UK, Lost Empire, Knackered Trojan Horse

Letter From America

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: June 17, 2017 Last modified: June 17, 2017

Maybe the so-called Special Relationship gets extra spirit from the Tory “understanding” with the DUP. In both Washington and London, the purported leaders of their countries do not have a mandate from a majority of the electorate, but both depend on the votes of bigoted anti-Diluvian evangelists, who do actually believe in the Flood described in The Bible, but do not believe in the flood lapping around their feet from sea ice melts.

The former Ian Paisley’s degree from the Bob Jones University did not endow him or the DUP with the ecumenism of modern American Evangelists who have now expediently forsworn their traditional anti-Papism to ally with reactionary Catholic Bishops against their common enemy – modern tolerance.

And both the DUP and Republican evangelical right in the US share an apocalyptic Christian Zionist view that makes them support Netanyahu and the far right in Israel. It is worth remembering that theological roots of this are not based on some sentimental philosemitism but on a reading of the book of Revelations that sees the gathering of the Jews in the Holy Land as a necessary precursor to the rapture, Armageddon and the Second Coming. It is only good for the Jews if you regard being converted to Christianity or being thoroughly smitten by a vengeful deity as a blessing.

Sadly, Trump’s unbounded admiration for Nigel Farage seems to have inhibited him from tweeting support for May. We can assume that a blessing from the US president might have lost her even more seats. Domestic resistance, even in his own party, tempers some of Trump’s policy eccentricities at home but the presidency’s powers over foreign policy give him more leeway abroad, although, even there, the foreign policy establishment has inhibited some of his wayward options. For example, although like so many previous presidents he promised to move the US Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as Congress has mandated, the State Department’s residual attachment to international law has forced him to postpone it yet again.

However, Farage notwithstanding, the Trump administration has even less time than Obama for the so-called special relationship with Britain, a phrase very rarely heard in the US media except when Washington is looking for London to send sepoys to lend international flavour to yet another military folly.

However, we sometimes forget that the “special relationship” was very much a Labour invention. After fighting World War Two alone for over two years Ernest Bevin wanted NATO to cement an American commitment. Churchill condemned Attlee’s permission for US bases in Britain as a derogation of sovereignty while Attlee committed troops and treasure to support the US in Korea, even if that was mandated by the UN.

Suez showed who was in charge of that special relationship. Indeed, forgotten now, but newsworthy at the time was that Senator Joe McCarthy (and his sidekick Robert Kennedy) had Winston Churchill and the UK in their sites for trading with China during the Korean War. They pointed out that the tan­gential British contribution to the Chinese war effort probably equalled the value of the British input into the Korean war itself.

While on the one hand, Brexit adds cogent geopolitical reasoning for keeping friendly with the Americans, since the UK is now again just an isolated off-shore island, on the other hand Trump’s silence on the matter has devalued the US commitment to NATO’s common defence. Recent Tory miscalculations, on the referendum and the election do indeed suggest that belief in fairies is a strong component in conservative politics, but can even they believe that an isolationist Trump administration feels any special regard for Britain?

Geoffrey Howe at a UN briefing once explained that British foreign policy was the same now as in the days of Pitt – to ensure that no combination of powers could arise in Europe that could threaten our island, and I suspect that most conservative governments did indeed thwart and sabotage European unity with that in mind. EU foreign policy has almost always been a joke, depending as it did on consensus and thus effective abstention on controversial issues. Britain lost its empire and found a role as Washington’s Trojan horse in Brussels.

The current chaos suggests other possibilities. Perhaps it is time to audition for a new role, or rather resume the position of supporter of the UN Charter and international law. It is something that Labour should be thinking about, taking up where Robin Cook left off.

About Ian Williams

Liverpool and Corbyn three decades on.

I fought the hard left in the 1980s. Now I’m backing Corbyn

Ian Williams

Neil Kinnock should understand Corbyn’s plight – he once endured the same hostility from within his own party and the media

Neil Kinnock’s 1985 conference attack on Militant – video

Guardian Saturday 24 September 2016 0

The impending Labour conference in Liverpool evokes a sense of deja vu all over again. Once more we will have a Labour leader confronting a clique that is seeking to seize the party machinery.

