by a media controlled by the same class of megarich criminals feeding them mindless reality TV, soap operas and a “get rich quick” celebrity culture that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality for many. The students, after sleeping for almost fifty years, are now waking up to the state of the nation. We are not broke, but we have been robbed in a blatant scam, and the students of the future are among the ones who will have to pay for the heist.

Note thet these mindless students are not protesting for themselves. Most of them will have graduated before the measures are brought in, but the university under-graduates have been supported by many school pupils and students of pre-university sixth form colleges, who know they will be affected by the government class-laden legislation. Class-laden? Young people from poor families will hesitate getting into massive debt before they even start on their adult careers, and the assurances of grants and special measures for the poorest does not impress them. They are sops to get the measures passed, and need be worth nothing more than the Liberal “pledge” to oppose such acts. That was plainly worthless!

Mindless MPs

Yesterday’s demonstrations ended up chaotic, and the culprits are being called names by the media—“mindless” and “thugs”. It is the media pundits who are mindless, and the idiotic MPs who think they can gull the people forever. The students are showing that is not the case. Unjust societies fall apart because people will not put up with it, and the British are beginning to realize how they have been tricked. It is simply that they have lost the will or the courage to publicly demonstrate their diaproval, but students are leading the way.

The students are not “mindless”, it is liberal MPs like the local empty-headed idiot, Don Foster, who represents the rather posh city of Bath. Someone threw a rock through his window, and Mr Foster responded that he did not enter politics to win a popularity contest but to change things. He seemed quite oblivious to the fact that he actually stood as an MP in a popularity contest—it is called democracy! MPs are elected when they gain the popularity of the electorate, and that popularity is based on what they promise to do.

The half witted Foster, reneged on his promise and merely had a brick through his window. Next time, if the electorate are learning anything, he will be evicted. The local MP for this constituency of Somerton and Frome, David heath, a Liberal Democrat, who has had a narrow majority for several elections can hardly expect to remain in his seat in parliament now that he too has voted against the students’ and the country’s best interests. These two and their fellow opportunists will doubtless by then have abandoned all pretence of being Liberals and will have joined the Tories.

Mindless Media

Media pundist are never “mindless”. They write their columns and usually have sufficient ego not to want to humble themselves even when proved to be wrong. One of them, on Murdoch’s TV tried to bombast an NUS spokesman into condemning the NUS organized demonstrations, but the young man admirably stood his ground despite the anchor man speaking over him, and attempting to harass him into slipping up. The demonstrations had been taken over by “anarchists”! It is a general assertion made by media pundits trying to make out that demonstrations are fundamentally vehicles for what they also like to call “rent a crowd”, professional rioters. Quite where these professionals hide or make aliving when there are no riots to lead, is hard to figure, but they always emerge mysteriously when a demonstration gets out of hand. No one ever seems to figure that it is frustration and anger at being duped by professional careerists called policemen and politicians.

No one ever considers either that, it being in the interest of the state apparatus to discredit demonstrations by introducing petty but violent acts, they have undercover agents provocateurs actually causing and inciting trouble. Any self respecting professional rioter, having broken into Millbank or the Treasury building would have set them both on fire, but these professional anarchists only set fire to a few placards and wooden staves in the streets. These professionals could hardly expect to get employed again, could they?

Mindless Police

Certainly the police professionally anger crowds by their so-called “crowd control” techniques. They “kettle” crowds or sections of a large crowd—confine them by force—into a narrow space and refuse to allow them to pass. This naturally causes immense frustration when people want to relieve themselves or to go for food or drink. Yesterday, a section of the crowd were induced to cross Westminster Bridge to escape the kettle, but then were stopped half way across and confined for hours in the narrow space of the bridge. The police are meant to be the guardians of the right of lawful citizens to move along the Queen’s highways, but they wilfully break the law themselves, with the result that violence is the only way to escape. Innocent people have died in these kettles, and a young man needed a three hour brain operation yesterday after a baton attack. It goes without saying that any rogue policeman will be innocent.

The police too are “mindless” because the media are forever highlighting violent protests but ignore peaceful ones. A peaceful “candle lit” vigil across the bridge in the South Bank was hardly mentioned by press or TV. So the provocation of the police and their plain clothes agents might actually be giving the publicity that will arouse the sleeping giant of the British public and their generally compliant trades unions from their slumbers.

The Effective Tactic—Destabilization

If Parliament relies on demonstrations being forever peaceful, and therefore of no consequence so it can simply ignore them, it is making a big error, one it has often made before. The present situation is plain to anyone who thinks just a little. The rich get richer even when the country is, they tell us, broke. Only last week, Ireland had to go cap in hand for a large multibillion Euro loan to bail out its own banks. This week the Irish banks are handing out tens of millions in bonuses, just as British and US banks have done. The banks and their employers, the super rich financiers, gleefully put up two fingers to the world, while the people have to scratch about to pay their mortgages and rents, aye and taxes, if they can. That is why the students are angry, and why we all should be angry too. It is why we should support them and ignore the whingeing special pleading of the press and the broadcast media.

Listen! The richest 1 percent of the world’s population owns over $200 trillion. No need to guess where most of the 1 percent live. Maybe as little as 5 percent of this largess would solve the world’s economic problems, but Obama has just caved in to the rich man’s lobby in the US called the Republican Party, and most of the world’s leading developed countries have bailed out their banks while putting the burden of their empty treasuries on the people, not where it should be, on the minority who own as much as the rest put together. Governments ought to be joining together to ensure the rich are taxed and pay it.

Curiously many, the most intelligent among the rich, do not mind it as a temporary burden! Those rich people not among the “mindless” realize that their riches are most secure in a stable world, and corporate and financial greed is now destabilizing the world. That they do not like. It follows in all logic that the best way to get the rich to pay their fair share towards economic stability is to threaten instability. That is what “mindless” students are doing.

Sounds Familiar: Aneurin Bevan in 1959

I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in Great Britain to believe that when they have got over the delirium of the television, when they realize that their new homes that they have been put into are mortgaged to the hilt, when they realize that the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land, when they realize that the refinements for which they should look are not there, that it is a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud, when they realize all those things, when the years go by and they see the challenge of modern society not being met by the Tories who can consolidate their political powers only on the basis of national mediocrity, who are unable to exploit the resources of their scientists because they are prevented by the greed of their capitalism from doing so, when they realize that the flower of our youth goes abroad today because they are not being given opportunities of using their skill and their knowledge properly at home, when they realize that all the tides of history are flowing in our direction, that we are not beaten, that we represent the future: then, when we say it and mean it, then we shall lead our people to where they deserve to be led!

Nothing much changes, or has changed, in the intervening fifty years except that Bevan’s Labour Party was sold out to Blair’s New Labour party, which more appropriately should have been called Not Labour. Blair made the Labour party into a neoconservative party, and brought about the state of affairs Bevan predicted. Now we have five neoconservatives, or at least four and an opportunist, standing for the leadership of the New Labour party. So nothing will change. Labour voters have always mostly been dupes of the Oxbridge middle classes. Maybe, it is time they trusted to a few socialists instead, or even thought about politics instead of watching the “delirium” of reality and “celebrity” TV.

The recent vast bailouts to the world's bankers certainly show that the moneylenders have taken over, and already they are making vast profits and, of course, bonuses. Why should they get bonuses for these profits? The Bank Rate is set in the UK to 0.5 percent, so anyone with money in the bank will get this meagre rate of interest. Yet the bank can lend it to businesses, not usually British ones, at anything up to 10 percent, earning an automatic profit of 9.5 percent, or at least a substantial one for doing nothing to earn it. The bank of England sets the bank rate for the benefit of the banks, and they benefit, but what have they done to merit any bonuses? It is yet another banking scam.

Meanwhile, the new British Tory government, with the help of their chums who own the media, like Rupert Murdoch, propagate the myth that the country is bankrupt, and swinging cuts must be made, notably in unemployment and other benefits for the poor. In this way, the anger of the people at being mugged by bankers is diverted to anger at the unemployed for drawing benefits! How easy it is to manipulate the masses.

No cuts would be needed at all if the government retrieved from the banks what it gave them, if it taxed the billionaire hangers on who come from places like the former Soviet Union with chests of ill-gotten cash—the so-called oligarchs, if it taxed our own British megarich more progressively, and if it legislated against the scams and loop holes that the wealthy use to multiply their wealth at the expense of the lower and middle classes.

There is nothing at all complicated about this. You do not need a degree to understand it, yet the British today claim it is all too complicated. One has to conclude on the contrary that people are too lazy to think for themselves and too ready to accept what they read in their newspapers, and see on the television news.

Bevan saw it all, and sadly, the way the Labour party got taken over by Blair and Brown, there was nothing to stand in the way of it. Resurrecting Labour will be harder than resurrecting Christ, so maybe a new left wing party is needed. The Germans seem to be heading in that direction. It needs to begin with a Clause 4. If anyone does not know what it is, maybe they should Google it!

Protests Make Political Parties More Responsive

Latin American protests have caused deaths and national crises since the 1970s, but democratic reforms too. Moises Arce, an associate professor of political science in the Missouri-Columbia College of Arts and Science, has found that political protests, although they can be violent, can bring about stronger political parties and more responsive policies (published in Party Politics):

Many of these protests in Latin America have led to changes in policies and the direction of the government. In some cases, protests may ultimately be helpful for democracy. The established parties may be taking things for granted. Political protests become forms of street accountability. The change that we have seen after many of these protests is the creation of new parties that better represent the popular interests of society, and, therefore, serve as more effective communication channels for political discourse.

By studying political activity and parties in 17 Latin American countries since 1978, Arce found that most protests were because economic policies favored the business sector. Most recent policies have given Latin America large scale economic stability but little improvement from the general public's perspective. There is still a high level of unemployment, and the public has become more knowledgeable of political corruption:

People have died, so it's unfortunate that government reforms happened that way. Currently, almost all Latin American countries have left or left leaning presidents who tend to be more responsive to popular demands and will create a new political equilibrium between those popular demands and the business sector.

Politicians often argue that protests are disruptive and should be suppressed, and that protests are unnecessary in a democracy, but they are happening and have not damaged democratic stability. Of course, generally the political right are ultimately not interested in democracy, only their own power, and many so called Liberals, and even New Labour “socialists” in the UK, are dupes of the rich anyway, so the trend towards unrestrained global capitalism means that “the existing power structure will be forced more and more to directly violate its own formal democratic rules”, as Slavoj Zizek puts it. The Patriot Act in the US and similar repressive legislation laid on incredibly thckly by the Blair and Brown governments are far more dangerous to democracy than a few protests, or even the terrorism attacks they pretend to be to prevent.

People in Latin America are becoming tolerant of protests. In Europe and the US, politicians are getting more and more scared of it. Democracy needs both parties and protests. We have the duff parties. All we need now, according to Arce, are more and more determined protests.

Stop the Afghan War—Save our Public Services and Jobs

Dozens of soldiers are spilling out of choppers around the villages. The insurgents are on their radios, getting ready to strike. [Captain] Dan is not going to let them, and soon the night sky lights up with air strikes, gunships, rockets and bombs. Around dawn, Dan's lieutenant radios. He is with the village elder. There are five dead and 11 wounded women and children. Dan is depressed. he wants to go down and explain. He wants the villages to know there were bad guys there… NYTimes, writer, Elizabeth Rubin

Rubin asked Captain Dan whether he knew this would happen. “Yeah, I did”, he replied. She adds that his choice was “my soldiers or the Afghans”.

Rubin is content to leave it at that, but Captain Dan was attacking Afghan people, men, women and children in their own homes in their own villages, and to Captain Dan—doubtless one of our heroes—the Afghan men, by defending their homes and families, are defined as being “bad guys”. Naturally, the Afghans, defending what is theirs, do not realize they are bad guys at all and have to have it explained to them—if they are still alive!

