Tony Blair denounces and threatens the evil dictator Saddam Hussain who has, we are told, the ability to destroy the entire 'civilised' world with a flick of his chemical/biological weapons. Within days a passing (and quickly suppressed) news item on Channel 4 informs us that there is a huge increase in cancer cases in Southern Iraq as a result of the 'allied' bombing of seven years ago. Soon after, tucked away in the inside pages of The Independent, is the news that the US Ambassador in Kuwait has told Americans in that country not to worry because Iraq does not have the capability to attack Kuwait, its nearest neighbour (let alone more distant countries). There must be very few people who didn't feel that the money spent on weapons to kill Iraqi men, women and children would have been better spent on rebuilding the welfare state, which is what most of us voted for when we voted Labour to power.
In the middle of all this came International Women's Day. Labour's new women MPs saw it as a day they could celebrate on behalf of all women. Never mind the cuts in benefits, in sickness allowance, in pensions, the increase in tuition fees for students etc.etc. There had been many victories! Their very existence in Parliament was one! Another victory was that lone parent benefit would be cut - but only to help the poor single mothers who were miserable at home and will now be 'trained' to go and find a job. (What will ultimately happen about childcare provision remains yet another grey area of 'moral dilemmas' for New Labour). Victory number three, which MPs say might come any day now, is a minimum wage (which of course would affect women since they are a majority of low paid workers) - well yes, it would be less than £4 an hour - below the poverty line by European standards - but the MPs would be heroines nevertheless for 'winning' it on behalf of their less fortunate sisters. As for education - New Labour were committed to education for EVERYONE - and as a result existing grants simply had to be cut, and if you did not understand the logic of that you must go and study the Green Paper.
Meanwhile Tony Blair's 'inclusiveness 'is showing itself for what it really is - exclude those demanding their rights, exclude the rebellious, the unemployed, the deprived at every level of the state. Black people - as refugees from regimes armed by Britain, as dependents of those settled here - are to be excluded with greater bmtality and finality than ever before. At the other end of the state machinery, 'difficult' children, even those under eleven, are being dumped in a limbo by being excluded by the education system And according to the Chief Inspector of Prisons himself, 30-40% of incarcerated young offenders should not be in prison at all. A Human Rights Bill is going through parliament to save us the trouble of going to the European Court, but it will exclude all those who cannot pay legal bills, since legal aid will not be available for cases taken up under it. And while British Embassies boast of having the cheapest workforce in Europe, the Bill takes no position on improving workers' rights, which were decimated by the Tories.
While, so far, New Labour, unlike the Tories, have had the skill to silence the trade union leadership with face-saving options, Blair's deals with big business may now make all this far more difficult. Not that the trade union leadership want much. They're not asking to organise around workers' collective demands - essential methods of collective action such as secondary picketting are still banned. They merely want to be allowed to continue to act as administrative channels for the "grievances" of isolated individual workers, which are dealt with by the state through industrial tribunals. But for this to happen, "dialogue" between employers and workers (and therefore union recognition) is needed. This is in line with the "European model", but is now being blocked by Tony Blair because the CBI is demanding that firms with less than 50 employees (i.e. 97% of British firms) should be exempted. As European TUC spokesman Wim Bergans puts it, "the Blair Government should be counted on the European right". Now, as the reality and unreality of life under New Labour unfolds, it is time, more than ever before, for the "excluded " majority to build a genuine workers' movement, willing to fight exploitation in all its forms.
InqilabSpring 1998 3
