Seumas Milne's Blog, page 13

Woolwich attack: If the whole world's a battlefield, that holds in Woolwich as well as Waziristan | Seumas Milne

Denying a link between western wars in the Muslim world and the backlash on our streets only fuels Islamophobia and bloodshed

The videoed butchery of Fusilier Lee Rigby outside Woolwich barracks last May was a horrific act and his killers' murder conviction a foregone conclusion. Rigby was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations in Afghanistan. So the attack wasn't terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians.

The killing of an unarmed man far from the conflict, however, by self-appointed individuals with non-violent political alternatives, isn't condoned by any significant political or religious tradition. Quite apart from morality, the impact was violently counter-productive for the Muslims that Rigby's killers claimed to be defending, as Islamophobic attacks spiked across Britain.

But the determined refusal of the political establishment to recognise the link with the wars they have been waging in the Muslim world is toxic and dangerous. Echoing the recycled nonsense of his predecessors, David Cameron claims Woolwich was "an attack on the British way of life".

The answer, he insists, is to "confront the poisonous narrative of extremism", ban the "hate clerics" - anything but mention the war. More than a decade after the launch of a campaign that has delivered mass slaughter, torture, kidnapping and destruction across the Muslim world, such deceitful inanities are simply designed to hide the political elite's role in the violence.

There can't, after all, be the slightest doubt about what Rigby's killers thought they were doing. Michael Adebolajo spelled it out on the streets and in court. This was a "military attack", he claimed, in retaliation for Britain's occupation and violence in "Muslim lands", from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond.

"Leave our lands and you can live in peace," the London-born Muslim convert told bystanders. The message couldn't be clearer. It was the same delivered by the 2005 London bomber, Mohammed Siddique Khan, and the Iraqi 2007 Glasgow attacker, Bilal Abdullah, who declared: "I wanted the public to have a taste" of what its government of "murderers did to my people".

To say these attacks are about "foreign policy" prettifies the reality. They are the predicted consequence of an avalanche of violence unleashed by the US, Britain and others in eight direct military interventions in Arab and Muslim countries that have left hundreds of thousands of dead. Only the wilfully blind or ignorant can be shocked when there is blowback from that onslaught at home. The surprise should be that there haven't been more such atrocities.

Mainstream Islamic teaching supports the right to resist foreign occupation, while rejecting violence against non-combatants or outside the battlefield. But it is the US and its closest allies in the war on terror who have declared the whole world to be a battlefield, in which they claim the right to kill whoever they deem to be a threat.

British and US special forces have been doing that in Somalia. The US routinely kills large numbers of civilians in drone strikes across the Muslim world – 12 were reported incinerated last week in Yemen. By waging a war without borders, often against unarmed or unidentified victims, they have fatally blurred the boundaries and invited their enemies to do the same. That was Adebolajo's view of the Woolwich attack, his brother Jeremiah told al-Jazeera TV: "The geographical location of the battlefield, since this war on terror, has basically disappeared."

What is clear is that denying the role of US-British wars and killing in fuelling domestic terror attacks can only inflame Islamophobia – and absolve politicians from their responsibility for years of bloodshed and backlash. Unless the pressure grows to halt the terror war abroad, Woolwich certainly won't be the end of it at home.

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Mission accomplished? Afghanistan is a calamity and our leaders must be held to account | Seumas Milne

British troops haven't accomplished a single one of their missions in Afghanistan. Like Iraq and Libya, it's a disaster

Of all the mendacious nonsense that pours out of politicians' mouths, David Cameron's claim that British combat troops will be coming home from Afghanistan with their "mission accomplished" is in a class all of its own. It's almost as if, by echoing George Bush's infamous claim of victory in Iraq in May 2003 just as the real war was beginning, the British prime minister is deliberately courting ridicule.

But British, American and other Nato troops have been so long in Afghanistan – twice as long as the second world war – that perhaps their leaders have forgotten what the original mission actually was. In fact, it began as a war to destroy al-Qaida, crush the Taliban and capture or kill their leaders, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

That quickly morphed into a supposed campaign for democracy and women's rights, a war to protect our cities from terror attacks, to eradicate opium production and bring security and good governance from Helmand to Kandahar. With the exception of the assassination of Bin Laden – carried out 10 years later in another country – not one of those goals has been achieved.

