| With talk of a general election in the air, it's hard to tell government and opposition apart. More and more, it is clear that bourgeois democracy is just a mechanism to exclude workers from power... |
Don't vote for Blair's bourgeois democracy
WORKERS, MAR 2005 ISSUE
The past few months have seen British political leaders trying to outdo one another over who will rid our hospitals of the killer disease MRSA quickest. Who can axe the most civil service jobs? Whose figures add up? Who will introduce the most ruthless model of the free market into our health services? Who will save Africa, a continent plundered by British colonialism? And who will implement the Australian model immigration policy best?
But that's about all they squabble over. Blair and Milburn continue to steal Tory policies as soon as they are announced. The new role for a parliamentary opposition appears to be that they find an old idea, reinvent it as a policy, and then the government promises to implement it immediately.
The role of the governing party seems to be to make promises and then do the opposite. Labour's manifesto in 2001 promised not to introduce university top-up fees, so they blatantly introduce them without any shame. Blair promises Parliament, before the invasion of Iraq, that a special trust fund will be set up to safely hold the revenues from the sale of Iraqi oil, but then $8.8 billion disappears, some to pay for the occupation, some paid to US contractors and the rest literally gone.
An unknown Tory MP defects to Labour, with a great fanfare, because he loves Blair's style and stand on Iraq and the EU. On the one occasion that workers are permitted to vote in a referendum on a government proposition — regional devolution — they decisively reject it by a margin of four to one because they don't want more politicians.
Disrepute
Never before has bourgeois democracy appeared in such naked disrepute. Bourgeois democracy, like the capitalist system it claims to manage, is in terminal decline. Their political parties no longer have any relevance. The Labour Party has abandoned any pretence of its members determining policy. Now it is left to a playground punch-up between Brown, Blair and Milburn. Blair screams that Labour's manifesto for the election yet to be announced will be unremittingly New Labour — more privatisation and neo-liberal market policies on a scale that Thatcher could only dream of. Its party members have left in droves. But Blair doesn't care, because the party is irrelevant as he prepares to hand over to the EU more and more areas of British policy making.
The Tories have had to manoeuvre Howard in as leader after their membership (average age approaching 80) voted in Ian Duncan Smith, the Quiet Man — surely a sign that the Tories are finished. They remain despised by the working class. Howard complains that Labour keeps stealing their policies and they will therefore have to keep them secret until just before the election. They cannot shift their position in the polls despite the unpopularity of the government. The Liberal Democrats try to present themselves as the liberal voice of capitalism but few are listening. They love the EU and they failed to pursue their advantage of opposing the invasion of Iraq by supporting the puppet government and the phoney elections. Simply, they lack courage.
Westminster: a seat of power, but not for the working class
But the latest proposal from the government takes the biscuit. The Law Lords have ruled that it is illegal to indefinitely hold foreigners imprisoned without a reason and without charge or trial at Belmarsh high security prison. No surprise there, then! But what is Home Secretary Clarke's response? To extend such incarceration without charge or trial to all British citizens, in order to ensure that foreigners are not discriminated against. The new imprisonment will be within the comfort of your own house, except that you — and anyone living with you — will be tagged, not permitted to leave the house or have any visitors. All communications and behaviour will be monitored, and just so you don't get lonely, there will be a bevy of armed police around your home. No wonder South African writer Gillian Slovo described this as a repetition of what happened in South Africa under the apartheid regime.
Clarke also wants to change the legal system in such cases so that the judge becomes the prosecutor. This is all done, we are told, to defend democracy.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party uses the Freedom of Information Act to dig up dirt on other political parties, the government's Electoral Commission is overruled in its opposition to postal voting, the head of the Electoral Commission warns that people are becoming fed up with all parties, the government is set to give us 24-hour drinking as demanded by the drinks industry and scores of super casinos as demanded by the US gaming industry.
Bourgeois democracy is indeed a mechanism designed to prevent ordinary people — workers — from taking power away from their capitalist ruling class. They can swap one party for another one, or one Prime Minister for another, but they cannot take power. A dictionary definition of democracy describes it as a system of government in which the people have a say in who holds power. No chance of even this limited definition being met, then. And that's without the influence of the bourgeois media.
Funding
Yet our government set up and funds the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (alongside a long list of other foundations for democracy funded by the US and other governments) to show the new democracies of eastern Europe and others, including Iraq, how to manage their new neo-liberal capitalism without giving their own workers any possibility of taking or retaking power.
British political parties create and train parties in these countries in their own image, telling them how to campaign, what institutions to set up, etc. Even trade unions in these countries are given the treatment. These makeovers are all part of the conditions for membership of the EU capitalism survival club and funded with our money through the Department for International Development.
An example from Hungary of their lessons in democracy gives the game away. Its Social Democrat government conducted a referendum on whether or not to privatise its health service. A majority voted no but the privatisation is to go ahead anyway. The Hungarian parliament voted to withdraw all Hungarian troops from Iraq by Christmas 2004. The Defence Minister ignored this and is sending more troops under the NATO training umbrella and handing over 77 T-72 tanks to the government of Iraq.
Blair, hand in glove with Bush, is forcing what they call democracy and freedom into Iraq at the point of a gun, and presumably they intend to do the same with the others on the US list. If democracy means a system for managing capitalism without the interference of workers, then freedom means unfettered free market capitalism.
Bourgeois democracy, therefore, is nothing other than a mechanism to exclude workers from power. It follows that, as workers, we should make it unworkable and irrelevant. That's why workers should not vote in the coming general election.
Call it abstention, a voters' strike or a boycott, but the higher the number of those not voting, the higher the number of people not giving consent to the government, the more damage to Blair's and capitalism's right to rule and the more damage to their system of control. We should then ask ourselves the question, should we finish the job and take it away once and for all?
If Blair got 40% of 60% in 2001, that suggests that 24% voted for him and 76% didn't. That did bother him because he has tried every conceivable means to reverse the figure. He is desperate for postal voting despite the fact that his own election commission has ruled against it on the grounds that it is open to fraud. Blair is quite happy to countenance fraud in order to get the numbers up. If he wants them up, we should keep them down.