Analysis Jeremy Corbyn: is he really unelectable as prime minister?

Opinion in Labour circles is sharply divided about whether their new leader can take the party into government

Three decades ago, it was Neil Kinnock at the Bournemouth conference, making his famous speech about Militant, while I was in Liverpool fighting an attempt by a dedicated, well-organised group of entryists to seize the party structure and use it for its own political agenda. This time it is Jeremy Corbyn being denounced by Labour MPs and confronting the self-described party “moderates”.

Like many of the old left I frankly wondered about Corbyn when he stood – but in the end mostly found that the complete absence of personal ambition that had deprived him of experience for leadership was one of his foremost qualities, especially when faced with the blandly insincere, uninspiring, but patently ambitious New Labour clones who were competing with him.

Even now, I cannot truly understand the depth of the Labour establishment’s revulsion for Corbyn, because I have yet to hear or read a lucid case against his politics, except that he is deemed to be “unelectable”, which would be more convincing if it did not come from those who are working overtime to make it true.

The inarticulate anger about his candidacy reminds me of what George Orwell wrote about totalitarian literary language, that it has “a curious mouthing sort of quality, as of someone who is choking with rage & and can never quite hit on the words he wanted”. With Owen Smith having stolen Corbyn’s policies, it makes the rage even more perplexing.

 ‘Corbyn has inspired hundreds of thousands of formerly disillusioned members and newly motivated activists, joining what they consider to be the reborn Labour party.’ Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Kinnock, now canonised by the pundits as the man who paved the way for Labour’s electoral turnaround in the 1990s, should recognise the media’s treatment of Corbyn. When Kinnock was leader, reporters used to meet in the pub to sort out the “line” for events, even before they happened, and in one form or another I remember it was always “a slap in the face for Kinnock”. However, not even in the backstabbing tradition of the parliamentary Labour party were so many members so actively complicit in his attempted death by a thousand hacks.

Militant was eventually beaten, by a combination of administrative action and membership revulsion at its eminently parodiable oratorical style, pseudo-scouse accents and rigid self-righteousness. It was what we would now call the soft left, and the so-called Tribune group, that did much of the heavy lifting. We brought in John Prescott, Robin Cook and others to speak in the Militant Merseyside heartland and offer an alternative left vision to exorcise the ghosts of the Fourth Internationals.

If you want some flavour of that alternative vision it is worth looking at Kinnock’s famous speech, and even beyond his call “to strip ourselves of the illusions of nuclear grandeur”, to his stirring yet pragmatic invocation of Labour values. “There is no need to compromise values, there is no need in this task to surrender our socialism, there is no need to abandon or even try to hide any of our principles, but there is an implacable need to win, and there is an equal need for us to understand that we address an electorate which is sceptical, an electorate which needs convincing, a British public who want to know that our idealism is not lunacy, our realism is not timidity, our eagerness is not extremism.” That was the Kinnock on whose team I worked for the 1987 election.

Sadly the softness of the left was its primary characteristic. After Kinnock, Tony Blair’s people managed to swamp and dissolve the Tribune group and, in keeping with New Labour’s attempts to emulate Bill Clinton in the US, turned the party into a PO box for corporate donations. They squeezed out “special interest groups” like the unions, and took the core electorate of the party for granted – while filtering out potential parliamentary candidates who might put Labour values above their career, thereby disenfranchising the membership.

But as Kinnock went on to say: “We have voluntarily, every one of us, joined a political party. We wish a lot more people would come and join us, help us, give us their counsel, their energies, their advice, broaden our participation. But in making the choice to join a political party we took a decision, and it was that by persuasion we hoped that we could bring more people with us. So that is the basis on which we have got to act, want to act.”

