Follow the money
UKWatch.net - 20 Mar 2008
The “war on terror” and the multinationals who are profiteering from it I started writing about the private security industry in July 2001, when I sold a story to the Observer newspaper about a company called DynCorp. They were hired by the US to help the “reconstruction” of Bosnia and Kosovo by running the new post-war police force. Kathryn Bolkovac, one of the US police officers sent by the firm, discovered DynCorp staff were trafficking women. DynCorp tried to stop her investigation then sacked her. DynCorp are a US company, but ran the Bosnian operation through their subsidiary in Aldershot, so Bolkovac went to an industrial tribunal in Southampton which backed her claims. At the time this seemed like an odd piece of corruption from the fringes of the system. But then came the 9/11 attacks and, as Tony Blair told us, “the rules of the game changed”. Under the new rules, there was going to be a lot of privatised “reconstruction”. Indeed, even before the bombers started their “deconstruction” of Iraq, the US government handed contracts to Bechtel and Halliburton to rebuild what had yet to be destroyed. An army of private military contractors – or mercenaries – guarded the corporate reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan. DynCorp, fresh from sex trafficking in Bosnia, supplied the Praetorian Guard for Hamid Karzai in Kabul. As a journalist I found that contractors gave me a steady stream of scandal stories. I wanted to try and understand the whole process of security privatisation, not just describe the many areas where it went rotten. It quickly became clear that this was an Anglo-American operation. So, for example, the most important security contractor in Iraq ? Aegis – is a British firm. Before the Iraq war Dick Cheney came to Britain to promote battlefield privatisation in a conference with Labour ministers and transatlantic businessmen because he thought that, “our British colleagues are far ahead of us” in commercialised warfare. It was also clear that the privatisation went way beyond the well known examples in Iraq. Private companies supplied interrogators in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Contractors even helped the “waterboarding” of US captives in the secret “black sites”. Corporations also run the massive databases, “data mining” operations and bureaucracies that make up “homeland security” in the US. In Britain the biggest “homeland security” contract, the ID card, will be run by big transnational firms. When judges told the then home secretary Charles Clarke he could not lock up foreign nationals without a trial, he turned instead to “control orders”. This form of house arrest was nicely packaged and run for Clarke by private companies Serco and Group 4. All these are parts of the ongoing privatisation of “anti-terror” security. Trying to understand the effect of War on Terror, Inc, meant trying to understand the “war on terror” itself. Gordon Brown and his boy wonder, David Miliband, came to my aid by offering an analogy. They said the “war on terror” should be like the Cold War. Their nostalgia for the era of anti-red witchhunts and support for “anti-communist” dictatorships was hard to understand, but their analysis was spot on. During the Cold War the Anglo-American political leadership tried to brand every challenge to their leadership, at home or abroad, as part of international communist subversion. Similarly, in the “war on terror”, leaders in Washington and London try to use the terrorist threat to justify a whole host of new international interventions or authoritarian measures at home. Within hours of the fall of the Twin Towers, Donald Rumsfeld said to his note taker that the US needed to attack: “Near term target needs… go massive – sweep it all up. Things related and not.” For the last five years we have seen the US “going massive” and trying to squeeze unrelated issues into the “war on terror” – most obviously by making the attack on Iraq part of the response to Al Qaida, despite Saddam’s lack of any connection to the terrorist killings in New York. The whole point of the “war on terror” is not to deal with terrorism as such. It is to assert US political and military might. Britain’s leaders have decided to ride on the coat tails of that power. There is a novel feature to the “war on terror”. While Britain and the US grabbed extra power, they quickly passed that power to private corporations. The new authoritarian state and the post-Thatcherite shrinking state bred and formed a new hybrid of subcontracted authoritarianism and privatised warfare. During the Cold War, US president Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence” of the “military industrial complex” because “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”. The new security industrial complex has created a powerful commercial lobby with a vested interest in new military interventions abroad and new authoritarian measures at home. While politicians in Washington and London are quite capable of throwing themselves into the disasters of the “war on terror” on their own account, they are encouraged by their authoritarian and military urges magnified by the new security executives. There are two main mechanisms. Firstly, the industry lowers the bar to wars abroad and crackdowns at home. Every time a minister ponders such a move, a gaggle of businessmen will offer some “can do” solution. Secondly, when ministers and officials leave government they can now count on a comfortable seat on the boards of the security companies they previously hired. In addition the security industry funds a gaggle of paid-for academics to pump up “security” fears. Recently the Labour linked think tank IPPR got funding from four firms cashing in on the “war on terror” – Raytheon, Booz Allen, EDS and De La Rue – to fund a “security commission” pushing new alarmist claims. War on Terror, Inc is published by Verso. Solomon Hughes writes a weekly column for the Morning Star. You can contact him at sol.hughes@btinternet.com

The ?White Season?
