Left And Right Must Unite And Fight I

The Morning Star editorialises:

As dogs return to their vomit, so the enthusiasts for a police state in Britain return to the Communications Data Bill.

On television at the weekend Home Secretary Theresa May came as close as she could to calling for this discredited measure to be resurrected. It received a drubbing from a committee of MPs and lords late last year and was then dropped from the Queen's Speech at the insistence of junior coalition leader Nick Clegg.

The Bill would grant sweeping additional powers to the police and intelligence services to monitor everyone's internet communications, whether or not they are suspected of possible terrorist involvement. May had previously argued that these measures were essential in order to combat terrorism and crime planned or instigated through internet-based pages, messages and phone calls.

There appears to be have been no need for such modern technology in the plot to murder a soldier outside Woolwich barracks last Wednesday. But in the backwash of the brutal slaying of Lee Rigby, reintroduction of the Bill has received qualified or outright backing from former Labour home secretaries Jack Straw, John Reid and Alan Johnson, as well as Gordon Brown's national security adviser Lord West.

These four grim horsemen of the apocalypse have previously championed such policies as universal ID cards and 90-day internment without trial. In truth, state agencies such as GCHQ, MI5, MI6 and Special Branch have no need of additional powers. They have all the means required to monitor actual or wannabe terrorists in Britain, buttressed by the issue of 500,000 intercept warrants each year.

We also know that in practice the security and intelligence services have no compunction about acting outside the law should it be deemed necessary. Moreover, it has emerged that MI5 and MI6 knew plenty about at least one of the two men shot by police after the vile slaughter of Drummer Rigby.

The security services had no need of a Communications Data Act to take any action they wished to monitor, recruit or arrest Michael Adebolajo or, indeed, to have him kidnapped and sent abroad for torture as part of Britain's covert involvement in the "extraordinary rendition" programme.

Of course the public here has to be protected from terrorist attacks, from whatever quarter. The same applies to civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. It is the failure to observe the second of these pronouncements that has now added Woolwich to the list of terrorist killings on the streets of our country. Further restricting civil liberties in Britain will not eliminate that jeopardy.

The harsh reality is that shadowing US-led foreign policy in the bombing, invasion and occupation of other countries breeds resistance as well as deranged reactions like those we saw on Wednesday. Western state terrorism and Islamist counter-terrorism feed the same false narrative of a "clash of civilisations" between western Christianity and eastern Islam.

Yet the reality is that US and British foreign policy is driven by the rather more profane requirements of monopoly capitalism. The "war on terror" is the politically and grammatically illiterate concept coined by former US president George W Bush to mask that underlying fact.

If, as William Blum once remarked, a terrorist is someone with a bomb but no air force, an imperialist is someone with both - but, increasingly, no pilot.