Labour and Empire

A close friend finds my outright condemnation of the New Labour project infuriating, quite unfair. She stresses the good work they have carried out in her own community: Well-thought-out schemes and wisely targeted cash leading to palpable improvements in people's lives.

To be honest, I don’t even know how true this. Such is my bitterness with New Labour I don’t keep up with such bread and butter issues. If there is anything to it, such successes may be one reason so many one-time left-wingers have stayed loyal to Mr Blair.

But regardless of how true it might be, for anyone who claims to hold universal democratic ideals it really isn’t good enough. Socialism paid for by the misery and enslavement of foreigners isn’t socialism at all, it’s just more tribalism – putting the welfare of your own lot before others. It’s hard to take comfort from domestic improvements when they’re clearly being bankrolled by the blood and tears of those elsewhere.

There are endless debates about whether the current world order is or isn’t imperialist, but in a most important sense it definitely is. However you go about it, imperialism is characterised by the exploitation of other peoples. It matters little whether you actually administer a colony, the important question is do you turn it to your own benefit? Do you encourage it work to your own advantage, rather than to its own? Do you cause it to suffer to bring wealth back to your own shores?

All five Labour Prime Ministers have been keen imperialists in this sense. Ramsay Macdonald’s brief flirtations with power were imperialist in every sense, the globe was at its pinkest. He certainly wasn’t voted into office to dismantle that empire, he was elected to distribute the spoils more equitably.

Of course it may not have of seemed like that at the time. Those who fought for public welfare simply wanted a fairer slice of the pie. But while the working classes might have shifted towards to the living standards of the middle classes in England, for those slaving away in Asia nothing changed, it often worsened.

Although Atlee oversaw the initial dismantling of the formal empire, there was certainly no parallel drive to improve the living standards and liberty of colonial subjects. If you were an African digging diamonds or copper you still got paid peanuts. The great share of the wealth still went back to Europe, only now some of it went on to fund social welfare programs.

This is not to suggest that successful domestic welfare requires foreign exploitation. Cuba achieves great healthcare without needing to bleed other countries to fund it. Whatever complaint you make about Cuba’s internal politics, you can’t accuse her of impoverishing her neighbours for her own gain. (There’s another candidate in the hemisphere.)

But in the case of the Parliamentry Labour party it has always been the case. From Cape Town to Baghdad to Jakarta, Wilson and Callaghan supplied arms to anyone prepared to protect British business interests, prepared to keep life miserable and wages low. Like every other modern British government, they inherited a highly unfair world order and stopped at nothing to keep it that way.

Blair’s foreign policy is nothing new to Labour, this is the history of Labour in power. It’s a horrible irony, but for all the sincere effort of some party members, and some excellent domestic gains, Labour has been a terrible, selfish player in world affairs. To the alien eye, rather than an asset the British welfare state could be mistaken for another means by which the outside world was kept unequal. A little trickledown at home to keep the natives quiet, and the empire unchallenged.

Britain’s ‘favourable’ global business connections have paid huge premiums to our domestic welfare, often at the most testing times. Like North Sea oil, ‘favourable’ foreign investments wrote many of the dole-cheques that limited the eighties’ riots. Like tax breaks and extra policemen, they were another strategy to weather the storm.

Foreign exploitation still generates a great deal of Britain’s income, and part of that goes toward our relatively lavish welfare. It pays for schools and social services, highly-skilled paramedics to scrape binge drinkers off pavements, artificial hip joints and machines to keep us alive into our nineties – unimaginable services in many of the countries Britain invests in, and extracts from.

As I said before, it doesn’t have to be this way – welfare doesn’t have to be based on imperialism – it’s just that in Britain it always has been.