UKWatch.net - 20 Mar 2008
Last week, the BBC ran its ?White Season??a series as puerile as it was offensive. Billed as an exploration of ?what it means to be white and working-class in 21st century Britain,? the trailer summed up the central message. A close-up facial shot of a white, bald and obviously working class male was shown. As the hymn ?Jerusalem? played, brown hands appeared, writing one after another in foreign languages in black pen across his face. Eventually his entire face?bar the whites of his eyes?was coloured black. As he closed his eyes, the words ?Is white working-class Britain becoming invisible?? appeared. Writing in the Daily Mail, under the heading ?White and working class…the one ethnic group the BBC has ignored,? Richard Klein, the broadcaster?s Head of Independent Commissioning for Knowledge asserted that ?Over the past two decades, Britain has been through a revolution.? ?Globalisation, mass immigration and economic upheaval have helped to transform the fabric of our nation,? he continued. ?These changes have been the subject of noisy debate within the media, politics and academia, yet it is a curious irony that, in all the heated discussion about the consequences of this revolution, one voice has been largely absent: that of the white working class.? Whereas once ?the white working class were seen as an integral and respected part of our national life,? now, ?The voice of the white working-class is barely allowed to intrude into British politics or culture. In metropolitan circles, where sneering at any minority ethnic group would be regarded as an outrage, this white working-class opinion is all too often treated with suspicion or contempt.? With its ?White Season,? Klein went on, the BBC was ?determined to redress the balance by commissioning a new season of programmes looking at the attitudes of the white working class.? Klein?s claims are an invention. Just when was it that the working class was considered the ?backbone? of the country and treated with ?respect?? Britain is a country in which every social advance?from healthcare, education, trade union rights and universal suffrage?had to be fought for tooth and nail in the face of fierce hostility from the ruling establishment. And once the working class had established these gains, over the past 30 years or so the ruling elite has done its utmost to dismantle them one after the other. But it is the prefix ?white? that really counts here. In preparation for the series, BBC Newsnight commissioned a survey amongst 1,000 or so ?white? people. Blacks and Asians were excluded. So presumably were all non-British ?whites. And what of the results of this survey? It found that those designated as ?white working class? were slightly more pessimistic about the future than those designated as the ?white middle class.? To anyone outside the rarefied environs of BBC executives and their political paymasters, this will hardly come as a revelation. Britain has indeed been through a ?revolution? over the last decades. It is one in which the expunging of ?class??or more particularly, the interests and concerns of the working class?from every aspect of social and political life has been the central concern of the ruling establishment, and most especially the Labour Party, as it sought to implement a massive transfer of wealth away from working people to the super-rich and major corporations, making Britain one of the most socially unequal countries in the world. Globalisation, job insecurity, crime and political marginalisation all featured strongly in the listed concerns of ?white workers? and only slightly less-so amongst those decreed to be ?white middle class.? Had the BBC not engaged in its own brand of racial profiling, one would have found that similar concerns find equal expression amongst black and Asian working people. But none of these were explored in the BBC?s ?White Season.? Its sole concern was to assert that the sense of political alienation and insecurity amongst white workers was bound up with race, and the economic and social impact of immigration and the sense of betrayal produced by the ?liberal nostrums? of multiculturalism and ?political correctness.? From the Wibsey Working Men?s Club, just outside Bradford, where ?With high unemployment and a perception that recent Asian immigrants receive the lion?s share of Government benefits, members feel that their very community is under threat and that racial tensions could erupt at any time,? to Peterborough where an influx of Polish immigrants is said to have raised tensions, to Barking in east London, the message was the same: ?White, working class Britain? is being submerged beneath a sea of blacks and foreigners. The great significance given to the small percentage points revealed in the survey between the views of working class and middle class people to the ?loaded? questions they were asked was meant to hammer home the message. In the same article, Klein insinuated that immigration was wholly for the ?middle classes? who benefited from a ?Polish plumber or a Ukrainian