Issue 40, January 2008

Nation Revisited

An occasional e-mail to friends

January 2008, # 40

The patriot game

It looks increasingly likely that the government is about to pull the same stunt that Margaret Thatcher did in the 1979 general election. She ruined the chances of the National Front by saying that she understood people’s fears of being “swamped.” This brilliantly timed message gave the electorate a false hope that she would do something about immigration and resulted in a disappointing result for the National Front.

Now Gordon Brown is talking about deporting foreign drug dealers and gangsters. By the time of the next election the Labour Party will pretend to crack down on immigration. And the far-right will struggle to get their message across. People will believe Gordon Brown about immigration just as they believed Tony Blair about weapons of mass destruction. There is no limit to public gullibility.

The Tories dare not mention the word “immigration.” The ghost of Enoch Powell still haunts the politically correct halls of Central Office. They are obsessed with promoting black and Asian candidates. And their focus groups are convinced that their lead in the polls is due to their drift to the center. It’s actually more likely that it’s because of people’s disgust with the Labour Party.

The Tories will make the European Union their main issue. They will fly the flags and beat the drums in a noisy show of jingoism. We will hear a lot of hypocritical waffle about “national independence” and “British values.” The party that attacked Egypt on the orders of Israel will be singing Land of Hope and Glory.

We face the grotesque prospect of the Labour Party and the Tory Party playing the patriot game. The twin pillars of global capitalism have hijacked the far-right’s policies and telling the people what they want to hear. As a result of this cynical deception the British National Party will lose their anti-immigration voters to Labour and UKIP’s support will go to the Tories.

Of course some people will see through this charade. But the majority of voters will still go for the old gang parties. They will convince themselves that Brown and Cameron are honest men. They will not consider that the same interests finance both parties; and they will forget that both parties have presided over the importation of millions of Third World immigrants. If that nice Mr Brown says that he will stop immigration they will believe him. And if that nice Mr Cameron promises them a referendum on a treaty that is already done and dusted they will believe that too.

What will Gordon do?

Gordon Brown was hailed as a great manager because he presided over the British economy during a period of worldwide boom. But with a recession crossing the Atlantic he finds himself 12 points behind the Tories (YouGuv poll). Britain is tied to the global economic system and there’s little that he can do with oil at $100 a barrel and the Dow Jones going into freefall.

In 1938 Mosley wrote in “Tomorrow we live:”

The same power of almost unlimited mobility of finance in practice subordinates completely the economy of Britain to the economy, or rather chaos, of a foreign country. Finance in the City of London is so interlocked with finance in Wall Street, New York, that in practice, the City of London has become a sub-branch of Wall Street. Let anyone who doubts this study the immediate reaction on the London Stock Exchange of any movement on Wall Street. For London follows Wall Street entirely irrespective of British conditions. In recent years adverse movements on the London Stock Exchange have followed adverse movement on Wall Street even in face of good British trade reports. On the other hand, upward movements on the London Stock Exchange have followed an up-swing on Wall Street, even in the face of a disastrous British unemployment return the previous day. What matters to finance in the City of London is not what is happening in British Industry, but what is happening in Wall Street, New York.

Seventy years later Mosley’s analysis is still spot on. Britain is still tied to Wall Street and we are suffering for George Bush’s disastrous mismanagement of the American economy. Investors and shareholders in banks like Northern Rock and UBS are paying the mortgages of poor Americans and there’s nothing that Gordon Brown, or the Bank of England, can do about it.

At the Lord Mayor’s Banquet Gordon Brown called on the EU to become a “global Europe” and pledged his loyalty to the Atlantic Alliance with Britain as a junior partner. He will not save us from an American recession brought on by profligate deficit spending. He can only reduce interest rates to stimulate the economy and risk an effective devaluation of the pound.

In 1938 Mosley’s policy was based on the British Empire. But the Second World War destroyed the empire and bankrupted Britain. After the war he called for a United Europe but Britain was psychologically addicted to America and it took us another thirty years to half-heartedly accept geopolitical reality.

The White Dominions have made their own arrangements but Europe is the world’s largest trading bloc and now that communism has been abandoned we can renew our traditional alliance with Russia. So long as we remain tied to Wall Street we will suffer endless booms and slumps as rootless financiers move goods, credit and labour around the world. We must aim for the genuine independence of a self-sufficient and sustainable economy.

Defining the enemy

The anti-Russian campaign instigated by the American neo-cons and slavishly followed by Gordon Brown’s government serves no British or European interest. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband probably has a deep and ancient racial hatred of the Russian people. He comes from a family of revolutionaries who helped to overthrow the Romanov dynasty and free the Jews from centuries of hostility. But Czarist anti-Semitism died in 1917 and the quarrels of the last century should not be allowed to dictate British foreign policy.

The tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions serve no purpose. Russia is a European power with the fastest growing economy in the world. She is our natural ally and there are no political or territorial disputes between us. The anti-Russian hysteria is kept going by the American arms lobby and the Zionists. The defence contractors sell their products easier in a climate of mutual animosity and the Zionist lobby sees Russia as a friend of the Arabs.

