I’ve been a natural Labour voter for most of my (short) electoral life, but in both of yesterday’s elections I voted against them. Why? Because I’m more and more convinced that while Tony Blair is leader, the Labour Party is not the party it says it is. It is meant to be the party of peace and justice for all, but the stupid, illegal war that Blair has waged in Iraq, and the climate of fear and hatred his colleague David Blunkett has been generating at home, are creating a belligerent country governed by tabloid headline and paranoia, against the party’s core principles.
Tony Blair has been left out of the manifestos for the local & European elections because he has become a liability for the party, but he is also a liability for the whole country. By blindly tagging along with George Bush he has tarnished our international standing, damaged our relations with the EU and turned us into a prime terrorist target. At home his has given his full support to Blunkett’s persecution of asylum seekers, dimissal of civil liberties and commitment to jailing everyone he can get his hands on - a quick fix that makes good headlines but does little long-term good. What happened to the party of social justice and reducing poverty?
Like many increasingly dissatisfied people, I support a Labour government, but not a Blair government. He has become wildly out of touch with his own party and his own people. It is time for him to go, especially as in Gordon Brown, we have a more than suitable candidate to replace him. I did my bit yesterday by voting Green instead, and I’m doing my bit today by lending my support to Tim Ireland’s Big Intervention. If you feel the same way as I do then air your feelings on your blog - send Tim the link and he’ll put it up (if you haven’t got a blog, then sign up for one, it’s quite easy). If you live in a Labour-held constituency then write to your MP, and regardless of who your MP is you can put up posters or write to a newspaper. Don’t miss this chance to make your feelings known. Thank you.
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June 11th, 2004 at 17:18:16
I think the problem goes to the heart of the Labour party itself. It has always been too centralised, too tribal (in that Labour MPs have always voted with the party out of blind loyalty, so fuck principles, eh?), too much like the Trade Unions (in that it tends to get very complacent and/or currupt when it gains power) and too keen on promising the Earth, and then failing to deliver.
Even Blairism is just a symptom of the greater Labour malaise. Labour has always been getting hijacked by one crazed consensus after another. It had to purge Communists in the party before World War One in case they took control of the party. A scared and timid Labour party spent the 70s getting bitchslapped by the Unions. In the early 80s the party was split between Micheal Foot’s amateurish red flag waving and the proto-Blair SDP. Throughout the 80s, the Militant tendency ran amok, and took up Kinnock’s time, time that might have been better spent on beating Thatcher. And now we have Phoney Blair trying to do a Tory homage. It’s not the first fad to take over the party, nor will it be the last.
Perhaps Blair is not so much of a problem as the whole party?
June 13th, 2004 at 00:15:24
By removing Saddam’s regime (and by other humanitarian military interventions in Sierra Leone, the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan), the British government under Tony Blair has done more for “social justice and reducing poverty” than any Labour administration ever. In doing so, it’s obviously also upset your delicate middle-class sensibilities. I’m sure that, when they get round to reading your ‘Blog, most Iraqis will understand how much their liberation vexed you. However, because I’m genuinely committed to “peace and justice for all”, rather than, say, committed to feeling warm and fuzzy about myself when I sit in front of the telly, I couldn’t care less.
(Normally I’m more analytical in my comments on ‘Blogs, but your post was devoid of substantive argument so I have responded more-or-less in kind. I defy you to disprove my central assertion, however: one of the main reasons for the drop in those asylum seekers you claim Blunkett is “persecuting” is their return in huge numbers to their countries of origin.)
June 13th, 2004 at 12:24:27
Now, it would be nice to argue with you on this. But since you’ve already started to accuse Chris of ‘delicate middle-class sensibilities’ and being ‘warm and fuzzy’, it seems your argument is so flimsy that you need to back it up with insults, rants and stock bombast. Well, in doing so, you have already lost the argument.