nanny.? Others were still more explicit in deriding the ?middle class? and their ?liberal? values for being oblivious to the real cost of immigration. Caitlin Moran in the Times railed that immigration was ?very useful? for the ?liberal left-wing? who could use the ?Ukrainian carpenters on 2 an hour.? Meanwhile, Moran continued with a palpable sense of horror, it was the working classes ?who are actually living this multicultural life, and sharing their shops, schools, hospitals, pubs and streets with dozens of different nationalities, cultures and beliefs.? Author Tim Lott, in an article entitled ?White, working class?and threatened with extinction,? also claimed that ?it?s the do-gooding liberal middle classes that have betrayed those ?beneath? them.? This ?betrayal? apparently consists of the abolition of selective grammar schools, implementing policies of ?multiculturalism? while deriding ?the host white indigenous culture,? suppressing English nationalism and building council houses?in that order. Lott at least acknowledged that ?there is also a large liberal working class? that is, ?rarely mentioned by the WLMC [white liberal middle class] who like to keep a monopoly on morals.? But it is not the views of this ?white, working class? that concerns him and others. As Lott explained, their fascination is rather with those layers of the ?white working class? who are ?wilfully ignorant, hedonistic, angry, often racist,? and even ?verging on the crooked,? tending ?toward the philistine? and mistrustful of ?education.? Not that the BBC?s programme makers and its supporters claim to represent this working class. Klein remarked somewhat loftily, ?Most people at the BBC don?t live lives like this, but these are our licence payers,? while Lott, answering his own rhetorical question as to whether he looks down on the white working class ?now that I am middle class myself? Probably.? The BBC claimed that its aim was to allow the ?authentic voice of the traditional white working class? to be heard. Given the parameters set, this ?voice? turned out almost universally to consist of right-wing commentators, overt racists and even fascists. The BBC?s series of programmes were obsessed with the British National Party. Two of the areas chosen are where the BNP had scored small successes in local council elections. In Wibsey, a young white male?a Union Jack flag disfigured by a swastika hanging behind him?boasted, ?If I saw a young Paki getting kicked and knocked over, I would not blink an eyelid, I hate them so much.? In Barking, the documentary focused on the campaigning activities of a local BNP officer. Initiating the series, BBC Newsnight invited BNP leader Nick Griffin on to a roundtable discussion where he blamed ?Islam and particularly Pakistani immigration? for the hard drugs trade in Britain. ?Impartiality? in the service of reaction Many have noted that such a programme could not have been shown 10 or even 5 years ago. For the programme makers and their supporters it is evidence of a refreshing air of openness, ?objectivity? and ?impartiality.? The BBC?s supposed ?liberal? bias has long been the focus of attacks by media opponents, such as Rupert Murdoch, and those with a political axe to grind?from the Conservative Party (which views the BBC as Britain?s last ?nationalised? institution), to the Blair government for its coverage of the Iraq war and its aftermath, and Zionists over its very occasional critical treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But over the last period, these complaints have also been raised from within the BBC. Klein himself made a speech in 2006 in which he said that the BBC was ?out of touch? and ignoring ?mainstream? opinion. His remarks followed an ?impartiality? summit involving BBC executives and leading presenters where, according to the right-wing Daily Mail?s gloating report, ?BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.? In June 2007, a BBC-commissioned report found that the corporation existed in a ?left-leaning comfort zone,? and that it had an ?innate liberal bias.? The 80-page summary found that its broadcasting output was dominated by a liberal consensus that failed to give voice to a wide range of views. Commenting favourably on the ?White Season? in the Financial Times under the headline ?White men unburdened,? John Lloyd noted that ?A cultural movement is happening within liberal opinion. It no longer greets immigrants with open arms. They are welcome?but with tighter conditions, aimed at encouraging, even mandating, integration…. All these orotund concepts?assimilation, cultural diversity and mutual tolerance?are now in contest…. ?This political shift has now spilled into Britain?s most important cultural institution, the BBC.? The World Socialist Web Site has commented previously on the social and political evolution of a significant layer of the former liberal intelligentsia. From the Labour Party?s role as the chief ally of the Bush administration in the US and its doctrine of pre-emptive war, to the campaign by supporters of the