Instead, al-Qaida has mushroomed and spread throughout the Arab and Muslim world, engulfing first Iraq and now Syria. Far from protecting our streets from attacks, the war has repeatedly been cited as a justification for those carrying them out – most recently by Michael Adebolajo, who killed the Afghan war veteran Lee Rigby on the streets of London in May.

The Taliban is long resurgent, mounting 6,600 attacks between May and October this year and negotiating for a return to power. Mullah Omar remains at liberty. Afghan opium production is at a record high and now accounts for 90% of the world's supply. Less than half the country is now "safe for reconstruction", compared with 68% in 2009.

Meanwhile, women's rights are going into reverse, and violence against women is escalating under Nato occupation: 4,000 assaults were documented by Afghan human rights monitors in the first six months of this year, from rape and acid attacks to beatings and mutilation. Elections have been brazenly rigged, as a corrupt regime of warlords and torturers is kept in power by foreign troops, and violence has spilled over into a dangerously destabilised Pakistan.

All this has been at a cost of tens of thousands of Afghan civilian lives, along with those of thousands US, British and other occupation troops. But it's not as if it wasn't foreseen from the start. When the media were hailing victory in Afghanistan 12 years ago, and Tony Blair's triumphalism was echoed across the political establishment, opponents of the invasion predicted it would lead to long-term guerrilla warfare, large-scale Afghan suffering and military failure – and were dismissed by the politicians as "wrong" and "fanciful".

But that is exactly what happened. One study after another has confirmed that British troops massively increased the level of violence after their arrival in Helmand in 2006, and are estimated to have killed 500 civilians in a campaign that has cost between £25bn and £37bn. After four years they had to be rescued by US forces. But none of the political leaders who sent them there has been held accountable for this grim record.

It was the same, but even worse, in Iraq. The occupation was going to be a cakewalk, and British troops were supposed to be past masters at counter-insurgency. Opponents of the invasion again predicted that it would lead to unrelenting resistance until foreign troops were driven out. When it came to it, defeated British troops were forced to leave Basra city under cover of darkness.

But six years later, who has paid the price? One British corporal has been convicted of war crimes and the political elite has shuffled off responsibility for the Iraq catastrophe on to the Chilcot inquiry – which has yet to report nearly three years after it last took evidence. Given the dire lack of coverage and debate about what actually took place, maybe it's not surprising that most British people think fewer than 10,000 died in a war now estimated to have killed 500,000.

But Iraq wasn't the last of the disastrous interventions by the US and Britain. The Libyan war was supposed to be different and acclaimed as a humanitarian triumph. In reality not only did Nato's campaign in support of the Libyan uprising ratchet up the death toll by a factor of perhaps 10, giving air cover to mass ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate killing. Its legacy is a maelstrom of warring militias and separatist rebels threatening to tear the country apart.

Now the west's alternative of intervention-lite in Syria is also spectacularly coming apart. The US, British and French-sponsored armed factions of the Free Syrian Army have been swept aside by jihadist fighters and al-Qaida-linked groups – first spawned by western intelligence during the cold war and dispersed across the region by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The wars unleashed or fuelled by the US, Britain and their allies over the past 12 years have been shameful. Far from accomplishing their missions, they brought untold misery, spread terrorism across the world and brought strategic defeat to those who launched them. In the case of Afghanistan all this looks likely to continue, as both the US and Britain plan to keep troops and bases there for years to come.

By any objective reckoning, failures on such a scale should be at the heart of political debate. But instead the political class and the media mostly avert their gaze and wrap themselves in the flag to appease a war-weary public. The first sign that this might be changing was the unprecedented parliamentary vote against an attack on Syria in August. But the democratisation of war and peace needs to go much further. Rather than boasting of calamitous missions, the politicians responsible for them must be held to account.

Twitter: @seumasmilne

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Mandela has been sanitised by hypocrites and apologists | Seumas Milne

The ANC liberation hero has been reinvented as a Kumbaya figure in order to whitewash those who stood behind apartheid

We have now had a week of unrelenting beatification of Nelson Mandela by exactly the kind of people who stood behind his jailers under apartheid. Mandela was without question a towering historical figure and an outstanding hero of South Africa's liberation struggle. So it would be tempting to imagine they had been won over by the scale of his achievement, courage and endurance.

