Jack Straw helped create the illiberal secret court rules he's now using himself

In 2013 Tories and their Liberal Democrat enablers colluded to launch an an astounding attack on the concept of fair and open justice by creating a system of secret courts to protect the political establishment from scrutiny.

Secret courts (or Closed Material Proceedings as they are officially known) create the bizarre Kafkaesque circumstances that people can have their fates decided in courtrooms that they are not allowed to enter, based on evidence they are not allowed to see.

Not only does Theresa May's secret court legislation prevent citizens from seeing the evidence that is being used to determine their fate, it prevents their lawyers from seeing it too.

In March 2013 it was clear that the Tories and Lib-Dems had enough votes to pass Theresa May's attack on the justice system, but the Green MP Caroline Lucas tried to make two key amendments to the legislation in order to try to at least prevent outright abuse of the system.

One amendment was to prevent the use of secret court proceedings in civil cases, and the other was to ensure that judges have a legal obligation to consider the "public interest in the fair and open administration of justice" before any secret court proceeding could be launched.

Both of these amendments were voted down by the Tories, their Lib-Dem sidekicks and four liberty-hating Labour MPs.

One of the four Labour MPs who voted with Theresa May and the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition to defeat these amendments was the former Labour Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Fast-forward to 2017 and Jack Straw is facing a civil lawsuit alleging his complicity in the abduction and torture of a Libyan dissident and his pregnant wife in 2004.

After the fall of the Gadaffi government in 2011 incriminating documents were found that showed how members of the British security services tipped off the Americans about the whereabouts of the anti-Gadaffi Libyan dissident Abdelhakim Belhadj and his pregnant wife.The couple were then were then kidnapped by US forces, transported out of Malaysia on a torture flight to Tripoli and then handed over to the Libyan government, where they were then tortured and subjected to interrogation with numerous questions supplied to them by MI6.

Not only is there strong evidence that the UK colluded with Gadaffi's secret police torture centres under Jack Straw's watch, he also deliberately and brazenly lied in the House of Commons 2005 when he claimed that Britain had never been involved in any US torture flight operations.

Now Jack Straw and the MI6 agent Mark Allen are being sued for damages by the torture victims for their role in this kidnap-torture plot, and the judge Andrew Popplewell (a privately educated establishment insider) has decided to invoke secret court rules to allow the defendants to present secret evidence that cannot be seen by the victims, their lawyers, members of the press, or the public.

Had Caroline Lucas' amendments to Theresa May's monstrous attack on the justice system been passed (with the help of Jack Straw's parliamentary votes) then Jack Straw wouldn't now be able to obstruct the fair and open administration of justice by using secret court proceedings, presumably to hide evidence of his complicity in the plot from public scrutiny.

After the decision to allow secret court proceedings in the case was announced, Belhadj said that "I went through a secret trial once before, in Gaddafi’s Libya. It took about a half hour, and I never saw any of the evidence against me. Later a guard came to my cell and tossed in a red jumpsuit – that was how I found out that the secret court had sentenced me to die ... Fatima and I have stuck with this case for all these years because we believe the British system, unlike Gaddafi’s, can deliver justice. But what kind of a trial will it be if we put in a mountain of evidence and government officials can simply refuse to answer us?"

It's impossible to deny that Belhadj has a point here, especially in light of the fact that one of the actual defendants in the case actually voted this shockingly illiberal system of judicial secrecy into existence in the first place.

You really couldn't get a clearer example of a self-interested politician making up laws for their own personal benefit than this, but that's how the British establishment operate, with the likes of Theresa May and Jack Straw colluding to scratch each others' backs.

And that's why Jeremy Corbyn is seen as such a huge threat by the Westminster establishment, because he's never shown any inclination to participate in this cross-party collusion to protect establishment elitists from the consequences of their own actions.

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Who really has "no credibility" in the Labour leadership debate?

In this article I'm going to look at some comments from the Blairite leadership candidate Yvette Cooper and Jack "cash for access" Straw slamming Jeremy Corbyn's economic policies with far more vitriol than they have ever used to describe George Osborne's ideologically driven austerity con.