Is it right that we should be killing people in their own homes, thousands of miles away from our own homes, because our odious and gruesome leaders have decided that they are bad guys who will kill us in our beds if we do not kill them in their beds first? It plainly is not. The enemy has metamorphosed from being international terrorists, Al Qaida, to being the Taliban, a local Moslem sect who had nothing to do with 9/11! They are the heroes, not our brave boys. Our brave boys are the bad guys, by any standard of morality. Which one of us would not defend our own homes if we were placed in the situation the Afghans have been put in? The Americans did it against the British. Why then are they objecting to others doing the same? Why are they acting as imperialists, like king George's British? Are they hypocrites?

Stop the War!

Incidentally, the UK’s heroic Christian leader, Dr Gordon Brown, says he will spend an extra £5 billion on the war next years, yet he is cutting public services and sacking people allegedly to save a few million pounds. Are our leaders insane idiots, or do they just take us to be? Do not vote for a war party!

UK Election: 6 May. Who to Vote For!

The PM, Mr Gordon Brown, has asked the Queen to dissolve Parliament so that there can be an election on 6 May. The electorate now have a month to make up their minds who they want to rule them for the next five years.

They should not vote for any candidate who will not agree to:

• Tax the banks to get back the money New Labour gave them.
• Repeal all the bad and oppressive laws that New Labour introduced and are lying unused until some fascist decides to do so.
• Abandon the neoconservative myth of the War on Terror that Blair got from Bush and Cheney to keep people worried about nothing, and pull out of Afghanistan.

If they don't agree, then don't vote for them. Simple!

A Judge’s View on the Law and How to Protect It

Lord Bingham, until he recently retired, the most senior British judge was interviewed for The Guardian by Stephen Moss in connexion with the publication of his recent book, The Rule of Law. Bingham’s last three jobs were Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice, and senior Law Lord. One imagines he is a man who knows the law. He unequivocally condemns the Iraq war of 2003 as illegal:

I took the view which Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst [legal advisers to the Foreign Office in 2003] took—that it simply wasn’t authorized. The whole of the Foreign Office thought this… It is not at all clear to me what, if any, legal justification of its action the US government relied on… If I am right and the invasion of Iraq… was unauthorized by the security council, there was a serious violation of international law and the rule of law… It is, as has been said, “the difference between the role of world policeman and world vigilante”.

Yet Jack Straw told the Chilcot inquiry he often ignored the legal advice his law officers at the Home Office as well as the Foreign Office gave him!

Michael Wood drew attention to the fact that the ministerial code obliges ministers to act in accordance with national and international law, so it isn’t really good enough to say I don’t take the advice of law officers.

Can anyone tell me how these New Labour ministers, from Tony Blair onwards and downwards, manage to get away with such cavalier disregard for the law, and centuries old British parliamentary and ministerial convention that is meant to save us from fascists. Isn’t it plain that it does not do what it is supposed to do, because a bunch of crypto fascist neoconservatives have taken over Labour as New Labour, and have done just as they wanted in office. And no one is raising a stink about it.

It is one thing to enjoy parliamentary privilege, which is the right to be able to say in Parliament anything an MP thinks has to be said without fear of libel actions or jail—something irrelevant to the fiddling of expenses—but it is another to march roughshod over the country’s hard earned laws and customs, meant to protect us, the people, from becoming subjects and not citizens. New Labour’s thirteen years of legal flatulence has made us subjects again—subjects of any undemocratic authoritarian government, one that has put in place every requirement for a fascist putsch. Why is no one outraged at the unknown number of super injunctions that stop us from knowing what is going on? Why are students not incensed, especially now that Labour is hitting them and their universities harder than ever while continuing to feed the country’s wealth to the bankers? Why are there no lawyers willing to risk being jailed to protect the sanctity of the law?

Lord Justice Bingham notes that the government is using the threat of terrorism to erode our basic freedoms. He approves of Benjamin Franklin’s dictum:

He who would put security before liberty deserves neither.