For some, that may be true. For many others, in the western world in particular, it reeks of the rankest hypocrisy. It is after all Mandela's global moral authority, and the manifest depravity of the system he and the African National Congress brought to an end, that now makes the hostility of an earlier time impossible to defend.

So history has had to be comprehensively rewritten, Mandela and the ANC appropriated and sanitised, and inconvenient facts minimised or ignored. The whitewashed narrative has been such a success that the former ANC leader has been reinvented and embraced as an all-purpose Kumbaya figure by politicians across the spectrum and ageing celebrities alike.

But it's a fiction that turns the world on its head and obscures the reality of global power then and now. In this fantasy, the racist apartheid tyranny was a weird aberration that came from nowhere, unconnected to the colonial system it grew out of or the world powers that kept it in place for decades.

In real life, it wasn't just Margaret Thatcher who branded Mandela a terrorist and resisted sanctions, or David Cameron who went on pro-apartheid lobby junkets. Almost the entire western establishment effectively backed the South African regime until the bitter end. Ronald Reagan described it as "essential to the free world". The CIA gave South African security the tipoff that led to Mandela's arrest and imprisonment for 27 years. Harold Wilson's government was still selling arms to the racist regime in the 1960s, and Mandela wasn't removed from the US terrorism watch list until 2008.

Airbrushed out of the Mandela media story has been the man who launched a three-decade-long armed struggle after non-violent avenues had been closed; who declared in his 1964 speech from the dock that the only social system he was tied to was socialism; who was reported by the ANC-allied South African Communist party this week to have been a member of its central committee at the time of his arrest; and whose main international supporters for 30 years were the Soviet Union and Cuba.

It has barely been mentioned in the past few days, but Mandela supported the ANC's armed campaign of sabotage, bombings and attacks on police and military targets throughout his time in prison. Veterans of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC's armed wing, emphasise that the military campaign was always subordinate to the political struggle and that civilians were never targeted (though there were civilian casualties).

But as Ronnie Kasrils, MK's former intelligence chief, told me on Wednesday, Mandela continued to back it after his release in 1990 when Kasrils was running arms into South Africa to defend ANC supporters against violent attacks. And there's no doubt that under today's US and British law, he and other ANC leaders would have been jailed as terrorists for supporting such a campaign.

One of the lessons of Mandela and the ANC's real history is that the cold war wasn't just about capitalism and communism – or freedom and dictatorship, as is now often claimed – but also about colonialism and national liberation, in which the west was unmistakably on the wrong side.

South Africa wasn't an anomaly. The brutal truth is that the US and its allies backed dictatorships from Argentina and Greece to Saudi Arabia, while Soviet support allowed peoples from Vietnam to Angola to win national independence. Cuban military action against South African and US-backed forces at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988 gave a vital impetus to the fall of the racist regime in Pretoria.

That's one reason why Mandela was a progressive nationalist, and Raul Castro, the Cuban president, spoke at Tuesday's celebration of Mandela's life in Soweto, not David Cameron. And why the man Barack Obama called the "last great liberator of the 20th century" was outspoken in his opposition to US and British wars of intervention and occupation, from Kosovo to Iraq – damning the US as a "threat to world peace", guilty of "unspeakable atrocities".

Such statements have barely figured in media tributes to Mandela this week, of course. The enthusiasm with which Mandela has been embraced in the western world is not only about the racial reconciliation he led, which was a remarkable achievement, but the extent of the ANC's accommodation with corporate South Africa and global finance, which has held back development and deepened inequality.

There have been important social advances since the democratic transformation of the early 1990s, from water and power supply to housing and education. And in the global climate of the early 90s, it's perhaps not surprising that the ANC bent to the neoliberal flood tide, putting its Freedom Charter calls for public ownership and redistribution of land on the back burner. But the price has been to entrench racial economic division, unemployment and corruption, while failing to attract the expected direct foreign investment.

The baleful grip of neoliberal capitalism, and the growing pressure to break with it, is a challenge that goes far beyond South Africa, of course. But along with the struggle for social justice and national liberation, the right to resist tyranny and occupation, and profound opposition to racism and imperial power, that is part of the real legacy of Nelson Mandela.

