If you haven't been reading the British newspapers, then this bit of news likely sneaked into the back page. If you're been reading The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, or any of the other major British papers, then the British MP Expenses Scandal has been the front page every day for the last two weeks. In April, someone - they're still not sure who - leaked the files containing the government-credit-filed expenses of the Members of the British House of Commons. The outrage has been overwhelming, and this likely marks the end of Gordon Brown's labour government.
Ironically enough, I couldn't be happier with it that way. To those who know me, this will come as a shock; I shouldn't be celebrating the defeat of a social democrat party that is a member of Socialist International, and yet I am.
Quite simply, the labour party that rules Britain today is not the same one that ruled Britain before the left's nightmare that everyone else calls 'the 1980's'. In order to understand why Gordon Brown's government has to be destroyed by this scandal, we need to wind the clock back to the 1970's.
In the late 1970's, a centre-left Labour Party ruled Britain, and had almost continously since 1964. James Callaghan's government had instituted a number of socialist reforms to the country, under the matchless leadership of his Minister of Industry - Tony Benn - who pushed for social and labour reform throughout Britain.
Then, came 1979.
In 1979, not only did Iran's fanatic mullahs overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of The Shah, but an equally fanatical government came to power in Britain, under the rule of Margaret Thatcher. By the end of her first term, Thatcher had effectively demolished the Social Democracy that Britain had been, replacing it with a kleptocratic regime, in which the ultra-rich trampled over workers rights, colonial possession's rights. Britain invaded The Falkland Islands, got into bed with Pinochet (and I don't even have to go into how much I loathe the man), and introduced the dangerous position of moral absolutism.
Had this only happened in Britain, the Labour Party could have weathered this storm, reorganized, and fought back according to its principles. The difficulty was that the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party of Canada were suffering the same problem. The Big Three of Reagan, Mulroney and Thatcher ruled supreme throughout the 1980's, demolishing the state apparatus that had been established by Carter, Callaghan, and Trudeau before them.
At the same time, the Labour Party was engaged in a brutal 'civil war', between the left factions and the centre-right factions. By the time the Labour Party finally got its act together and overthrew the conservative oligarchy in 1997, "New Labour" had been born. In Thatcher's own words, it was the greatest achievement of her entire political career.
Why? Because even though Blair's Labour Party defeated the conservative government that had ruled since 1979, the Labour Party that had endorsed democratic socialism was gone; replacing it was a centre-right neoliberal party led by a man with close personal relationships to the business elite and the every horrific Rupert Murdoch. Many of the reforms started by Thatcher's government - rampant defense spending, support of American projects in Iraq, unrestricted free trade agreements, Afghanistan, or wherever - were continued under Blair.
In 2003, we saw just how far the Labour Party had fallen, when it joined the war criminal in marching to war in Iraq, ignoring the calls of the UNSC, its own people, its own former ministers, its own MPs, and its own supporters, and dragging Britain into the bloodbath of Iraq.
Though things have gotten slightly better with Gordon Brown, the difficulties remain largely the same: Workers rights are gone, the power of the Trade Unions is gone, the power of the business elite has grown tremendously.
New Labour has to die at the end of this expenses scandal. It has to because it cannot continue to claim to represent democratic socialism if it does not reform. If it even wants to consider itself socialist - or even 'labour' - it needs to reform, and it will not do so unless New Labour is first eliminated. It's time for New Labour to die, it's time for socialist Labour to return. To do that, Gordon Brown's government has to fall, and it has to fall hard.
Ebook , by Autumn Reed
6 years ago
3 comments:
Also, consider the fact that sucessive Labour governments had gutted the British military to pay for their social engineering; to compensate, the UK, and the rest of the European NATO states with it, basically contracted their national defense to the US. Ironic, indeed, that the only way European democratic socialism can be fiscally viable is with the protection of American nuclear weapons.
Don't believe me?
By the end of the Callaghan government in 1979, the British Army had only seven day's worth of war supplies in the case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The RAF had only 72 hours of ordnance before it would have been rendered ineffective. At the best case, most of West Germany and the Netherlands would have been overrun by two weeks; Soviet troops would be strolling in Paris at the end of the month.
Alex: That comparison was unintentional. It was simply pointing out what else was going on, my apologies; and yes, I read The Economist, though not as frequently as I used to.
Mladen:
The hysterical assertion that an attack on Central Europe was "imminent" is absurd. They had already invaded Afghanistan, they were tied down as it is.
As for nukes and the deterrence factor, here's my bit on this: Why don't I have cocaine on my breakfast cereal? Partially because I don't want to, and partially because I don't keep it in the fridge. Part of the way in which I've prevented my slaves from staging a violent uprising is by not keeping slaves. It's like a deterrent, but not quite as moronic or stupid.
They were already so involved in Afghanistan that the German Army could have defeated them with their eyes close and their right hand tied behind their back.
Cameron, the USSR didn't enter Afghanistan until the last days of 1979. Even at that time, they never had more than 100,000 troops there at one time; they weren't tied down nearly to the same extent that the US was in Vietnam. And as for your response to deterrence, detente with the USSR was stupid; the Soviets only agreed to it because it allowed them to conduct a massive armament campaign (both conventional and nuclear) while the New Left in the West caused us to disarm.
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