HOME Secretary Reid, who has been making people’s blood run cold with his tales of dozens of conspiracies and thousands of terrorists, has reduced the scale of the ‘terror threat’ to ‘severe’ from ‘critical’.
According to Reid, this means that a terrorist attack, like the one he is currently alleging, where ten airliners were to be exploded in mid-air killing thousands to ‘commit murder on an unimaginable scale’, is no longer ‘imminent’ but remains ‘just’ ‘highly likely’.
However ‘highly likely’ means that there is a very good chance that mass murder on an unimaginable scale is about to happen.
If this is the case, the Home Secretary has a duty to shut down the airlines until the secret police get to the bottom of the mass of conspiracies that they are now allegedly surveilling. However, he won’t do this because capitalism is all about making profits.
The real difference between ‘imminent’ and ‘highly likely’ is that under the latter big business can carry on making its profits, while under ‘imminent’ the airlines and the BAA were rapidly going broke, along with a mass of businesses great and small.
Nothing in the security situation has changed. But big business has been kicking up a storm about the billions of pounds it is losing.
There have been hundreds of cancelled flights, while businessmen could not take their lap-tops and mobile phones aboard their flights to carry on profit making.
A bit of playing with words has put that right.
The reason that Reid – the day after he announced multiple plots, conspiracies, and dangers – lowered the terror threshold is that profit is primary, people are expendable.
Some business people have been saying that since the Prime Minister did not think that the situation was serious enough to warrant him breaking his summer holidays and recalling himself and parliament, they could not accept that the situation was serious enough to warrant bankrupting their businesses.
So planes are going to fly under conditions where Reid declares that it is ‘highly likely’ that terrorists are actively intent on bringing them down. Profits are sacred.
In fact, it is the thirst for profits, big oil profits that is driving the Blair government to assist Bush in building a ‘new Middle East’.
It is the same thirst for profits that is at work at home where the Blair government is seeking to level the Welfare State and hand its multi-billion budget to big business.
It is this drive for profits that has radicalised millions of workers at home and abroad, of all colours and religions.
The government is striving to get rid of basic rights so as to be able to deal with these forces using dictatorial methods. Its demonisation of Muslims is to generate the fear necessary to be able to bring in draconian measures.
Blair and Reid are the terrorists. Their government has helped to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Palestinians and Lebanese. It practices imperialist terrorism. It is covered in blood from head to foot.
Some of the draconian measures that they immediately want to bring in are well known.
They want the police to be able to hold suspects for 90 days before they have to charge them or release them.
They want to bring in control orders that will allow them to put suspects under permanent house arrest.
They want to be able to deport suspects back to their countries of origin even if it is known that the regime there will torture them.
They want to give the police summary powers so that the police will be both judge and jury.
The source of terrorism in the world is capitalism and imperialism. To halt terrorism means smashing capitalism and imperialism and replacing it with socialism.
The first step is for the working class to bring down the Blair government, to bring in a workers’ government that will withdraw all British troops from the Middle East, support the Lebanese, Palestinian and Iraqi people and carry out socialist policies at home.
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