No place for Blair as EU leader
October 27, 2009
The media is full of speculation about the new European president. Probably within a week the way will be open for the new appointment.
Sadly, the Irish ‘Yes’ vote to the Lisbon Treaty leaves only the Czech government with any power in the situation. The Czech Republic has suffered grievously from invasions and clearly values its sovereignty. It has rejected the US missile defence system and its desire for independence in foreign policy may well lead to a rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. But, should President Vaclav Klaus allow the treaty to pass, the door will be opened to a new president of Europe.
The position is a sort of executive head of the government of Europe. He or she is to be elected for two-and-half years and would be allowed to seek re-election for a second term. The president is supposed to operate by consensus to ensure “continuity” in European policy-making. Working almost in parallel will be another new position, that of foreign affairs and security representative.
The European Union has always suffered a serious democratic deficit and the new positions would make the situation even worse. For all the talk of the new leader’s “election,” the situation is more akin to the College of Cardinals electing a new Pope. The 25 heads of government will meet and agree by a majority who the new president will be. Thus 13 heads of government can elect a president for the entire continent. The European Parliament will have no say, national parliaments will have no say and perish the thought that the people should have any say.
The creation of the post of president is a triumph for the tenacity of the European long-sighters. The project has always been to create a huge free-market Europe, with ever-limiting powers for national parliaments and an increasingly powerful common foreign and security policy.
The proposed European constitution met a swift end when it was rejected in France by people concerned about the marketisation of Europe and the explicit limiting of the public enterprise role of national governments.
But the European council of ministers was undeterred. It set about creating the much more innocuous-sounding Lisbon Treaty. In reality it is little different from its predecessor. It too requires member states to subscribe to a common foreign and defence policy, a European role for NATO and an economic system based on markets with a limited role for the state.
Europe’s social agenda has been under constant threat over the past few decades. The Maastrict Treaty looked to price stability rather than social cohesion as the cornerstone of economic policy. Limiting government borrowing and deficits in the eurozone demonstrates a certain conservative view of the role of the public sector, not to mention a whole host of “liberalisation” methods such as competition in postal services.
Therefore, who the new president is matters a great deal.
David Miliband says we need a president “who stops the traffic in Beijing and all the world’s capitals,” which seems a strange way to approach such a decision. It’s no secret that the man he has in mind is our former PM Tony Blair.
On Iraq and Afghanistan, Blair demonstrated exactly where his priorities were, displaying his contempt for the UN and international law. His decision, taken without any parliamentary consultation, to invite the Bush administration to use Fylingdales and Menwith Hill as part of the US missile defence system showed a contempt for democracy.
Anyone who seriously thinks he should be president of Europe should examine their thinking.
Blair sees things in terms of some self-proclaimed north Atlantic moral superiority in dominating the affairs of the world. The Iraq invasion, its dishonesty and appalling consequences come directly from that kind of perverted logic.
Post-Lisbon the European president and the foreign and security representative will have enormous and largely unaccountable powers. Tony Benn famously described democracy and accountability to a Labour Party conference by advising us to ask three questions of all leaders.
“From where do you derive your authority? In whose interests to do you deliver it? How do we remove you from office?”
Wise words indeed.
Remembering a fine comrade
On Friday, Redmond O’Neill will be buried. Redmond died too young and in great pain. He worked all his life in socialist causes in a disciplined and focused way. As head of administration in City Hall under Ken Livingstone, he did an enormous amount to foster a radical agenda and facilitate the historic visits of Jessie Jackson to the Stop the War million-plus rally in 2003 and of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2006.Last Saturday the Stop the War rally on Afghanistan held a minute’s silence in his memory. Thank you, Redmond, for your tenacity, efficiency and determination
Popular pressure is the only way now
October 20, 2009
George W Bush decided in September 2001 that the tragedy of the World Trade Centre could be avenged by an attack on Afghanistan and prepared for war. Never one to be outdone in the hyperbole stakes, Tony Blair quickly offered a British “blood price.” The UN was stirred into action on the dubious claims that to attack Afghanistan was an act of self-defence and we duly went to the battlefront. Most parliaments of the many participating countries acquiesced in this. They were equally supine when a whole raft of anti-terror laws aping the US Homeland Security Act were introduced.
That was eight years ago - longer than the second world war.
Today, when backed into a corner Brown and other ministers fall back on the argument that this near decade of conflict has our streets safer. However, few would consider themselves safer since 2001. Most would accept that the continuing military presence in Afghanistan and the disaster in Iraq have made their lives far more precarious.
And life for Afghans eight years on from the invasion remains desperate. The Afghan people have known little peace in almost 30 years and their country is under occupation, covered in land mines. The decades of war have created thousands of injured and disabled victims.