Cold War propaganda is being regurgitated. Stories of Russian backwardness that originated in the Reich Propaganda Ministry of the 1940s are appearing in the popular press. They depicted Russia as a nation of uneducated peasants who could never compete with the West. But this propaganda image was quickly shattered when the Red Army outwitted the Germans and drove them back to Berlin. And it was further undermined when Russia led the world with Sputnik in 1957 and the Mir space station in 1986.

Far from being backward Russia has always been in the forefront of scientific achievement. The two world wars took a devastating toll on the Russian people and the terrible destruction of the last war set back her economy for a generation.  But modern Russia is developing at an unprecedented rate and rivals Europe, America and Japan in technology.

With massive reserves of gas and oil Russia is a self-sufficient economic superpower. It’s inevitable that the availability of Russian gas and the proximity of German industry will lead to a partnership of interest from Lisbon to Vladivostok. But instead of promoting peace America has provoked Russia by establishing military bases in Central Asia, recruiting the eastern European states into NATO and by threatening to site missiles on Russia’s borders.

American foreign policy is stuck in a 1950s time warp. The greatest threat to our survival is not a Russian invasion but Third World immigration. We are not threatened by Russian tanks and planes but by the crippling social burden of keeping economic refugees and their dependants. Instead of stoking up hostility to Russia our government should recognise the real and present danger of unlimited non-European immigration. They prefer people to fear an imaginary enemy instead of confronting the importation of cheap labour and the “ethnic cleansing” of our native population.

Profit and loss

Iraq is entering the final phase of colonization. General Izzat al-Duri is firmly in control of the Sunni heartland but America is trying to cobble the Shiite militias into a national army. The puppet government of Nouri al-Maliki is being bribed with billions of dollars of “liberated” oil revenues and 150,000 mercenaries, from Blackwater and other security agencies, are guarding the oil wells and pipelines.

Much of the country is destroyed but General David Petraeus has seized the Iraqi oilfields. British forces are being redeployed to Afghanistan where the Taliban now control over half of the country. But in order to exploit the central Asian gas fields the Americans will have to double or treble the 40,000 NATO and 50,000 collaborationist forces under their command.

The oil industry will only pump gas and oil from wells that are economically viable. If production costs are too high, like the tar sands of Athabasca, they will leave it in the ground. There is a significant oilfield off The Falkland Islands but the cost of operating drilling rigs in the South Atlantic has, so far, been prohibitive.

The estimates for the Iraq-Afghan project were based on spending millions of dollars to capture trillions of dollars worth of gas and oil. The cost in human lives and broken minds and bodies was probably never even considered. The same oligarchs who control the oil industry and the US government also control the media and they were confident that they could manipulate public opinion.

But the super capitalists got their sums wrong. Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom were massively over budget and public opinion has turned away from them just as it did in Vietnam. When the Iraqis put aside their tribal differences they will realize that they are being paid with their own money. America’s “victory” in Iraq is a desert mirage and far from being cheap Iraqi oil will prove to be far too expensive.

History is repeating itself. The British Empire and the Soviet Union were both forced to withdraw from Afghanistan by the harsh nature of the country and the fierce determination of the Afghans to resist imperialism. Pakistan is bitterly divided by the war and America’s attempt to extend “the war on terror” to Iran has run into credibility problems. Even American intelligence agencies discount their own government’s propaganda.

It seems that central Asian gas and Iraqi oil are not so profitable after all. The hard-faced capitalists behind the project are not sentimentalists; they will walk away from the carnage that they have caused just as they would abandon a depleted oilfield. There is nothing romantic about American imperialists; their propaganda about bringing democracy to the masses is gratuitous nonsense and more and more Americans are realizing it.

Paying for the executioner’s bullets

When Mao Zedong had his enemies shot he allegedly charged their families for the executioner’s bullets. The latest scandal involving the funding of the Labour Party may result in a similar arrangement. The government wants us to subsidise political parties that are committed to racial suicide. When Brown or Cameron appears on television preaching multicultural mumbo-jumbo it will be at the expense of their victims. The wretched white taxpayers will be paying for their own destruction.

This is the latest in a long list of crimes against the people. The party that was founded to protect the workers is in the pockets of the bosses and the party that has always stood for the landed gentry is in the grip of the moneylenders. None of them represent British interests. They are unprincipled whores who have sold themselves to global capitalism.

One of the few good developments in modern society is the decline of politics. Fewer people bother to put illiterate crosses on ballot papers and membership of the old gang parties has collapsed. People know that there’s no difference between them and that their leaders are interchangeable. Dave Cameron is more of a socialist than Gordon Brown who could easily be mistaken for a Tory. And Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats is unknown.

Instead of making us pay for the political parties the government should insist that they are self supporting. There is no reason for parties to spend fortunes on national campaigns. Candidates should be able to pay their constituency expenses out of their own pockets. This would save the millions of pounds wasted on television campaigns and ensure that our representatives are capable of earning a living.

