Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

Something very odd is happening. The suspect wanted by the police for ‘masterminding’ the 7/7 and 21/7 bombings, Haroon Rashid Aswat, has now been detained in the UK for seven months, but apparently not even been questioned about the bombings. Instead he is being held awaiting a decision by the Home Secretary to extradite him to the US on the grounds of setting up a terrorist training base in Oregon. This may however be explained by the sensational statement made on the US Fox Television network by the American terrorism expert, John Loftus, a former senior FBI prosecutor, that Aswat is in fact an agent of MI6 and has been under their protection for many years. In Loftus’ own words: “What’s really embarrassing is that the entire British police are out chasing him, and one wing of the Government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him……He’s a double agent”.

This is not the first time that information put into the public domain by the UK security services has turned out to be distinctly dodgy. We were told for months that US rendition flights taking prisoners to countries that sanctioned torture had never landed at British airfields. It is now admitted that two CIA-chartered aircraft used for this purpose landed at least 14 times at Northolt and Brize Norton in a 7-month period shortly after the Iraq War.

We were told (eerily familiar from the 9/11 attacks) that the 7/7 London bombings last year came out of the blue and the security services had no prior warning. We now know, from internal security sources, that MI5 was aware a year beforehand that two of the bombers were planning to fight for Al-Qaeda, and had bugged them for two months as they talked about this and their plans to return to a camp in Pakistan for British terrorists. Rebel MI5 agents have leaked documents showing Ministers withheld information from the public about what the security services knew about the suspects before the bombings. They want an inquiry into ‘intelligence failures’, but this has been rejected.

When the Brazilian Jean Charles de Manezes was shot shortly after the abortive 21 July bombings, a series of allegations about his behaviour and clothing were made public to justify his wrongful killing. Again, we now know that none of them was true.

We are already familiar, in the case particularly of the Iraq War, of stories being planted in the public domain to manipulate opinion into the acceptance of policies that would otherwise have been insupportable. The story of an alleged ‘poison gas’ attack on the London Underground broke in November 2002, four months before the Iraq War was started. MI5 and police sources were cited to claim that “a terrorist attack had been nipped in the bud”. In fact, no plot had been discovered.

Even more significantly, on 5 January 2003, just two months before the war, a police raid on a flat in Wood Green, north London, was said to have found a ‘poisons laboratory’, including recipes for ricin. Two days later the Prime Minister announced that the discovery highlighted the dangers of WMD and that “the arrests show this danger is present and real and with us now. Its potential is huge”. Yet on that same day chemical weapons experts at Porton Down had found in more accurate tests that the initial positive result for ricin was false. There was no ricin in the flat. But this crucial evidence was kept suppressed for over two years. When by chance it did come to light in the Kamel Bourgass murder case, the defence lawyers argued that it was a massive conspiracy tapestry woven by the authorities, and used by the government to justify the war in Iraq and detention without trial in the UK.

A similar tactic was used to legitimise the war in Kosovo in 1999. The then US Defence Secretary, William Cohen, claimed that “We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing…they may have been murdered”. The Prime Minister invoked the Holocaust, and the British press took up the call with headlines like “Flight from genocide”. Yet a year later the International War Crimes Tribunal found that the final body count in Kosovo’s ‘mass graves’ was less than 2,800. The genocide-that-wasn’t had legitimised a war that was actually aimed at the dismemberment of the last centralised State-run economy in Europe.

Even when the true facts have been uncovered by independent investigation, the security services may still try to spin a false line. When the American-led Iraq Survey Group were due to report categorically after the war that there were no WMD in Iraq, John Scarlett, head of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee, still tried to insert 9 ‘nuggets’ into the report, reintroducing claims that the ISG had already found to be false, to make it appear that maybe there were still WMD out there. Not content with the ‘sexing up’ of the Government’s original dossier, he then tried to do the same to the US report.

The implications of this catalogue of fabrications, distortions and lies are serious. Can the security services and the authorities be trusted? Two reforms are clearly called for. One concerns the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee which at present is appointed by the Prime Minister and reports directly to him, and he can edit their report before publication if he chooses. If intelligence briefings are not to be selectively used or misrepresented for political purposes, the ISC should in future be appointed by the House as a whole, should receive full intelligence briefings on key issues, and should report directly to the House.

Second, allegations made by the security services or Home Office against alleged terrorists should not by themselves alone justify indefinite detention by control orders without charge or trial. Charges should be stated and a trial held unless a judge independently, on the precedent of public interest indemnity certificates, concurs with the Home Secretary’s advice that there are overriding reasons of national security that the evidence cannot be made public at an open trial. This is a reform which Parliament should insist upon later this year when the Terrorism Act is due for review.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 06:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Where does the Labour Party go from here? At the PLP meeting on Monday the Prime Minister made two main points. One was that Members should trust him and leave the timetable for his departure to himself. The other was his claim that the Labour Government would not get a fourth term unless it stuck to his strategy. Yet all the evidence over the last year suggests the opposite: that we will not win a fourth term if we stick to his strategy.

