Editorial: Blair: I only know what I believe

BLAIR: I ONLY KNOW WHAT I BELIEVE: EDITORIAL lair tries his best to avoid Bush's "poodle', but his low popularity ratings reveal that Iraq will be his legacy. The war that was launched on lies about WMD but was really about oil and the containment of China will be what he is remembered for. His heir apparent, Gordon Brown, spoke not a word of disagreement about Britain's alignment with the neo-cons in charge of the US, and as Chancellor agreed to the billions spent on perpetrating the war. Whether he will maintain such a close relationship with the US administration after his succession remains to be seen. But anyone who thinks Brown's government will alter new Labour's neo-liberal trajectory will be sadly disillusioned. As Alan Thornett points out in this issue, the scene was set for Labour's rejection of social democracy long before the arrival of Blair - the Thatcher years, trade union leaderships' adoption of new realism and social partnership, the defeat of the miners, all laid the ground for a realignment of British politics towards the right. The right of centre positioning of all three major parties creates a democratic deficit. Anyone wanting to vote to defend the welfare state, anyone thinking that public transport should be just that - public - in public ownership, anyone wanting a redistribution of wealth on a more equitable basis - has in most cases no-one to vote for. In Scotland the Scottish Socialist Party provided an alternative platform, with socialist policies openly discussed and campaigned for. But Tommy Sheridan's split from the SSP and the formation of Solidarity, combined with the squeeze on the anti-Labour vote exerted by the Scottish National Party, has led to both left groups being wiped out in the recent Scottish elections. The Greens also suffered from the SNP-Labour squeeze, but being unaffected by any split, managed to keep two seats. Respect, which has adopted a policy of focusing on seats in which they think they can get a good vote, stood in very few wards in the recent local council elections, winning a few seats but remaining invisible to the mass of the population. Not only invisible, but also unable to build itself, for unless someone is standing in your area, how can an electoral party be built during election time? You can also see how a democratic and disciplined party with a good candidate can achieve a strong result given the attacks on the class, as with the Besancenot canditature for the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) in France or prior to that the Left Bloc in Portugal. Of course the result in France would have been better if the rest of the radical left had allowed the possibility of a unity candidate. But nonetheless a vote of 4.1% and 1.6 million votes is impressive. The need for new left parties remains as strong as ever. The savage, even morbid, stage of capitalism that is neo-liberalism today has abandoned all notion of social responsibility and reduced millions to destitution. Using ever- increasing amounts of surveillance, violence and torture, capitalism's sole aim is to achieve ever greater, short-term profits based on 1 the production of commodities many of which are entirely unnecessary. Instead of social solidarity, peace and the possibility for most people to live a happy life, we have misery and alienation. Socialists have to pose an alternative, but not one that simply reiterates old beliefs. We have to integrate into our analysis the new prospect facing us - that of global warming and climate change. The writings of John Bellamy Foster, Joel Kovel and others point the way towards a Marxism for the twenty first century and it is this that we can build on. Environmentalists and green activists have been warning for many years of the potential for catastrophe, but socialists have been slow to take up the issue. Nonetheless it is increasingly clear that looking for answers within a capitalist framework will provide no answer at all. Capitalism by its very nature is incapable of resolving the crisis. Worse still, its answers will attempt to make the poor of the world pay - in both the developed and developing worlds. Fidel Castro's short article, 'On Biofuels and an Energy Revolution', gives an example: 'Insatiable in its demand, the empire had flung into the world the slogan of producing biofuels in order to liberate the United States, the world's supreme energy consumer, from all external dependency on hydrocarbons.' But, Castro argues, the result will be hunger in the South as land used to grow food for the population is turned over to produce energy for the US. We need to develop a politics based on ecosocialism - a programme that can truly resolve the interlinked global crises of environmental collapse and savage capitalism.