-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM125/LM125_Edit.html {{<Begin>}} 10/31/99 6:05 PM BST Mick Hume Editor One-party state? Don't talk libertarian nonsense When Tony Blair ended his messianic speech to the New Labour conference with that punchline about 'And now, at last, party and nation joined in the same cause', it made some commentators a little nervous about echoes of one-party politics from the past. In an acutely observed piece in the Times, Matthew Parris declared himself uneasy about the speech's 'Tomorrow belongs to me leitmotif of a new order of things', adding that 'Mr Blair's conflation of party with nation' had 'made my flesh creep'. In Scotland on Sunday, Gerald Warner even suggested that Blair's rhetorical flourish had conjured up the spectre of the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl: 'One Nation, One State, One Leader! Sieg Heil!' There is indeed something deeply creepy about this prime minister. And, while Blair is no more a Nazi than he is a Communist, Britain under New Labour is assuredly a one-party state. It is a one-party state, however, with a difference. Opposition forces have not been banned by government diktat, nor defeated in a civil war, nor crushed in a coup. Instead, most of them have been quietly and politely incorporated into the New Labour project. A little over 10 years ago, when old Labour was in total disarray and all meaningful debate took place within the ranks of the Conservative Party, one could talk about Margaret Thatcher's government having established a o ne-party regime. Thatcher's domineering style was to polarise issues and trash all opponents, as she handbagged her way through the 1980s, famously demanding to know of everybody, 'Is he One of Us?', and giving short shri ft to the many who failed that test. Blair, by contrast, preaches the doctrine of 'inclusiveness'. He has self-consciously defined himself as the man in the middle of British politics, and invited all politicians of the centre to join the creeping New Labour consensus. Exclusion orders will be served only on those few deemed to be one of 'them' - the hardcore minority 'forces of conservatism' against whom Blair aimed his fire in that Bournemouth address. The Liberal Democrats have effectively become a kind of soft left wing of New Labour, providing not so much an opposition in the House as an in-house opposition. Leading Tories, too, have been seen waving from atop the Bl air crusade bus. The launch of the 'Britain in Europe' campaign in October had heavyweight Conservatives such as the former cabinet ministers Michael Heseltine, Kenneth Clarke and Chris Patten lining up behind the prime m inister. It is not only opposition politicians who have been brought into the Blair fold. From industry to the media and from entertainment to the universities, few corners of British society have been left untouched by New Labour 's recruitment campaign. Every influential body has moved within Blair's orbit, to the point where even those who are not entirely seduced want to be involved. One remarkable result is that there is no longer any serious anti-Labour lobby within the British business community. Where previous Labour leaders might have sought to ingratiate themselves with the old establishment, the New Labour government (while not above a bit of toadying to the royals) has set about forging a new elite bearing it s own stamp. As James Heartfield demonstrates in detail elsewhere in this issue of LM, this process of transition within the political class may not yet be complete, but it has quickly entrenched New Labour's people in po wer as the agents of one-party rule. Two and a half years after Blair's electoral success, it is now clear that New Labour is the natural party of government for the end of the 1990s. It is equally clear, however, that Blair's party is not really the conscio us architect of its own success. It has had no grand political masterplan to implement. Rather, New Labour draws its strength from the way that it reflects political and cultural changes which have occurred in Britain sin ce the 1980s. Where Blair's people have tried to innovate policy initiatives, as with the Millennium Dome or the new Scottish and Welsh assemblies, they have met with a response that is lukewarm at best. But where they ha ve surfed and assimilated existing trends in society, rebranding them as their own, they have been much better able to establish their authority. 'The class war is over', Blair announced at the Bournemouth conference. If he meant that the old political battle between right and left has ended, few would argue. What is less clear is who won that contest. As one Ameri can commentator recently observed, the left lost the economic war, but the right lost the culture war. As a consequence we are left with a world in which everybody accepts (albeit without much enthusiasm) that there is no alternative to the capitalist market. Yet at the same time, few are prepared to champion the values of Enlightenment thinking and individual freedom that capitalism has traditionally claimed as its own. The resulting pec uliar compromise has proved to be New Labour's home ground. Now that nobody will contest the market system, economics has been reduced to a technical matter of fiddling with regulations. This is a job for which Gordon Brown and the rest of New Labour's boring bean-counters are wel l suited. As Blair boasted in Bournemouth, we've 'never had it so prudent'. His government is even better suited than the Tories were to pursuing some economic policies associated with the Thatcherite 1980s, such as the e ndless attempts to reform the funding of the health, welfare and education systems. Where Tory traditionalists might have balked at too much confrontation with the professions, New Labour's control freaks are never happie r than when ceaselessly searching for a more technocratic style of government. New Labour also provides the perfect language for today's culture of lower expectations. As the party of the therapeutic state, it best articulates the debased politics of emotionalism and sentimentality, as symbolised by Blair's constant use of children as a human shield in his Bournemouth speech. And in the spheres of art and education, the new cultural elite's doctrine of 'inclusion' and non-judgemental diversity has smoothed the way f or the rise of relativism and retreat from standards of excellence. For more than a century, the Conservatives were the dominant party of British politics. Not only are they now unelectable, but there seems no reason for them to exist outside of the all-encompassing blancmange of Mr Blair 's political centre. The Tory conference in Blackpool did not really, as many claimed, signal a lurch to the right. Rather it was symptomatic of a party lurching all over the place in search of something to stand for. The process has produced some eccentric policies. It would be easy to