Twitter: @seumasmilne

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Politics Weekly podcast: autumn statement and Mandela's legacy

George Osborne delivered his fourth autumn statement this week with a keen sense of relish. He was able to point to improving economic growth - sharply adjusted upwards since March - and falling unemployment. He used the good news to taunt his opposite number Ed Balls but also made clear that there would be no letting up on his austerity measures.

However, in what he called a 'fiscally neutral' statement there was room for some tinkering. A planned fuel duty rise of 2p per litre was cancelled, there was a re-announcement of a new tax allowance for married couples and the lifting of green levies which he expects will save households about £50 per year on energy bills.

In this week's podcast we head down to the Resolution Foundation the day after the statement to see how the dust has settled. Tom Clark hears from Justine Roberts, chief executive of Mumsnet; Peter Kellner, president of polling firm YouGov; and from the Resolution Foundation's senior economist Matthew Whitaker.

Plus: we ask Robert Chote, chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, why his - and everyone else's - economic forecasts are always so wrong.

Also this week: we mark the death of Nelson Mandela at the age of 95. Guardian columnists Hugh Muir and Seumas Milne discuss his political legacy and the state of present day South Africa.

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Britain is up to its neck in US dirty wars and death squads | Seumas Milne

The war on terror is now an endless campaign of drone and undercover killings that threatens a more dangerous world

You might have thought the war on terror was finally being wound down, 12 years after the US launched it with such disastrous results. President Obama certainly gave that impression earlier this year when he declared that "this war, like all wars, must end".

In fact, the Nobel peace prize winner was merely redefining it. There would be no more "boundless global war on terror", he promised. By which he meant land wars and occupations are out for now, even if the US is still negotiating for troops to remain in Afghanistan after the end of next year.

But the war on terror is mutating, growing and spreading. Drone attacks, which have escalated under Obama from Pakistan to north Africa, are central to this new phase. And as Dirty Wars – the powerful new film by the American journalist Jeremy Scahill – makes clear, so are killings on the ground by covert US special forces, proxy warlords and mercenaries in multiple countries.

Scahill's film noir-style investigation starts with the massacre of a police commander's family by a US Joint Special Operations Command (Jsoc) secret unit in Gardez, Afghanistan (initially claimed by the US military to have been honour killings). It then moves through a murderous cruise missile attack in Majala, Yemen, that killed 46 civilians, including 21 children; the drone assassination of the radical US cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son; and the outsourced kidnappings and murders carried out by local warlords on behalf of Jsoc and the CIA in Somalia.

What emerges is both the scale of covert killings by US special forces – running 20 raids a night at one point in Afghanistan – and the unmistakable fact that these units are operating as death squads, whose bloodletting is dressed up as "targeted killings" of terrorists and insurgents for the benefit of a grateful nation back home.

When a Yemeni journalist, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, demonstrated just how targeted these killings can actually be in practice – by exposing the US slaughter at Majala – he was framed and jailed in Yemen as an al-Qaida collaborator, and his release was initially blocked by the personal intervention of Obama.

Of course, the US and its friends have carried out covert assassinations and sponsored death squads for many years. But assassination and undercover killings, once criticised by the US as an unfortunate Israeli habit, are now a central part of American strategy – and the battlefield has gone global. The number of countries in which the US Special Operations Command is operating has risen from 40 to 120.

And Britain is with them every step of the way. British officials like to present their own drone operations in Afghanistan as a moral cut above those of the CIA and Jsoc. In real life, the collaboration could hardly be closer. This week Noor Khan, whose father was one of more than 40 killed in a US drone attack in Pakistan, has been at the appeal court in London demanding the British government reveal the extent of GCHQ support for such war crimes.

The government is hiding behind "national security" and the special relationship. But there can be no doubt that GCHQ intelligence is used for drone attacks – just as British undercover units have been operating hand in glove with US special forces in Somalia, Mali, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Theresa May has been stripping British Muslims suspected of fighting for al-Shabaab in Somalia of their citizenship, just in time for them to be killed or kidnapped by US special forces, evidence has emerged that British special forces themselves killed a British recruit, Tufail Ahmed, there last year.

Britain has plenty of experience of its own dirty wars, of course. BBC's Panorama programme last month broadcast interviews with members of a former undercover army unit in Northern Ireland (several of whose officers had taken part in colonial campaigns) that carried out a string of drive-by shootings of unarmed civilians in Belfast in the 1970s. "We were there to act like a terror group," one veteran explained. Just like the US special forces in Gardez, they mounted regular cover-ups and struggled to accept the people they killed had not been "terrorists".

The assumption that they were taking out the bad guys, armed or unarmed, clearly trumped the laws of war. The same goes for the war on terror on a far bigger scale. Drone strikes are presented as clean, surgical attacks. In reality, not only does the complete absence of risk to the attacking forces lower the threshold for their use. But their targets depend on intelligence that is routinely demonstrated to be hopelessly wrong.

In many cases, far from targeting named individuals, they are "signature strikes" against, say, all military-age males in a particular area or based on a "disposition matrix" of metadata, signed off by Obama at his White House "kill list" meetings every Tuesday. Which is why up to 951 civilians are estimated to have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan alone, and just 2% of casualties are "high value" targets.

At best, drone and special forces killings are extrajudicial summary executions. More clearly, they are a wanton and criminal killing spree. The advantage to the US government is that it can continue to demonstrate global authority and impunity without boots on the ground and loss of US life. But that is a reflection of US weakness in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq: dirty wars cause human misery but give limited strategic leverage.

They also create precedents. If the US and its friends arrogate to themselves the right to launch armed attacks around the world at will, other states now acquiring drone capabilities may well follow suit. Most absurdly, what is justified in the name of fighting terrorism has spread terror across the Arab and Muslim world and provided a cause for the very attacks its sponsors are supposed to be defending us against at home.

The US-led dirty wars are a recipe for exactly the endless conflict Obama has promised to halt. They are laying the ground for a far more dangerous global order. The politicians and media who plead national security to protect these campaigns from exposure are themselves a threat to our security. Their secrecy and diminished footprint make them harder than conventional wars to oppose and hold to account – though the backlash in countries bearing the brunt is bound to grow. But their victims cannot be left to bring them to an end alone.

Twitter: @seumasmilne

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Is the use of unmanned military drones ethical or criminal? - video debate

Columnist Seumas Milne and Peter Lee, a military expert at Portsmouth University, discuss the moral and political questions raised by drones

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Is the use of unmanned military drones ethical in battle? - video debate

Columnist Seumas Milne and Peter Lee, a military expert at Portsmouth University, discuss the moral questions raised by drones

Seumas MilnePhil MaynardKen Macfarlane

America isn't leaving the Middle East, unfortunately | Seumas Milne

The Iran nuclear deal is a product of the failure of the war on terror. It should at least hand more control to the region's people

Remember how we got here. Three months ago, the US, Britain and France were poised to launch yet another attack on an Arab and Muslim country, this time war-wracked Syria. An unexpected, and unprecedented, vote by British MPs halted the bid to escalate the war. That stiffened resistance in the US Congress.

As Obama struggled to win support, Russia seized the chance to press for the UN-supervised destruction of Syria's chemical weapons. A deal was reached and the threat of attack abandoned. A couple of months on and Iran, Syria's closest ally, has now signed an agreement with the big powers to limit its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief – and Syrian peace talks are back on the agenda for the new year.

The west's August attempt to confront the Iranian-Syrian "axis of resistance" has been turned on its head. Russia has been bolstered without lifting a finger. The closest US allies in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are crying betrayal and demanding their supporters sabotage the deal in Congress.

In fact, both agreements simply reflect a recognition of reality after 12 years of failed wars of intervention across the Middle East. In the case of Syria, despite covert intervention by western and Gulf states, the Assad regime has been gaining ground as the rebel camp slips further into the grip of al-Qaida-linked sectarian jihadists.

When it comes to Iran, the Shia Islamic republic has been hugely strengthened by the west's war on terror and the US-British invasion of Iraq in particular. Sure, Iran has been hurt by sanctions imposed by nuclear-armed states and the campaign of assassinations and sabotage waged by the US and Israel.

But the restrictions on its uranium enrichment programme agreed in Geneva on Sunday are significantly less onerous than those Iran offered in 2005, when its proposal of a centrifuge cap of 5,000 was rejected by the US out of hand. It now has upwards of 16,000.

