In the wake of the abortive attack on Glasgow Airport on June 30, Gordon Brown has been showing off his prowess as a moral philosopher and as a social theorist. On the former score, he was reported on BBC News as saying that the people who did it were evil. (Thanks for that Gordon: lacking your ethical insight I'd never have reached that conclusion myself). On the second, he's parroting Blair's nonsensical line that the attacks have nothing whatsoever to do with British foreign policy in Iraq. See the front page of the Communist Party of Britain's daily newspaper, the Morning Star:The Star's editorials are sometimes hit and miss, but today's was OK:
The same old story
(Morning Star July 2 2007)
IF anyone in the trade union movement or, indeed, the country at large had any illusions left about Prime Minister Gordon Brown's claimed commitment to a new variety of politics, they will have been rapidly disabused by his uninspired and hackneyed response to the attacks over the weekend.
With his total refusal to accept that events in Iraq and Afghanistan could have any possible link with the attempted car bombings in London or the Glasgow airport incendiary attack, Mr Brown merely fell back on the blank incomprehension that has become new Labour's trademark.
He urged the public to continue "living their lives as normal" and pledged: "Everything is being done in our power ... to protect people's lives."
Well, Mr Brown, that is pure, unadulterated cuckoo-land nonsense, as well you should know.
The British public has regularly shown that it will carry on despite hostile circumstances, from the Blitz onwards.
But to pretend that life in those circumstances is "normal" is just so much political humbug, unless you believe that having a government which invades and oppresses other countries at will, provoking attacks by any means that the oppressed and their supporters can dream up, is the normal, run-of-the-mill fabric of existence.
But that abnormal state of events is rapidly becoming the norm in new Labour's Britain.
And what else does Mr Brown offer us?
"Irrespective of Iraq, irrespective of Afghanistan, irrespective of what is happening in different parts of the world, we have an international organisation trying to inflict the maximum damage on civilian life ..."
Just what does this parliamentary fool think that "irrespective" means?
it appears that our new Prime Minister has the same tenuous grasp on reality as his predecessor.
If Mr Brown really wants to do everything in his power to protect people's lives, his first approach ought to have been, rather than attempting to imitate Tony Blair imitating Margaret Thatcher imitating Winston Churchill, to look at the real world that we live in and identify the source of the problem.
That source is injustice. Injustice to the Palestinians, who are living in Gaza in what amounts to the largest concentration camp in the world, while this government supports the unbridled depradations of Israel, and economic boycott for the crime of having elected a government that the US didn't approve of.
Injustice to the Iraqis, who have suffered invasion, blitzkrieg and mass murder for the crime of not having weapons of mass destruction and continue to suffer occupation for the sole reason that the US and Britain covet their oil.
Injustice to the Afghans, who have suffered similarly for the crime of once having had aspirations to socialism, having the Taliban imposed on them and then removed, both as a result of CIA manipulation, and not accepting the rule of a US puppet.
Remove those injustices, Mr Brown, and you will not have to come to the public mouthing Blairite platitudes about an unwinnable war on terror which you share the guilt of inspiring with your predecessor and the maniac in the White House. Remove those injustices and the phoney war with terror will become an unpleasant memory, not a present reality.