Corbyn’s sincerity and vision is reminiscent of Kinnock in that speech and of the party pre-Blair and Peter Mandelson: the soft democratic left of that era,with its concern for human rights and socialism, the heirs to Nye Bevan. Corbyn has inspired hundreds of thousands of formerly disillusioned members and newly motivated activists, who are joining what they consider to be the reborn Labour party because they think that their views will now make a difference, not be ignored or pre-empted by controlling cliques from revolutionaries of the left or careerists of the right. Entryists hate such swelling membership rolls because they are inherently uncontrollable. They prefer a hollowed-out organisation they can control.

So instead of engaging in McCarthyite smears against the new and renewed members, calumniating them as entryists and disenfranchising them, those currently sitting on the benches of Westminster should be welcoming them and joining them on the streets to turn the tide for Labour.

 Corbyn confronted by reporters at a poster launch: ‘Kinnock should recognise the media’s treatment of Corbyn.’ Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

A line in the Sand for International Law

Letter from America – Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: March 19, 2016 Last modified: March 18, 2016

The paths of two much mis-underestimated, highly ethical individuals crossed recently. A year before he became leader of the Labour Party, I saw Jeremy Corbyn at the House of Commons report back from a visit to Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. It was an impressive performance. Invoking Western Sahara is no way for a politician to win votes, nor even for a writer to win commissions! Second, the audience was loaded with Moroccans whipped in by their ­government to support its claims to the territory.

He dealt with them impressively, listening respectfully while calmly stating facts and restating principles in a way that averted provocation and conflict. I did not know it then, but he was foreshadowing his remarkable self control in the face of fanatical New Labour types who cannot believe they lost with all the certainty of Moroccans who cannot believe that anyone could question their right to rule the Sahara.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon went to Western Sahara earlier this month and stated a few home truths about the continuing occupation there and compounded his sins by visiting the headquarters of Polisario, the Saharwi independence front. Morocco went into paroxysms of counterfactual denunciation and claims that the UN and the international community accept its annexation. In a breath-taking abuse of language it accused the UN Secretary General of “semantic slippage”, for using the term “occupation” and expressed, among even more incoherent indignation noted with “utter dismay the verbal slippages, faits accomplis and unjustified complacency” of Ban.

In reality, away from whatever they smoke in offices of Morocco’s highly paid Public relations company, the International Court of Justice has ruled that the people of Western Sahara are entitled to self-determination. The UN Security Council has ruled that Morocco should withdraw from the territory and allow an act of self-determination. For more than 20 years, there has been a UN mission there to conduct a referendum – and Morocco has officially accepted those terms – even though in international law they do not really have any option. The world’s maps all show the territory separate from Morocco.

The Security Council resolution in 1975 called for Morocco to withdraw from the territory, and it has been defying it ever since. However, underlying their indignation, which highlights Ban’s courage, is that Morocco and its friends have thoroughly compromised the UN system. Successive UN officials have been bribed, suborned and browbeaten not to challenge the Moroccan version with anything as upsetting as the truth. ­Interestingly, MINURSO’s own website begins its list of UN resolutions in 1991, when it was set up, not in 1975, when the Security Council asked Morocco to get out.

Morocco has had outright support from France, and it benefits from good relations with Israel. In the words of then US ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan about Sahara and East Timor in 1975: “The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” Since then, it has tried to tidy things up but not enough to annoy the Moroccans, and one supposes that the issue was clinched by the $5 million-plus paid to the Clinton Foundation by the Moroccan-owned phosphate company that is looting Western Sahara’s phosphates.

Hillary Clinton, as US Secretary of State, tried to push Barack Obama’s administration to accept the dubious “autonomy” plan promoted by King Mohammed that excluded the option of independence for Western Sahara from the terms of the referendum. One should add that Polisario is about as compromised as any other “liberation movement” of the seventies in terms of its adherence to human rights. But the most convincing element of the Sahrawi claim is the Moroccan refusal to allow a referendum. The King knows he would lose it.

History should provide a pre-emptively answer to anyone who asks why we should worry about “a quarrel, in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing”. Britain is a permanent member of the Security Council of the UN, pledged to uphold the UN Charter, and with a few notable exceptions has been fairly good at it. The UK delegation has been reluctantly supportive of what Robin Cook would have called the ethical dimension of foreign policy over the Sahara, but is palpably discomforted by all the sordid reasons it should go along with others who would happily sell the Sahrawis down the sand dunes.