What has changed is that the costs of confrontation with Iran have escalated for the US; the credibility of an all-out attack on Tehran is now vanishingly small; the west's Arab allies are in turmoil or immersed in an unwinnable regional sectarian war – and Iran holds a key to conflicts the US wants defused or settled, from Palestine to Afghanistan.

Whether the nuclear agreement lasts or goes further, Geneva is a measure of realism in a region turned upside down by increasingly bizarre alliances. Take Israel, the secular Jewish state, and Saudi Arabia, the Sunni sectarian autocracy. They are now not only working hand in glove against Iran, but both strongly backed the abortive attack on Syria and championed July's military coup against the elected Islamist president in Egypt.

The US-backed theocratic Saudi dictatorship, along with the UAE, Jordan and Israel, are now in close alliance with the secular military regime in Cairo – which is busy buying weapons from Syria's ally Russia – while Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are the main backers of Islamist and jihadist rebel forces in Syria. In fact, the Saudi authorities have been offering to release their own jihadist prisoners if they agree to go and fight in Syria and Lebanon with al-Qaida-linked groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, Islamist Turkey, which also backs the Syrian rebels, is trying to move closer to Iran.

The chaos and cross-currents are a product of the war on terror and the Arab uprisings that flowed out of it nearly three years ago. The campaign that began in Afghanistan, and passed through the destruction of Iraq via drone wars against the terror groups it fuelled, reached its last phase in the attempts to hijack or crush the popular revolts across the Arab world.

At every point, the war has failed in its stated aim of fighting terror and left a trail of destruction, death and sectarian conflict in its wake, from Pakistan to Libya. It has also revealed the limits, rather than the extent of US and western power to impose its will by military force. And it's that strategic defeat and overreach – paid for at such great human cost – that has been reflected in the deals made with Iran and Syria this autumn.

The US administration has now signalled it wants a more modest engagement in the Middle East, focused on Iran, Syria and the Israel-Palestine conflict, as it "pivots" towards Asia and the rising power of China. "We've got interests and opportunities in that whole world," as Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, puts it. That's been interpreted by some as the prelude to a US withdrawal from the most directly western-dominated region in the world, encouraged by declining US dependence on Middle East oil.

That would be too much to hope for. The US has been boosting its military presence and archipelago of bases in the Gulf, and the Middle East will continue to be crucial to the global energy market. But the failure of the war on terror and US decline means it is likely to try to use a reduction of tension with Iran to streamline and scale back its military involvement.

Which would, of course, be welcome for the people of a region trying to carve out their own future. The west's baleful terror war will carry on across the Arab and Muslim world in the form of drone attacks and special forces operations. But the appetite for full-scale air and land campaigns seems to have exhausted itself. That can only be good for all of us.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

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Orthodox economists have failed their own market test | Seumas Milne

Students are demanding alternatives to a free-market dogma with a disastrous record. That's something we all need

From any rational point of view, orthodox economics is in serious trouble. Its champions not only failed to foresee the greatest crash for 80 years, but insisted such crises were a thing of the past. More than that, some of its leading lights played a key role in designing the disastrous financial derivatives that helped trigger the meltdown in the first place.

Plenty were paid propagandists for the banks and hedge funds that tipped us off their speculative cliff. Acclaimed figures in a discipline that claims to be scientific hailed a "great moderation" of market volatility in the runup to an explosion of unprecedented volatility. Others, such as the Nobel prizewinner Robert Lucas, insisted that economics had solved the "central problem of depression prevention".

Any other profession that had proved so spectacularly wrong and caused such devastation would surely be in disgrace. You might even imagine the free-market economists who dominate our universities and advise governments and banks would be rethinking their theories and considering alternatives.

After all, the large majority of economists who predicted the crisis rejected the dominant neoclassical thinking: from Dean Baker and Steve Keen to Ann Pettifor, Paul Krugman and David Harvey. Whether Keynesians, post-Keynesians or Marxists, none accepted the neoliberal ideology that had held sway for 30 years; and all understood that, contrary to orthodoxy, deregulated markets don't tend towards equilibrium but deepen the economy's tendency to systemic crisis.

