The Great Debate UK

Christopher Harvie on “the last days of Gordon Brown”

As Britain gears up for a general election with polls pointing toward a hung parliament, pundits are not only speculating on how the political landscape of the future might look, but they are also taking stock of the past.

In his new book “Broonland, the last days of Gordon Brown“, Christopher Harvie, a former colleague of Prime Minister Gordon Brown and an SNP Member of the Scottish Parliament for mid-Scotland and Fife in Brown’s Kirkaldy base, takes a turn at surveying the lay of the land.

Harvie analyses Brown’s role, New Labour and the trajectory of the economy, which grew under the leadership of prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to Brown, in spite of the fact that Britain’s “infrastructure and education were poor, manufacturing shrank; the UK’s nations drifted apart, while London seemed to wilfully detach itself from Europe”.

The gap between the rich and poor has widened as manufacturing has been replaced by  retail, entertainment and recreation.

At a launch at Bookmarks, the socialist book shop, in London’s Bloomsbury, Harvie, a member of the Labour Party from 1962 to 1988, spoke to Reuters about Brown, Scotland, politics and the economy.

“The Labour party in Britain is in a sort of crisis,” he said, adding that Britain is “far too dependent on financial services, which have been shown almost to be fraudulent in certain major respects.”

If politics reach an impasse after the election, “quite a lot of authority could be wielded by the minority goverments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland,” he added.

Tariq Ali on how unions fare under Labour rule

Amid a stand-off between British Airways and the Unite union, the Labour Party’s main financial supporter, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called a planned strike by BA cabin crew workers “unjustified and deplorable” last week and said both sides should return to talks.

Rail signal workers in the RMT union are also threatening to strike, but haven’t announced a date.

The Conservatives have tried to make political capital out of industrial unrest ahead of a general election expected to be called for May 6, accusing the Labour Party of being in the pocket of the unions.

But how much political leverage do trade unions in Britain really have?

Unions are still burdened by the steps former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took to crush the labour movement in the 1980s, says political commentator Tariq Ali, who has written more than 30 books, including “Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror” in 2006 and most recently a novel titled “Night of the Golden Butterfly”.

The Labour Party, founded in the early 20th century by trade unions to represent workers in parliament, has done nothing to reverse the consequences of a protracted coal miner’s strike under Thatcher which, combined with de-industrialisation and privatisation, weakened the power of trade unions in Britain, Ali told Reuters in a recent video interview at Verso Books headquarters in London’s Soho.

“When New Labour was elected in 1997, Tony Blair, the New Labour leader, made it very clear that he wasn’t going to change anything that Thatcher had done,” Ali said. “They used to boast in those early days — that not only will we not change, we will go beyond Thatcher.”

Tariq Ali on the state of UK politics

Where is the burning debate on domestic and foreign policy observers might expect from the major political parties ahead of the next general election in Britain?

It’s just not going to happen, says political commentator and writer Tariq Ali, whose new novel “Night of the Golden Butterfly” concludes a fictional series titled “Islam Quintet” he began writing 20 years ago.

“The whole thing is on a farcical level,” he said in an interview with Reuters, suggesting that the election campaign has so far centred on quibbles about how and when it is best to make spending cuts.

No matter who wins the election, which is due by June 2010, “the result will be more of the same on both the domestic and the international front,” Ali said, arguing that there are no fundamental political differences on domestic or foreign policy between the Labour and Conservative parties.

Ali predicts that Britain will continue to trail the U.S. in matters of foreign policy.

“British governments follow the lead of the United States — it doesn’t matter whether the president is Bush or Obama, whatever they are told to do they will do,” he said. “Their line follows the American line on everything.”

London-based Ali, who in the 1960s was exiled from Pakistan for his political activism, is an editor of “New Left Review” and has written many books on politics, including “Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London,Terror” and “The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power“.

Shlomo Sand on “The Invention of the Jewish People”

In his controversial book, “The Invention of the Jewish People,” author Shlomo Sand challenges historical notions of the link between Judaism and Israel, and argues that there is no record of exile of the Jewish people.

Israel has deliberately forgotten its history and replaced it with a myth, writes Sand, a Jewish scholar and historian based at the University of Tel Aviv. Without exile, there is no right to return, he says.

“The disparity between what my research suggested about the history of the Jewish people and the way that history is commonly understood – not only within Israel but in the larger world – shocked me as much as it shocked my readers.”

Early Rabbis and 19th century Zionist Scholars were responsible for the construction of a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people, Sand argues. He attributes the Jewish diaspora to early Judaist evangelism across North Africa, Southern Europe and the Middle East, not a biological lineage.

Sand spoke with Reuters about his thesis at Verso Books headquarters in London. Watch the video here: