1. The ideological battle after 7/7

In the final Westminster parliamentary debate before the Iraq war, a courageous parliamentary maverick, of long standing in the House of Commons, told Blair and Straw that the unjustified attack on Iraq would result in terrorist attacks in Britain. Further, he told them not to pretend they hadn’t been warned when the first attack happened. That MP was of course Kenneth Clarke, currently one of the candidates to become the new ConservativeParty leader.

Clarke’s warning probably reflected the consensus among serious politicians of all parties, among many journalists and political analysts, not to mention the police and security services (indeed the former Met Commissioner John Stevens warned for a long time that such an attack was ‘inevitable’).

In the aftermath of dramatic events like those of July 7, it is easy exaggerate the significance of them, and the changes they will bring. In this case the consequences have in part to be decided by political battles as yet unfinished. However it seems unlikely that the bombings will do much to undermine anti-war feeling in Britain, indeed in the longer term the reverse is probably true.

In the immediate wake of the bombings the Blair government faced two difficulties in turning the events into support for a simplistic ‘war on terrorism’ Blairite consensus. First was the obvious fact that the bombings were linked to the Iraq occupation and that Blair personally was absolutely incoherent and unconvincing when harried by journalists on this question. His repeated insistence that the mere asking of the question was a concession to the terrorists was, as one journalist put it at a Downing Street press conference, “insulting the intelligence of the British people.”

Second was the brutal slaying of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station (probably by the SO19 firearms branch of the Met, but possibly by an SAS soldier). The immediate public response of ‘tragic mistake’ has been undermined by the subsequent revelations about the manner of the killing, the unannounced existence of a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy, and Ian Blair’s attempt to prevent a Police Complaints investigation. In fact the shooting, revealing either callous brutality or incompetence, and probably an admixture of both, has outraged a wide section of liberal democratic opinion – including many people who do not have an anti-war position.

These two factors have made a Blairite monopoly of the post-bombing discourse much more difficult. The government, supported by the political right across parties, the right-wing media (ie most of it) and the police, has responded by attempting to make ‘Islamic terrorism’ a police and not political issue, and dramatise this ideological offensive with a broad swathe of new repressive legislation. (This attack on civil liberties is absurd from the viewpoint of actually combating terrorism, given that the UK has among the harshest anti-terror laws of any advanced country, and amongst the broadest surveillance capabilities.)

Blair’s statements on the bombings in fact go beyond a ‘war on terror’ framework towards depicting the world in a battle against an ‘evil ideology’, the origin and material basis of which is unexplained, which apparently just appeared full-blown in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim ghettos of Europe with no connection to the Iraq war(s), the war in Afghanistan or the occupation of Palestinian lands. Relayed by an immensely powerful media, this ideological offensive has considerable impact – especially in the immediate aftermath of the bombings – but is by no means completely dominant.

Let us note in passing that the London bombings are part of a terrible present handed the European nations by the Bush administration. Europe differs from the US in having large Muslim populations concentrated in its cities. An ‘evil ideology’ discourse will lead, and is already leading, to long-term disaffection among sections of the Muslim communities, with long term negative consequences for the stability of the bourgeois order.

The political fight in the wake of the bombing revolves around three intersecting fronts: civil liberties, racism and the defence of the Muslim community, and the continued battle over the war.

2. Civil liberties

There are two overlapping forces and motivations behind the offensive against civil liberties – the Blairites whose gut instincts happen to be authoritarian but want especially to appear ‘tough’, and at the same time the authoritarian right in politics – the Tory party, their allies in the media, and the police apparatuses who always want more anti-democratic laws.

These two forces do not necessarily agree about their objectives, but the results are the same: anti-democratic legislation which can easily be used against not just Islamist political currents, but a wide range of forces expressing social and political dissent.

The new ‘anti-terror’ legislation is likely to include measures which have eerie parallels with ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation in apartheid South Africa (including the threat of treason trials), something of which former AA movement activists now in the cabinet should be reminded. These include:

>House arrest
>Banning orders
>Attacks on the right of free speech, assembly and publication (especially on the internet).
>Increased powers of surveillance and detention without trial.
>Increased powers to deport foreign nationals , including to countries which practice torture.
>Increased powers to exclude foreign nationals seeking admission to Britain.

Of course those who advocate these laws will argue they only affect terrorist and their immediate supporters. But they will be on the statute books ready to be used against the workers’ movement, justice campaigners and political dissenters of every sort.

These laws are justified by multiple lies and hypocrisies. For example, the ‘assurances’ which the UK government has received from Egypt, Jordan and others that they won’t torture Islamists deported from Britain (honest) is laughable.

The measure which will make it an offence to ‘support terrorism anywhere is the world’ opens up to prosecution at some future date people who express solidarity with, for example, the FARC in Colombia or Maoist guerrillas in Nepal or left-wing rebels in the Philippines. Terrorism, defined as the use of force for political ends, covers such a multitude of sins that it leads open to the authorities and the courts to define it at will.

