•  HOME 
  •  ARCHIVES 
  •  BOOKS 
  •  PDF ARCHIVE 
  •  WWP 
  •  SUBSCRIBE 
  •  DONATE 
  •  MUNDOOBRERO.ORG
  • Loading


Follow workers.org on
Twitter Facebook iGoogle




British voters ‘punished’ Blair over Iraq war

Published May 12, 2005 4:02 PM

The world had a chance to see the deep contradictions in Western capitalist democracy with the recent British elections. Yes, the electors “punished” Prime Minister Tony Blair by costing his Labor Party parliamentary seats. There is even talk that Blair may have to step down as party leader. His successor, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown—roughly the U.S. equivalent of Treasury secretary—has already been chosen, it seems.

But the punishment is light, indeed, for the monstrous crimes of Blair and the rest of the British imperialist government. Blair is hated by the British working class for his servile support of George W. Bush and the U.S. wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Huge demonstrations even before the war on Iraq started showed how much the people were against these imperialist adventures.

Since then, perhaps 100,000 Iraqis have died. Almost 1,700 young worker-soldiers from the U.S. and Britain—the only other significant partner of the U.S. in the ludicrously labeled “coalition of the willing”—have also perished in Iraq, according to official sources.

Iraq’s modern infrastructure has been destroyed. Its once admirable health system, schools, industries and culture have been set back to the days before its revolutionary independence struggle. An ugly anti-Muslim chauvinism has been unleashed, culminating in barbaric acts of torture and humiliation by both U.S. and British soldiers.

Revulsion over all this resulted in sharp opposition to Blair and his ministers wherever they campaigned.

As much as the multinational working class in Britain rejected the war, however, they found it very difficult to get what they wanted at the polls. They want to restore the social programs that the Conservatives took an ax to, beginning with the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. In particular, they want their nationalized medical system and retirement plan restored to health. So, despite the war, they elected the Labor Party to office once again, but with a much reduced plurality.

The dilemma they faced was: how can you get what you want at the ballot box when the party that claims to be for social welfare and greater equality is also the party that is waging a cruel war?

The voters faced a Scylla-Charybdis choice. The snobbish Conservatives hammered away at Blair for lying to the people about Iraq, but everyone knew they would also hammer away at social programs. And they made no promise to bring the troops home.

Blair and Company tried to steer the discussion away from the war and talk about how they would improve housing, health and so on.

Britain’s third party, the Liberal Demo crats, just hoped people would be so fed up with both Labor and the Tories that they’d go for the fuzzy middle ground. They didn’t.

One interesting race was in London’s East End, where George Galloway, running on the newly created Respect Party ticket, defeated the pro-Blair candidate in a working-class district that normally is a shoo-in for the Labor Party.

Galloway had been an early and strong opponent of the war. He was expelled from the Labor Party in October 2003 after what he termed a “kangaroo court” of the party found him guilty of inciting Arabs to attack British troops, urging British troops to defy orders, congratulating a Socialist Alliance anti-war candidate who defeated Labor in a local election, and threatening to run against Labor himself.

After his expulsion, Galloway had told BBC, “The Labor Party will rue the day they took this step. ... With every bone in my body, I will fight to hold to account a lying, dishonest Prime Minister.”

And so he did.

Britain’s Labor Party has been part of the imperialist political establishment for many, many years, even though it has maintained a weak social democratic stance on domestic social policy. During the Vietnam War, Prime Minister Harold Wil son, also of the Labor Party, shamelessly capitulated to economic and political pressure from Lyndon Johnson and endorsed that dirty war in exchange for massive loans.

The working class, now infused and invigorated with many people of color from Britain’s former colonies, has spoken, but it has not won any real victory. That can only come in the streets and in the class struggle.