Both Ban and Corbyn see that an injustice perpetuated like this attacks the basic principles of the United Nations. In the face of the frantic Moroccan assault on Ban Ki-moon, Britain, and indeed ­Jeremy Corbyn, should be signalling ­support for the Secretary General’s brave initiative, aimed as it is at rescuing­hundreds of thousands of people from life in exile of under occupation.

About Ian Williams

Ian Williams is Tribune's UN correspondent

Letter from America – Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams Tribune : January 20, 2016

It’s a long road from when I interviewed Bernie Sanders for Tribune as mayor of small town in Vermont, or as the only avowed elected socialist in Congress. There is a genuine special relationship between the progressive wings of British and American politics. The upsurge of support for Sanders among Democrats parallels the huge groundswell of support for Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour  leadership election. To a large extent we can thank the Bill Clinton/Tony Blair axis. The recently released notes of the conversations between the two show them spending a lot of time on the “Third Way,” planning global meetings of the New Labour/DLC Axis, the Centre Left.

Before they took up office, several of us met Blair in New York when he and Gordon Brown came to “learn from the Clinton campaign”. Disturbed, even then, by the uncritical enthusiasm for Bill, we remonstrated that he would sell his grandmother in the street for votes. Blair blurted: “But he wins elections!”

Reckless about the feelings of grandmothers, let alone the traditional constituencies, the poor and minorities and trade unionists, whose cause would be given away, let alone sold, to win elections, Clinton set the model for New Labour – ostentatiously disavowing calumniated “special interest groups”, while pandering to the right.  Unlike Clinton, the Blair administration did a lot of good work – but party bosses did not want anyone boasting about it, in case it alienated the financiers whom they hoped would replace the unions as bankrollers for the party.

In both cases, the plan was to hollow out the popular base of the parties, denying members effective input on policy or candidates, to reduce it to a PO box for corporate donations. As we saw in the Labour Party, it became a self-perpetuating career escalator for machine politicians that eventually ruthlessly weeded out any signs of dissent and any ties with the unions apart from  topping up the collection box.

New Labour tried to introduce primaries, copying US practice, but the plan foundered on the different political histories. It was the unforeseen consequence of this emulation of primaries that it allowed Jeremy Corbyn to tap into the deep reservoirs of disaffection with machine politicians,  whose main manifestation hitherto had been abstention at one level or another from the political process.

Continuing the parallels, neither the New Labour establishment, nor Hillary Clinton’s courtiers, cocooned as they were in their incestuous world, realised how disaffected the core constituencies and potential activists were, let alone that Sanders and Corbyn could tap that resentment and potential enthusiasm.

Hillary, following in her husband’s footsteps with the corporate begging bowl, thought politics was all a matter of collecting big cheques from Wall Street and Hollywood. Sanders actually raised more money than her, from millions of individuals who piled their widow’s mites into his campaign. In the unlikely event of bumping into Blair again, I could cheerily say: “But he wins redneck male support.” There are, for once, real lessons for the British Labour Party.  Sanders has made a virtue of saying the unsayable. He has attacked bankers, called for a universal healthy service, supported unions, called for higher wages and more protections for workers. Rather than let the media and political elite set his agenda, he has set his own, which resonates with millions of people. He calls himself a socialist, which effectively disarms the opposition. Where conventional wisdom made “higher taxes” a magic curse dooming any candidate, Sanders made it a battle cry against the rich.

There are differences. Sanders came from so far off-field the media did not know what to do with him and Hillary’s supporters hoped that if they ignored him, he would sink into obscurity. He didn’t, and now their attacks only galvanise his supporters. Attention has also transformed Corbyn from an obscure backbencher into a media titan, and it can allow him to stick to the Labour agenda, with the refreshing change that the public had few expectations of previous trimming incumbents but have been primed by the daily hate sessions from the media to expect Corbyn to propound a full Labour agenda. And Sanders is only vying to be the candidate – while Corbyn already is.