Production of poppies for drugs, meanwhile, is at a record high and suggests that either corruption or fear of the consequences mean no action has been taken to stem drug production. The option of converting such products into the painkiller dia-morphine, of which there is a world shortage, has been ignored.
Beyond that, widespread corruption by officials and the consequent loss of enormous sums of western aid to them beggars the question of the whole strategy over the past eight years. In the land of the free, however, the pressures to change this failing strategy are all coming from the wrong direction.
US President Barack Obama was himself elected partly because of his opposition to the Iraq war, and always asserted that the “real” battle was in Afghanistan. Since then he has come under a lot of pressure from hawks in his administration, becoming a prisoner of his own rhetoric on the subject. His subordinate General McCrystal has done what his many very political predecessors have done by making his demands for more money and more troops public.
In response, Obama has opted for a lengthy policy evaluation in which the debate is around troop numbers and whether another 40,000 will suffice. This macabre debate on sending young soldiers to kill, or be killed, will not end with the numbers game.
As with the Vietnam war, a troop increase will heighten tensions and the insatiable demands for more troops will be hard to resist for any president, once set on the course of an elusive “victory.” With this in mind, on Saturday the Stop the War Coalition, together with CND and the British Muslim Initiative, are holding the first demonstration concentrating on Afghanistan since 2001.
The aim of the protest is very obviously to put pressure on British politicians to recognise the huge error of current Afghanistan policy, but there is another dimension to the London demonstration. Around the world people will see the growing opposition being organised in Britain and can themselves be inspired to help end the war - which is already on a precarious footing.
The news that Afghanistan President Karzai will face a run-off election has not been received with much good grace. That widespread fraud was discovered and a partial recount demanded must call the whole election into question. Its impact on the traditional arguments used to justify the conflict has been powerful - after all the West was supposed to be bringing democracy to the region when it invaded in 2001.
And aside from the dubious electoral practices there are other even more serious concerns. While we are tragically all too aware of the deaths of 237 British soldiers, there is much less evidence regarding the number of Afghan dead. Bar sporadic reports of weddings destroyed and tankers bombed the true figure is unknown and probably not recorded.
The war has long since spun out of control. It has spread over into Pakistan and it has not acknowledged the unsettled demands of the Pashto people dating back to British India and partition.
The Taliban actions in Pakistan have provoked a huge reaction by the military, and enormous numbers of people displaced and forced into internal exile. The political consequences of this are huge as instability and more western aid follow.
If this continues, the demands for Western forces to go into Pakistan will grow. What, then, is the reaction of India? Or China?
Is it not time to realise the need for a foreign policy based on something better than the kneejerk reaction of George Bush, 10 years ago?
The demonstration will meet at Hyde Park at 12 noon on October 24.
Speech at Le Mouvement de la Paix event in Caen.
October 18, 2009
Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to this very important peace conference here in Caen: a city that was almost totally destroyed in its central part during the bombing after the Normandy landings in 1944. It is therefore fitting that we should be discussing the threat of war in other parts of the world, in this city.
As a lifelong member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, I have witnessed the ups and downs of the peace movement over many years, and the way in which the arguments for peace and disarmament have changed.
Nuclear weapons were developed during the Second World War, and brutally used against the Japanese people in 1945. They then very quickly became instruments of the Cold War, as the USA, then the USSR, followed by France Britain and China (in that order) developed their own nuclear weapons.
As an instrument of the Cold War they were both terrifying, and very dangerous, but many of us refused to accept the “equality of terror” argument, and instead we campaigned for disarmament by building good relations on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
The astronomical cost in financial terms of nuclear weapons made severe demands upon the economies of many countries, particularly the USSR, helping to lead to its demise in 1990.
That should have been the point at which the continued existence of both the Warsaw Pact and NATO should have ceased, and the role of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe should have taken over. Instead, NATO caste around for a role for itself and has since attempted to develop into a strategic arm of both the European Union and of the United Nations.
We are now at a crucial time in the possibilities of world peace and of both nuclear and conventional disarmament. However, conversely, we are also at a time of the most perilous danger possible, following the war in Iraq and the current conflict in Afghanistan. The reasons promoted, particularly by George Bush and Tony Blair, focused on prosecuting the war on terror. This argument led to the occupation of Afghanistan and was later used for the excuse to invade Iraq. The cost has been huge: the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and an international division between the Western countries and the predominantly Islamic countries, which is having, and will continue to have catastrophic consequences for international relations for the rest of this century at least.
Next Saturday in London we are mounting a big march and demonstration against the war in Afghanistan, and demanding the troops be brought home. The British participation is becoming increasingly unpopular. President Obama was elected in large measure because of his opposition to the Iraq War and his approach to the economic problems facing the United States. Unfortunately, he has always supported the war in Afghanistan and as he now grapples with the decision to deploy 40,000 more troops, every day the whole conflict becomes more reminiscent of the Vietnam war of the 1960s and 70s.