In America, most comments on ‘blogs, be they on the left or right, do at least try to argue in a mature and respectful way. Alas, they also get people getting stuck in who just want to bash, insult, scream down and bellittle their opponents. They have a word for these people: ‘Trolls’, and they get the contempt they deserve. So go lurk under a bridge, if you would.
June 13th, 2004 at 13:16:37
I know its childish to respond to a hubristic piece of nonsense with a hubristic piece of nonsense, but I can’t help myself - when you talk of the grateful Iraqis getting round to reading the blog, that would presumably be once electricity has been restored and they’re done being tortured by US prison guards as a matter of clear military policy? Welcome to democracy, chaps…
More seriously, you ignore the fact that the original blog entry was to do with Toni Blair, and the “stupid, illegal” war he led us into. He, personally and passionately, made the case around the UK for war based on the notional existence of WMD - ou sont les WMD maintenant? He did this in defiance of the wishes of the grassroots of his party and many in his Parliamentary party. The war on Iraq, which escapes the definition of “unilateral action” only by a technicality (that is, if you don’t see Britain as having entirely subjugated her sovereignty to American hawks), and, perhaps more importantly, the disaster that has been the “peace”, has attracted widespread condemnation and alarm from across the international community. Unfortunately, since you seem to be reheating sanctimonious post-facto neo-con twaddle, I suspect the views of the international community may rather have passed you by.
In terms of British politics, though, what it has done, apart from lowering our international standing, is suggest that in Blair we have a leader who, while supposedly standing for the progressive left-of-centre, has the foreign policy outlook of the regressive, imperialist right. And that’s not good. The original post was about getting rid of Blair - on this one, as they say, the people may very well be the judge.
June 13th, 2004 at 14:25:54
Alexander
your argument is so flimsy that you need to back it up with insults, rants and stock bombast
My argument is solid, even without the “insults, rants and stock bombast”. In contrast, Chris’s original post rests not on facts, but on tired journalistic tropes. The Iraqis are voting with their feet just as Chris voted with his pencil.
Is it because my argument is so flimsy that you have completely failed to address it?
June 13th, 2004 at 15:08:07
Hugh
The original post was about getting rid of Blair
The original post was about Tony Blair no longer representing Labour aims of “peace and justice for all” and his waging a “stupid, illegal war”, and about Chris voting against Blair’s party on those grounds.
For some reason you think the absence of WMD, acts of torture perpetrated by US troops and the dodgy electricity supply in Iraq discount my central contention that the Iraq war was a lesser evil for the the vast majority of Iraqis than a decade of “containment”—which, in case you’ve forgotten, was the only alternative available before the “war”. Not only have the good consequences of Blair’s intervention hugely outweighed the bad, but, as I pointed out and you have failed to address, the people of Iraq are underlining that fact by returning to their country. (And they are happily reading ‘Blogs too, thanks to us, not that you’ve noticed.)
(On the subject of your diversions, you’ll find my on-the-record views are anything but “sanctimonious post-facto neo-con twaddle”.
On WMD I was more skeptical than most anti-war campaigners—very much a priori.
On Abu Ghraib, I have posted my disgust here and here for example.)
Unlike you, I am heartily pleased that Tony Blair is “lowering our international standing” with the ranks of thieving, bullying dictators who run many (if not most) of the countries on this planet, where, incidentally, billions are denied the simple right that Chris so misguidedly exercised this week. You call giving people that right “regressive right-wing imperialism”. I call it “progressive internationalist socialism”. Funnily enough, so do the Iraqis.
June 13th, 2004 at 15:54:29
Right. First up, I neither intended, nor did in fact, suggest that you condoned the Abu Ghraib tortures. Nor (while we’re on the topic) did I suggest you condoned the fact that such abuses appear to have been a matter of US policy (”the use of military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation and near-starvation diets.”), so
condemned by Amnesty International (always embarrassing). Glad to clear that up. Delighted, even, to go further and assume you wll join me in deploring the network of US jails where people are held indefinitely without trial, with the full warmth of US hospitality
On the topic of the people of Iraq, my concern is that, far from this glorious “liberation” bringing a golden age of peace and security, it appears to have ushered in a chaotic era of instability, violence and turbulence (pick your examples, really - apologies now if all that HTML goes awry, I make no claims to be able to use it. Perhaps Chris would be good enough to tidy it up if I have erred).
