To many Labour MPs it came as a relief when John Prescott privately described President Bush's Middle East policy, and in particular the failure to obtain a just settlement for the Palestinians, as "crap". A true stalwart of the party had called something by its name, and once again it was possible to be proud of being a member. Underneath the hype and double talk there was a bedrock of traditional values waiting to resurface when the long Blairite nightmare was over.
One would think that after the implosion of 1983 - when a leftist programme brought Labour to its lowest electoral ebb since it became a major party - there would be no more room for illusions: Labour's role was to manage capitalism not to tame it, to equip working people to serve the market rather than to control the market for the benefit of working people. But this realism has itself turned out to be an illusion, as backbenchers' enthusiasm for Prescott's comment shows. They are only too anxious to believe that Blairite subservience to Washington is an aberration, and Washington's performance in the Middle East the result of incompetence. Neither is true.
A bungled mission to bring a just peace to the Middle East? The broader picture is one where the US - if possible with UN cover, if necessary without - has sought regional domination from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. In pursuit of these goals there is a great deal of talk about "democracy", but none about free and independent states deciding for themselves on what terms to do business with the West. In the words of the seminal neoconservative Project for a New American Century, "America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of US military forces". Its success has been mixed, and there has been a good deal of bungling. Maybe the Bush Administration's performance has been "crap", but if so it is not because it has failed to achieve a stable and viable state for the Palestinians and secure borders for Israel, but on the contrary because it has not succeeded in impressing its dominance on the countries of the region.
In Britain New Labour's uncritical alignment with the Bush strategy has exposed the fault lines in our society. Young Muslim men nightly witnessing the scenes of extraordinary violence the US and its allies have visited on the Middle East were never going to remain unmoved. That some have resorted to acts of criminal terrorism has created a cycle of suspicion and repression which threatens the 40-year long and partially successful effort we have made to overcome the crude racism of the Powell period. As Arabic-speaking passengers are excluded from international flights at the behest of vigilante passengers - and even from the London Eye - we are on the verge of a downward spiral which it will be difficult to stop.
But as the enthusiasm for penalising asylum seekers of whatever origin or creed and the general curtailment of civil liberties shows, this attempt to contain reactions to its foreign adventures is part of what our government now stands for. The human rights act is treated as a liberal conspiracy against the state, and the judges as dangerous subversives, at least when they disagree with the likes of John Reid. Surveillance is universal, ID cards essential and jury trial a luxury. The pattern is one in which undebated commitments are made - to the White House, to the Daily Mail or to corporate interests (think nuclear power) - and the state then manages the consequences. Increasingly the government exists to control the people, not to serve them.
Labour backbenchers ought to realise that what they have watched and allowed to happen over the last few years is no aberration, any more than US policy in Palestine is incompetent. Spare us the illusions.
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