Under cover of the start of war, Spain's supreme court has banned the Basque nationalist party Batasuna. This concludes a series of aggressive moves over the past year by Madrid against the nationalist-movement. Batasuna has won 15 percent in recent elections and has representation in local councils, European and regional parliaments. As a result of the decision all its offices will be closed and finances sequestered. This brings to a conclusion legislative moves in March last year, in the aftermath of George Bush's Axis of Evil speech, to outlaw parties for "excusing", "minimising" or "tacitly supporting terrorism". These are dangerous, new, widely drawn formulations that mirror similar anti-terror laws introduced in Britain, the US and elsewhere.
-er r Fecruary 2003 the Spanish police shut down the aunty s or Basque language daily paper Egunkaria on the ground that that
Idle of the road parties. staff detained. on Iraq. re an instrument of ETA". But tion" they can expect. group and is not linked to its political wing Batasuna. This provoked outrage from other Basque media and midThese parties control the regional parliament, which had invested over £5 million in the paper. The paper was raided by hundreds of masked officers and the editor and nine
Spanish premier Aznar has, alongside Blair, been Bush'S closest supporter. Britain and Spain are the only countries on the UN Security Council to have openly backed the war
The timing is not a coincidence. It has more to do with the Bush/Blair re-organisation of international politics than any claimed threat of terrorism in Spain, which could have led to a banning of the party at any time in recent decades.
The Spanish Justice Minister hailed the banning as a triumph for democracy, but it's result is the opposite. The Iraqi people might now have a better idea of the type of "liberaessons from history the interests of different sections of the British ruling class. Joseph Chamberlain, the Liberal imperialist speaking for sections of British industrial capital, advocated an alliance with Germany based on the joint exploitation of the British Empire.
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The alternative, and eventually successful strategy was supported by the dominant fractions of the ruling class, the City banking institutions, whose interests lay in the free movement of capital and an open world trading system.
By 1914 Britain was easily the largest creditor nation in the world, and its overseas investments totalled £4000 million, much of this outside the British empire.
These interests coincided with those of the rising USA, rather than the imperial protectionism implied by an alliance with • Germany•
Since 1940 the unchallenged economic and military dominance of
the United States has made it the guarantor of the capitalist world order generally. The extraordinarily internationalised structure of British capital, compared with every other major capitalist country, where over 50 percent of British owned capital is situated abroad, the status of the City as a world financial service centre, and its ever increasing dominance within the British economy has served to increase its dependence on US power.
This joint exploitation of the world is the basis for the so-called special relationship to which Blair is so attached. Unfortunately for Britain the increasingly unilateralist United States has less and less interest in reciprocating within this relationship except perhaps at the short term political level.
But why is a Labour Prime Minister so attached to the defence of US and British imperialism?
Although Blair and New Labour's enthusiasm for big business' foreign interests is more overt than in previous periods, the attachment of the labour movement to British imperialism is not new. W hen Engels was asked by the
Austrian Marxist Kautsky what English workers thought of colonial policy in 1882, he replied: "Exactly the same as what the bourgeoisie think. ...The workers merrily devour with Harold Wilson's Labour government backed the US intervention in Vietnam - but stopped short of sending British troops The Labour Party from its inception, along with the trade union leaders, was faced with the strategic choice to support or to oppose the empire and imperialism. them the fruits of the British colonial monopoly of the world market." (Engels letter to Kautsky 12.9.1882).
Lenin, summarising the views of Marx and Engels noted: "Marx and Engels systematically traced this relation between opportunism in the labour movement and the imperialistic features of British capitalism for several decades."
Marxists have engaged in an extensive discussion (beyond the scope of this article) of the material basis for British working class backwardness on its attitudes to colonialism and imperialism. Various arguments relating to the existence of a labour aristocracy, benefiting from imperialist exploitation have been advanced.
Additionally it has been argued that the industrial bourgeoisie was obliged to make concessions to workers and their organisations (and therefore accept reduced levels of profitability because dominant banking fractions of capital were willing to buy social peace (at its expense) in return for working class acquiescence to the British Empire.
Suffice it to say that British capitalism conceded significant reforms in terms of trade union immunities, living standards, and public service provision without the sort of revolutionary class confrontations which took place in continental Europe in the same period.
This in turn gave credibility to the reformism of Labour and the trade union leaderships, which could be seen to be "delivering the goods".