In passing we should note that a subsidiary objective of the Blairites is to deal a devastating defeat to the civil liberties lobby in general, civil rights lawyers and (this is how far we’ve come) to important sections of the judiciary who are seen as recalcitrant and absurdly liberal – for example in the rejection by the courts of the right to indefinite detention of aliens.

These new attacks on civil liberties will be opposed by a broad sector of democratic political opinion. As usual in such cases it will include those (probably like the Liberal leadership) who will seek meaningless ‘assurances’ (the legislation must be reviewed by parliament each year etc etc, those who reject certain measures and those who reject the whole thing. Unfortunately, a key area of struggle around all this is likely to parliament itself, especially the House of Lords.

The intervention by Ken Livingstone in this debate is important because he and others who have expressed concern break the attempted consensus around the new laws.

In the present situation it is highly unlikely that the breadth of the campaign against the anti-terror laws can be encompassed within the Stop the War Coalition. Opposition is going to be much broader than the STWC, even if the coalition is the force actually capable of mobilising people on the streets. There will be many who do not have any anti-war position who seek to oppose the anti-terror laws and/or support the demands of the Jean Charles family campaign. The united fronts on these issues are going to be different. We should not encourage the STWC to imagine it can be the broad front on these issues.

3. Racism and the attacks on the Muslim community

As could have been predicted from first principles racist attacks of all sorts shot up after the bombings. It is quite possible that the aftermath of the bombings was a factor in the murder of Anthony Walker in Liverpool. The danger in the situation is the creation of a climate of fear and the pushing of an ideology which sees immigrant communities, especially Muslims, as ‘the enemy within’. Without doubt this is creating fear and alarm in the Muslim communities themselves. There have been dozens of police raids on Muslims since the bombings, many of which appear to have little to do with the investigation into the bombings themselves.

The ‘enemy within’ climate is boosted by the Blairites’ discourse on “Britishness” and successive attacks on the rights of asylum seekers and economic migrants. However while right-wing politicians and the media more-or-less consciously stoke up hatred of the Muslim community and foster the ‘enemy within’ mentality, recent evidence suggests that this isn’t denting the huge majority in favour of a multiethnic and multicultural Britain. A huge survey reported in the Guardian showed 85% saying the bombings had not reduced their support for a multiracial Britain.

While there may be a tiny minority within the Muslim communities who sympathise with the bombers, the vast majority are totally opposed and realise that the bombings have opened up their communities to attack. It goes without saying of course that we regard Islamism, the political ideology which seeks to build a state on the Saudi, Taliban or Iranian model, as an utterly reactionary and obscurantist political movement to which we are completely opposed. We do not build alliances with such movements, not seek to minimise our political differences with them, or excuse their participation in or sympathy for terrorist crimes. We do however point out the key role of the United States in promoting the Taliban in the Afghan war against the Soviets, and their long-term support for the pre-feudal house of Saud.

4. Anti-war movement and the left

The bombings change the immediate context of the anti-war fight, but they do not change the overall situation. The more brittle, less conscious, elements in anti-war scepticism can be easily shifted by events such as 7 July, but then they can easily shift back again. Overall Iraq is a disaster for Bush and Blair; in particular it is turning into a disaster for the US neocons and threatens to sink their project. A key indicator is the rise of the US antiwar movement, and in particular the focus on Cindy Sheehan camped outside the president’s holiday home. As the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, and representing the feelings of a growing number of bereaved parents, she is a disaster for the White House. The American right has of necessity been forced into battle with her, but her case and its popularity show the right is losing support in the heartlands of Midde America. If it wasn’t Cindy Sheehan it would be another bereaved mother or father

Iraq is a quagmire with no way out for the Bush administration. If they cut and run from Iraq impossibility) they lose all the political and economic objectives they sought, with immense damage to their interests worldwide. If they stay, they continue to take political flak inside America and worldwide for the ongoing violence and brutality. For the moment they have no option but to tough it out.

This means that while the left and the anti-war movement have to swivel their activity at the present time around the defence of civil liberties and against racism and the victimisation of the Muslim community, the long term strategic objectives of the anti-war movement, the putting of the war centre-stage politically, and the demand for the removal of British and all Western troops, remain crucial for a prolonged political period. Linked to this of course remains the demand for justice for the Palestinian people, and for allied troops to withdraw from Afghanistan.

Understanding the connections between war, terrorism, torture, the bombings, racism and police authoritarianism cannot be done adequately on the basis of simple pacifism. The rise of political Islam, the furious militarism of the US and others, racism, and the death, destruction and misery all this is causing to many millions, cannot be understood without grasping the morbid and utterly ruthless nature of modern imperialism. That’s why Socialist Resistance will continue to up its profile in the anti-war movement and among the youth in analysing the nature of modern imperialism, solidarising with its victims, and building solidarity campaigns, especially those which highlight progressive alternatives, such as the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.