Seumas Milne's Blog, page 6
January 7, 2015
Corporate feasting will devour the NHS | Seumas Milne
It’s not a crisis, David Cameron insists. It’s a “short-term pressure issue”. Fifteen hospitals may be on emergency measures; accident and emergency departments may have just recorded their worst ever performance; 21,000 people may have had to wait up to 12 hours on trolleys in the past fortnight, with a tent set up outside Swindon’s Great Western hospital to cope with the overload.
So far as the prime minister is concerned, however, this is all scaremongering and Labour point-scoring. Egged on by an echo-chamber press, Cameron accused Ed Miliband of trying to turn the NHS into a political weapon. But five years into his government, the Tory leader clearly has no one to blame but himself. This has all the hallmarks of a 1979-style “crisis, what crisis?” moment.
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January 1, 2015
All over the world, the challenge to the old order is growing | Seumas Milne
A decade and a half into the 21st century, we’re still living through the aftermath of two epoch-making shocks. The first was the demonstration of the limits of US power in the killing fields of Afghanistan and Iraq – the war on terror that broke the spell of invincibility of the world’s first truly global empire. The second was the financial crash of 2008 and the crisis of the western-dominated economic system it unleashed, still playing havoc with economies and lives across the world more than six years later.
That crisis will shape politics in Europe in 2015, from London to Madrid. But the impact will be felt first in Athens. The slump and stagnation that followed the crash has already fuelled the rise of the populist right. Now, after years of self-defeating austerity and falling living standards, the radical left has leapfrogged ahead to challenge for power in the most devastated eurozone economies of Greece and Spain.
Continue reading...December 25, 2014
Heroes of 2014: Pope Francis | Seumas Milne
You don’t have to be a believer to recognise that the leader of a billion Catholics has emerged as a global champion of social justice. That’s something of a turnaround both for the Vatican hierarchy – and an Argentinian pope whose record under his country’s dictatorship was less than heroic.
But Pope Francis is making up for lost time: denouncing capitalism and the “tyranny” of the market, condemning inequality as the “root of social evil”, rejecting Islamophobia and western warmaking – and even claiming communists are closet Christians who “have stolen our flag”.
Continue reading...December 17, 2014
Deficit mania and balanced budgets are a political fraud | Seumas Milne
In Westminster and medialand George Osborne has a reputation as a master political strategist. He might have missed all his economic targets and been booed out of the London Paralympics. But this was the man, it was always said, who would set the traps to sink Labour and deliver a last-minute election turnaround in 2015.
After his autumn statement backfired so spectacularly this month, how can such claims still be taken seriously? It’s not just that he failed to meet his own objectives – on the deficit, debt and growth – while living standards have been continuously cut for the majority, and slashed for the poorest. After such a performance, any continuing talk of a “long-term plan” can only be met with derision.
Continue reading...December 10, 2014
Sending troops to protect dictators threatens all of us | Seumas Milne
We may have known the outline of the global US kidnapping and torture programme for a few years. But even the heavily censored summary of the US senate torture report turns the stomach in its litany of criminal barbarity unleashed by the CIA on real and imagined US enemies.
The earlier accounts of US brutality in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo pale next to the still sanitised record of forced rectal “infusions” and prolapses, multiple “waterboarding” drownings and convulsions, the shackled freezing to death of a man seized in a mistaken identity case, hooded beatings and hanging by the wrists, mock executions, and sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours.
Continue reading...December 3, 2014
Cuba’s extraordinary global medical record shames the US blockade | Seumas Milne
Four months into the internationally declared Ebola emergency that has devastated west Africa, Cuba leads the world in direct medical support to fight the epidemic. The US and Britain have sent thousands of troops and, along with other countries, promised aid – most of which has yet to materialise. But, as the World Health Organisation has insisted, what’s most urgently needed are health workers. The Caribbean island, with a population of just 11m and official per capita income of $6,000 (£3,824), answered that call before it was made. It was first on the Ebola frontline and has sent the largest contingent of doctors and nurses – 256 are already in the field, with another 200 volunteers on their way.
While western media interest has faded with the receding threat of global infection, hundreds of British health service workers have volunteered to join them. The first 30 arrived in Sierra Leone last week, while troops have been building clinics. But the Cuban doctors have been on the ground in force since October and are there for the long haul.
Continue reading...November 27, 2014
It isn’t Facebook that feeds terror. It’s war and tyranny | Seumas Milne
The refusal to accept Britain’s role in a violent campaign without end fosters fear and racism
It takes some mastery of spin to turn the litany of intelligence failures over last year’s butchery of the off-duty soldier Lee Rigby into a campaign against Facebook. But that’s exactly how David Cameron’s government and a pliant media have disposed of the report by Westminster’s committee of intelligence trusties.
You might have expected Whitehall’s security machine to be in the frame for its spectacular incompetence in spying on the two killers: from filling out surveillance applications wrongly and losing one suspect’s house number, to closing down the surveillance of another – just as the pair were preparing the Woolwich attack.
Continue reading...November 19, 2014
Austerity has clearly failed. So why don’t they ditch it? | Seumas Milne
Now we know for sure George Osborne’s economic plan has failed, even on its own account. For all the self-congratulation about credit-fuelled growth, the recession in wages goes on. Four years into the coalition, most people’s living standards are still falling. Last week it seemed as though pay might have finally overtaken prices. But yesterday’s figures showed that real earnings fell by 1.6% over the past year. That continues the longest drop, of seven consecutive years, since records began in Victorian times.
The fall in living standards is greater still for the poorest, who effectively suffer higher inflation. Add in the fact that business investment as a share of national income and productivity are still declining, and no wonder David Cameron’s red lights are flashing. Of course the Tories like to boast about employment growth. But since only one in 40 of the new jobs are permanent, the number of people in enforced part-time work has doubled to 1.3 million, and there has been an explosion in artificial self-employment, the experience on the ground is something else entirely.
Continue reading...November 5, 2014
The centre cannot hold under austerity, in Britain or Europe | Seumas Milne
Six years after the crash, the centre cannot hold. Crisis and austerity are delivering polarisation and political fragmentation, and its happening almost everywhere across Europe. In Britain the main parties share of the vote is shrinking, while Ukips rightwing populists are dragging the Tories towards them. At the same time, the Scottish National Party has mushroomed out of the independence referendum campaign as a self-proclaimed party of the left, commanding a level of support that threatens Labours chances at next years general election. And the radical Greens have overtaken the Liberal Democrats in the latest polls.
Its a pattern reflected throughout the continent. In the wake of the 2008 meltdown, incumbents were ejected from office one after the other, regardless of political colour. As cuts in services and living standards were imposed in a fruitless attempt to escape the crisis, support for establishment parties plummeted or fractured to left and right.
Continue reading...October 29, 2014
A real counterweight to US power is a global necessity | Seumas Milne
Conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine will spread without effective restraint on western unilateralism
Where is the end of history now? Across three continents, conflicts are multiplying. An arc of war, foreign intervention and state breakdown stretches from Afghanistan to north Africa.
In Iraq and Syria, the so-called Islamic State mutant offspring of the war on terror is now the target of renewed US-led intervention. In Ukraine, thousands have died in the proxy fighting between Russian-backed rebels and the western-sponsored Kiev government. And in the far east, tensions between China, Japan and other US allies are growing.
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