While Engels was writing 18 years before the foundation of the Labour Party this situation has remained broadly true in the intervening 120 years. Labour's arrival on the political scene at the beginning of the 20th Century after a brief flirtation with the radical promises of the Second International to oppose the impending (First World) war by all means including simultaneous general strikes by the workers of the belligerent countries, collapsed into supporting the war effort and the subsequent slaughter.
Labour has supported or participated in the conduct of every war, including the virtually continuous colonial wars (not least in Ireland) Britain has waged since
The Labour Party from its inception, along with the trade union leaders, was faced with the strategic choice to support or to oppose the empire and imperialism. From 1914 onwards they decisively chose the first course.
This Was not simply a response to the patriotic fervour which swept the country at the outset. of war, but was because the big majority of the labour movement had broken organisationally with liberalism but not decisively broken with it politically, and was certainly not socialist. Influential Fabians such as the Webbs supported Joe Chamberlain's Liberal imperialism with the idea that labour support for imperialism should be rewarded with welfare reform for the (British) working class.
Even Hyndman, the leader of the "Marxist" Social Democratic Federation was pro-empire and anti-German.
Nor was this a passing phenomenon and merely ideological in nature. Labour minisFrom T&G leader to Cold War Foreign Secretary: Labour's Ernest Bevin ters backed colonial repression (not least in Iraq) in the 1920s.
The Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Transport and General Workers Union, stated in 1946
"When I say that I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire, what do ! mean? I know that if the British Empire fell, the greatest collection of free (sic) nations would go into the limbo of the past, and it would be a disaster".
Indian independence was virtually forced on the Labour Government by the strength of the anti-imperialist movement.
The majority right-wing Labour leadership and the TUC were even more enthusiastic supporters of the Atlantic Alliance and the special relationship than the Tories. Roosevelt's New Deal Keynesian policies and Marshall Aid were seen as viable alternatives to communism.
During the Suez crisis in 1956, the Labour leadership sided with the US and Wilson's government aligned with the US the pro-US faction within the British ruling class against Tory Prime Minister Eden's failed attempt to reassert an imperial policy independent of the Americans.
It was not Labour, but the Tory Macmillan who conceded independence to the African colonies after the Suez debacle. Other parts of the labour movement tended to be influenced by the British Communist Party, which, after its short revolutionary phase in the earty 1920s tamely followed Moscow's line of "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism throughout the period.
Nor was the British trade union move ment free of imperialist collaboration. A soclalist resistance April 2003 |7 TUC report to the 1926 conference, the year of the General Strike, stated that it "wished to encourage the natives in the British Dependencies" to establish unions themselves. In the 1930s the TUC actively collaborated with the Colonial Office in fos tering "non-political unions which would steer clear of involving themselves in colonial independence movements
In the Cold War era, the TUC; and the ICTFU to which it was affiliated, expended considerable resources in combating Communist dominated unions (real or alleged) including opposing such actions as a boycott of apartheid South African goods proposed by the Australian unions.
There were of course honourable exceptions to this wretched picture, but mainly the leadership of the labour movement -the Labour Party, the TUC and its major affiliates have loyally supported their imperial masters.
The "deal" of welfare for imperialism was called off by the ruling class from around the time of the beginning of the Thatcherite neo-liberal offensive in the late 1970s. D espite this, the many labour
movement leaders have continued to loyally support the British state's foreign policies - and wars - suicidally in the case of the Mai vinas (Falklands) war in 1982. This led directly to Thatcher's second term and the defeat of the miners, the biggest defeat the British working class has suffered in its history
This is why the mass mobilisation of millions against the present war, and signifi. cantly the support for these mobilisations by major unions, marks an historic new stage for the British labour movement.
It is the outcome of a number of factors; the emergence of the "awkward squad" some of whom are influenced by Marxist internationalism, and angry at being ignored by Blair and the nakedness of the aggres. sion. But underlying this new development is the fact that neo-liberal globalisation has progressively removed the basis reformism in exchange for acquiescence and loyalty to the British state.
It is halting, uneven, and inadequate, to be sure. But it presents the possibility of ar ongoing mass working class and popula internationalism. This must be welcomes and developed to its full extent
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18 socla stre Education and GATS lance April 2003
for
Why should business put money into City Academies? In some cases the motivation is the opportunity for a sponsor to put an ideological commitment into practice. For example, in September 2002 Thamesmead Community College in London re-opened