The Red Cross Report on Iraq Confirms our Worst Fears but Questions need to be asked about Britain's Role Elsewhere.
Today's Red Cross report on conditions in Iraq confirmed our worst fears about what Iraqis are experiencing on a daily basis. The report stands in complete contrast to the spin we receive from Ministers. A stark example of how bad it is for ordinary Iraqis is that when asked what would most improve the quality of their lives, Iraqi parents responded by appealing to the authorities to at least remove the dead bodies from outside their homes each day so that their children did not have to continue to see the corpses on the streets decomposing. The consequences of the war initiated by Blair but funded by Brown will live with the Iraqi people and ourselves for generations. And yet Blair and Brown still continue to justify it.
It isn't just in Iraq that Britain's foreign policy is contributing to deaths and lives blighted by physical injury, torture and fear. New Labour's Britain supplies miltary aid to the brutal Columbian regime, whose senior miltary commanders have recently been exposed as having direct links with the drugs trade.
The Justice for Colombia Campaign has revealed that over 500 trade unionists have been killed since the regime of President Uribe came to power in 2002 and this year is set to be even bloodier than the last. The Colombian military continues to work with paramilitary death squads with total impunity and murders, torture and disappearances of opposition leaders, trade unionist students and campaigners are still everyday occurrences.
So when MPs and Trade Union General Secretaries appear on platforms opposing the war and the occupation of Iraq and calling for human rights in places like Colombia, just ask the questions:
How is it that in the election for Labour leader you can advocate support for Gordon Brown, joint leader of the present New Labour administration, that has perpetrated this war and supported with aid the brutal, murderous regime of Uribe?
How can you proclaim your peace and progressive credentials when your aim is to install Brown and his team of courtiers into office, the very people whose actions have brought about this brutality and terror on the populations of Iraq and Colombia?
It isn't just in Iraq that Britain's foreign policy is contributing to deaths and lives blighted by physical injury, torture and fear. New Labour's Britain supplies miltary aid to the brutal Columbian regime, whose senior miltary commanders have recently been exposed as having direct links with the drugs trade.
The Justice for Colombia Campaign has revealed that over 500 trade unionists have been killed since the regime of President Uribe came to power in 2002 and this year is set to be even bloodier than the last. The Colombian military continues to work with paramilitary death squads with total impunity and murders, torture and disappearances of opposition leaders, trade unionist students and campaigners are still everyday occurrences.
So when MPs and Trade Union General Secretaries appear on platforms opposing the war and the occupation of Iraq and calling for human rights in places like Colombia, just ask the questions:
How is it that in the election for Labour leader you can advocate support for Gordon Brown, joint leader of the present New Labour administration, that has perpetrated this war and supported with aid the brutal, murderous regime of Uribe?
How can you proclaim your peace and progressive credentials when your aim is to install Brown and his team of courtiers into office, the very people whose actions have brought about this brutality and terror on the populations of Iraq and Colombia?
posted by John at 12:57 PM
3 Comments:
My MP is doing precisely this. Her answer is that she has always been a Brown supporter.
But then what is the point, frankly, of opposing war/Trident/top-up fees etc if you are going to vote into power someone who (if not at some point in the past) certainly now backs these policies to the hilt.
It is utterly illogical and, worse, a denial of the realities staring most ordinary Labour members in the face. The policies Labour now stands for are not vote-winners. In three weeks' time we are going to get trashed. Simple as that.
Maybe then the penny will drop MPs will realise that we HAVE to have a debate and not a coronation for Brown. In the meantime, we have to keep lobbying. Last night ,our Branch meeting was (yet again) inquorate.If MPs deny us a contest with a socialist candidate ie John then people are likely to walk away in droves and there will be no-one left to campaign for them in two years' time.
Pointing this out might not be a bad idea, either! Don't lose heart, comrades!
Right again John.
Some of the same people trying to lecture us on solidarity with trade unions in Iraq are backing Gordon Brown and Tony Blair - who provide military aid to the Colombian government whose paramilitaries are murdering trade unionists - and backing an Iraqi government which maintains Saddam's anti-trade union laws, has added to them and employs many of Saddam's former Mukhabarat torturers and assassins.
well said Duncan McFar - it's ok for us to have solidarity with trade unions in Iraq but not to have proper trade union and employment rights here according to the Blair and Brownites!! (Despite our comprehensive consumer rights; statutory rights or anything which involves selling and the making of money.....!)
I once had a (polite) go at Bill Rammell who was the relevant Minister at the time about backing the Colombians at a conference fringe meeting explaining that my position was the same as Jeremy Corbyn's (who was also speaking at the fringe) i.e. that we should NOT engage with them to help train their police I think it was was that Rammell had said the British goverment was doing at the time a few years ago. He looked uncomfortable and simply said "point taken!". But they just carry on don't they? Oblivious is not the word - apart from not having proper integrity or morals these sort of ministers remind me of the Tory attitude where they think the poor deserve a bit of charity (well some of the kinder ones do anyway!) but they refuse point blank to put in the structural reforms whether to temporary housing here or to the infrastructures of third world countries thus perpetutating the problemn.
I always have teh uncomfortable feeling with Blairites and Brownites that they are trying too hard: they are so weedy the way they try to appease these governments in the way they do George Bush just cos they don't want to back down from their promises at the beginning of the Blair years where they wanted to break from traditonal Labour policy and be friendly to say the Clinton regime but it dosen't mean they have to go THIS far. (Also you do have to change manifesto commitments if they become out of date or there is some other good reason, it's just common sense and the Tories are always breaking theirs and so do the Blairites when they feel like such as so wrobgly ditching the ethical foreign policy.....)
I also don't know how anyone but the most besotted members of the Blair and Brown fan clubs can still believe they will get away without an election in these days of phone votes and sing offs for the part of Joseph (and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat for that like Leader of the Labour Party/possible Prime Minister that really SHOULD be voted for!!
And yes Blair really should have done a Love Actually on the war Iraq and the fact that he won't says it all really.
Miliband was trying to say on Newsnight that air traffic only counts for 0.4% of air traffic pollution - prob cos he is in league with big business like BA and BAA and wants a Heathrow third runway and Gatwick is only safe until 2019... when I worked at Heathrow some time ago there was actually a pro teerminal five campign in the staff canteen promoted by BAA I'm sure and quite a few staff seemed to ne supportin git but only because they though it would bring jobs and the debate over the fry ups/porridge (or slimming food for some of the vainer flight attendants!) didn't go much deeper than that. But if the neo-liberals and their excessive globalisation hadn't made most people so fearful of losing their jobs people might ebn able to look a bit more deeply than this which is another reason we need to strenghten our trade unions in this country.
It is really depressing about the farcical nature the leadership election is rapidly degenerating into as it reminds me far too much of the way the Tories do things.
Hopefully we can get the message out that we are not satisfied with the way things have been done and run and we really could do better: not "things can only get better" as that was actually starting from a negative standpoint but AWIP of course if that is a valid abbreviation.
N.B. I'm just back from Hastings which I know is highly marginal and the only election posters I saw were for the Green party apart from one that was just a list of names but I couldn't see whose from the car window. Don't know what that means for the forthcoming elections!
And here endeth today's scandalous gossip!
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