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Liberalism To Murdochracy
By John Pilger
12/19/07 "ICH" -- --
The former Murdoch retainer Andrew Neil has described James
Murdoch, the heir apparent, as a "social liberal". What strikes
me is his casual use of "liberal" for the new ruler of an empire
devoted to the promotion of war, conquest and human division.
Neil's view is not unusual. In the murdochracy that Britain has
largely become, once noble terms such as democracy, reform, even
freedom itself, have long been emptied of their meaning. In the
years leading to Tony Blair's election, liberal commentators
vied in their Tonier-than-thou obeisance to such a paragon of
"reborn liberalism". In these pages in 1995, Henry Porter
celebrated an almost mystical politician who "presents himself
as a harmoniser for all the opposing interests in British life,
a conciliator of class differences and tribal antipathies, a
synthesiser of opposing beliefs". Blair was, of course, the
diametric opposite.
As events have demonstrated, Blair and the cult of New Labour
have destroyed the very liberalism millions of Britons thought
they were voting for. This truth is like a taboo and was missing
almost entirely from last week's Guardian debate about civil
liberties. Gone is the bourgeoisie that in good times would
extend a few rungs of the ladder to those below. From Blair's
pseudo-moralising assault on single parents a decade ago to
Peter Hain's recent attacks on the disabled, the "project" has
completed the work of Thatcher and all but abolished the
premises of tolerance and decency, however amorphous, on which
much of British public life was based. The trade-off has been
mostly superficial "social liberalism" and the highest personal
indebtedness on earth. In 2007, reported the Joseph Rowntree
Foundation, the United Kingdom faced the highest levels of
inequality for 40 years, with the rich getting richer and the
poor poorer and more and more segregated from society. The
International Monetary Fund has designated Britain a tax haven,
and corruption and fraud in British business are almost twice
the global average, while Unicef reports that British children
are the most neglected and unhappiest in the "rich" world.
Abroad, behind a facade of liberal concern for the world's
"disadvantaged", such as waffle about millennium goals and
anti-poverty stunts with the likes of Google and Vodafone, the
Brown government, together with its EU partners, is demanding
vicious and punitive free-trade agreements that will devastate
the economies of scores of impoverished African, Caribbean and
Pacific nations. In Iraq, the blood-letting of a "liberal
intervention" may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda
genocide, while the British occupiers have made no real attempt
to help the victims of their lawlessness. And putting out more
flags will not cover the shame. "The mortality of children in
Basra has increased by nearly 30% compared to the Saddam Hussein
era," says Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at Basra children's
hospital. In January nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to
Hilary Benn, then international development secretary,
describing how children were dying because Britain had not
fulfilled its obligations under UN security resolution 1483. He
refused to see them.
Even if a contortion of intellect and morality allows the
interventionists to justify these actions, the same cannot be
said for liberties eroded at home. These are too much part of
the myth that individual freedom was handed down by eminent
liberal gentlemen instead of being fought for at the bottom. Yet
rights of habeas corpus, of free speech and assembly, and
dissent and tolerance, are slipping away, undefended. Whole
British communities now live in fear of the police. The British
are distinguished as one of the most spied upon people in the
world. A grey surveillance van with satellite tracking sits
outside my local Sainsbury's. On the pop radio station Kiss 100,
the security service MI5 advertises for ordinary people to spy
on each other. These are normal now, along with the tracking of
our intimate lives and a system of secretive justice that
imposes 18-hour curfews on people who have not been charged with
any crime and are denied the "evidence". Hundreds of terrified
Iraqi refugees are sent back to the infinite dangers of the
country "we" have destroyed. Meanwhile, the cause of any real
civil threat to Britons has been identified and confirmed
repeatedly by the intelligence services. It is "our" continuing
military presence in other people's countries and collusion with
a Washington cabal described by the late Norman Mailer as
"pre-fascist". When famous liberal columnists wring their hands
about the domestic consequences, let them look to their own
early support for such epic faraway crimes.
In broadcasting, a prime source of liberalism and most of our
information, the unthinkable has been normalised. The murderous
chaos in Iraq is merely internecine. Indeed, Bush's "surge" is
"working". The holocaust there has nothing to do with "us".
There are honourable exceptions, of course, as there are in
those great liberal storehouses of knowledge, Britain's
universities; but they, too, are normalised and left to natter
about "failed states" and "crisis management" - when the cause
of the crisis is on their doorstep. As Terry Eagleton has
pointed out, for the first time in two centuries almost no
eminent British poet, playwright or novelist is prepared to
question the foundations of western actions, let alone
interrupt, as DJ Taylor once put it, all those "demure ironies
and mannered perceptions, their focus on the gyrations of a
bunch of emotional poseurs ... to the reader infinitely
reassuring ... and infinitely useless". Harold Pinter and Ronan
Bennett are exceptions.
Britain is now a centralised single-ideology state, as secure in
the grip of a superpower as any former eastern bloc country. The
Whitehall executive has prerogative powers as effective as
politburo decrees. Unlike Venezuela, critical issues such as the
EU constitution or treaty are denied a referendum, regardless of
Blair's "solemn pledge". Thanks largely to a parliament in which
a majority of the members cannot bring themselves to denounce
the crime in Iraq or even vote for an inquiry, New Labour has
added to the statutes a record 3,000 criminal offences: an
apparatus of control that undermines the Human Rights Act. In
1977, at the height of the cold war, I interviewed the Charter
77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia. They warned that complacency
and silence could destroy liberty and democracy as effectively
as tanks. "We're actually better off than you in the west," said
a writer, measuring his irony. "Unlike you, we have no
illusions."
For those people who still celebrate the virtues and triumphs of
liberalism - anti-slavery, women's suffrage, the defence of
individual conscience and the right to express it and act upon
it - the time for direct action is now. It is time to support
those of courage who defy rotten laws to read out in Parliament
Square the names of the current, mounting, war dead, and those
who identify their government's complicity in "rendition" and
its torture, and those who have followed the paper and blood
trail of Britain's piratical arms companies. It is time to
support the NHS workers who up and down the country are trying
to alert us to the destruction of a Labour government's greatest
achievement. The list of people stirring is reassuring. The
awakening of the rest of us is urgent.
www.johnpilger.com
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