I can’t speak for Chris on the issues he personally voted on. I wholeheartedly support his conclusion, though. While you personally may have been relaxed about WMD as the central focus of the war prospectus, Toni wasn’t, making increasingly strident claims in pointedly arresting language (see Hutton ad nauseam). To whirl round and say “Never mind, all worked out in the end, eh?” doesn’t, when one is talking about taking unilateral military backing outside the auspices of the United Nations and occupying a sovereign state, quiite seem to cut it. Sorry.
I think, too, on the issue of “lesser evil”, we are going to have to disagree. One of the indispensable features of a participatory democracy is that Governments are trusted to act well and wisely. Going against the weight of international opinion and law seems to me to betray that trustt, and is unacceptable from any Government.
Do you think George W is a “progressive internationalist socialist”? That’s an interesting take on him.
I take it, then, that you would not be in favour of toni issuing a mea culpa either over Iraq or his style of Government, in the light of Labour’s frankly rather limp election performance?
June 13th, 2004 at 16:38:56
[This entry posted solely in the hope of closing Hugh's unopened tag so that the forum is usable again.]
June 13th, 2004 at 17:00:21
Clever, well done, my sincere apologies for amateurish use of tag doobrie. You have the floor…
June 13th, 2004 at 17:42:27
Damn, you had to break it while I was spending a weekend away, didn’t you?
Apologies, have not got round to writing a proper XML parser to check for unclosed tags in comments (was labouring under the misapprehension that people who post comments here actually know how to write HTML, so it wasn’t a high priority task).
Should have fixed the brokenness now, please do carry on.
June 13th, 2004 at 17:44:26
Hugh
Extraordinary. Your latest post not only breaks this site, but fails again to address either the logic of my original argument or its factual basis. Instead you furnish the world of ‘Blogging with a masterclass in faulty reasoning.
I’ll break it down into bite-sized chunks for you.
My argument is simple:
The Iraqi people, not Chris, not you Hugh, not Tony Blair, not George Bush, have—in the most concrete way possible—expressed their confidence in the future of Iraq: they are going back there to live. Take it from an immigrant, Hugh, migration is not easy.
They have seen the pictures from the jails. They have seen the results of the suicide bombs. They have seen comfortable, white, middle-aged, middle-class people walking in protest in the streets, demanding the withdrawal of the UN-approved occupying forces and they have decided, on balance, that they would be better off leaving this country and going home. Call me an imperialist, but I tend to think that we might be best advised to respect their judgement on the matter of whether or not their country is about to enter “a chaotic era of instability, violence and turbulence”. (Goodness, it’s not just Chris who likes his journalese.)
Just in case I haven’t made this clear enough:
1. The return of Iraqis to their newly liberated country of origin is an objective fact.
2. The imminent descent into Hell of said country is your partisan assertion.
3. The people returning to Iraq are Iraqis and they are betting their lives on their belief that you are wrong about point 2.
4. You are not an Iraqi.
The easiest way to spot an ideologue is his (it’s usually a “he”) habit of responding to the concrete with the abstract. It was that way when I used to challenge Right-wingers about Nicaragua or South Africa in the eighties and it’s exactly the same now when I challenge Left-wingers about Afghanistan or Iraq now.
Here’s the fact again just in case you missed it the first and second times.
Right. Now let’s deal with the rest of your nonsense.
I neither intended, nor did in fact, suggest that you condoned the Abu Ghraib tortures.
And I never suggested that you did. You did, however, accuse me of writing “sanctimonious post-facto neo-con twaddle” and, for reasons of rhetorical pertinence, I cited my statements on the issues you mentioned to demonstrate that my views were nothing of the sort.
