HE DELIBERATELY contrived conspin-doctor-in-chief Alastair Campbell and the BBC is a desperate attempt to divert press and public attention from the real issue at stake - the dwindling credibility of Tony Blair and his reshuffled pack of warmongers.
While Blair's adventure in backing Bush's war in Iraq appeared to bring a short term military victory, in the longer term it has already, just three months after the conflict, triggered a deep and continuing political crisis. Opinion polls as we go to press show a majority think Blair is so discredited that he should step down as Prime Minister:
Even as the Iraq casualty toll rises, and US and British occupying armies struggle to control the devastated country and contain the continuing popular opposition, the pretext on which the war was waged has been exposed in Britain and the USA as nothing more than a pack of lies
The failure to find any of the 'weapons of mass destruction', which Blair specifically cited as the reason why immediate military action had to be taken against the imminent danger of an attack, has led on to questions of how the government came to publish two "dodgy dossiers" comprising little but fiction, myths, lies and plagiarised extracts from a 12 year-old academic thesis.
And the issue has begun to splinter apart the leadership team welded together around Blair's New Labour project: former allies have now broken ranks to reveal previously hidden details and ministers have set out to save their own political necks by dumping the blame onto others.
Former cabinet minister Robin Cook has questioned whether there was ever any plausible evidence that Saddam still had weapons, while Clare Short, having belatedly broken from Blair, now insists that he had a long-standing prior agreement with George Bush to wage war on Iraq, no matter what the evidence.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has been quick to pass the buck to others, and to back away from the government's hysterical and evidently ludicrous claims that Saddam could have activated weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.
Straw has blamed the February dossier, published as he and Blair tried to face down massive public opposition and the biggestever anti-war movement, on Alastair Campbell, who he claimed commissioned and received it, and then published it without reference to other ministers.
"Comical Allie" Campbell has in turn tried to pillory the BBC journalist who first revealed the government's tweaking of the evidence. Campbell hopes his synthetic anger will deflect obvious questions about who actually wrote the two dossiers, under whose orders and on what basis, and who took the decision to insert altered sections of the PhD study into what was claimed to be a dossier based on intelligence sources.
t is not clear how long Campbell will
be able to sustain this charade, even
though the timid Commons Foreign Affairs Committee is pulling its punches, clearly petrified that pressing its questioning too hard might fatally wound Blair and his government. No matter how much he may bully and bang tables in the Channel 4 newsroom, Campbell's head is the one on the block for the lies that were published at his behest, and he will be sacrificed before Blair accepts the responsibility for misleading the public and his own party.
The underlying fact is plain for all to see: a major war has been waged and a country devastated and invaded: thousands of innocent civilians and countless more Iraqi soldiers have died, billions have been spent, tens of thousands of British and US troops are now bogged down enforcing an unwelcome occupation, and the Iraqi people have been subjected to a new form of dictatorship - all on the basis of assertions and allegations that were always dubious and are now demonstrably untrue.
Retiring UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix summed up Blair's ridiculous line ..... • • • • The lies that led to war combine with the grim record of sleaze and deceit since 19.97 ..... also facing an increasing volume and varithat the missing Iragi weapons will eventually be found: "It's sort of puzzling: you have 100 percent certainty about their existence and zero certainty about where they are."
While the Bush administration also faces Congressional inquiries, Blair's political crisis has been the sharpest and most deep-seated. It has now spilled over into domestic politics, with polls showing a sharp decline in Labour support - to give the Tories their first opinion poll lead since 1992 - and Blair's own personal rating and credibility plunging to a new low.
The lies that led to war combine with the grim record of sleaze and deceit since 1997, with the result that New Labour is the party now seen as untrustworthy.
The economy has also deteriorated to its worst state for a decade, triggering further job losses and crisis in manufacturing industry. Fat cat directors continue shamelessly lining their pockets with multi-million payouts while they cut back on employees' pension rights.
The total shambles of transport policy, and Blair's commitment to press ahead with his "modernising" onslaught on public services are further reasons why working people are losing faith in a government so obviously indifferent to them but committed to the needs of big business.
Amid this growing catalogue of policy failures and disappointed hopes there is a visible process of disintegration that is weakening the machinery of New Labour.
One by one, Blair is losing or dumping his previous circle of loyal supporters, while the back-bench Labour opposition on issues like university top-up fees and foundation hospitals centres on an increasingly restive group of former ministers including one-time health secretary Frank Dobson.
The departure of Dobson's successor, Alan "Moderniser" Milburn, stepping down from the cabinet to spend more time with his ego, is the latest body-blow to Blair, who ety of criticism from a long list of former ministers seeking to air a grievance or reinvent themselves in a more progressive stance.
Former cabinet member Stephen Flyers has been rumbling around
criticising the fiddled figures of the Private Finance Initiative; dumped environment minister Michael Meacher has revealed the government's bias in favour of GM crops; sacked Home Office minister Barbara Roche has discovered that New Labour's policies do nothing to narrow the class divide in inner cities; Peter Mandelson fires off volleys of indignation at the slow progress towards the Euro.
Blair's reshuffle represented a desperate effort to plug the gaps, trundling in "supply" minister John Reid - a man with no previous concern or interest in health care - to replace Milburn, and bully through the controversial Blair-Milburn plans for foundation hospitals and restoration of the NHS internal market.
Yet the biggest furore was created by Blair's decision to scrap the ancient office of Lord Chancellor - a project that could have been more sensibly and popularly done as part of the abolition of the House of Lords, but which was instead decided unilaterally and without much detailed planning by the PM, making no attempt to consult or discuss with his ministers.
Although in comparison with the Irag war this might be regarded as a misdemeanour rather than a major crime, it has helped to underline the haughty presidential style of a Prime Minister who is losing his touch. As one anonymous minister told the Guardian "He's pissed off his enemies, but now he's pissing off his friends as well."
The reshuffle is unlikely to stem the ] decline in labour's fortunes: the
policies Blair is doggedly forcing through will see to that. Even David Blunkett's shameless efforts to play the racist card on asylum and immigration and outflank the Tories from the right is simply serving to polarise opinion, make racism seem more 'respectable", and thus buttress the far right.
But for the socialist left to capitalise on this situation we need more than a disintegration of Blairism, and more than the wel. come resurgence of opposition to Blairism in the unions: we need a corresponding process of integration and political strengthening of an alternative - the Socialist Alliance.
We need the Alliance to stick energetically to its decisions to broaden its base of support and to take seriously the need to establish itself as an organisation that aims to win and retain the involvement and support of the trade unions at national and local level.
We need the organisations of the left in England to prioritise the needs and interests of the working class rather than those of their own particular current, and to recognise and seek to emulate the realignment into a common Party that laid the basis for the recent electoral gains of the Scottish Socialist Party.
Blair's new crisis is the left's best opportunity yet. Socialist Resistance supporters will be working hard in our efforts to ensure the left response is adequate to the occasion.
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4 soclal Trade union news st resistance Summer 2003