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Blair’s BAe arms scandal
THERE WAS a time when Blair was referred to as
‘Teflon Tony’; throw anything you like at him and it wouldn’t stick. Not
so now. After the continuing ‘loans for peerages’ scandal and the
unprecedented scene of a serving prime minister being questioned in a
police investigation, Blair is now in the middle of controversy
surrounding corruption charges levelled at arms manufacturer BAe and his
decision to wade in and call off the investigations.
The charges against BAe involve a £60 million ‘slush
fund’ run specifically to promote defence equipment contracts with the
Saudi regime. The slush fund is alleged to have paid for, among other
things, cars, call girls and a £2 million three-month holiday for Prince
Turki bin Nasser.
The deal being investigated, the Al Yamamah
contract, was signed in 1985 under the then Conservative government of
Margaret Thatcher and has seen BAe equip, organise and train the Saudi
air force at a price of over £43 billion. Corruption has long been
suspected around the Al Yamamah deal – a 1992 National Audit Office
report has never been released "for fear that it would hurt ‘sensitive
international relations’." (The Economist, 2 October 2006) The
investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into the mass of bribes
and dodgy-dealing surrounding the deal has been ongoing since the late
1990s and it seemed that the SFO were making some progress.
But at the end of 2005, a new deal had been signed
with the Saudi regime to supply 72 Eurofighter Typhoons along with other
military services which is worth at least £6 billion and could be worth
more in the long run than the Al Yamamah deal. As BAe chief executive,
Mike Turner, stated in 2005: "They [the Saudi leaders] don’t, rightly,
like the fact that members of their royal family are being named in our
press". (The Guardian, 27 September 2005) So, the Saudi government
threatened to cancel the Eurofighter deal.
Blair cited national security interests as the
reason for closing down the corruption enquiry but, in reality, the
‘interests’ being served here are those of the fat cats who make
billions from selling weapons of mass destruction!
Larry Elliot, economics editor for The Guardian
newspaper, commented that the key factor in the geopolitics of the
Middle East is Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the US, and that
"anything Britain does is a sideshow". He went on to state: "With
Britain’s own oil and gas reserves falling, Whitehall has justifiable
concerns about energy security. Saudi is the world’s No1 supplier of oil
and is too powerful to upset. Given that Russia has the world’s biggest
reserves of gas, those expecting the incorruptible British justice
system to deliver up the killers of Alexander Litvinenko may be in for a
long wait". (18 December 2006)
This strikes at the heart of the matter. Whatever
façade of openness and democracy that the ruling class and their
political representatives attempt to put across, when it comes to the
crunch, business interests and the anarchy of the free market dictate
capitalist governments’ policy. Of course, fat cats are corrupt. Of
course, dodgy deals go on. It’s only natural for this to be perpetuated
by a system based on the creation of obscene wealth for a tiny minority
through the massive exploitation of the majority. And for those lining
their pockets off the back of our graft, it’s only a problem when such
deals, such corruption, become public and undermine their authority.
The international arms trade is notoriously corrupt.
David Isenberg, writing in the Asian Times on the BAe investigation,
stated, "it brings to mind the line uttered by Claude Rains’ character
Captain Renault in Casablanca: ‘I’m shocked, shocked to find that
gambling is going on here!’" (6 October 2005) The CIA estimated that, in
the late 1990s, 40-45% of all the corruption in world trade stemmed from
the arms industry, despite it amounting to less than 0.5% of total
trade.
The level of corruption and the nature of the
regimes that Britain and BAe are willing to deal with in pursuit of a
profit exposes the lie of Bush and Blair’s mission to ‘export democracy’
to the Middle East. Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights is deplorable.
A 2003 Amnesty International report stated: "At least seven people, all
foreign nationals, had their right hand amputated, and one man had two
of his teeth extracted under qisas (retribution) punishment". The Saudi
regime oversees the prohibition and repression of political parties,
trade unions and human rights organisations. But as an economic and
strategic ally, Blair and Bush are willing to turn a blind eye to all
this!
In 2005, it came to light that BAe had made payments
between 1997 and 2004 to General Pinochet. These payments were to
‘facilitate’ arms and weapons system sales to Chile and other Latin
American states. That a company such as BAe was happy to deal with ‘the
butcher of Chile’ is sickening, but should come as no surprise, fitting
in, as it does, with the general attitude displayed by many
representatives of the capitalist class both during Pinochet’s military
rule and after his death. As The Economist stated in their obituary to
him: "General Pinochet liked to portray himself as the selfless defender
of god and country against atheist communism. Some of his friends, chief
among them Lady Thatcher, appeared to support this view, ostentatiously
taking tea with the doddering old man and stoking him with praise". (The
Economist, 16 December 2006)
For the bosses, democracy is by no means a
precondition and, when the rule of capital is threatened they are
willing to sweep it to one side: "To eliminate communism required ending
democracy, which as he [Pinochet] put it later, was ‘no longer able to
confront an enemy that has destroyed the state’." (ibid) This attitude
among the British ruling class was given theoretical justification in
1977 by Ian Gilmour, who later served in the Thatcher government. He
wrote: "Conservatives do not worship democracy. For them majority rule
is a device… and if it is leading to an end that is undesirable or is
inconsistent with itself, then there is a theoretical case for ending
it". (Inside Right)
It seems only natural, then, that the business
interests of BAe along with others in the British capitalist class, were
put above anything like ‘justice’ or ‘the truth’! But since Blair’s
vetoing of the SFO investigation, more allegations of BAe corruption
have come to light, including allegations surrounding the sale of air
traffic control systems to Tanzania. Considering the international
reaction to the dropping of the Saudi enquiry, it is likely that the
Tanzanian enquiry will continue. As Larry Elliot put it: "There is a
world of difference in getting tough with, say, Ethiopia, over its
standards of government procurement, and doing the same with the world’s
biggest oil producer". (The Guardian, 18 December 2006) Tanzania is the
fifth-poorest country in the world, with GDP per capita of only $600. As
such, this enquiry is likely to run its course as a face saving
exercise.
But the result of the Saudi affair, along with
numerous other corruption and sleaze scandals to have hit New Labour,
and Blair in particular, now mean that Blair is seen as damaged goods. A
layer of the capitalist class may well now see ‘sleazy’ New Labour as no
longer capable of acting as its key representatives and revert to
backing an invigorated Conservative Party under Cameron. But whatever
the outcome here, parliamentary democracy is a means to an end for big
business. The only way forward for the working class and poor, both in
Britain and internationally, is to fight for real democracy, for
democratic workers’ control and for a socialist society. Through this
the resources of the world could be used to provide for the needs of the
billions, not to make super-profits for a tiny minority at the top
through war, death and exploitation!
Greg Maughan
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