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve and high priest of deregulation, at least had the honesty to admit his view of the world had been proved "not right". The same cannot be said for others. Eugene Fama, architect of the "efficient markets hypothesis" underpinning financial deregulation, concedes he doesn't know what "causes recessions" – but insists his theory has been vindicated anyway. Most mainstream economists have carried on as if nothing had happened.

Many of their students, though, have had enough. A revolt against the orthodoxy has been smouldering for years and now seems to have gone critical. Fed up with parallel universe theories that have little to say about the world they're interested in, students at Manchester University have set up a post-crash economics society with 800 members, demanding an end to monolithic neoclassical courses and the introduction of a pluralist curriculum.

They want other schools of economic thought taught in parallel, from Keynesian to more radical theories – with a better record on predicting and connecting with the real world economy – along with green and feminist economics. The campaign is spreading fast: to Cambridge, Essex, the London School of Economics and a dozen other campuses, and linking up with university groups in France, Germany, Slovenia and Chile.

As one of the Manchester society's founders, Zach Ward-Perkins, explains, he and a fellow student agreed after a year of orthodoxy: "There must be more to it than this." Neoclassical economics is after all built on a conception of the economy as the sum of the atomised actions of millions of utility-maximising individuals, where markets are stable, information is perfect, capital and labour are equals – and the trade cycle is bolted on as an afterthought.

But even if it struggles to say anything meaningful about crises, inequality or ownership, the mathematical modelling erected on its half-baked intellectual foundations give it a veneer of scientific rigour, valued by students aiming for well-paid City jobs. Neoclassical economics has also provided the underpinning for the diet of deregulated markets, privatisation, low taxes on the wealthy and free trade we were told for 30 years was now the only route to prosperity.

Its supporters have an "almost religious mentality", as Ha-Joon Chang – one of the last surviving independent economists at Keynes's Cambridge – puts it. Although claiming to favour competition, the neoclassicals won't tolerate any themselves. Forty years ago, most economics departments were Keynesian and neoclassical economics was derided. That all changed with the Thatcher and Reagan ascendancy.

In institutions supposed to foster debate, non-neoclassical economists have been systematically purged from economics faculties. Some have found refuge in business schools, development studies and geography departments. In the US, corporate funding has been key. In Britain, peer review through the "research excellence framework" – which allocates public research funding – has been the main mechanism for the ideological cleansing of economics.

Paradoxically, the sharp increase in student fees and the marketisation of higher education is creating a pressure point for students out to overturn this intellectual monoculture. The free marketeers are now being market-tested, and the customers don't want their product. Some mainstream academics realise that they may have to compromise, and have been colonising a Soros-funded project to overhaul the curriculum, hoping to limit the scale of change.

But change it must. The free-market orthodoxy of the past three decades not only helped create the crisis we're living through, but gave credibility to policies that have led to slower growth, deeper inequality, greater insecurity and environmental degradation all over the world. Its continued dominance after the crash, like the neoliberal model it underpins, is about power not credibility. If we are to escape this crisis, both will have to go.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

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Unite can't be left to resist Cameron's smear campaign alone | Seumas Milne

David Cameron and the Tory press have launched a retro anti-union drive to damage Ed Miliband. But it won't fly in today's Britain

Living standards may be falling and Labour's poll lead widening on the back of Ed Miliband's pledge to freeze energy prices. But to judge by the outpouring of poison from David Cameron and his media friends, the Conservatives have finally come up with a strategy to win the next election. Their plan can be summed up in one word: Unite.

For the past few months, the prime minister has lost no opportunity to denounce the country's largest union (and Labour's biggest affiliate) in the most lurid terms. He has poured vitriol over its general secretary, Len McCluskey, portraying the former docker as a scouse Svengali and Miliband's puppet-master. A fortnight ago he went lower still, branding Unite's sacked convenor at Grangemouth, the respected Stevie Deans, a "rogue trade unionist who nearly brought the Scottish petrochemical industry to its knees".

In one Prime Minister's Questions, Cameron mentioned Unite and McCluskey eight times. But this is just the warm-up. Egged on by his election strategist, Lynton Crosby, Cameron – government sources say – plans to ratchet up the campaignagainst Unite still further. It's the ideal device, Tories reckon, to paint Labour's leader as a weak 1970s throwback.