At a time of recession, it is unconscionable to think in terms of continuing these wars, noting the enormous social, moral, political and financial costs associated with them. It is also equally immoral to even consider the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons. During the Cold War the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was agreed, placing conditions on the five declared nuclear weapons states to take steps towards disarmament and in return, all other signatories would refrain from developing nuclear weapons in any form, or causing other people to develop them on their behalf.
The NPT comes up for its quintennial review next year in May (in New York), and it is to be hoped that the 5 declared weapons states will announce some progress toward fulfilling their historical commitments.
In the case of the UK, we are campaigning very hard for the non replacement of the Trident Nuclear missile system and for taking the remaining three submarines off patrol, and for not approving expenditure on new warheads. It is calculated that a new generation of weapons will cost the British people 76 billion pounds over the next 25 years.
However, the NPT of itself cannot bring about disarmament. India and Pakistan have both developed nuclear weapons and despite protestations by the Western powers, have in fact received, in the case of Pakistan, a huge amount of military aid, and in the case of India is now receiving nuclear technology support by the United Stations which is virtually a reward for the development of nuclear weapons, in contravention of the principles of the NPT.
The Middle East is clearly a tinder box and at enormous risk, and whilst I do not support any country developing nuclear weapons, it is very clear that Israel’s possession of 200 nuclear warheads, together with the delivery system makes the possibility of a nuclear free zone in the Middle East very difficult, and makes it impossible to argue that no one else in the region should have nuclear weapons for their own self defense. In my view there must be the strongest possible pressure on Israel to decommission its nuclear weapons as part of the process towards a nuclear free Middle East. It is heartening that Iran has now agreed to International atomic energy authority inspections of all of its facilities and this is the most welcome sign we’ve had from the region in the recent past.
The NPT is important, but it is even more important that there be a UN sponsored Nuclear Weapons Convention that can insure that all nuclear weapon states meet together and begin a process of disarmament.
We are at a crossroads in history. The world has never been more technically advanced than it is at the present time, yet 1 in 6 of the world’s population are without sufficient food. In the case of the poorest people in the poorest countries, they are facing a shorter life expectancy as a result, and a grim future.
The recession is not a time to re-arm but it is a time for peace, disarmament, and it’s a time for conquering economic, environmental and health inequalities. That is the purpose of the peace movement.
Government selling off the family silver
October 13, 2009
Parliament resumed on Monday after an excessively long recess. Greenpeace got there first and, using the simple expedient of a ladder, climbed over the wall and then onto the roof and unfurled banners about climate change. Sunning themselves on the roof and being waved at by passers-by, they looked like the happiest people in Westminster. They at least had a cause they believed in.
Gordon Brown looked glum, having just paid £12,000 back to the House of Commons, and MPs were frantically awaiting a letter from Thomas Legg about their living expenses. Interesting and important as this is, there was something much more sinister going on.
The government’s first response to the recession was to nationalise most of the banks, increase benefits and promote housing and infrastructure investment as a way of maintaining employment. Not exactly revolutionary, but at least sane and useful. Since then it has faltered, first by refusing to take control of the banks and only vaguely even thinking about executive bonuses.
Then it got worse as the government announced that the banks would return to the private sector - having had £60 billion of state support - and that the deficit on the budget must be paid off or at least halved in four years.
This was a green light for the Tories, who immediately promised £50bn in cuts. The Liberal Democrats also pledged to make cuts, but were not as specific with their figures.
New Labour hated to be trumped by any of this, so the weekend was full of stories about government asset sales. A list of sorts was drawn up and optimistic price tags were put on them - a bit like a family in a financial hole, who have cast around the house for things to sell, load into the car boot and head off to the nearest school playground to flog.
This wouldn’t be a great way of managing family finances but, when it comes to national assets, it’s disastrous.
Cabinet Office Minister Liam Byrne announced that the list will include the Tote, Dartford river crossing, the student loan book and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Additionally, councils will be told to sell assets to pay for investment in the future.
It is a strategy worthy of Margaret Thatcher in her heyday. Back then, severe cuts in government funding forced local authorities to sell buildings to property companies and then lease them back at huge rents.
The private finance initiative in the health service places much the same long-term burden on patients and taxpayers. The sales proposed will all cost far more than they will bring in. The Tote generates an income, the student loan book would only be worth buying if the purchaser can make money collecting student loans by increasing the charges.
It seems only a short while ago that students received grants and graduates did not start life in debt. Are we to sell educational achievement to financial wide boys?
Selling the Channel Tunnel link sets a precedent. What’s next? The West Coast Main Line with all the billions spent on it? The East Coast Main Line and all its infrastructure?
