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The rising of Britain's 'new politics'

By John Pilger - posted Monday, 9 October 2017


Since 1945, like the Tories, British Labour has been an imperial party, obsequious to Washington: a record exemplified by the crime in the Chagos islands.

What has changed? Is Corbyn saying Labour will uncouple itself from the US war machine, and the US spying apparatus and US economic blockades that scar humanity?

His shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry, says a Corbyn government "will put human rights back at the heart of Britain's foreign policy". But human rights have never been at the heart of British foreign policy -- only "interests", as Lord Palmerston declared in the 19th century: the interests of those at the apex of British society.

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Thornberry quoted the late Robin Cook who, as Tony Blair's first Foreign Secretary in 1997, pledged an "ethical foreign policy" that would "make Britain once again a force for good in the world".

History is not kind to imperial nostalgia. The recently commemorated division of India by a Labour government in 1947 – with a border hurriedly drawn up by a London barrister, Gordon Radcliffe, who had never been to India and never returned – led to blood-letting on a genocidal scale.

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

W.H. Auden, 'Partition'.

It was the same Labour government (1945-51), led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee – "radical" by today's standards -- that dispatched General Douglas Gracey's British imperial army to Saigon with orders to re-arm the defeated Japanese in order to prevent Vietnamese nationalists from liberating their own country. Thus, the longest war of the century was ignited.

It was a Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, whose policy of "mutuality" and "partnership" with some of the world's most vicious despots, especially in the Middle East, forged relationships that endure today, often sidelining and crushing the human rights of whole communities and societies. The cause was British "interests" – oil, power and wealth.

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In the "radical" 1960s, Labour's Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, set up the Defence Sales Organisation (DSO) specifically to boost the arms trade and make money from selling lethal weapons to the world. Healey told Parliament, "While we attach the highest importance to making progress in the field of arms control and disarmament, we must also take what practical steps we can to ensure that this country does not fail to secure its rightful share of this valuable market."

The doublethink was quintessentially Labour. When I later asked Healey about this "valuable market", he claimed his decision made no difference to the volume of military exports. In fact, it led to an almost doubling of Britain's share of the arms market. Today, Britain is the second biggest arms dealer on earth, selling arms and fighter planes, machine guns and "riot control" vehicles, to 22 of the 30 countries on the British Government's own list of human rights violators.

Will this stop under a Corbyn government? The preferred model - Robin Cook's "ethical foreign policy" – is revealing. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Cook made his name as a backbencher and critic of the arms trade. "Wherever weapons are sold," wrote Cook, "there is a tacit conspiracy to conceal the reality of war" and "it is a truism that every war for the past two decades has been fought by poor countries with weapons supplied by rich countries".

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About the Author

Australian-born John Pilger is a multi-award winning journalist and documentary film maker. On November 4, 2014, John Pilger received the Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s international human rights award. A Secret Country, his best-selling history of Australia published 20 years ago, remains in print (Vintage Books).

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