think, for example, that the Tories now favour both keeping the hereditary peers and electing the second chamber. And one might just as easily conclude th at the party is for or against GM foods, depending on whether one listened to the shadow trade and industry secretary or the shadow environment team. Yet perhaps the rump of William Hague's Tory Party does still have one role. It is a similar part to that played by the American Communist Party in the 1950s - as a fringe group whose importance is deliberately inflated b y its mainstream opponents, in order to give those in power something to define themselves against. As Blair searches for a 'moral purpose' to substitute for a political vision, he needs to identify dragons for New Labour to vanquish. That is the role he has allotted to the evil 'forces of conservatism'. And many of Hague's Tories seem willing to play the part. Their obsession with Europe is less about the details of monetary policy than the feeling that Europe is something to do with the future, while they are more comfortable with the past. That way lies the path to becoming a party of British aborigines, existing only to uphold the ancient rituals and rights of a displaced minority. Whether or not we care about the fate of the Tories, there are obvious dangers in the emergence of the one-party state. New Labour's authority in society is broad, but it is shallow, not being based on real political comm itment. The insecure new elite often acts like a thin-skinned authoritarian. In Bournemouth, when Blair divided the world between those who follow him - the 'progressive forces' - and everybody else - the 'forces of conservatism' - it sounded like a divide between good and evil. And when he told u s that New Labour had not doctrines but 'eternal values', it sounded less like a political party than the guardian of the Holy Grail. Such a moralistic outlook will brook no criticism, as those who have tried to argue wit h Blair's leadership have found on issues ranging from Kosovo to the countryside. New Labour's true colours shone through in the passage of Blair's speech that dealt with civil liberties. The arguments for freedom from state control were simply waved aside as 'libertarian nonsense'. The civil liberty h e believes in, the prime minister told us, is the freedom to live in a civil society free from the scourge of drugs. Then he announced a new law and order crackdown and DNA testing for all offenders. The implication was that any measure is legitimate if it is done in the name of keeping the streets clean and our children safe. That amounts to a blank cheque for the authorities to do as they see fit, while damning anybody who complains as an enemy of civilised society. The only liberty Blair's approach upholds is the freedom of the state to intrude into ever-more areas of everyday life. The irony of Blair's pitch is that New Labour represents the truly powerful force of social conservatism today. He banged on in Bournemouth about seeking the 'liberation of human potential'. Yet on everything from tying up scientists in red tape to urging economic restraint, from curtailing personal freedoms to dictating how people bring up their children, his government is doing the very opposite in practice. Some might think that the precondition for any genuine attempt to liberate the human potential would be to give people the freedom to think and act, not as part of a consensus-obsessed party-nation, but as autonomous individuals. They might even assume that kind of freedom to be the only basis for any meaningful collective initiative. But that, as we now know, is libertarian nonsense. If this magazine is bankrupted by the ITN libel case in the next few months, perhaps somebody should bring out one with a more meaningful title. Like 'LN'. @http://www.informinc.co.uk/ITN-vs-LM/story/whole_story.html > The February 1997 issue of LM magazine ran a story which raised embarrassing > questions about ITN's award-winning pictures from a Bosnian Serb-run camp. ITN > tried to have every copy of the magazine, which contained the article The > Picture that Fooled the World by German journalist Thomas Deichmann, pulped. LM > has refused to back down and ITN have sued the magazine's editor and publishers > for libel. Read why the magazine is refusing to give in to ITN's libel writs and > gagging orders in an open letter from Mick Hume, editor of LM. This site tells > the whole story ITN does not want you to read, and explains what has happened so > far in the libel case. Join us to defend press freedom and free speech against > this unprecedented attack by a media giant. }}} Excerpt from http://www.informinc.co.uk/ITN-vs-LM/story/LM97_Bosnia.html The whole story: The original article 'The picture that fooled the world' Photo: ITN archive This image of an emaciated Muslim caged behind Serb barbed wire, filmed by a British news team, became a worldwide symbol of the war in Bosnia. But the picture is not quite what it seems. German journalist Thomas Deichmann reveals the full story The picture reproduced on these pages is of Fikret Alic, a Bosnian Muslim, emaciated and stripped to the waist, apparently imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence in a Bosnian Serb camp at Trnopolje. It was taken from a videotape shot on 5 August 1992 by an award-winning British television team, led by Penny Marshall (ITN) with her cameraman Jeremy Irvin, accompanied by Ian Williams (Channel 4) and the reporter Ed Vulliamy from the Guardian newspaper. For many, this picture has become a symbol of the horrors of the Bosnian war - 'Belsen '92' as one British newspaper headline captioned the photograph (Daily Mirror, 7 August 1992). But that image is misleading. The fact is that Fikret Alic and his fellow Bosnian Muslims were not imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence. There was no barbed wire fence surrounding Trnopolje camp. It was not a prison, and certainly not a 'concentration camp', but a collection centre for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished. The barbed wire in the picture is not around the Bosnian Muslims; it is around the cameraman and the journalists. It formed part of a broken-down barbed wire fence encircling a small compound that was next to Trnopolje camp. The British news team filmed from inside this compound, shooting pictures of the refugees and the camp through the compound fence. In the eyes of many who saw them, the resulting pictures left the false impression that the Bosnian Muslims were caged behind barbed wire. }}}End Excerpt Reproduced from LM issue 125, November 1999 http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM125/LM125_Edit.html Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] {{<End>}} A<>E<>R ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense." --Buddha + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." 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