THE crisis of the Blair government has intensified to the point where the government is now more deeply split and divided than ever, while it continues to reveal its contempt for even bourgeois law, and its poisonous hostility to the working class.
Last week the Attorney General, under direct instructions from the Prime Minister, told the House of Commons that the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into alleged illegal corrupt dealings between BAE Systems and the Saudi monarchy had been abandoned.
The reason was that ‘it has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest’.
The maintenance of the rule of law was jettisoned, in the most embarrassing circumstances, in front of the whole world, so that the ‘wider public interest’ – the very advantageous financial arrangements between the British bourgeoisie and the Saudi Royal Family – could continue.
In the same week, the Blair government took action against the interests of the British trade unions, on whom it still rests.
The Labour government is supporting bosses who want to quit the established EU states and move to the new EU states in eastern Europe where wages are miniscule, without having to face strikes by the workers who they are about to dump.
The Blair-Brown Labour government is submitting to the European Court of Justice its claim that the right to strike is not a fundamental EU right whereas the right of bosses to move their capital round Europe is. This is the equivalent of a stake into the heart of the trade union bureaucracy.
Labour is for new anti-union laws to prevent British and EU workers striking to prevent their jobs being exported to eastern Europe.
To make matters even more tense, Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton is set to weigh into this class struggle today.
He is due to declare war on a ‘hardcore’ of benefit claimants who are not taking the ‘opportunities’ made available to them by this ‘caring government’.
Hutton is to declare: ‘The next challenge we face is to ensure the hardcore of “can work but won’t work” benefit claimants take advantage of the opportunities out there and compete for jobs alongside growing numbers of migrants who arrive in Britain specifically to look for work rather than to settle for the long term.’
Hutton is going to try to force workers to compete with migrant workers from Eastern Europe, many of whom work for less than the minimum wage, in a ‘race to the bottom’ destroying British workers’ wages and conditions in the process.
At the same time, evidence has emerged about the Iraq war which puts the final nail into the coffin of the government on this question.
Carne Ross, Britain’s former First Secretary to the UN gave evidence to the Butler Inquiry which until now has been kept secret. He stated that there was ‘no intelligence evidence’ that Saddam had wmds, and that British government officials repeatedly warned the US that if Saddam was removed there would be ‘chaos’.
Blair had however already made up his mind that Britain would go in with the US come what may, and produced the ‘dodgy dossiers’. Now 650,000 corpses later, with Iraq breaking apart, Blair must stand trial over this issue.
However, this is not the only trial that the government may face.
On Friday, Blair was interviewed by the police for two hours over the cash for peerages scandal.
Following his evidence, which was at odds with that of his Labour crony Lord Levy, the latter’s friends declared that he was not going to take the rap, and that Blair was in sole charge of the acquisition of loans.
Subsequently, Chancellor Brown issued a statement seeking to put an Atlantic Ocean between himself and Blair saying that, ‘At no point until the loans were made did the Chancellor have any knowledge of any loans to the Labour Party, and in relation to fund raising, whether loans or donations, he has always considered it inappropriate for him in his position as Chancellor, to have any involvement.’
The message to Blair is you’re on your own. The rats are leaving the sinking ship, and the captain and officers are completely discredited and quite prepared to hand office over to the Tories.
The working class however has a completely different interest. It must stop the return of the Tories by organising a general strike to bring down the disintegrating Blair rabble, and bring in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies at home and abroad.
