[A-List] Paul Foot on New Labour

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Worse than Thatcher

Paul Foot
Wednesday May 14, 2003
The Guardian

My earliest memories of David Triesman glow with pride at the furious and
eventually successful campaign to get him reinstated as a suspended student
at Essex University in the late 1960s. He was a wild man of the Very Far
Left. I didn't follow his subsequent career very closely, except
occasionally to observe him on the usual dreary road from left to right,
until he ended up as general secretary of the Labour party.

Last week, acting entirely on his own authority, he suspended George
Galloway from Labour party membership. He gave as a "reason" some mild
remarks George made about the role of his party leader during the war in
Iraq. Triesman made no comment about the hotly disputed allegations made
against George by the Daily Telegraph, but the suspension can only have
damaged George's libel case against the newspaper. What amused me most,
however, was Triesman's pathetic whine that he was acting against George
exactly as he or any of his predecessors would have acted against any other
party member. Really?

How did the Labour party leadership respond, for instance, to the shocking
story of Geoffrey Robinson's massive (and secret) loan to his fellow
minister Peter Mandelson? What action followed the revelations about the
extremely close connections between Mandelson and the Hinduja brothers when
the latter were under investigation in India for the most monstrous arms
dealing?

What action did the Labour party take against Dr John Reid when the
parliamentary standards commissioner exposed his nepotistic employment of
his son on a salary paid out of his parliamentary office cost allowance? As
far as I know, there was no Labour party investigation into any of these
allegations, each of them in my view much more damaging to the Labour
movement than the trenchant comments of George Galloway. There were no
suspensions. Robinson is still an MP. So is Mandelson. So shocked were the
Labour leaders at the revelations about Dr Reid that they promoted him - to
be chairman of the Labour party and now leader of the House of Commons. I
wonder whether David Triesman ever reflects on the ideals and passion of his
youth, and compares them with his current responsibility for New Labour.
How, for instance, does he hope to persuade people that the Labour party
still deserves the support of the workers and the poor? This week come
official figures to prove that after six years of Labour government the gap
between rich and poor in Britain is even wider than it was under Thatcher.
"Worse than Thatcher" is a terrible indictment, but thoroughly deserved. In
every area of social and political endeavour the New Labour administration
has distanced itself from its origins, promoted and enriched the rich,
glorified them for their wealth and occasionally even dabbled in their greed
and their corruption. Those who speak up for the rich are promoted,
ennobled, rewarded. Those who have the guts to speak out against them and
their cabinet toadies are suspended.

Is Tam Dalyell anti-semitic? My first job as a young feature writer on the
Scottish Daily Record 41 years ago was to interview the Labour candidate at
a parliamentary by-election in West Lothian, an engaging Old Etonian who
lived in a castle. I liked him at once (and have liked him ever since) but
was rather surprised when he told me a few months later that there was only
one socialist country on earth: Israel. Obviously, Tam has changed his mind
since, and obviously he is wrong to complain about Jewish pressure on Blair
and Bush when he means Zionist pressure. But that's a mistake that is
constantly encouraged by the Zionists. The most honourable and principled
Jews, here, in Israel and everywhere else, are those who oppose the
imperialist and racist policies of successive Israeli governments. It was a
Palestinian Jew, Tony Cliff, who convinced me very early in life that the
six-day Israeli war in 1967 was a war of conquest and occupation that would
make it easier for US billionaires to keep their fingers on the region's
oil. When I wrote in this column not long ago about the discrepancy in
reactions to UN resolutions against Israel and against Iraq, I was surprised
to read a rebuttal from a representative of the Board of Deputies of British
Jews. The Board was set up in 1760 to "protect, support and defend the
interests and religious rights and customs of the Jewish community in the
UK". There are lots of Jews in Britain who are bitterly opposed to the
loathsome Israeli occupation of other peoples' countries and the grotesque
violence it involves. Are their interests also protected and defended by the
Board of Deputies? If not, are the deputies guilty of making the mistake for
which they denounce Tam Dalyell?