Nu Labour

Ragemongering

Manufacturing Consent, Nu Labour
Published on

Justice secretary Jack Straw says prisons exist to punish criminals and attacks the “criminal justice lobby [sic] for putting the needs of offenders before those of victims”. Immigration minister Phil Woolas says a tough new points-based system to limit non-EU immigration is needed to make sure the UK won’t reach a population of seventy million. Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell, a while back said the unemployed should be made to work for their benefits.

Three examples of ragemongering, pandering to the worst instincts of the tabloids. Unlike America where fear and hatred of the stranger seems the paramount emotion driving the rightwing press, in the UK it seems to be anger and rage at everybody getting one over on ordinary, decent hardworking folk. Scroungers getting money for nothing from my hard earned wages, criminals mollycoddled by those leftie lawyers, bloody foreigners coming over here and getting everything handed on a silver platter, those are all tabloid stock villains. Amongst a certain part of the electorate there’s a deep rooted conviction that other people are getting away with murder and a strong desire to see them punished for it. It’s a well conditioned reflex that New Labour has been nurturing ever since they first got in power, by a torrent of ill considered and needless legislation designed to trigger these sentiments. Because if there’s one thing New Labour has internalised is that they need the tabloids behind them to remain in power.

For Gordon Brown it must be slightly worrying that such a big hitter like Jack Straw is engaging in this tactic now, just when Gordon himself is widely praised for his handling of the credit crisis, after such a long period of tabloid dissatisfaction with the Designated Successor. It may just be a sign that Gordon’s political position is not as secure as it seems to be, that Straw is positioning himself for a possible leadership battle in the near future. Ragemongering after all can also be used to raise your own profile, rather than that of the party…

The voice of the soft Labour left

Civil liberties, Nu Labour, War on Terror
Published on

Reading David Osler’s blog is always interesting, because he always manages to capture the views of the soft, making excuses for New Labour left, like Polly Toynbee with better writing skills and slightly more self knowledge. A good example is his commentary on l’affaire David Davis. For those who didn’t pay attention last week, shadow home secretary David Davis resigned his seat in parliament to force a by-election after the government won the vote on extending the time terrorism subjects could be held without charge from 28 to 42 days. According to Davis (and I would agree with him) “42 days is just one – perhaps the most salient example – of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.”

So how did Osler respond to this? By portraying it as an opportunistic stunt of course, sounding little different from Harriet Harman:

Part of me almost admires the gesture he is making. In so far as it will keep up the pressure on the government to rescind the disgraceful legislation that the Commons carried last night, I’d even go as far as to call it a good thing. But a gesture it remains, and a deeply opportunistic one at that.

Myself, I’m with Blood and Treasure:

It seems to me that the choice available over this is to outsmart yourself by trying to uncover the “real reasons” behind his resignation or take him at his word and push the issue. And whatever else Davis might have in mind, and whatever you think of his framing it as “fundamental British freedom” this is the issue.

That seems to me to be a much more productive attitude to take than jeering about how opportunistic Davis is, or how much of a rightwinger. But that’s the soft left for you. A guy like Osler always ends up making excuses for Labour, letting tribal loyalty overrule his disgust of the party’s policies by arguing that the Tories would be worse, even if it’s getting harder and harder to do so with a straight face. That’s why he has to rubbish Davis.

Praising with faint damns

Nu Labour, War on Iraq
Published on

That’s what it feels like this this Guardian article is doing, with its amazing revelations that the Blair government was just as clueless as the Bush junta in preparing for the War on Iraq:

The government’s top foreign policy advisers were as inept as their US counterparts in failing to see that removing Saddam Hussein in 2003 was likely to lead to a nationalist insurgency by Sunnis and Shias and an Islamist government in Baghdad, run by allies of Iran, the Guardian has learned.

None of Whitehall’s “Arabists” warned Tony Blair of the difficulties which have plagued the occupation. The revelation undermines the British claim that it was US myopia which was to blame for the failure to foresee what would happen in postwar Iraq.