Another flag of the ideologue is his reflex narcissism: “Not in my name!”, “Better dead than red!”. You don’t disappoint. You begin with “On the topic of the Iraqi people” and within seconds you are writing about “my concern”. The pro-war Left have this strange obsession with the Iraqi people and the antis want to tell everyone about themselves.
Yes, your HTML did go awry.
Declaring that my argument “doesn’t cut it” is not the same as disproving or undermining it. You have again failed to do so. The UN had, has and could not have any moral authority in the matter of the liberation of Iraq, its officials having collaborated in the theft of its oil wealth and, in the process, propped up a murderous, nepotistic regime. This is without even going into the UN’s recent record in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (3m dead), the Sudanese government (currently represented on the UN’s Human Rights Commission and responsible for “the worst humanitarian situation in the world“—the words of the UN’s own co-ordinator in the region) or Rwanda (200k dead). (These are all “sovereign states” incidentally. Tony’s marching in to relieve mass-murderers of their machetes would have been as illegal in Rwanda as it was in Sierra Leone.)
“Going against the weight of international opinion and law” has nothing to do with the central moral question of Iraq and the net effect of war on its people to date, the issue which you continue for all your prolixity to avoid. Ronald Reagan (whom I disagreed with on almost everything) acted against international opinion in his defiance of the Soviet Union and today the World is a massively better place as a result.
Do you think George W is a “progressive internationalist socialist”?
Er no. I didn’t even mention his name. You did, in your never-ending quest for the ultimate straw man. I said that spreading democracy was an aim of progressive internationalist socialism. But it might be a good idea for you to warm up by tackling that lesser contention of mine straight on. God knows you haven’t bothered to do so with anything else I’ve actually posted here.
June 13th, 2004 at 18:34:41
My, as they say, you are an exceedingly angry little man, aren’t you? Hectoring, personal, unnecessarily patronising - “insults, rants and stock bombast” got it pretty well.
Now, amusing as it might be to deconstruct your little explosion for its inherent contradictions and, frankly, hyprocrisies, I’m afraid (and I anticipate the glee with which this will be treated), I can’t be bothered. You still fail to address my point on the stablity of Iraq, which the occupiers appear unable to guarantree. And, moreover, that if one regards legal certainty, democratic accountability and the Rule of Law as important, one has to observe and live by these. Failure to do so is to take the law into one’s own hands, which is unacceptable on the individual level - why should it be acceptable on the international level? I refer you again to my treatment of your “lesser evil” point, and to earlier postings on the accountability of Tony Blair for his decisions. I don’t believe in means justifying ends. That’s my view. I’m not really asking you to share it, uninterested as to whether or not you do.
The point about Bush is that you appeared to be ascribing to Coalition actions some kind of coherent and attractive political vision, which (in my view, and it may just be my view, don’t write in) is pushing it a bit.
What we were talking about were elections in this country, which Labour resoundingly got slammed in. I hate to bring this up, but yourself included (good to see the return of the ever-excellent Rosensteils, though). Might that be why you are, shall we say, slightly strung over the issue? And why you haven’t mentioned the possibility of toni’s mea culpa?
June 13th, 2004 at 18:38:17
My, as they say, you are an exceedingly angry little man, aren’t you? Hectoring, personal, unnecessarily patronising - “insults, rants and stock bombast” got it pretty well.
Now, amusing as it might be to deconstruct your little explosion for its inherent contradictions and, frankly, hyprocrisies, I’m afraid (and I anticipate the glee with which this will be treated), I can’t be bothered. You still fail to address my point on the stablity of Iraq, which the occupiers appear unable to guarantree. And, moreover, that if one regards legal certainty, democratic accountability and the Rule of Law as important, one has to observe and live by these. Failure to do so is to take the law into one’s own hands, which is unacceptable on the individual level - why should it be acceptable on the international level? I refer you again to my treatment of your “lesser evil” point, and to earlier postings on the accountability of Tony Blair for his decisions. I don’t believe in means justifying ends. That’s my view. I’m not really asking you to share it, uninterested as to whether or not you do.
