THE Labour government is pushing through the Houses of Parliament a bill that will make desertion and refusal to serve in an occupied country punishable by life imprisonment.
Labour MP John McDonnell has led the tiny parliamentary opposition to the bill, calling for the scrapping of the life imprisonment provision – a call that was defeated by 442 votes to 19.
The Defence Minister Tom Watson made the issue plain when he said that life imprisonment would only apply where there was a decision to avoid ‘relevant service’.
McDonnell spelt it out that the bill ‘was really about the war in Iraq’. He continued to point out that the number of ‘abscondees’ had trebled since the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The truth is that the imperialist war and occupation of Iraq is opposed by the majority of the people in the UK (and also in the US).
Among this majority are thousands of servicemen and their families, who know that Blair lied his way to war, and that the Bush-Blair strategic target was to grab Iraq’s oil, and that to achieve that goal thousands of military corpses, and over 100,000 Iraqi corpses, was a price worth paying.
A number of serving soldiers have courageously refused to serve in this imperialist war, and since the war started army recruitment has dropped disastrously as far as the government and the military chiefs are concerned.
The war is so unpopular, that one SAS veteran who refused to return to service in Iraq was given an honourable discharge, and a doctor, an officer named Kendall-Smith, was sentenced to just eight months imprisonment after he declared that he would not return to Iraq as the war was illegal.
However, imperialist war is inseparable from capitalism in its imperialist stage.
The US and the UK already have Iran in their sights. After Iran (or maybe before) there are other oil and gas rich states, such as Venezuela and Bolivia, where rapid regime changes and the seizure of gas and oil resources are a matter of life and death for imperialism.
This means that the ruling class has to restore order in its armed forces, and also restore order in Britain, where disaffection with capitalism and imperialism is rife among working class and middle class youth and where serving in a British occupation army could not be less popular.
Imposing life imprisonment for desertion and refusal to serve in an occupation army is an attempt to restore order in the military.
Such a law may well stop more desertions, but in the last analysis it will lead to such a build-up of opposition and resentment that it will lead to mutiny.
Likewise with the drive to restore order in society.
The latest example of this is the 50-strong pre-dawn police raid on the one man Brian Haw picket of the Houses of Parliament in opposition to the war in Iraq.
The police are using the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (recently passed in 2005) to try to snuff out Haw’s brave demonstration against the war, in the belief that restoring order in society is the way to maintain order in the military.
Likewise, people who marched last Saturday against the ‘Starving of the Palestinians’ were told by the police that if they used loudhailers near to parliament the police would arrest them under that same Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.
The News Line urges the trade unions in Britain to take up the case of troops who refuse to serve in Iraq. The government must be told that the jailing of troops who refuse to serve in the occupation of Iraq will be met by the calling of political strikes against the government.
Similarly, the trade unions must take a decision to send hundreds of picketers every day to Parliament Square to ensure that Brian Haw’s 24 hour picket against the Iraq war is not stopped by the state.
However, the only way to settle the issue of imperialist war is through the building up of the WRP and the Young Socialists to mobilise and lead the working class in a socialist revolution to overthrow British capitalism and imperialism.