[…]

Christopher Segar, who took part in Whitehall’s Iraq Policy Unit’s prewar discussions and later headed the British office in Baghdad immediately after the invasion, said: “The conventional view was that Iraq was one of the most Western-oriented of Arab states, with its British-educated, urban and secular professionals. I don’t think anyone in London appreciated how far Islamism had gone.”

Officials alone cannot be blamed. Ministers failed to ask serious questions. Blair never called on the experts for detailed analysis of the consequences of an invasion, officials say. He saw the war as Iraq’s liberation and felt any postwar problems would pale in the face of Iraqi delight.

See? It’s not that Blair and his cronies helped start an unnecessary immoral war that has so far killed between half a million and one million Iraqis, it’s just that they weren’t prepared for those horrible Islamists determined to spoil the liberation party. Nobody could have foreseen that the people of Baghdad would dislike having foreign troops coming in and bombing the powerplants and shooting up the neighbourhoods. Of course not, who could’ve thought that the Iraqis would not be pleased by seeing their American and British liberators?

Oh wait…

The truth is, Blair knew what the consequences of the war were going to be and didn’t care. As long as he could pretend he had personally liberated the Iraqis, he was happy. Now that the situation has become even worse than expected, his media chums are recruited to put the most positive spin on this disaster still possible: we didn’t mean it, it was the horrible Islamists that made us do it.

Bonus paragraph, awe-inspiring in its awful stupidity:

Contrary to the conventional view that the occupation’s problems stem mainly from failure to plan for postwar Iraq, they say there was plenty of planning, from how to react to mass refugee flows and a humanitarian crisis to the fallout from a sharp rise in the world price of oil. The real failure, they concede, was one of political analysis. Officials did not study how Iraqis would react to an occupation and what political forces would emerge on top once Saddam was removed.

The heart of the matter

Law in action, Nu Labour
Published on

In an excellent article by Henry Porter on the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog about Gordon Brown’s generous offer to give the British a bill of rights, the following paragraph succintly explains where a large part of New Labour’s authoritarianism is coming from:

In a new paper, Roger Smith, the director of Justice, puts his finger on an important part of the government’s culture. ‘A single thread links together matters as apparently diverse as the Iraq war, Asbos and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. That thread is an impatience by ministers with due process, either in the legislative process of policy or its execution.’

Which is odd, since so many of New Labour’s top bods are supposed to be lawyers, so they should be familiar with the concept of due process and its importance.

Brown bottles out

Nu Labour, UK politics
Published on

The question has been doing the rounds for weeks now: will he or won’t he? Today the answer came: he won’t. Brown won’t call for an early election:

Mr Brown told the BBC he had had a “duty” to consider whether to hold an election, but decided against it so he could show his “vision” for Britain.

[…]

He denied the opinion polls had led to the decision not to hold an election, saying: “I have a vision for change in Britain and I want to show people how in government we’re implementing it.”

Pressed on the decision, Mr Brown said that the series of crises since he became PM in June meant “the easiest thing I could have done is call an election. I could have called an election on competence”.

He added: “We would win an election, in my view, whether we had it today, next week or weeks after.”

But, he said: “I want the chance in the next phase of my premiership to develop and show people the policies that are going to make a huge difference and make a change in the whole country itself.”

That’s typically New Labour, to always talk as if they’ve just come into power, to ignore their own history. It’s always new policies, more change, new approaches, new opportunities for the people of Britain, as if the past ten years of Labour governments never happened and the Tories have just been ousted from power. This way their own mistakes and failed policies are swept under the carpet, while keeping the momentum of a new government. Having an early election would be part of that process, if Brown had been confident he could’ve won and won convincingly. But he bottled out and now he’s going to recreate this momentum the oldfashioned New Labour way: with lots and lots of new, improved, not very well thought out policies.

However, none of this changes one very important fact: that Brown has become the prime minister of Britain without ever having had a mandate from the voters.