The point about Bush is that you appeared to be ascribing to Coalition actions some kind of coherent and attractive political vision, which (in my view, and it may just be my view, don’t write in) is pushing it a bit.
What we were talking about were elections in this country, which Labour resoundingly got slammed in. I hate to bring this up, but yourself included (good to see the return of the ever-excellent Rosensteils, though). Might that be why you are, shall we say, slightly strung over the issue? And why you haven’t mentioned the possibility of toni’s mea culpa?
June 13th, 2004 at 19:17:11
Your argument is just rhetoric and hot air. I shan’t bother ‘engaging’ with it because there is very little there but attempts to provoke and agitate. No wonder you resort to cheap insults. But then, that’s what trolls do, right?
Argue properly and you will be replied to properly. Otherwise, shut up!
June 13th, 2004 at 22:49:44
A/H
Your argument is just rhetoric and hot air.
You are both at a loss to counter me because that is exactly what my argument is not.
I have repeatedly made factual statements (with supporting evidence from disinterested parties) and drawn logical conclusions from those facts. That is what arguing “properly” is about.
Again, in your most recent posts, neither of you have addressed either my facts or my reasoning; neither of you have mentioned the people of Iraq. At least this time neither of you have claimed to do so. I think this concession represents some kind of progress. Well done.
you are an exceedingly angry little man, aren’t you?
I am exceedingly angry. I am over six feet tall. These facts, like everything else you have brought to this “debate”are irrelevant.
June 14th, 2004 at 11:08:14
Or, to put it another way:
1. The instability, security problems, rise of militant Islam, infrastructure failings and lack of a clear, detailed plan for the future in Iraq are objective facts.
2. That former asylum seekers returning to Iraq are doing so as a vote of confidence in the actions of America and Britain is your partisan assertion.
See? Rhetoric’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
You speak of the UN’s corrupt “theft” of Iraq’s oil, but if you were arguing honestly you would have also admitted that Iraq’s oil is still being sold off cheaply, to American companies, to pay for the damage done by the invasion. Or ’stolen’, if you will.
You suggest that the weight of international law and opinion has nothing to do with the central moral question of Iraq. Well, that’s debatable in itself, but additionally, you’re the only person who has framed this argument in the narrow terms of “the central moral question” (which is…?). It’s a bit cheeky of you to take an argument that was clearly concerned with the worldwide effects, both long and short term, of the Iraq action, then claim it falls down because it doesn’t match some vague criteria that only you fully understand.
June 14th, 2004 at 13:27:03
Tom
1. The instability, security problems, rise of militant Islam, infrastructure failings and lack of a clear, detailed plan for the future in Iraq are objective facts.
None of which I dispute. I disputed Hugh’s predictions about Iraq (in fact, not even predictions, but “concern” if you read his original text). The Iraqis (and Afghans…), by their actions, demonstrate that they share my skepticism. They are better informed. They have more at stake. They are not interested in making party political points. They have, like most of the less well-off in the World, more important things to worry about.
2. That former asylum seekers returning to Iraq are doing so as a vote of confidence in the actions of America and Britain is your partisan assertion.
I did not say that the Iraqis were expressing their confidence in the actions of America and Britain, but that they were expressing their confidence in the future of Iraq.
you’re the only person who has framed this argument in the narrow terms of “the central moral question”
Chris’s original post framed this argument in terms of “social justice and reducing poverty”. I have tried, mostly alone, to continue to address that question through the multiple examples of countries where social justice has increased and poverty has been reduced for millions of people directly as a result of Tony Blair’s actions.
Along the way, I have compared those countries where we have not intervened and where our non-intervention has permitted horrors to occur which dwarf anything you have alluded to. In my years of watching the World, only one thing has remained constant: rich people in the north get most worked up about the sufferings of poor people in the south when there’s a political point to score. Chris’s original post was an example of this rule in action.
