Back Towards The Locus

James Alexander, a Prospective MP for York Outer, writes on Labour List…

I consider myself to be very much a citizen of the world and an egalitarian. These are some of the reasons why I am a member of the Labour party.

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To ensure a centre-left future for the UK, we must also fight to retain a Democrat in the White House and that other centre left parties are in office in major democracies around the world.

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The Labour party has a lot in common with foreign counter-parts and working together in a more coherent way could be achieved on a party level, helping centre-left Governments work more closely together.

I don’t share Alexander’s enthusiasm for a “socialist defence force” – he seems to be endorsing a conspiratorial elite without quite realising it – but I agree that we should work harder to aid dissidents and democratic movements internationally. Let’s look, for a moment, at how the Labour government has “worke[d] together” with “foreign counter-parts“…

• Here’s Labour MP Kim Howells, schmoozing with Columbia’s High Mountain Brigades. Our government gives them money and arms, and they’re best known for butchering workers and trade unionists.

• Here’s Islam Karimov, the Uzbekistani autocrat. He’s a pal of the current Labour government – he hands over information that he’s extracted through torture and they slap down his critics and let him to freely export arms. Elsewhere, he’s known for torturing political prisoners to death and boiling dissidents alive (warning – NSFW and NSFLunch images).

• Here’s Tony Blair explaining to Jeremy Paxman that the Saudi Arabian officials “have their culture, their way of life”. It would be nice if they were discussing, say, food or religious festivities, but really they’re talking about the charming practices of forced amputation and institutional torture. The Labour government so reliant upon Saudi Arabian oil and exports that it cuts off investigations into their large-scale corruption.

There’s a valid argument which proposes that the interaction of states should not and need not be influenced by their respective human rights standards. However, the fetid deviousness of New Labour is luridly illuminated in its bland pretensions towards an international morality. There are politically convenient denunciations; memberships of Amnesty International; glib references towards the “equal worth of human beings” and their “equal right to independence“.

A consistent amorality would at least be honest; would at least be a platform on which to build. As it is, the “stances” of the Labour government are little more than murals. They may attract, they may enrage, but really they’re just paintings splashed across opaque, unyielding surfaces.