HINDUJA SCANDAL
The transformation of the British Labour Party in the mid-nineties from unelectable trade union lobby to the face of New Britain was based on the theory of 'triangulation'. Clinton pollster Dick Morris advised Blair's team that they would have to run against their own record as well as fighting the Conservatives, mapping out a 'third way'. Spin doctor Peter Mandelson developed the twin-track strategy of making the party a friend of business on the one hand, and denouncing the Tories for their 'corruption'. The charge of corruption was important because it sublimated Labour's traditional appeal to anti-business sentiments into a form of Christian piety more acceptable to the establishment. As the party distanced itself from its working class base, public disaffection with politicians reinforced the perception that all politicians were corrupt - a perception, ironically, that reinforced Labour's anti-corruption drive.
Once in power the contradictions of Labour's anti-corruption policy have become apparent. Labour's friends in business from Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone to the millionaire Hinduja brothers have, not surprisingly, wanted things from the government. Having promised a government with clean hands, Labour are surprised to find that its business interests are subjected to intense scrutiny. Without a real base of support in the country, people are willing to believe the worst of what are in the end, mostly insubstantial scandals. And without a political movement in which struggle and debate clarifies events, personality clashes drive the government. The result is that the 'Machiavellian' Mandelson slipped on his second banana-skin, accused of helping the Hinduja brothers get a passport, stabbed in the back by the Prime Minister's press secretary Alastair Campbell, to the delight of the press.
Anti Nazi League
Britain's Second World War leader Winston Churchill said of Germany's anti-Jewish law in 1938 that 'it was a hindrance and an irritation, but probably not an obstacle to a working agreement' (Clive Ponting, Churchill, p394), and in any event shared Hitler's prejudice that the real danger came from 'tyrannic government of these Jew Commissars' in Soviet Russia (Ibid. p230). During the war the British Ministry of Information decided against publicizing the extermination of the Jews, on the expectation that few people would sympathise with them. Since the war, the establishment's attitude to Hitler's 'Final Solution' has always been problematic. The Soviet-bloc countries drew what little legitimacy they had from the identification of capitalism with fascism. Though British governments revelled in anti-German chauvinism, the historical role of business in supporting Hitler always gave anti- Fascism a radical edge.
With the dissolution of the Soviet-bloc many radicals sought to reinvigorate their appeal by cranking up campaigns like the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), seeking out handfuls of retrograde British Right-Wingers. Here at least was a relatively popular campaign. Even the Union of Jewish Students, with whom the left had formerly come to blows over Israel, could support the campaign to commemorate the Holocaust. What the radicals missed, though, was that removed from the context of its relationship to capitalism, the holocaust had become a safe issue for the establishment. In fact, as a commemoration of human suffering holocaust remembrance could serve quite conservative ends. Yesterday's first British Holocaust Remembrance Day gathered choirs of schoolchildren to Westminster Hall to hear the Prime Minister and the Chief Rabbi wring their hands over the persistence of evil in the world. Holocaust remembrance, with its promise of redemption through the recollection of suffering, has become the equivalent of the Christian religion in a secular age.
TOO VULGAR TO ADOPT?
The British Courts backed Flintshire Social Services' decision to seize twins Kimberly and Belinda, adopted by a Welsh couple, the Kilshaws, who made contact with the natural mother over the internet. The decision comes after heavy-handed interventions from one 'disgusted' Home Secretary Jack Straw, and the Prime Minister Tony Blair. The press campaign against the Kilshaws in essence is that they are too vulgar to adopt children. With bad hair, brash manners and an untidy house, their lives were dissected in a press feeding frenzy. And then, in a fit of self-righteousness, the press accused the Kilshaws of parading the twins, and their own children, in the media.
Once a champion of the new technology, the Prime Minister said that he was especially appalled that the twins had been 'adopted over the internet'. But the twins were in fact adopted in an Arkansas court, whose decisions would ordinarily be recognized as wholly legitimate. What really offended Blair was that ordinary people had come to an arrangement amongst themselves, without going through the proper channels of state supervision and regulation. But the facts are that the Kilshaws have a much better record of raising healthy, well-adjusted children than do the British Social Services. A recent study by the Prime Minister's own Social Exclusion Unit found that a majority of children raised in care would serve time in prison.
-- James Heartfield