Despite Hugh’s claim, my argument does not even require me to ascribe “coherent and attractive political vision” to Blair’s actions. I don’t. Our different positions on this issue (and the formal unknowability of the minds of Blair and Bush ;-) make it impossible for us to discuss the intentions of those Coalition leaders in any rigorous way.
Blair could have joined in the rumble because he didn’t like the colour of Saddam’s dress uniform and the sum total of human suffering would still have been significantly reduced by his “illegal” war. As it happens, he didn’t and it was. None of you have shown otherwise.
June 14th, 2004 at 13:56:15
I’ve been away from the Internet all weekend (an emergency visit to fix the brokenness on Sunday afternoon notwithstanding) and missed all the debate. I haven’t the time to reply to the comments to this post (nor do I really want to, given the low signal-to-noise ratio in the majority of them). What I will quickly say is that, in the same way that the hardcore anti-war brigade wrongly condemn anyone who supported the fall of Saddam as a stooge for American “imperialism”, the argument from the pro-war camp that anyone on the left who was against the war as a isolationist hypocrite, who likes to enjoy his own democratic rights but not extend those rights to others, is equally fallacious.
I opposed the war because I believed it was not a war of liberation. The US may have claimed they were there to liberate, but their past track record of supporting democracy only when it pleases them made these unconvincing (Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s, etc.), and recent attempts at regime change in Afghanistan have produced a state that looks a long way from democracy (vis. the rule of regional warlords and the recent resurgence of the Taliban). The comprehensive sale of Iraqi state assets and contracts to American companies and the large-scale continual military presence planned after the occupying troops go show that the United States wants to maintain economic and military control in Iraq (just as it did when it sold arms and gave billions of credit to Saddam). With military presence, the new Iraq will not be free, and with rampant uncontrolled capitalism in the place of state institutions, poverty and social injustice will continue (just as it has in Russia).
That’s all I’m going to say on the matter. I won’t reply to any further comments on this post, but I thought I should at least clarify my position with (as demanded) some facts.
June 14th, 2004 at 17:19:51
Fascinating position for me, far away in Australia, cos we have a government of exactly the opposite persuasion but doing the exact same thing. Iraq, refugees… there is some possibility we got the Iraq thang from you folks, and gave you refugee biffing in return.
And the ‘orrible little man and his nasty administration may well be dunked for exactly the same reasons.
Similar troll fights too. The Americans, by the way, can descend a long long way in this stuff. Like fighting with aqualungs in a cess pit.
There’s a very good internet proverb which both sides will probably claim as their own. Never fight with a pig. You get all dirty and the pig loves it.
I reckon this site is a heap of fun, by the way.
June 14th, 2004 at 18:22:52
Chris
My apologies if you were offended by my post(s) to your ‘Blog. You originally made judgments about Blair—you call his involvement in the war “stupid”, and accuse him of “blindly” following Bush—which were so unreasonable (whatever you think about the war) that I felt permitted me to make milder judgments about you.
You describe yourself as “middle-class” on your own Webpages and my remark about “feeling warm and fuzzy” was not directed at you specifically but at a wider group within the “well-intentioned” in Britain at the moment. Admittedly my parenthetical “say” didn’t exactly make that distinction very clear. Sorry.
My fundamental problem with your original post was that it was that, insofar as its content was falsifiable, it was demonstrably untrue on your own terms. Ironically, if you had simply said “I don’t give a stuff about the fuzzy-wuzzies so I’m going to vote against this prat for getting us into (a) war(s) on their behalf” I would have left well alone.
Equally, if you (or your other posters) had come across as completely stupid there would have been no point in persisting. If I was aggressive it was because I was less concerned about winning anyone over to my cause than publicly demolishing some widely-held and fundamentally broken beliefs. It was also because I wanted to express some frustration on behalf of the people who have been listened least by both sides in this wider debate: the Iraqis.