A decade of militaristic Labour aggression

For British politics, the defining moment of the last decade was not an election result or a policy announcement. It was February 15 2003, when over a million people marched through London to oppose the invasion of Iraq. It was the biggest demonstration in British history, but both Labour government and Tory opposition went ahead and launched a war without public support. This striking turn of events illustrates two key aspects of the last decade - a government pursuing a thoroughly militaristic agenda and a public resistant to going along with it. Tony Blair's attachment to militarism was a key characteristic of his premiership. The terrorists who murdered thousands in the World Trade Centre in 2001 hoped to provoke a war that would be seen as an assault on Islam. George Bush played right into their hands. Blair fell into line with sizeable but far from overwhelming public support for invading Afghanistan. While al-Qaida was known to be a loose network, the media spoke as if it were a global conspiracy. Bush and Blair announced the "war on terror." It didn't work. Attempts to secure public support for invading Iraq failed from the start, with few taken in by fictitious weapons of mass destruction. Blair's comments on Saddam's brutality were undermined by his friendship with Saudi despots. For the first time in living memory, British troops were sent into a war that was opposed by a majority of the population.

But militarism is about more than troop deployments. The government plans to renew the Trident nuclear weapons system. The arms firm BAE Systems has enjoyed so much influence that former foreign secretary Robin Cook said that BAE's boss had "the key to the garden door at No 10." This twisted relationship reached its zenith in 2006, when Blair intervened to end a criminal investigation into allegedly corrupt BAE arms deals with Saudi Arabia. The incident was a staggering demonstration of the way that both militarism and capitalism distort democracy. Blair defended millionaire gunrunners, Saudi despots and Washington neocons while treating public opinion with contempt. With a few honourable exceptions, his militarism was enthusiastically supported by his ministers and the Tory opposition. By backing BAE, Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron showed their belief in furthering the financial interests of the wealthy at the expense of the majority. Taxpayer-funded subsidies for arms dealers reached around £850 million per year in the middle of the decade. Nor is war immune from the privatisation craze - military occupation has been outsourced, with contracts handed to mercenary companies whose soldiers in Iraq outnumbered British troops.

The privatisation of war has contributed to dramatic changes in the nature of armed conflict. Listening to certain commentators, you could get the impression that no such changes have taken place. Cheerleaders for militarism still talk as if war were a matter of defending nations from aggression with established armies. In reality, over 90 per cent of casualties in modern warfare are civilian. The vast majority of the decade's wars have been within, not between, countries. Their combatants have been resourced by multinational arms companies without national loyalties and have frequently included mercenaries. The changes to the nature of warfare are rarely acknowledged because they make the traditional arguments for militarism redundant. The horrific day in 2005 when terrorists blew up commuters in London has been used by politicians to justify all manner of policies. But no amount of battalions, tanks, Eurofighters or Trident missiles would have prevented such an attack. Bombs and bullets do not lead to compassion and understanding. Furthermore, it is clear that the biggest threat we face to our security is the danger of catastrophic climate chaos. The floodwaters will not stop at national borders or be repelled by a hail of bullets. While the government ploughs money into military "solutions," its supporters claim it would be "unrealistic" to do otherwise.

Given that the world now spends nearly $2,000 on military force for every dollar spent on conflict prevention, it is amazing that non-violent approaches are successful at all. Yet recent years have seen non-violent methods of conflict resolution used successfully in countries as diverse as Estonia, Guatemala and Mozambique; the relative lack of violence in Northern Ireland is surely one of the greatest successes of the decade. Non-violence has far less money and publicity than violence, but the British people have shown themselves able to see through the flimsy network of lies and reassurances used to justify militarism. Not only were most of the public opposed to the Iraq war but polls consistently show majorities against Trident and the occupation of Afghanistan. Last November it became clear that the government's gung-ho approach to war had massively mistaken the public mood when an independent poll revealed that 87 per cent of British adults believe the dead on all sides should be commemorated on Remembrance Day. The millions who marched in 2003 did not prevent the Iraq invasion, but they may have made Blair or Bush think twice about laying into Syria or North Korea. Many more people are now aware of the arms industry's influence within government. In 2008, campaigners achieved the closure of the Defence Export Services Organisation - the arms companies' lobbying unit within the MoD. Arms dealers were infuriated by its replacement with a slightly weaker, but still abhorrent, unit within UK Trade and Investment.

