Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous
By Nick Cohen
Verso, 2000
247pp, $35(pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/23110
"I appreciate there were some people who voted for us who thought we would make a difference. They didn't understand" — it is unguarded candour like this from a newly elected MP in Tony Blair's 1997 New Labour landslide that gets straight to the heart of Labour Party politics in Britain.
The above quote was from a woman Labour MP who, once in government, pushed through cuts to single mothers' pensions. When she was in opposition, she had maintained that you do not help the poor by plunging them further into poverty.
This is just one of the illustrations of New Labour's enlistment in the class war against the poor drawn by Nick Cohen, a "left-of-centre" reporter for the liberal capitalist Observer magazine.
The recanting of this politician, whose opposition rhetoric did not survive election night, has been repeated across the board, from welfare policy to foreign policy. "Joining New Labour is like joining the Mafia", says Cohen, "you must kill what you love to prove your loyalty".
When Cohen listens to Tony and the Blairites, he hears them "singing every song in the Tory songbook, and composing new numbers of their own". The New Labour arias have the same melody as old conservatism, despite the different lyrics of Blair's "New Way", which is supposedly "beyond left and right" of the tired old ideological and class divide. The "inclusive" Blair is bridging the divide by "governing for all", a libretto that certain Australian Labor premiers and would-be prime ministers are smitten with.
Despite the "Under New Management" sign hung outside Whitehall, however, a closer examination of Labour's new "ideology-free political zone" shows that it is business as usual for established capitalist concerns such as Britain's arms exporters.
Tough talk against human rights abusers such as Burma and Indonesia is cheap when in opposition, to be quietly abandoned when governing a country which is the second largest arms exporter in the world. Anything — like human rights — that gets in the way of trade and investment overseas, and repatriating the profits back to British capitalists, is a luxury that Labour must do without.
Opening up new areas of society to the invigorating broom of profit-making is a particular Blairite crusade. New Labour's "inclusiveness" means a "punishment boom". With one new prison being opened each fortnight in Britain in 1998 (not that far behind the three a week in President Bill Clinton's USA), the privatisation of prisons has created a strata of capitalists with an appetite for jailing people.
Their boast is that they can do it cheaper than the old, inefficient state system. Cutting prison staff to achieve this certainly helps. Without a lot of burdensome conditions to adhere to from a government which barely pretends to retain its regulation role, crime is paying handsomely for some. Prisoners' rights, which are human rights after all, might have been eroded in all this but "law and order" is too valuable as an election jingle to be ditched.
As well as crime, a racist-based "alien invasion" is also a valuable weapon in Labour's populist arsenal. Criminalising asylum-seekers is a Blair specialty. Imprisonment without trial in detention centres pays political dividends to the right-wing populist, and when the refugees riot to assert their civil liberties, that only "proves" their unsuitability to be in the country.
Cohen reminds us that we should closely watch how politicians treat refugees because it is how they would like to treat the rest of us if they could get away with it.
Another frontier being opened up by Blair is education. While McDonald's are selflessly helping with English lessons by teaching children to spell Chicken "McNuggetts", in the US the experiment has gone further, with private corporations running entire schools.
The results in Britain's test schools — teacher numbers down, class sizes up, a collapse in standards, fiddled exam results, creative accounting and the delivery of a captive youth market to advertisers — have not phased Blair a bit because the other result — a fresh source of profits — is the only one that counts.
If Cohen doesn't offer any ideas on what to do about Blair's Britain, he does spare us the fantasy that good men and true women can regain control of the party and guide it to better things.
Cohen makes it plain enough that Labour's behaviour is a consequence of capitalism. Labour cannot make a difference as long as capitalism exists.
There is an answer — a socialist and a revolutionary one — lurking in there. It is an answer that is beyond the liberal political scope of Cohen's book, but the question is at least raised with some satirical bite.