Why We Write…
Why, against all hope, do people write against the system? People have always rebelled against corrupt systems of control; have always made good arguments, often with the justification of truth and history with them, yet the system remains. Not only does the system still exist, it is today more powerful than ever. The rise of globalisation - taken to mean in this instance the communication revolution that has lessened the significance of physical borders, and enabled global systems of control and influence to flourish outside of traditional Nation states - has enabled this. Corporations are able to spread their influence across the globe through various forms of virtually instantaneous media, gaining vast power and wealth in the process as effectively they have become bigger than the nations in which they physically operate.
Governments have been careful to ensure they are not trapped within their own borders when large businesses can act outside of them, so they to have increased their influence outside of their own borders. British security forces have been undergoing a revolution, no longer are they concerned with defence of the realm, they are now designed to be a quick reaction task force, able to be deployed around the world on short notice, and in multiple locations. This is the most important part of Tony Blair’s ‘New Britain’, the ability to spread political will more effectively by having a better-designed army to enforce that will. Britain has always been a nation to promote influence through the real fear of violence (’Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves’) but in modern society it is not deemed polite or acceptable to use force unless you have justification for doing so, so this is the second main part of New Labour: concerted propaganda concerning the New Labour crusade against ‘terror’.
That is the beauty of being a government, if you need a justification, you can just create one, the public do not need to know the truth, they just need to know enough to endorse their policy. The UK have used their close relationship with the US to use 9/11 as the new justification for using violence to spread policy and influence. After the difficulties posed by the end of the Cold War, a new easy to roll out excuse is available to lazy governments who want to embark on violence to pursue elite interests. Who better to take advantage of this situation than New Labour, the ‘Sultans of Spin’, so successful are they that people have renamed the fear-inducing word ‘propaganda’ with the innocent connotations of ’spin’. New Labour have used spin to have us believe that the way they handle the media is not lying, or concerted propaganda, but merely spin - merely a polished form of the truth.
New Labour have a long and distinguished track record of the lying, and their desperate attempts to control the media (which has sadly been very successful) speaks volumes of how far from the truth Tony Blair’s utopian statements of a New Britain really are. Yet through it all little has changed, New Labour lie, a few voices speak out, uncovering the truth, ridiculing the lies, but the rest of the world is too busy watching TV and listening to the drivel fed to the media by the New Labour PR machine to care, or believe.
But is this a reason to stop? Should truth be abandoned because the majority like to believe in myths, rather than face the changes that need to be made in the world? Or should people continue to write, to speak out, to protest, to record truth against all the odds? Even if it takes a hundred years before a historian uncovers the truth about British politics 1997-2020, the truth will out, and it will vindicate those brave enough to speak out, and will uncover those who lied, those who manipulated the media to pursue elite aims, those who started wars based on lies. Tony Blair will have his wish, he will be recorded in the annuls of history, but only as a delusional fraud who lied to a nation in pursuit of a fatally flawed dream.