No longer can arms companies have it all their own way. NGOs have highlighted the true cost of Trident, resulting in a Cabinet split that means there is a real chance of Trident renewal not going ahead. With British soldiers still dying and killing in Afghanistan and other armed conflicts around the world rarely even making the British press, there is far, far more to do. Climate change and economic crises have gripped the world's attention. It is vital that we make the links between militarism, climate change and capitalism. This means not only co-ordinated campaigning but clearer messages. We must continue to expose the way that both war and climate change have delivered profit and power to the few, at the expense of the planet and its people. Militarism sustains its support by constantly telling us, despite the evidence, that people cannot achieve things alone, that we need powerful individuals employing men with guns to keep things under control. Gandhi suggested that one of the biggest threats to Indian freedom was the people's reluctance to trust themselves. There is always a tendency to fall back on trusting violence, governments, money, traditions or even activist heroes. The first step to challenging militarism is having the confidence simply to trust ourselves.

Labour's dead man walking returns

It is, one supposes, the first time that a multimillionaire has ever graced Trimdon Labour Club with his presence as a visiting speaker. And it is a mark of the desperation and political bankruptcy of new Labour that it has pulled ex-prime minister and war criminal Tony Blair out of storage and is using him in its election campaign. There must have been many peace and political activists in the country who experienced an uncomfortable sense of deja vu when the oily face of Blair appeared once more on the television screens yesterday, hurrying into the Trimdon club under police escort. It's one of the few good things to say about politics in the Brown era that, somehow, the world seemed rather cleaner without the arch-opportunist and apologist for capitalism anywhere in evidence. But returned he is, and with the ascendance of Peter Mandelson in Cabinet and the creeping back into the public eye of Alastair Campbell, the set's complete.

Complete, that is, if you ignore the vanished coterie of disgraced new Labourites who have bitten, or are about to bite, the dust in various scandals involving influence-peddling and MPs' expenses. That's quite a substantial number, incidentally. But what does the political resurrection of Mr Blair tell us about the Labour Party in this election? In short, it tells us that the party hasn't learned a damn thing from the events of the last few years. It hasn't learned that the Blairite love-affair with the City led inexorably to the abuses that precipitated the banking crisis. The sense of invulnerability that came from having a capitalism-friendly Labour administration and a complaisant Tory opposition gave the banks and their tame speculators a licence to fiddle, free rein to invent ever-more ludicrous financial "products" to enable them to extract yet more paper "profit" from dodgy transactions and a society so based on greed and the acquisition of personal wealth that their behaviour could be passed off as acceptable. Capitalism, never exactly savoury, became casino capitalism, in which gambling was passed off as trading and skimming was considered legitimate. So difficult has new Labour found it to establish any real difference from the Tories that they are now reduced to arguments not about what, but about when. Not about attacking or defending the welfare state, but about how soon and how often to attack it. This unsurprisingly makes election campaigns difficult.

The electorate may be misguided at times, but it certainly isn't blind and anyone to the left of centre is finding it increasingly difficult to support a party which has demonstrably lost its way along with its progressive principles. Thus, the recourse to Tony Blair. It's back to the politics of spin over substance, back to a sales technique rather than a political manifesto and a return to the fight to command the centre rather than drive politics in a progressive direction. Not that there was ever much chance of a Brown administration being vastly progressive, but it has shown an increasing tendency to revisit the recent past, to try to recapture the "glory days" of the new Labour project that everyone except Labour's leaders realises is stone dead, even though as yet unburied. Mr Darling had a chance to become the defender of public services. He was driven into fighting to avoid an instant bloodbath of cuts. But he has wasted that opportunity and with it, rejected Labour's best chance of a principled victory in a general election. A vote for Labour is, in most cases, still necessary to defend against the wild excesses of a Tory Britain, but the retreat into spin represented by Mr Blair's resurrection hugely diminishes Labour's chances of electoral success. The Blairite dream of a Labour middle class is dead, but they still won't let it rest.