Cameron's press outriders have been preparing the ground for weeks. Outraged that Miliband dropped Labour's suspension of Deans and the Unite-backed candidate, Karie Murphy, in the Falkirk parliamentary selection after claims of rigging fell apart, the Murdoch press and the Mail group have declared open season on the union.

The Sunday Times and Daily Mail have led the field, splashing stories of supposed Unite skullduggery week after week. Murdoch's weekend flagship has tried to revive the Falkirk row, using emails culled from Deans's Grangemouth computer, and cast spurious doubt on McCluskey's own re-election this year – with 144,570 votes, more than 60,000 ahead of his rival.

The Mail has widened the field of attack to Unite's industrial tactics, slipping into full 1980s revival mode. Under the headline "Terrorised by union bullies", the paper claimed the union was running a "sinister" campaign of "intimidation" and "dirty tricks", after Unite activists staged a silent protest with a giant inflatable rat outside the homes of Ineos executives.

The media onslaught has dovetailed with the corporate attack on the union at Grangemouth. Far from the union closing down the plant, it was the employer that locked out the workforce last month until they accepted worse terms and conditions. Unite had threatened to strike after Ineos used the Falkirk controversy to suspend Deans. The Ineos owner, Jim Ratcliffe, has now made clear that he repeatedly put off confrontation with Unite until the company was ready.

Just as striking is the fact that emails from Deans's computer were given to the Sunday Times the day after his disciplinary hearing and effective dismissal three weeks ago. An Ineos spokesman told me yesterday that the company had passed them to the police and information commissioner, but would neither confirm nor deny if it had also arranged for the emails to be given to the press.

Either way, a company about to benefit from a £125m government loan guarantee has certainly given a helpful boost to Cameron's campaign. The emails confirm what we knew already: that Unite recruited a large number of industrial workers to a moribund local Labour party and supported the progressive Murphy to be Labour's candidate.

Beyond that, the partial and potentially libellous internal Labour report that triggered Miliband's intervention and call to reform Labour's union link has been shown to be at best misleading. Its main allegation, that a handful of people were signed up without their knowledge by other family members, has been superseded by new evidence. Affidavits from members of the Kane family, at the centre of the dispute, have been passed to the Guardian. They confirm that none had a problem about joining, none was a union member or paid for by Unite, and one was actually planning to vote for Murphy's opponent.

What were in fact the kind of cock-ups and local disputes that are, as Labour's report puts it, "not unusual" in such contests have been transformed into an ugly smear campaign – used to break the resistance of a well-organised industrial workforce and now being relentlessly exploited to try to derail Miliband's growing political momentum. The aim is clear enough: to portray the Labour leader as hopelessly in hock to trade unions (which in reality have remarkably little influence on Labour policy), while diverting attention from falling living standards – and the commanding grip of the far more powerful City and corporate interests on the funding of the Conservative party.

But the onslaught on Unite isn't only about Labour, let alone the storm in a Falkirk teacup. McCluskey's union, the strongest in the private sector, has shown that its combative tactics have delivered results. Its "leverage strategy" – what the Mail calls terrorism – aims to offset industrial weakness by targeting the suppliers, customers and shareholders of recalcitrant employers with lobbying and demonstrations. To their dismay, it has proved effective: from Honda and London buses to construction and Crossrail.

Not only that, but Unite has gone out on a limb to demand the collective working class political voice squeezed out of the Westminster and media magic circle for a generation – which is what lies behind Falkirk. And, with other unions, it is one of the only organisations with real social weight and resources that opposes an entrenched neoliberal consensus and corporate elite.

So it's no wonder those vested interests that benefit want to cut Unite down to size. The Sunday Times worries about the "shift to the left" in public opinion it fears Miliband is tapping into. The only way the Labour leader can head off Cameron's Unite propaganda war is to get off the back foot and turn the tables on the City and big business lobbyists that stand behind the prime minister and his party.

In any case, there's little sign that Cameron and Crosby's Unite baiting is going to work. It's a retro 1980s strategy that doesn't chime with people's experience of Britain in 2013: falling real wages, shrinking public services, insecure jobs and corporate profiteering, not overweening unions. But it won't be seen off if Unite is left to fight alone.

Twitter: @seumasmilne

UniteLen McCluskeyDavid CameronConservativesEd MilibandTrade unionsSunday TimesDaily MailSeumas Milne
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