tightening of already brutally restrictive limits on asylum seekers drift back behind Labour Terry Smith Despite a few false dawns in which major trade unions have flirted with the notion of reducIng or dropping their affiliation to the Labour Party, Blair can once again count on the union bureaucracy to back his bid for a third term.
While the GMB has cut back Its donations to Labour and put strings on its affiliation fees, UNISON has fought off attempts to adopt a similar policy: only the RMT rail union has been excluded from the party - while the Fire Brigades Union which has fought bitter disputes with the government voted last summer to break its 85-year link with the party of Prescott and Blair.
By contrast UNISON, which has campaigned hard on such Issues of principle as PFI, Foundation Hospitals and public sector pensions, has been committed throughout to a third term Labour government regardless of the outcome, while UNISON reps on Labour's national bodies have bent to every twist and turn of government policy.
Occasional concessions, arrogantly thrown to union leaders by Blair like scraps for a mangy dog, have been seized upon by union leaders as justification for maintaining political support - despite the fact that for union leaders to profess full support for Blair is tantamount to a suicide note, and few of them have any alternative politics to offer.
Union leaders have trumpeted such issues as the increase in the minimum wage, and promises to end the twotier workforce in local government, while glossing over the goverment's refusal to repeal many of the Tory anti-union laws, their dogged insistence on PFI, Foundation Hospitals and City Academies, and their betrayal of pensioners. • As the election date has drawn closer the once-famed "awkward squad" of union leaders has become markedly less awkward: the government's climbdown over public sector pensions seems to have removed the last issue over which any unions were prepared to take a stand before the election - leaving members to count the cost afterwards. Harry Sloan looks at the politics of the three main parties as Tony Blair sounds the starting gun for the Just four months after the last General Election, the 9/11 events plunged the world into a new, more reactionary era of politics.
The destruction of the twin towers was tailor-made for George Bush's global ambitions, and was seized upon with barely disguised satisfac tion as the basis for new wars which suited the new White House strategy, first on Afghanistan, and then Iraq.
Tony Blair, apperently mesmerised by Bush, and using whatever arguments could be cobbled together to justify British involvement, eagerly followed the US lead. The official British opposition, the Conservative Party, egged Blair on, endorsing every step to war.
The second opposition party, the Liberal Democrats, remained unconvinced by Blair's arguments and opposed the war on Iraq, calling for a second UN resolution before military action could be supported.
This marked a substantial shift of attitude by the Lib Dems, who had joined the Tories in backing the onslaught on Afghanistan in 2001, and in subsequently supporting British troops remaining in the country to "finish the job".
Accompanying these aggressive and brutal wars, in which tens of thousands of innocents have died, and tens of billions of pounds have been squandered, has come the notion of a domestic "war on terror", the main content of which has been the enactment of steadily more draconian legislation to erode civil liberties in the US and UK, and facilitating • indefinite detention of foreign nationals without charge, trial or public display of any evidence of wrongdoing Guantanamo Bay and until recently Belmarsh Prison.
To maintain any credibility for such a "war on terror", a level of paranoid public hysteria has had to be cultivated, the most immediate aspect of which has been fostering Islamaphobia, but which has almost inevitably spilled over into wider levels of racist fears over "illegal" - and legal -asylum-seekers, refugees and migrants.
Although "old" Labour had a far from progressive line on issues of race and immigration, and was responsible for some of the early legislation to impose racist restrictions, this type of political ground has historically been the preserve of parties of the right (crime and immigration remain the two areas of policy on which Michael Howard's Tories currently have a lead over New Labour).
So every lurch to the right by Blair's ministers, every additional tightening of already brutally restrictive limits on asylum seekers and provisions for their rapid deportation, has triggered an even more extreme response from the Tories, who scent in this the type of populist issue that secured victories for their Australian counterparts.
Once again the Lib Dems, despite the wretched record of many of their local councillors on race issues, have been the only one of the "big three" parties to break ranks and challenge the paranoid, racist approach of Blair and Howard. The Lib Dems, while arguing that the system needs •to be "regulated", - explicitly reject "quotas or targets on asylum seekers" and call instead for "a quick, fair and principled assessment of each case"
With war, war on terror and social paranoia as the dominant backdrop, and an election being fought on the basis of "security" in the aftermath of controversial legislation axing centuries of civil liberties and giving sweeping new powers to the Home Secretary, it is important to recognise that the Blair government has not lost momentum in forcing through its programme of "modernisation", with the resultant massive extension of privatisation and erosion of public services.
The shift to the right, the abandonment of any policies Every lurch to the right by Blair's ministers, every additional and provisions for their rapid deportation, has triggered an even more extreme response from the Tories or values enshrining social solidarity runs through the Blair reforms from top to bottom, from education, through the NHS, to social issues such as crime and disorder where the early notion of getting "tough on crime, The abandonment of any policies or values enshrining social solidarity runs through the Blair reforms from top to bottom tough on the causes of crime" has been scrapped in favour of more imprisonment, more police and more anti-social behaviour orders, now to be supplemented by the introduction of ID cards, while the causes of crime go untouched.
And every time New Labour moves further to the right on social policy, the Tories move a step with them - ensuring that the 2005 election will be fought on some of the most right-wing political terrain in recent memory.
In place of social solidarity, Blair substitutes a Bush-style faith in market mechanisms. In place of his early talk of "rights and responsibilities", his government's mantra now is "choice" - "choices" to be exercised not by those planning services accessible to all, but by individual consumers of public services.
In the NHS for example, patients are to be obliged to "choose" which hospital they should go to for their operations, be it NHS or private, regardless of evidence that what most of them would choose is for their local NHS hospital to be equipped and resourced to deliver the care they need.
Nor are patients to be told that if they choose to go to other hospitals further afield, the result could be that the local hospital that provides A&E and other vital services for their entire community could be driven into financial crisis and forced to close services or close down altogether.
NHS managers are now told that there can be no guarantee of funding for services other than attracting sufficient patients in a new, free Blair's fees have brought lop-sided expansion of higher education market for health care.
The Tories, of course, want to go even further down this same road, and have promised that patients who were willing to go private for their treatment would be subsidised in doing so from NHS budgets. They want every hospital to be cut free not only from central NHS control but also from any government targets for performance. While scrapping targets to force upperformance, the Tories also promise to allow matrons to close down dirty hospital wards - although how this solves the problem of poor, under-staffed and often privatised cleaning services is not explained.
Not even the Lib Dems offer any alternative to this free market consensus on health care: although they promise to scrap charges for continuing social care of frail older patients in nursing homes, and for eye and dental checks, they too promise to make more use of the private sector, and echo the Tory call for scrapping any planning targets.
The housing crisis is the latest to be met by a new announcement that echoes the formulations of Thatcherism: this time Blair is proposing the "propertyowning democracy".
Instead of replacing the network of council housing which used to be available at affordable rents, and which held down the prices of housing until Thatcher sold them off, New Labour's response to the soaring cost of houses will be to encourage another million families to take out mortgages.