This is heading straight back to the mentality of Beeching and the late Nicholas Ridley in closing feeder lines that would become a “burden” on the public purse. The sales so far announced will all cost more in the long run to the public if one works on the principle that state enterprises are there for the common good.
To make cuts in a recession merely deepens that recession. To sell assets means a loss of already huge public investments and enables the purchaser to fleece the public for decades to come.
And all this pain for £16bn? How about making beneficial cuts instead?
Gordon Brown has at last recognised the waste and intrusion of ID cards. How about moving on to cancel Trident and its £76bn millstone? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost many billions already and on current predictions millions more to come. How about aggressively closing tax havens and loopholes to increase government income?
Community development finance institutions are independent organisations that have sprung up which provide finance to individuals, businesses and social enterprises while promoting social justice. In order to ensure citizens have an active role in what happens to their money, such organisations should be supported at government level.
The Tobin tax has also been overlooked, yet is a straightforward sales tax on currency trades across borders, which has the potential to prevent financial crises while at the same time raising an estimated $100-300bn a year to meet other urgent global priorities such as climate change and poverty.
In the end it all comes down to philosophy.
We know what the Tories want. We know the Liberal Democrats essentially approach the recession with the same frame of mind. From Labour we expect - and demand - something different.
Statement on the Western Sahara for the UN Fourth Committee special committee on decolonisation
October 5, 2009
(Statement by Jeremy Corbyn, member of the UK parliament since 1983, is Chair of the Western Sahara Group of MP’s and also Vice Chair of the Human Rights Group.)
I first raised issues concerning the Western Sahara in the UK Parliament in 1984 and on many occasions since then. I have attended a number of European Conferences on the issue and visited the refugee camps in Algeria and the liberated territories. There is something deeply shocking about seeing large numbers of people, now in their third generation, in a refugee camp as a result of the legacy of colonialism.
The United Nations has a crucial role in ensuring there is a peaceful and just future for the people of the Western Sahara. The charter and the De-Colonisation committee exist to protect peoples such as the Saharwi.
The Western Sahara is one of the last unresolved issues of colonialism dating back to the 1884 Congress of Berlin that drew colonial boundaries. Morocco having achieved its complete independence following French withdrawal in 1956 traditionally supported the right of self determination of colonised peoples. This policy changed in the 1970’s and on Spanish withdrawal Morocco occupied the territory, fought to keep it and effectively forced the majority of its people into refugee camps in Algeria, where they have remained for over thirty years,
During this time there have been efforts made by the UN to maintain the ceasefire and to ensure that the Saharwi peoples in the camps are able to sustain life. I pay tribute to the organisations and Governments that have given practical support to the peoples in the camps.
However, maintaining life is only existence and does not constitute proper living or self determination of their own future.
It is clear in law that the Saharwi people have a right of return, that they must be allowed to decide their own future and that Morocco is an occupying power within the meaning of the Hague Convention.
Despite the efforts of the UN and successive Secretary General representatives the people of the Western Sahara have not had the opportunity of a free choice. Successive Moroccan objections prevented and agreed electoral roll being established.
The new UN representative and the High Commissioner for Refugees have set about their work with commendable energy and it is to be hoped that this will bear fruit.
However in the rarified atmosphere of conferences it is easy to forget the reality on the ground.
It is eighteen years since the ceasefire of 1991, thirty four years since the first refugees arrived in Algeria. The sense of anger and disappointment amongst the people leads to huge pressures on the leadership of the Polisario. The refugees, denied their rights and freedom will not remain peaceful for ever. Their poverty and hardship is in stark contrast to the considerable riches of the Western Sahara and its sea that are being exploited by settlers and international companies.
The status quo is not an option; progress must be made.
The European Union has concluded trade agreements and provided a great deal of support to Morocco. This has been done despite protests concerning human rights abuses and the sale of fish from the Western Sahara coast and of minerals extracted from the territory. This is in contravention of the human rights conditions of EU trade agreements and of the Hague convention on occupying powers.
Immediately it is to be hoped that there will be action taken, specifically to allow prison visits and releases.
There must be an acknowledgement of the illegal nature of the continued occupation and political action taken to correct this.
It is important to recognise that this issue first came to the attention of the United Nations in 1963 when the First Special Committee considered the matter. There have been considerations by the General Assembly when resolution 1514 (XV) was carried.
There have been many more resolutions carried and in 1975 the International Court of Justice issued an opinion on this issue.
165,000 people are living in forced exile and action must be taken to ensure they receive the right of their own self determination. The ball is firmly in the court of the United Nations to resolve this matter.
A settlement that brings justice for the Saharwi people will be of huge benefit to all the peoples of the region and ensure good relations between all nations of the Margheb. A peace dividend based on justice.
The time has come for action to end this last colony in Africa and allow its people to return.