Precisely, and that is where we are! Bingham believes we are getting the delicate balance between liberty and security wrong:

Liberty is losing out at the moment. Extraordinary inroads are being made into principles that would once have been regarded as completely inviolate, such as the growing practice of putting material [evidence] before some decision-making tribunal or judge that the defendant never sees. When I talk to the young, I’m struck by how, even when they have impeccably liberal instincts on things like torture and the death penalty, they tend to make an exception for terrorists. They’ve grown up in a world post-9/11 in which terrorism has been seen as this colossally potent threat.

The danger of terrorism is no more serious than it was in the seventies and eighties, probably less so, but the threat to hard won liberties is indeed real! Thus Bingham’s Belmarsh ruling in 2004 was that indefinite detention without trial of foreign terrorist suspects was incompatible with the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. He is proud of it because he felt “the stakes were quite high”. Plainly there are. They put anyone at risk of the same treatment. What can ever be just about jailing, without trial or evidence and possibly forever, someone who is merely a suspect? That is now British law!

Someone thinks someone else might commit a crime so they are confined for an indefinite time. It is the Inquisition. It is witch hunting. It most certainly has nothing to do with any concept of justice. Yet who is bothering. Lord Bingham seems to believe there is nothing to be done to defend good law other than through the ballot box. But no UK party is promising to remove all the bad law New Labour has brought in, and they are all complicit in the neoconservative terrorism myth. So the ballot box can solve nothing. What then? Bingham says, if that fails, we should turn to revolution!

Supposing a government came into power that wanted to introduce a whole lot of measures borrowed from the statute book of Nazi Germany, we would be justified in rebelling, just as we were against Charles I.

So what are the British people, and particularly the youth who have most to lose, doing about it? They have not even noticed. They are too busy having fun, watching reality TV, reading the gutter press, getting pissed, and, like half wits, pretending they are all celebrities.

The Politicization of Science

Further to the humiliation of Professor Nutt by the neocon New Labour government of the UK for giving it proper scientific advice as he had been appointed to do, it turns out that similar politicization of science has been going on under the neocon Bush administration. Policymakers within the federal government were trying to suppress objective scientific evidence, to distort scientific findings, and to put people in positions, notably in environment and public health, where they could promote a political and ideological agenda.

Objective science should not be subverted to serve political or ideological goals.

Science is being misused—through efforts to suppress or distort scientific findings, through the appointment of scientists and researchers who meet certain political and ideological rather than professional criteria, through funding politically self serving scientific studies, and through the intimidation of scientists. Newspapers, congressional hearings, and reports from respected scientific organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences and the Union of Concerned Scientists, have expressed concern. Politics is undermining the integrity of the scientific method.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) conducted an investigation into the politicization of science within the government. It found a systematic effort to suppress and distort scientific findings to promote political ends. For example, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) replaced a web site fact sheet containing information on proper condom use, the efficacy of different types of condoms, and a study showing that condom education does not lead to an increase in sexual activity, with information on condom failure and the value of abstinence. Also, information suggesting a link between breast cancer and abortion was posted on the National Cancer Institute’s web site against the objection of CDC staff who denounced such information as long refuted and unsubstantiated.

The same report indicates that the Bush administration delayed for nine months an EPA report (eventually leaked) that indicated that 8 percent of women between the ages of 16 and 49 have blood mercury levels that could lead to reduced IQ and motor skills in their children. When new rules of mercury emissions were finally released by the EPA, at least 12 paragraphs were included, sometimes verbatim, not from scientific sources but from a legal document prepared by industry lawyers.

Reports commissioned by Henry Waxman documented many distortions of science by the executive, on a par with the suppression of Professor Nutt by the UK government, such as the widespread incorporation of erroneous, politicized information in federally funded “abstinence only” curricula. Some of these misrepresentations include inaccurate statistics about contraception, a false linkage between abortions and breast cancer, the labeling of a 43 day old fetus as a “thinking person” and the notion that “sweat and tears” can transmit HIV.

