THE former Labour Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, yesterday continued with his campaign to restore his alleged political reputation. He says that this was destroyed when Prime Minister Blair made him the scapegoat for the fiasco of the Labour government’s law and order policies.
He admitted that ‘public confidence’ in the government’s ‘war on terror’ had been ‘undermined’ by the lies that fuelled its war with Iraq, namely that Iraq had wmd, and the means of delivery, and that these were a direct threat to its neighbours and even to British troops in Cyprus. Also the lie that Iraq had been seeking to buy uranium from Niger and was close to producing a nuclear weapon.
He is unconcerned that three years after the invasion 100,000 Iraqis are dead, the whole country of Iraq is destroyed, that large numbers of US and UK solders have been killed and wounded, and oil prices are now sky high, putting the whole world into economic crisis.
On the domestic front, he blames inexact intelligence, not the lies that were told, for the difficulties in convincing the British people that the current government equation can be trusted. This is that the situation is such that their basic rights must be handed over to the government for the sake of security, a security which means that some of them will be killed by mistake in the implementing of the government’s shoot-to-kill policy.
He says that public confidence was further damaged by the Forest Gate raid where again ‘faulty intelligence’ led to a house being broken into, a family being terrorised with one man shot in the chest and narrowly avoiding death.
Clarke’s unspoken thesis is that since such tactics are necessary, those who die in mistaken state attacks, such as Jean Charles de Menezes, have not died in vain, and their relatives should be proud of the sacrifice that they have made for imperialist policy.
Clarke lectures those who have endured the police attacks and the millions who have witnessed them, that they must realise that ‘absolute knowledge’ could only exist in a ‘police state with intrusion into. . . every family and community’.
In fact, he is a seeker of such ‘absolute knowledge’. He wants to see identity cards, and 90 days of interrogation by the police before they have to level a charge or release a suspect, and a national dna register. He has already brought in house-arrest without charge or trial, non jury trials, where those charged cannot see the evidence against them, and the Serious Crime and Disorder Act, whereby a policeman can arrest a person on suspicion that they could be considering carrying out a criminal act. These measures will allow him and his fellow ruling class servants to intrude into every family and community precisely to assemble ‘the all-intrusive British police state’.
With massive opposition developing to New Labour’s plans, Clarke’s main appeal is to the judiciary to give up its defence of innocent until proven guilty etc., saying: ‘It is now time for the senior judiciary to engage in a serious and considered debate about how best legally to confront terrorism in the modern circumstances that have changed so profoundly since 9/11 and 7/7.’
What are these modern circumstances. Their essence is that the source of world terrorism is the US-UK attack on Iraq, Afghanistan, and their drive to ‘reorder the world’ with Iran and other oil bearing areas now in their sights.
Bush, Blair and Clarke know that this onslaught will touch off counter-attacks inside Britain, but they are not prepared to change their imperialist policy, even if it means dozens of attacks within the UK.
Indeed, they see their police state’s main function as keeping the British workers down at a time when the government has decided to smash up the Welfare State.
There is only one road to world peace and this is through overthrowing capitalism and imperialism.
Overthrowing the source of world terrorism will enable rational, equal and fraternal relations to be established between Western and Islamic countries with the drive to imperialist war abolished by the expropriation of the capitalist ruling classes. The road to peace is the road to the victory of the world socialist revolution.
