Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Trident vote will split Labour and rely on Tory support: Blair's crisis poses a challenge for the left

Socialist Resistance no43  |  page 3

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

In the fading days of his decade in office, Tony Blair appears to have teamed up with Gordon Brown to annoy and alienate as many people as possible.

It is hard to draw any other conclusion from the catalogue of outrageous policies being driven forward by Blair's government as he lurches into his final few months in power with his own credibility in tatters along with that of his party.

In between fending off searching questions from the police enquiry on the cashfor-peerages issue, Blair's ministers have:

• stepped up the war in Afghanistan to a new peak, with additional troops dispatched and now waging one of the most intensive bombardments in the history of NATO as they battle to contain a resurgent Taliban.

• maintained the occupation of Iraq, refusing to set any schedule for withdrawal and continuing to trail abjectly behind the clueless neocons of the Bush administration - which also finds itself discredited and embroiled in scandal.

• committed themselves to pushing through a vote on commissioning a replacement for the Trident nuclear missile system currently carried on nuclear submarines: estimates of the likely cost of this "detererrent" vary upwards from £15 billion. The case for this project is so weak, and popular opinion so hostile that a BBC poll is predicting dozens of Labour MPs will revolt and vote against or abstain when Blair puts the proposal to the Commons -leaving Blair and Brown (who has endorsed the project dependent on votes from David Cameron's Tories to carry the day.

but while Blair and Brown agree that the sky is the limit for military spending, they have begin to put the squeeze on public services, ripping off the pension rights of local government staff and now slashing the real terms pay of over a million NHS staff with a below-inflation rise this year - and clear warnings that even tighter restrictions could apply in future.

• Brown is also sitting on