There is also growing use of political criteria for scientific appointees. Applicants have been asked about their political affiliations rather than their professional credentials. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine released a report entitled “Ensuring the Best Presidential and Federal Advisory Committee Science and Technology Appointments”. Among their recommendations was that “it is no more appropriate to ask Science and Technology experts to provide irrelevant information—such as voting record, political party affiliation or position on particular policies —than to ask them other personal and immaterial information, such as hair color or weight”.

Nazi New Labour Sack Nutt For Refusing to Spin

This neocon, neofascist, pseudo-Christian New Labour government in the UK is getting more and more like Hitler sitting in his bunker refusing to surrender while Germany was bombed, battered and burned around him. Brown clings on to the last vestiges of power his absurd government has, while issuing directive after ridiculous directive to the already battered and utterly frustrated British People.

Now the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, has sacked his drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, head of the government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. His heinous crime is advising Johnson on the misuse of drugs! The purpose of this council, when it was set up in 1971 was to provide key advice on what Class A drugs should be, and to ensure that policy is based on evidence. New Labour, of course, are too fascistic to listen to advice. They are only interested in pursuing the doctrinaire free market policies that Blair and Brown intended when they took over the Labour Party on behalf of neoconservatism and their own brand of Christian fundamentalism. Beguiled by Blair's charm and promise of government at last, Labour Party members let him gnaw away the socialist heart of the Labour party like a parasitic wasp eating a defenceless caterpillar. And what did the trades unions do? They stood by! Just stood by doing nothing!

In the same news programme on BBC TV we heard that New Labour will finally privatize the National Health Service, by allowing private patients to be treated with the help of a public subsidy. This will ensure that waiting lists do not get longer when they apply the forthcoming cuts on public spending necessary because of all the public money given to fat cat bankers. New Labour continuously kicks sand into the eyes of its supporters who are too feeble or dim to respond.

This government is utterly discredited, and New Labour will be lucky to get into power ever again. Certainly, it is time the unions either withdrew support immediately, or threatened to withdraw it if New Labour does not revert to Labour by reinstating the old consititution, whereby members could actually influence policies, even if they had no way of ensuring that elected Labour governments acted on them. Because the membership are just fodder for getting Blairite selected MPs elected, and the members have no say in what their MPs do, they might as well accept they are slaves to the greedy neocons Blair approved as flunkeys and yes men—and yes women too, plenty of them! Blair is now being rewarded. Having given away $ trillions, Brown is looking forward to his own rich pickings.

The whole of the scientific community ought now to be up in arms at the complete disdain Brown and Johnson show they have for science. There can be few people in Britain who do not agree with Professor Nutt that alcohol and cigarettes are far worse than cannabis, and the public are making a judgement merely on impression. The scientists have the concrete evidence, and it confirms the general impression. Nutt has also pointed out what everyone, certainly most of our young people, know, and that is that ecstasy is pretty harmless too. Deaths have occasionally been attributed to ecstasy, as an anaphylactic reaction, but deaths are attributed to the same sort of shock from peanuts, and they are not classified as dangerous drugs. Similarly, the professor said smoking cannabis created only a “small risk” of psychotic illness. There is unquestionably much more psychoses generated by alcohol. Many still die annually from the physiological effects of smoking cigarettes. He is right!

Professor Nutt rightly accused ministers of devaluing and distorting evidence and said drugs classification was being politicized. Prof Nutt is standing by his judgement based on the scientific research that cannabis should be reclassified as only a Class C drug based on its effects. He said science can help the government. It could give them excellent advice. And that was the very purpose of the Drugs Council he chaired. But he thought it would be simpler, and one might add more intelligent, if they took the advice rather than sending messages that confuse the public. Twice in the last few years, once with cannabis and then with ecstasy, ministers ignored the experts because of “public perception”. Former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, still talks of the “need to send out a message”. Parliament's Science and Technology Committee has criticised such propaganda:

The government's desire to use the class of a particular drug to send out a signal to potential users or dealers does not sit comfortably with the claim that the primary objective of the classification system is to categorize drugs according to the comparative harm associated with their misuse.

