Regime Change

Neil Clark writes:

The view that the new government is left-wing is not only held by those on the right, but by many on the liberal left too, who maintain that measures such as the scrapping of the planned third runway at Heathrow, the binning of the ID cards scheme and the announcement of a referendum on electoral reform show that we're now led by some really groovy progressives.

If only it was true. Unfortunately what we experienced earlier this month in Britain was not a left-wing coup, but the opposite - an anti-democratic coup by the most reactionary force in the world - international capital.

For most of its period in office new Labour served the money men well. They carried on with the Tory policy of privatisation, allowed hedge funds, private equity firms and other financial speculators to operate freely, and fought the imperialistic wars that capital had wanted.

While the economy was booming, and their beloved warmonger Tony B Liar was at Number 10 Downing Street, opening up new markets for them from Belgrade to Baghdad, capital was happy to leave Labour in control. But with Blair's resignation and the global economic crisis, things changed. Labour, because of its links with public sector unions, was unlikely to make the drastic cuts in spending that capital urgently required.

Moreover, after 13 years of Labour government, the money men - the men who really rule Britain - knew it was time for a "regime change" to maintain the pretence that Britain was a functioning democracy. Gordon Brown, the man hailed as "The Iron Chancellor" a decade earlier, quickly became a hate figure. But despite the relentless anti-Brown campaign, the general election did not deliver the knock-out blow to the Labour leader that capital had hoped for.

Capital had wanted a majority Tory government. The markets, we were repeatedly told, did not want the "uncertainty" of a hung parliament. But having failed to achieve an outright Tory victory, the money men then pushed for the next best thing - the speedy formation of a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition to start cutting public spending without further delay.

When Brown stayed on as Prime Minister on May 7, as he was perfectly entitled to, the anti-Labour campaign went into overdrive. "In the space of five tumultuous days, Britain has gone from democracy as we know it to the brink of dictatorship," cried The Sun. The former Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn said that Gordon Brown's refusal to quit Number 10 represented "nothing less than an attempted coup."

The anti-Brown witch-hunt was reminiscent of the campaign to force the incumbent Slobodan Milosevic to step down after the first round of voting in the presidential elections in Yugoslavia in 2000. Like Brown, Milosevic was acting perfectly legally by staying in office - like Brown, there were some very powerful people who wanted him out. As in Yugoslavia in 2000, international capital got their man, and a Labour-led coalition, which "the markets" made it very clear that they did not want, was strangled at birth.

Instead it's full steam ahead for the final chapter of a project that has been planned since the late 1940s and which started in Britain in 1979, namely the destruction of the post-war mixed economy welfare state.

Those who believe the Liberal Democrats, or even David Cameron's Conservatives to be somehow "left-wing" ought to have studied the parties manifestos a little closer.

For the litmus test which tells us whether a party really is progressive, is not whether or not it supports a third runway at Heathrow, or its position on ID cards, but its stance on public ownership.

Whereas the Lib Dems supported railway renationalisation in 2005, in 2010 the policy was dropped. Today's Orange Book Lib Dems advocate further privatisation: of the state-owned bookmaker the Tote and the Royal Mail. Nick Clegg, the public school educated banker's son, who once worked for the neoliberal EU trade commissioner Leon Brittan in the 1990s, made his reactionary, anti-collectivist views clear in an interview he gave to the Spectator magazine earlier this year, when he praised Margaret Thatcher's victory over the trade unions as an "immensely important visceral battle for how Britain is governed."

If there really had been a "left-wing coup" in Britain this month, as conservative commentators claim, then the new government would not now be menacing Iran, but announcing plans to pull British troops out of Afghanistan. It would not be cutting corporation tax, but raising it - and launching a major programme of re-nationalisation. It would not be appointing bellicose neoconservative supporters of the Iraq war as Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary, but putting on trial all those who planned and propagandised for the illegal wars of the past 13 years. It would not be trying to appease the City, but clamping down on the financial spivs, profiteers and speculators who have made their vast fortunes at the expense of the majority. And instead of calling for more "competition" and for the state to "back off" as the faux-progressive Nick Clegg has done, it would be ditching neoliberal capitalism and replacing it with a humane economic system in which people always came before profits.