BLAIR yesterday announced the latest line of government spin – that compulsory ID cards, state-run mass fingerprinting and DNA bases, along with no-jury trials and detention without trial, are not about a loss of basic rights.
In fact they are all aspects of ‘modernity’. In other words all these developments of what used to be thought of as a military-police state have become thoroughly laudable and inseparably part of modern life, according to Blair.
What Blair is really talking about is that the enormous crisis of modern capitalism and imperialism, now in its death agony, has reached the point where it has to reorder the planet and secure the oil and gas resources of the world if it is to survive.
This reordering creates mountains of corpses abroad, while the cost of imperialist militarism combined with capitalist economic collapses create a greater and greater need to abolish welfare states at home.
The result of these trends is a huge sharpening of the class struggle between the working class and the bosses and a desire within sections of some working class minorities to avenge their relatives and co- religionists who are being slaughtered abroad.
The survival of the ruling class in this situation requires a much stronger state at home, unhindered in its work by old fashioned concepts of basic rights, and able to use the thumbscrew and its modern electronic equivalents without check, in Blair’s thoroughly modern society.
The weak British ruling class cannot look this situation in the eye, and say what is. Instead, it has to invent the fiction that the Muslim religion produces legions of fanatics and that the innocent West which has done nothing at all to alienate Muslims, has to defend its way of life by any and all means that are necessary, and that this constitutes modernity.
That the targeting and scapegoating of minorities is decidedly old fashioned, and dates back to the scapegoating of the Jews in Germany in the 1930s, does not worry our enlightened and thoroughly modern would-be despots.
Then, as the crisis of capitalism worsens, it is only a matter of time before a ‘brave’ politician, another Jack Straw, emerges to say that if the Muslims are unable to feel British then they should be packed off to where they feel at home.
That this is not a thoroughly modern tactic, but the traditional divide and rule tactic of British imperialism, re-jigged for today’s imperialist struggles to redivide the world, is obvious.
All that is missing in Britain is the restoration of the death penalty. However, all of the signs are that it is going to make a comeback.
The UK ruling class is opposed to the death penalty, yet it allowed its puppets in Iraq to keep it for use against the Ba’athists.
Yesterday the British Prime Minister refused to condemn the plans to hang the President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. He refused to say that he was even opposed to it.
The reality is that US and UK imperialism are desperate to see Saddam dead, since they fear that Saddam alive, even in prison, is a threat to their plans for Iraq and the Middle East.
They recognise that state executions are central to this task, and will not condemn Saddam’s execution.
Likewise in Britain. At a time when the rule of capital is under serious threat from the working class, the ruling class that opposes the death penalty will give the go-ahead to state executions, and shoot-to-kill operations, of the type that we saw in the case of Jean Charles de Menezes.
The opposition of the British ruling class to the death penalty is not even skin deep.
Blair’s modernity = the barbarism of capitalism in its death agony, where all scientific advances are utilised for developing more and more methods for surveillance and repression.
The only way to answer this capitalist barbarism, in the guise of modernity, is through the organisation of the British socialist revolution, to smash capitalism and imperialism and to bring in socialism.