Using the classification system to send messages again amounts to saying, “feed the public lies—that is all they understand”. It is the neocon method of giving the public myths they can accept and believe. These myths are just lies. But Professor Nutt is saying also that it does not work. It is no deterrent. The classifications are “to provide the public with an evidence-based and rigorous appraisal of relative harms”, and from it they can make their own comparisons and judgements.

His sacking from a none paid, entirely honorary and voluntary job is an insulting and demeaning challenge to the value of science. What did the Home Secretary have to say? He had “lost confidence” in Nutt's advice. Well that means that Johnson and the New labour set of dummies want their adviser to join them in their habit of “spin”, another modern euphemism for lying. It does not suit them to have objective advice, true advice, they want sycophants around them who will say just what the want to hear. But that is not surprising. Blair was quite a sociopath, incapable of knowing the difference between truth and lies, probably a good reason why he was accepted into the Catholic communion, and recommended as President of Europe—an absolute slap in the face for almost everyone in Britain, if it happens.

The real conservatives, the Tories, supported New Labour on this, just as they did over the Iraq war. But on this occasion a voice of reason came from the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne. He said the decision to sack the adviser had been “disgraceful”:

What is the point of having independent scientific advice if as soon as you get some advice that you don't like, you sack the person who has given it to you?

Mr Huhne added that the government might as well have “a committee of tabloid newspaper editors to advise on drugs policy”. Prof Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at Oxford University and former chief executive of the Medical Research Council, said:

I worry that the dismissal of Prof Nutt will discourage academic and clinical experts from offering their knowledge and time to help the government in the future.

New Labour ministers might think drug taking is immoral, but then so is smoking and drinking, especially to excess, the norm among many people, especially the young, today in Britain. Professor Nutt is pointing out hypocrisy, something New Labour just cannot grasp. So, an independent scientist has been removed for reporting sound scientific advice. Let us hope that scientists for once will rally behind one of their own, and in favour of science. The very top scientists should howl in rage, not that others should not, but the top ones have a chance of being heard. These AskWhy! pages have said before that scientists, who could be a powerful force in the world for good, should be more prepared to open their mouths in protest, and to act in defence of their findings. Rage, rage, you lot!

Baha Mousa: Tortured to Death in Iraq

An inquiry into the killing of an Iraqi hotel worker, twenty six year old Baha Mousa, has heard he was arrested along with a number of other civilians by soldiers of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in Basra in 2003. It is a horrible and devastating story which should bring tears to the eyes of anyone reading it, tears of shame and humiliation at what was done to him in our name.

These Iraqi civilians were subjected to brutal and vicious abuse from British troops, were subjected to sensory deprivation techniques, kicked and beaten repeatedly. The inquiry saw video footage of hooded and bound prisoners being beaten and abused by Corporal Donald Payne of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. In his opening address to the inquiry, Rabinder Singh QC, representing Mr Mousa’s family, said:

Baha was a human being, yet to his guards he was known as “fat boy” or “fat bastard”.

Mr Mousa’s father is a colonel in the Iraqi police. While being tortured for 36 hours on the floor of a filthy toilet at a holding facility, Baha Mousa was heard to scream for respite, and say he thought he would die. Mr Singh read out the statement of another detainee, describing what were Mr Mousa’s last moments on the evening of the second day:

I heard Baha Mousa screaming, “Oh my God, I’m going to die, I’m going to die. Leave me alone. Please leave me alone for five minutes”.

After he had been tortured to death, Mousa’s body was released. He had suffered 93 separate injuries. Neither Mousa nor any other of the civilians detained had been tried or convicted of anything. He had recently lost his young wife to cancer and had been left working in a war zone with two motherless, and now fatherless, children.

Solicitor for the detainees Phil Shiner said the responsibility for Mr Mousa’s death rested at the highest level. He said the inquiry must establish:

How it came about that senior politicians, civil servants, lawyers and senior military personnel knew—or ought to have known—that British soldiers and interrogators were using coercive interrogation techniques in Iraq and thought these were permittable and lawful.

