New Labour: Selling Britain Into Corporate Slavery

Posted on February 14, 2008
Filed Under Politics |

So, Gordon Brown has been accused of selling the children of Britain into slavery by reducing their education to nothing more than training them to have no ambition or abilities beyond abasing themselves before exploitative companies.

The only lessons children will learn in Brave New Britain are how to oil the corporate money-machines and how to become the cloned and expendable labour force of global business.

When business says jump to Gordon Brown and his jittery lackeys, the only answer they can come up with is: “How high, your Sirships?” When Darling of the Treasury was stupid enough to think that he had the power to introduce legislation to tax business, he was promptly thrown back into his toy-box by Digby Jones and the money-men.

The government of UK Plc is owned, lock, stock and barrel by business. When MPs and ministers are not begging for backhanders from business for performing dodgy backroom deals, they are simply ordered around like minor servants by the chairmen of multinationals.

Of course, this all started for New Labour under the Emperor of Servility, Tony Blair.

At least under Mrs Thatcher’s religion for the non-thinking, Greed Is Go(o)d, there had been some chance that the money which sloshes around the arms trade might find its way into the pockets of those near and dear, if not otherwise unemployable loved ones:

“What Bandar [Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar] could not secure, in the face of the Israeli lobby in Washington, was a massive contract that would transform the entire military profile of the Kingdom [Saudi Arabia]. Reagan encouraged him to go to the British, and Mrs Thatcher was able to pull off one of the largest arms deals of all time, although it was shrouded in secrecy. Even America’s leaky top table would not disclose the true value of what became known as the Al Yamama defence deal. Included in it were seventy-two Tornado fighter aircraft, endless airbase infrastructure, and much more; the eventual value was somewhere between $30 and $50 billion. It was described to me subsequently by a top Foreign Office mandarin as the most corrupt British contract in modern history.

“A few months earlier, in July 1985, unknown to us, Bandar had jetted off to Austria, interrupting a rare Thatcher holiday in Salzburg to initial the deal. When it came to secrecy about the contract and the fabulous backhanders that flowed from it, the Saudis met their match in Britain. No one was ever prosecuted, but numerous well-placed people and their relatives profited from assorted back-pocketry. All we could be sure of in Washington at the time was that there was an odour, some of it no doubt fuelled by envy, but most of it coming from the chat amongst politicians and officials about who had benefited from the usual Saudi practices. Endless pro-Israeli Congressmen would try to point us this way or that, but we were never able to identify the actual value of the deal, or of the associated bribes, or the proximity of the recipients to key British politicians in power at the time”.

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Still, Tony Blair taught the iron discipline of rapid reaction: when somebody with money tells you what to do, you do it without question and fast as lightning.

Which is why no levels of grovelling subservience with regard to quashing the SFO investigation into the Al Yamama Saudi arms deal with BAE Systems would raise one twitchy eyebrow of surprise in anyone.

The Guardian has this on the current judicial review:

The British government appears to have “rolled over” in response to Saudi pressure to drop an investigation into alleged bribery in arms deals, a senior judge said today.

Two high court judges are reviewing the decision of Robert Wardle, the director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), to drop the investigation into allegations of bribery and corruption in contracts between BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia.

Dinah Rose QC, for the pressure groups Corner House Research and the Campaign Against Arms Trade, today told the court Tony Blair applied “irresistible pressure” on the SFO and the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, to end the investigation while he was prime minister.

“There were repeated efforts by the UK ambassador to Saudi Arabia and personal overtures from Tony Blair. Irresistible pressure forced them to drop the prosecution,” Rose said.

The prime minister “stepped over the boundary between what is a permissible exercise and impermissible attempts to influence or dictate a decision on the investigation by expressing his view,” she said. “This is the clearest case of intervention that goes too far.”

According to The Daily Mail, Tony Blair is even more complicit in promoting and fostering terrorism than had already been thought:

“Although some companies have sought to excuse bribery on the basis that jobs would be lost if bribes were not paid, the flip side of the coin is the extent to which companies lose business either because they are unwilling to pay bribes or because they are out-bribed by competitors,” he said.

Corruption also had profound implications for national security, as acknowledged by the leaders of all G8 countries, including Mr Blair when he was Prime Minister. They recognised that “corrupt practices contribute to the spread of organised crime and terrorism, undermine public trust in government and destabilise economies”.

The Foreign Office recognised that weak or failing states were frequently safe havens for terrorists.

Corruption among ruling elites in the Middle East had been cited as a factor motivating the leadership of terrorist organisations such as al Qaida, one of whose stated aims was the elimination of corrupt regimes.

Mr Hildyard said Saudi Arabia had assured the United Nations that it would comply with its duty of co-operation in anti-terrorist matters. Its willingness to co-operate with the UK was so strong that it had signed a “memorandum of understanding” to facilitate such contact.

Yet, said Ms Rose, the Saudi government had issued threats aimed at stopping the BAE inquiry and the Director of the SFO had unlawfully submitted to those threats.

So, what does this say about New Britain?

That it is a failed banana republic which will comply willingly with the wishes or orders of any dictatorship or chairman of business, as long as somebody is making squillions of money out of the deal.

It also says that New Britain is no longer a democracy, but merely a political harlot; a nation in the form of a low prostitute which will sell its people and principles to, not even necessarily the highest bidder, but anyone who flashes the cash, but possibly with no intention of paying the bills.

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