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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 6:39 pm Post subject: War, poverty, the super-rich. The Brown charge sheet is seri |
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| Quote: | War, poverty, the super-rich. The Brown charge sheet is serious
In March 2003, Robin Cook stood up in the Commons and made one of the most electrifying speeches in modern political history when he announced his resignation from a government intent on the illegal invasion of Iraq. If you look closely at the footage, you will see behind Cook a trim, grey-haired man get to his feet and start applauding. It's not done to clap in the chamber lest the movement disturbs the hot air, but more and more MPs gave Cook a standing ovation.
The grey-haired man was John McDonnell and four years later he emerged as the agreed candidate of the Labour left to run against Gordon Brown. After just three days in the spotlight, a YouGov poll showed McDonnell was already picking up around 20 per cent of the electoral college. Brown's people started making phone calls to McDonnell waverers - polite calls but their meaning very clear - and thereby ensured that the short step to Number 10 would become a six-week, stage-managed progress via Washington and Baghdad to today's coronation in Manchester. Rather than risk a protracted, high-profile debate on their man's 10-year record in government, they opted to paper over the cracks and hope voters wouldn't notice.
Had there been a contest with McDonnell, Labour supporters might have had a chance to hear Brown clarify his plans. They might, for example, have had a chance to make known their feelings about the offer to Paddy Ashdown of a seat in Brown's first cabinet.
Nor would Brown have been allowed to get away with the platitudinous 'we must learn the lessons' line he delivered on the occasion of his five-second visit to the green zone earlier this month, laughably called a fact-finding mission. Yet this was a war Brown voted for, financed and has continued to support. Likewise, he has supported the continuing debacle in Afghanistan, where, in January, Nato commanders declared that their new year's resolution was to kill fewer Afghan civilians, a resolution so far unfulfilled.
His statements on Iraq may be unemphatic and infrequent, but you would be hard pressed to slip a cigarette paper between his position and Blair's. In 2005, for instance, with Iraqi civilian dead piling up, chaos mounting and torture, humiliation and degradation exposed, Brown still felt able to say: 'I think what we did [going into Iraq] was necessary. And what we continue to have to do to fight terrorism internationally is essential.'
Brown has had more to say about another 'essential' in the fight for Britain's security - Trident. Challenged in 2006 on this £75bn piece of valueless weaponry, Brown said: 'In an insecure world, we must and we will always have the strength to take all necessary long-term decisions to ensure both stability and security.' A very Brownite cabinet minister let the cat out of the bag when he told me that no Labour party would be elected to government without Trident. So Trident was for the protection of the Labour party rather than the country? No, no, the minister hurriedly corrected himself. Britain faced a global threat from Islamic militants who wanted to recreate the Caliphate from the Indus to the English Channel. At which point, rational discourse simply fails. The idiocy, crassness and cynicism of the Brownite case for Trident is mind-boggling.
But it is as custodian of the nation's finances that Brown claims his greatest successes. The Iron Chancellor. Mr Prudence. He has, he repeatedly reminds us, liberated the British economy from the debilitating cycle of boom and bust. In reality, what he has done has been to give the market its head, creating an unprecedented and continuing boom for the rich while the poor go bust and buster. The chancellor is a well-known number cruncher, so it would have been instructive to hear what statistics he would have quoted had McDonnell had the opportunity to cite the figures he has put together in his pamphlet, 'Another World Is Possible' (Labour Representation Committee).
At the top end, the numbers are beyond belief. The money sloshing around the City has become, even for dedicated free marketeers, an embarrassment. Speaking last week about tax breaks for the rich, Nicholas Ferguson of SVG Capital, confessed he felt 'uncomfortable paying lower taxes than his cleaner'.There was a time when that discomfort would have been articulated by Labour politicians. But no. Gordon Brown is the joint-creator of New Labour and, as Peter Mandelson once told a meeting of business executives in America, New Labour 'is intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich'.
The sight of ex-ministers lapping up their non-executive director stipends is repellent enough, but more worrying is Brown's confusion of the presence here of millionaires (now estimated at 425,000) and Russian billionaires (how does someone amass £5bn in as many years legitimately?) with national wealth. The average pay for the chief executive of a FTSE 100 company is now £2.4m. The corporation tax rate has fallen from 33 per cent to 30 per cent and is promised to fall to 28 per cent next year. The Treasury has recently admitted that between £97bn and £150bn is lost annually through tax avoidance.
Labour Prime Ministers used to be damned for inviting trade unionists for beer and sandwiches at Number 10, but where is the outcry at the multinational billionaires trooping in and out for caviar and champagne? What influence are Microsoft's Bill Gates and Lee Scott of Wal-Mart, appointed by Brown to advise the Treasury on globalisation, having on government policy? What has investment banker David Freud to tell us about reform of the welfare system?
The story at the bottom end is tragic. A fifth of the population is officially regarded as 'income-poor', compared with 13 per cent in 1979. Among ethnic minorities, the figures are far worse, with 58 per cent of Asians and 40 per cent of black British 'income-poor'. Tax credits and the minimum wage are all very well, but with indirect taxation on the rise, lower income families are always going to suffer. In 2006, the number of children living in poverty increased by 200,000, bringing the total to 3.8 million.
This will be the first Labour government to have presided over an increase in inequality, between rich and poor, north and south, white and black. It feeds crime and leads to overflowing prisons. It damages the nation's physical and psychological health. It perpetuates and hardens social divisions.
Gordon Brown has just published a book about self-sacrificing figures from history who stood out against the crowd for what was right. I, for one, would have relished the chance to have heard McDonnell quiz him on how he thinks his record of warmongering, featherbedding the rich and penalising the poor would have gone down with Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. |
meet the new boss, same as the old boss 
from http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2110202,00.html |
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