New Statesman and the Euston Manifesto group against the ?appeasement? of Islamic fundamentalism, former pacifists and leftists have become transformed into political apologists for free market capitalism and so-called liberal imperialism. Domestically, faced with growing social inequality, a global economic recession and competition between rival nation states for control of vital markets and resources, the former liberals argue that it is no longer possible to sustain universal provision of health, education, housing and democratic rights. Rather these rights should be afforded, in general, to those born in Britain who have paid into the system. David Goodhart, editor of the pro-Blair Prospect magazine (for which Lloyd also writes), most famously propounded this view in the pages of the Guardian in 2004, accompanied by measures to ?close the door? on immigration ?before it?s too late.? ?To put it bluntly, most of us prefer our own kind,? he declared. Far from being ?impartial,? the BBC?s ?White Season? is a major attempt to encourage and legitimise this embrace of racial and ethnic politics as a justification for all manner of right-wing social and politic nostrums. The highlight of the BBC?s efforts and by far the most politically revealing of the various programmes was Denys Blakeway?s revisiting of Conservative politician Enoch Powell?s infamous speech on immigration in 1968. Speaking before an audience of Conservative businessmen in Birmingham, Powell had warned of the dangers of racial integration in apocalyptic terms. Citing an unnamed Wolverhampton constituent, who was harassed by ?wide-grinning piccaninnies? and ?excreta pushed through her letterbox,? Powell?paraphrasing the Roman poet Virgil?foretold an imminent race war and ?the Tiber foaming with much blood.? In the documentary, Powell was portrayed as a ?maverick? who ?outraged the political establishment,? but ?struck a chord with the public who wrote to him in their thousands, and London?s dockers came out on strike in support.? Its underlying thrust was that Powell?s sacking from the shadow cabinet the day after his speech meant that it was no longer possible to openly debate the dangers of unchecked immigration. Forty years on, the documentary suggested, Powell had been proven correct. Immigration and the policies of ?multiculturalism? were jointly responsible directly for everything from the inner-city riots of the 1980s and 1990s to the July 7 London bombings. A monetarist and free marketer when it was still considered socially inadvisable, Powell was in all essentials a forerunner of the Thatcherite Conservative Party. His economic proscriptions combined with his hostility to Britain joining the European Economic Community meant that he was a political opponent of then Conservative leader Edward Heath. His speech was intended as a challenge to Heath by the Tory right. Deliberately inflammatory, it was directed against the Labour government?s planned introduction of the Race Relations Act prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of race in matters such as jobs and housing allocation?the notorious ?no blacks, no Irish, no dogs? signs. Powell?s little white lady?whose existence was never proven?was a landlord who, he suggested, should be free to discriminate as she pleased. Powell went on to leave the Conservative Party and joined the Ulster Unionist Party in 1974. By the end of Thatcher?s leadership, however, he was largely reconciled with the party. None of this dealt was dealt with in the documentary. Nor was there any mention of inner-city poverty and police racism and harassment that actually sparked the riots in 1980 and 1990, much less the Iraq war that has done so much to fuel the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Diehard reactionaries such as Powell?s biographer and champion of a specifically English nationalism, Simon Heffer, and philosopher Conservative Roger Scruton were featured in the documentary, which began by stating that ?in the wake of riots and terror attacks, many are now asking, was Enoch Powell right to predict disaster in his ?Rivers of Blood? speech?? Juxtaposing negative comments on ?multiculturalism? with scenes of the London bombings, it concluded, ?ten years after his death, many believe that Powell?s arguments were often prescient.? Here it is worth noting Blakeway?s remarks on television?s treatment of history at the Imperial War Museum in London in October 2004, in which he highlighted the importance of ?revisionist? historians, able to put ?the past in a different light, and whose views have often changed the way the past is perceived.? The ?reinterpretation??or rather rehabilitation?of Powell is only the latest mea culpa offered by former liberals who have now embraced the ideas of the right. Following on from their support for pre-emptive war and the ?war on terror,? they have now ditched their old policies of multiculturalism in favour of a repackaging of the neoconservative theory of the ?Clash of Civilisations??masquerading as a defence of the ?white, working class.?