Some of our representatives have gone straight from university to become political researchers and then MPs. They lack the experience that comes with pursuing a career and learning to survive in the real world. It’s no wonder that they are so out of touch with their constituents.

In the past MPs had served in industry or the armed forces. The Labour Party used to have a few coalminers and steelworkers amongst its ranks of lawyers. And the Tories boasted industrialists, bankers and property developers as well as landowners. But many of today’s MPs are professional politicians who have never had a proper job.

If this cosseted political class donated part of their generous salaries and expenses to their parties there would be no need for secret backers or state funding. There would still be corruption because that is the nature of politics. But those of us who despise the head-counting charade of “democracy” could spend our money as we please.

Punitive Taxation

The practice of using taxation as an instrument of social engineering is not new. Every British government since the First World War has used tax revenues to distribute wealth. What Rudyard Kipling called “robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul.” This was done more or less openly and the majority of people accepted it. Having established the principle of using taxation to alter society the government is now devising new taxes to control us.

Successive governments have raised tobacco and alcohol taxes on the pretext of protecting our health. This has done little to change the habits of our drinkers and smokers who pay some of the highest prices in the world. Most Europeans pay much less but they seem to be just as healthy. It’s true that Scotland suffers a high rate of alcohol-related illnesses but drink costs the same in England and Scotland so other factors must be involved.

As education has declined government interference has increased. Instead of people making informed choices for themselves they are denied basic education and must rely upon the state to guide them. If they drink too much the state will increase the price of alcohol as a deterrent. And if they have got more money than they really need the state will introduce a carbon emission tax to force up air fares and stop them from flying around the world.

These cynical tactics are being used in the name of enviromentalism. “Global warming” has joined “anti-racism” and our “special relationship with America” as an official tenet of the new state religion.  Anyone who contests these articles of faith is condemned as a heretic and brought before the courts to be severely dealt with. The state has deliberately conflated dissent with terrorism and justifies heavy-handed policing with the “war on terror.”  Public opinion has been silenced in the name of democracy.

The sale of indulgences by a corrupt Catholic Church was a money making racket that had very little to do with the forgiveness of sins; and the new taxes on everything from gambling to flying have got nothing to do with morality or global warming. They are simply a way of raising money to pay for vital government projects such as killing Iraqis and Afghans; or buying unimaginably expensive, and ultimately useless, ballistic missiles systems from America.

By controlling the media big business has brainwashed the masses. It can send them to die in foreign wars, export their jobs, import cheap labour and silence them with draconian “anti-terrorist” legislation. Enough of them will still go through the meaningless pantomime of voting to keep the old gang in power. It makes absolutely no difference if a Labour or a Tory government is elected. Both parties are bankrolled by global capitalism and can be relied upon to serve their masters. The popular press and television perpetuate this racket but the rise of the Internet and the decline of newspaper sales give some hope for the future.

Detention without trial

The government seeks to extend police powers to hold suspects for increasingly long periods before they are charged. They say that they need these powers to combat “terrorism.” But the state already has such powers; in 1940 they interned over a thousand BUF and other fascist supporters without charge or trial under Defence Regulation 18B. One of the first was Eric Thomas the BUF leader in Limehouse who had been selling electrical goods in Germany. Steven Dorril in his book “Blackshirt” (Viking 2006) describes events:

Under 18B the authorities could detain without trial people they believed capable of prejudicial acts against the state. Reasons for detention did not have to be revealed either to the detainee or to the Advisory Committee dealing with appeals. Herbert Morrison attacked the “extraordinary sweeping powers” under which “anybody whom the Home Secretary did not like could be hanged, drawn or quartered almost without any reasonable or proper means of defending himself.”

Thomas was detained in deliberately harsh conditions:

He was held in solitary for twenty-five days without charge under special watch orders. He was not allowed a solicitor and no visitors except his wife. His “filthy” cell was artificially lit for twenty-four hours a day with the small window sandbagged.

The plutocratic state is always willing to suspend freedom of speech in defence of “democracy.” In the war against totalitarianism they installed an authoritarian coalition government under Winston Churchill.  And now 68 years later Gordon Brown wants to give our trigger-happy police far-reaching powers simply because “they have asked for them.”

The complete failure of detention without trial in Northern Ireland has already been forgotten. In the end it was not military might or draconian policing that beat the IRA; it was an American-brokered political settlement. The same will prove to be the case with the latest terrorist threat. If we stop invading their countries and killing their people it’s highly probable that Muslim extremists will leave us alone. The so-called “clash of civilizations” is really a political matter. So long as we part of the American-Israeli axis we face the threat of reprisals from fanatics amongst our huge and growing immigrant population.

If we really want to protect ourselves against terrorism we should get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and demand that Israel quits the occupied territories in compliance with UN Resolution 242. Our returned soldiers should be redeployed as border guards to keep out the endless waves of Third World economic refugees. And the Royal Navy and the RAF should act as our first line of defence by helping to protect Europe’s southern maritime borders against invaders.