Britain & America's special relationship

What if Hitler had won the war? Or Lee Harvey Oswald had missed? History is full of what-if questions, the stuff of fiction and almost-fact – and here are two more as we pound into 2010. What if Tony Blair hadn't dissembled about weapons of mass delusion? And – absolutely connected – what if Britain hadn't copped out at Suez? That final question is posed (in crisp counter-factual terms) by Robert Skidelsky at the end of his essay on 20th century Britain for A World By Itself, a chronicle of our small island's upheavals from Bede to Blair. What if the Brits and the French had told Eisenhower to go hang in 1956, he asks. What if they'd put the Suez Canal Company back in place, set up a joint garrison on the waterway – and become the empowered driving forces of a united Europe? magine a permanent and very cordiale entente, a new Third Force for planet Earth. And go on imagining. You saw Messrs Brown and Sarkozy playing natural best mates over bankers' bonuses the other day. Now head for the Westminster conference centre as a very ex-prime minister faces the genteel drip-drip of Iraqi water torture. We know already that there's something dodgier here than the odd dossier. We have heard a parade of the diplomatic great and good curl civilised lips over Downing Street's antics in March 2003. We have seen top lawyers furrow their brows at the illegality of it all. We have even endured Tony singing "Je ne regrette rien" as per usual. Yet the basic point – and harshest of truths – has barely been touched on.

George Bush and Dick Cheney had the intelligence they required. America's great secret sausage machine was sizzling with links to Saddam. It may all have been craven rubbish (as a few brave souls declared). But it was what the commander-in-chief deemed conclusive, with necessary action to follow. Mighty armies marched to the top of the hill with no chance of marching down again. And what could our PM do then, poor thing? Wimp out and order the fleet to sail away? Court derision amid a frenzy of knocking knees? Back John Scarlett's iffy-squiffy conclusions against the torrent of supposed certainties pouring in from Washington? Of course, millions marched for a different answer. Of course doves and hawks were at it again. But cast your mind back to Eden and Suez and ask, in reality, what other choice No 10 had. So 53 years ago, strapped for cash, short of too many troops fighting a US war in Korea, we let Ike ring down the curtain on empire. (Good job? But that's not the point). So Britain's bomb became America's bomb, lease-lent by default and impossible of independent operation. So MI5 and 6 became mere needy adjuncts of the CIA. So we couldn't fight a war of our own – see the Falklands – without US help, and permission. So our self-esteem and diplomatic status came to rest on a bit-part role as America's best friend over the water, the Oval Office's bridge to the heart of Europe.

Blair, being Blair, gave such spear-carrying a rhetorical ring. He talked up our influence. But why, after Clinton, put so much effort into getting cosy with George W? Because he thought – and surely still thinks – that it's the office that matters, not the name of who happens to be president. Don't worry whether it's an elephant in the room, or a donkey: just stick close to a relationship of extra special importance to Great Britain, because it haplessly defines us. But Wilson stayed out of Vietnam. Why couldn't Blair do the same for Baghdad? Because Europe in 1964 wasn't the Europe of 2003. Because the whole dependency culture of British political life had changed. Call Tony Blair a "sycophant" like the Daily Fail, if you wish. Call him a twister and a cheat, like many in his own party. Call him any of the names Chancellor Brown used to whisper behind his hand. But don't forget that PM Brown is first out of the traps when Obama wants more troops in Helmand, or that would-be PM Cameron, mending his White House fences fast, stands right behind him. Regime change when Mullah Omar departed; regime change again if Karzai doesn't perform. By all means dump on Blair if it makes you feel better. By all means cheer Chilcot on. But remember that this is by no means the whole of the story. Remember that we are impaled on a relationship none of our leaders – past or immediately present – will change, specially constrained by a truth that cannot be boldly told. For what would happen if they did? Then – no counter-factual needed – the emperor would run desperately short of clothes.