Britain is Stealing the US Crown of No 1 Climate Villain
UKWatch.net - 20 Mar 2008
This is a truly shaming moment for Gordon Brown?s government. On Monday ministers were once more accused of failing to fully assess the environmental impact of a third runway at Heathrow. The Conservative MP for Putney, Justine Greening, argued that the airport operator, BAA, had been too closely involved with the expansion plans, alleging that government collusion had resulted in environmental concerns being ignored. With Ruth Kelly and the Department for Transport seemingly determined to bust the UK?s climate-change targets, it now falls to the likes of Greenpeace and Plane Stupid to try to defend them. The environmental activists who dropped banners at Heathrow and the House of Commons protesting against the planned third runway may have been breaking the law by taking direct action, but in a wider sense they were simply trying to uphold it. They were arrested for an unusual reason: trying to enforce government policy against the wishes of the government. The case is simple: the government is committed to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Expanding Heathrow will increase them. Ministers have acknowledged repeatedly that climate change is the greatest threat facing the globe. Gordon Brown himself gave a speech on November 19 last year in which he stated clearly that the ongoing rise in global temperatures should be kept to less than two degrees, and that, in order to achieve this, global emissions would need to start falling within 10 to 15 years. Yet Brown seems to see no inconsistency in demanding global action on climate change while simultaneously expanding the most polluting form of mass transport known to humanity. While government may be committed to achieving its climate-change targets, it is clearly not committed to the means of achieving them. Quite the opposite. Billions are being poured into motorway-widening schemes. As the Guardian has reported in recent weeks, government grants for domestic solar panels and other renewable technologies have been slashed, killing off a promising new sector of power generation. Instead, ministers seem minded to support E.ON?s plans for a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Instead of supporting the cleanest electricity-generating technology, Brown sides with the dirtiest. Aviation is the final straw. At a time when millions of people are clearly expressing urgent concerns about climate change, the government is about to embark on a public relations suicide mission, gearing up for a titanic battle with climate campaigners which is guaranteed to drag the UK?s international environmental reputation through the mud. At the same time as ministers jet off to UN conferences to make long-winded speeches about global warming, black-clad police will be dragging climate change protesters out of the way of BAA?s bulldozers in the full glare of the world?s media. Imagine the ironic laughter that the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, will face from Chinese, Indian and other delegates at the 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen, when he lectures them about cutting their emissions as the tarmac is laid at Heathrow. No longer will the US be the world?s primary global warming villain, particularly if the new American president re-engages with the Kyoto process. Instead the country that everyone loves to hate will be Britain. It will be a deeply humiliating experience for those in government ? and there are many ? who are truly committed to tackling climate change. If Ruth Kelly keeps on down this insane path, she will not be lightly forgiven ? by her colleagues, let alone by the rest of the country. But Brown?s government may yet be saved from its own stupidity ? by the very people whose lives it is determined to destroy. Seven hundred homes will be flattened if the plans go ahead, including the entire community of Sipson. But these residents are not going to go without a fight. A thousand people turned up to a public meeting in Chiswick last month. More than 700 packed a small hall in Putney, and 600 mobbed a public meeting in Richmond. Thousands more arrived at a protest meeting in Westminster on February 25 ? so many that security staff had to close the doors on safety grounds. More than 10,000 people are expected to join a rally on May 31 at Heathrow itself. These campaigners are backed by a formidable political coalition. Every London mayoral candidate opposes the expansion of Heathrow. The Tories? Peter Ainsworth addressed the Westminster meeting, as did Nick Clegg and Vince Cable for the Liberal Democrats. MPs from across the political spectrum lined up to condemn Ruth Kelly and the government. Virtually all the speakers highlighted climate change as the main reason why they opposed the new runway. And direct-action campaigners have promised a sustained scorched-earth campaign unless the government backs down. This will be the iconic climate change battle of the decade ? with Gordon Brown?s government cast as the enemy. That is, unless Ruth Kelly can summon up the courage to stand up to BAA before it is too late.