The WEEK ending 11 June 2000
CLASS WAR?
Since the local elections in May, the British Labour government has been preoccupied with its 'core support', who are supposed to be 'alienated'. The truth is that New Labour does not have any core support. The New Labour project was defined by its opposition to old Labour's creaky party machinery and the old trade union bosses. The party membership was always a middle class clique, but their numbers are getting smaller every month. Even Blair's counter-pitch to 'middle England' blew up in his face when the Women's Institute at Wembley greeted his appeal to community and family values with a slow hand-clap on 7 June. He was, they said, 'too political' - meaning that they resented being used as a backdrop for the latest re-launch of new-brand Labour.
The government's cynical response is to stoke up demotic resentment at supposedly over-privileged Oxbridge colleges. Seizing on the case of Laura Spence, the Tyneside schoolgirl turned down for a medicine course by Magdalene College, Chancellor Gordon Brown promised a campaign against the 'old boy network'.
New Labour's protestations about privilege are no class war in the making. On the contrary, Blair's ruling class party is only prepared to toy with the rhetoric of the class war because of the historically unprecedented quiescence of the mass of working people. If there were any danger that a real campaign against privilege would ensue, the government would never even mention the issue. The government's 'social exclusion unit' makes cosmetic protests over uneven distribution of goods in society, while Blair has endorsed the ascendance of the propertied classes that gives rise to it.
With no intention of redressing the distribution of power in society, Brown's observation that the children of those with power get to go to good universities is banal. Worse, his willingness to make universities into an instrument of social amelioration threatens their role as centres of excellence. The independence of the universities to select according to their needs is worth defending. If college places are to be distributed according to social policy, education will take a back seat, and free intellectual development will have to take place elsewhere.
LIONISING ASSAD
Hafez al Assad, president of Syria died on 10 June, a friend of the West that had demonised him as a dictator from his seizure of power in November 1970 to his support for operation Desert Shield in 1991. Born 6 October 1930, educated in the lycée and the Soviet air force, Assad was a member of the moderate, pan-Arabic Ba'ath party founded by Michel Aflak in the 1940s. Uniting the Arab world against the West was a powerful idea only defeated by playing of different Arab states against each other. In the 1970s Assad's Ba'ath regime was vilified as the original terroristic state while America made his Ba'athist counterpart in Iraq, Saddam Hussein an ally.
Before assuming the presidency, Assad had used his position as airforce chief to rein in support for the PLO, refusing air cover to Syrian tanks that were trying to defend Palestinians against the Jordanian slaughter of Black September. In power, though, Assad played up his credentials as a leader of the Arab nation refusing to endorse the US sponsored Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978. The Syrian intervention in the Lebanon two years earlier was presented in the West as evidence of Assad's dictatorial ambitions. Assad's sponsorship of George Habash's radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was a proxy in the conflict with Israel.
The reversal of Assad's status in the West, from demon to champion was arbitrary and perverse. Re-motivating US military strategy in the region by turning on their former ally Saddam Hussein, America sought Arab support from those very states that Saddam had attacked while working for the West. Assad opportunistically endorsed the allied campaign against Iraq, contributing troops to the assault called 'Desert Storm'. Assad's participation in Desert Storm was a trial organised by the West, to see if they could 'do business' with the ageing dictator. Assad's influence on Arab nationalist opinion was used to moderate Hizbullah and Palestinian opposition to the peace process.
AUTHORITARIAN FANTASIES
A year ago David Copeland planted three nail-bombs in as many weeks in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho. He killed three people, injured scores more and caused an understandable alarm and distress amongst Londoners, especially members of the minority groups he targeted. But last April's bombs were also a cue for left-wing commentators to mount an exploitative press campaign, whipping up fears that a resurgent far right was seeking to undermine tolerance and multiculturalism.
Copeland's trial has given the lie to that propaganda. From the outset it was clear that the nail-bombings were not the work of the vanguard of the Fourth Reich but of an isolated loser. Copeland was a loner who scornfully described the much-talked up Combat 18 as 'a bunch of yobs'. He learned his bomb-making skills not from hardened fascist militants but from the internet. His explosives came not from a secret Euro-Nazi network but from over-the-counter fireworks that he took home on his bicycle. Less black-shirted stormtrooper, more demented anorak, Copeland told police that his heroes were Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and an American serial killer. This bedsit bomber said that he wanted to be caught so that he could be famous.
The sad old left's fantasies about fascism on the march are shared by the New Labour Home Office. Since the bombings, the police have carried out high-profile raids on right-wing activists whose racist opinions are unacceptable to the new elite. Exploiting fears about 'terrorists' like Copeland, this government has strengthened the already draconian anti- terrorist powers enjoyed by the police. The far right has made no political impact in Britain for many years. The fantasy politics of anti-fascism, on the other hand, continue to provide a crucial ideological plank in the platform of our authoritarian ruling party.
NO TEARS FOR BRIGADIER SAUNDERS
British military attaché Brigadier Stephen Saunders was shot dead in Athens by the November 17 group on 8 June. In an emotional plea to the press Saunders' wife Heather said that the killers had destroyed her, and her daughter as well.
Stephen Saunders was a career soldier who rose to the highest ranks of the most proficient killing machine in the world, the British Army. The son of an Army officer, he graduated from the military college at Sandhurst and was commissioned in the Duke of Edinburgh's Royal Regiment (Berkshire and Wiltshire). Before him the regiment were part of the 'occupying army' that Churchill sent to defeat the former allies of the Greek resistance fighters EOKA and install a military dictatorship.
Saunders was mentioned in dispatches for his role in the Berkshire and Wiltshire's brutal reign over south Armagh, 1973-4, which solidified opposition to British rule in the area that became known as 'bandit country'. He was promoted to northern Ireland Headquarters in the early eighties at the height of the 'Shoot-to-kill' policy of assassinating republican activists. He was made Colonel in 1992 and Deputy Commander of the Headquarters 8th Infantry Brigade in 1992, a crack counterinsurgency force operating around Derry. (Captain Fred Holroyd who exposed Britain's dirty tricks in northern Ireland in his book War Without Honour was attached to Headquarters 3rd Infantry Brigade which, despite the numbering, was one of only two such others.)
British rule in northern Ireland secured, Saunders played a more political role as part of the UNIKOM force sustaining the blockade of Iraq in 1997, at a time when deaths from malnutrition and disease were running at several thousand a month. Following the aerial bombardment of the Balkans in 1999 Brigadier Saunders was sent as attaché in Athens to promote Britain's military presence in the region. -- James Heartfield
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