The use of hooding and other torture techniques were banned under the Geneva Convention, and outlawed by the UK Conservative Heath government, in 1972, following the use of sensory deprivation techniques during internment in Northern Ireland. Mr Singh wondered whether the use of these techniques had ever ceased:

In 2003, the so-called “conditioning” techniques were used in Iraq on civilians in the name of the people of Britain. Stress positions, hooding, sleep deprivation, food deprivation and noise all came back. Perhaps they never went away.

It is important not to fall into the trap of thinking that this case was simply one of indiscipline. This case is not just about beatings or a few bad apples. There is something rotten in the whole barrel.

For the abuse and murder of Baha Mousa and the indignities and outrages perpetrated on countless numbers of Iraqi victims, only one man has been found guilty of war crimes and that man, the only one who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to only a year in prison and dismissed from the service. Defence Secretary, Des Browne, admitted “substantive breaches” of parts of the European Convention on Human Rights that protect the right to life and prohibit torture, still no one in the army’s hierarchy has been identified as responsible and punished, though the Ministry of Defence agreed to pay out £2.83 million to those who were mistreated, accepting some culpability.

The Baha Mousa inquiry may provide some answers to what went wrong in the army’s chain of command. It may expose ignoble and immoral conduct among British soldiers, including senior officers, in wartime. And all three of the major parties supported the war. Though the Liberals made a token protest, it was not enough to exonerate them. The British public ought to recognize that politicians from all parties carry the guilt of the wounding and deaths of myriads of Iraqis.

But the army’s political masters, the Blair-Brown neo-Nazi concoction called the New Labour government, remain in power, the personal guilt of ministers unacknowledged, their draconian laws still on the statute book, and their own crimes still unpunished. We need to remove these criminals from office, and to send them to the law courts for judgement. We are supposed to know, from our experience of Naziism that military might ought not be used to achieve political objectives.

New Labour’s Achievements

Our greatest current philosopher, Ted Honderich, starkly sums up the New Labour experiment we have been suffering since grinning Tony won over the electoral masses in 1997. Labour activists and voters were delighted, but not lefties and socialists who characterized Blair as the first Labour Prime Minister not to have waited until he got into power to sell out. His New Labour had already manifestly abandoned everything that made labour a party of the working class.

Blair’s and Brown’s record since have proved that the New Labour party hasn’t a principle that it is not willing to ditch, that it was not about offering us a new set of policies, but was about selling us a more colourful shade of Thatcherism, and that this “selling” amounted to telling lie after lie after lie, trowelling on the lies so heavily that Brown has gotten completely tangled in his web of deceit, something that Blair knew by his burglar’s instinct was about to unravel so he got on his bike and cycled off at full speed, trying to grab as much loot as he could while wobbling off. The outcome in Great Britain is that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Ordinary workers have ridden on the stoked up debt mountain for the past decade as much as the bankers, giving them the illusion of being better off, but Brown is determined to leave us feeling sorry. He has given a trillion or so pounds sterling to bankers, and left the working class in hock for the next fifty years. The Gini Coefficient is a statistical measure of inequality, running from 0 to 100, where 0 is perfect equality and 100 perfect inequality—a single person has everything. The Gini index for Thatcher governments was 29 or 30. For Blair and Brown, it is about 35. UK society is much less equal than it was before the turkeys voted for Thanksgiving Day, or Christmas in their case. Blair lined up with his chum George W Bush not only to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Arabs, but also to mould Britain closer to the US, seen by Blair as an ideal—the Great Society, no doubt. The Gini coefficient in the US is around 45.

It’s not a shock that you get turned away from a hospital if your breathing’s getting worse and you couldn’t afford health insurance… For president, America is getting a choice of millionaires at this election. It won’t be as clear this time as last election, though, that it doesn’t matter who wins. Last time America proved that, by not really trying to find out who won.

In the supposedly greatest democracy in history, it seemed inexplicable why Americans were not outraged at Bush’s blatant gerrymandering and electoral rigging, but Americans seemed uninterested. Honderich is right, as are the 50% of people who cannot be bothered to register and vote in the US—what is the point? The US is not a democracy, it is a plutocracy! Britain has taken giant steps in the same direction under New Labour. We should start objecting before it is too late.