The loss of 4 million votes since 1997 and of half the party’s membership, and now the loss of 320 Council seats, does not suggest underlying popular support. Understandably several colleagues at the PLP called for unity, but unity can only be achieved around a framework of policies which command broad support both within the Party and among the public. Unity will not be achieved simply by a transfer of leadership which continues existing policies which have brought us to this point, but only by a renewal of the party around new and different policies which can regain both party and public aspiration.

So what is wrong with British politics today? The single biggest problem is the lack of accountability of power. It underlies every issue where the Party and the public disapproves of Government policy, but cannot change it. There is little point in lobbying Parliament or taking to the streets in protest at war in Iraq or Iran, or the replacement of Trident or a new round of nuclear power stations, or the marketisation of public services, or anything else, if the Government (for which often read the Prime Minister) has already made up his mind, isn’t listening.and can’t be held to account. The checks and balances have all but disappeared.

What is needed is a new framework of power which restores the authority of the House of Commons, secures effective Ministerial control of the civil service, and moves to a more constitutional type of premiership. Parliament through strengthened Select Committees, chosen by a secret vote of the whole House in accordance with Party numbers and not by the Whips, should have statutory power to ratify Cabinet appointments, to summon Ministers and require disclosure of all relevant documents, to appoint external Committees of Inquiry where the Government may be reluctant to do so, and to table its own motions for debate on the floor of the House at least once a month with a vote at the conclusion. The honours system, which is corrupted by patronage more than a reward for merit, should be sharply reduced and overseen by Parliament, or preferably abolished.

Once Parliament was empowered to respond effectively to public and Party opinion, a wholly different agenda becomes possible. Inequality is now more extreme even than under Thatcher. It is true that child poverty has been reduced, pensioner allowances extended, and tax credits increased. But the Government’s own figures just published show 11.4 million, a fifth of the population, still living in poverty at the same time as FTSE-100 chief executives earned on average last year £32,263 a week, or 408 times more per week than the State pension and 185 times more than the minimum wage. This is utterly unacceptable: income and wealth are not generated by the rich but by teamwork, and pay should reflect that, which the capitalist market does not. Two reforms are urgently needed to redress this. The bonuses, so-called ‘fringe benefits’ and stock options enjoyed by the rich should be costed and taxed at the marginal rate which should be 50% in excess of £100,000. At the other end of the scale, the minimum wage, currently £5.05 an hour, should be steadily raised over a 5-year period to the Council of Europe Decency Threshold (currently £7.40 an hour), which would take 6.5 million out of poverty.

A reinvigorated Parliament is also needed as a bulwark for the championing of civil liberties. We are currently seeing the rebalancing of power towards the State, with restrictions on jury trials, cutbacks in legal aid, a national database kept on all individuals registered via ID cards, limits on the right to protest, the use of control orders for detention without charge or trial, and even the use of the Terrorism Act to frogmarch a pensioner off the premises. Without in any way risking genuine national security, which must remain paramount, many elements of this illiberal legislation can and should be reversed, and Parliament should take the lead.

The obsessive introduction of the private market model into every area of public services – the NHS, education, housing, pensions, probation and local authority ‘strategic development partnerships’ – does not have either party or public support or the evidence base to justify it. What is needed instead is a genuine public service model – identifying failings that do exist in delivery of the service and vigorously remedying them, but retaining the structure and concept of a public service that uniquely expresses an equal citizenship and nationhood for all.

New measures are needed to restore equity and justice as a balance against the overriding drive for economic efficiency. As Sweden has shown, a more socially integrated society is also more economically dynamic. Social mobility, which all support, is highest in countries with much more equal distribution of income and wealth. A fixation with economic dominance within the Lisbon EU agenda has led to downplaying environmental goals against unfettered expansion of car and plane travel, weaker targeting of industrial emissions, and slower development of renewables and energy conservation. Equally, industrial rights in the workplace are kept suppressed in cases of unfair dismissal, reinstatement, corporate manslaughter, and union recognition.

Lastly a new start is needed in our relations with the US, especially under the Bush Administration. There are two arguments for the present policy of continuing to hug the US close. One is that, downstream of the US, that is the best way to influence events. But as we found out, painfully, over the Iraq war, there was no reciprocity, even in the award of contracts afterwards. The other is that we are so dependent on the US for our strategic defence capability that we have no alternative but to stay close. But politically that dependence means forever relegating ourselves to a role of mere accessory to US military goals, serving under a US command and fostering a unilateral US hegemony when the aim of UK foreign policy should be a stronger role for the UN in support of multilateralism and the rule of international law.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 06:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)