Jack Straw

I'm not sure why the mainstream media are so keen to give Jack Straw such a big platform to spit his anti-Corbyn bile given that he was caught out with his corrupt "cash for access" scam just six months previously. I really don't believe that a disgraced influence pedlar like Jack Straw deserves to oxygen of publicity, but I do think it's worth noting that his accusation that Jeremy Corbyn;s economic policies are "economically illiterate" illustrate exactly where his ideological allegiances lie.

We never heard Jack Straw speaking out in such strong terms against the economic illiteracy of George Osborne's ideological austerity con, despite the fact that Osborne blatantly missed all of the hubristic economic projections he made in 2010; created more new public debt in just five years than every Labour government in history combined; oversaw the longest sustained decline in wages since records began; lost the UK's AAA credit ratings for the first time since the 1970s; caused the slowest post-crisis recovery in British history; and had his ideological austerity agenda criticised as harmful to the UK economy by a clear majority of trained economists.

Despite all of this economic ammunition the likes of Jack Straw had to fire at George Osborne before the General Election they remained resolutely silent, yet as soon as someone dares propose an alternative to George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda, they clamour to spit as much furious bile as possible at him, even though he's a member of the same political party they are!

The venomous rhetoric Jack Straw has reserved for Jeremy Corbyn makes it absolutely clear where his ideological allegiances lie. Not only is the man a disgrace for selling political influence, he's also an ideological blood brother to the Tory party, and an opponent of the massive grass roots movement within the Labour Party to return it to it's social democratic principles.

Yvette Cooper

Yvette Cooper slammed Jeremy Corbyn's economic policies as "not credible" during a speech in Manchester in which she spent far more time attacking her leadership rival than actually detailing her own policies.

If we look a little closer at the arguments she used to criticise Jeremy Corbyn's plan to use money creation in order to fund large public infrastructure projects (Direct Quantitative Easing) it's quite easy to see who is lacking economic credibility, or even any kind of political nous.

Here's the pseudo-economic babble she came out with to attack the idea that newly created money should be invested in infrastructure and services rather than propping up failed banks and enriching the tiny super-rich minority as the original £375 billion in QE was:

"Quantitative Easing to pay for infrastructure now the economy is growing is really bad economics ... QE was a special measure when the economy collapsed, liquidity dried up, interest rates fell as low as they could go. But printing money year after year to pay for things you can't afford doesn't work ... History shows it hits your currency, hits investment, pushes up inflation and makes it harder not easier to get ... sustainable growth."

There are so many things wrong with this garbled pseudo-economic spiel I'm going to have to resort to bullet points to get through it all:

• To hear a potential Labour Party leader repeating the Tory propaganda about how brilliantly the UK economy is recovering is bizarre. Instead of reinforcing the Tory narrative that everything is going great in order to attack a member of her own party, perhaps she might be better off pointing out that the UK is still enduring the slowest post-crisis recovery in history, and that GDP per capita (the amount of economic activity per person in the UK) is still significantly below the pre-crisis level.

• The idea that the original £375 billion in QE was a good and necessary thing is laughable, especially since the Bank of England's own research concluded that 40% of the benefit went to the 5% of wealthiest households. To hear a potential future Labour Party leader slamming a money creation scheme to improve infrastructure and services and defending a money creation scheme that handed £150 billion directly to Britain's wealthiest families is sickening stuff.

• Cooper also claimed that QE was a good thing before because "interest rates were at a historic low", which is odd, because interest rates still remain at the all time record low of 0.5% today. If we just skip past the fact that she's blatantly put the cart before the horse in claiming that low interest rates were a reason for QE rather than an effect of QE, we're left with a rather obvious question: If such a low interest rate (0.5%) was such a good reason for QE back in 2009, why is exactly the same rate now (0.5%) not a good reason for more QE (just this time supplied direct to the economy rather than pumped into insolvent banks)?

• The idea that Quantitative Easing is "printing money" has been debunked so many times it's beyond belief that Cooper is repeating that story again. Only 3% of the money in the UK economy takes the form of notes and coins. Perhaps Cooper is unaware that the vast majority of money in circulation is created out of nothing by private banks and rented out in interest bearing loans, over 60% of which end up funding property speculation and being gambled on the unregulated global derivatives casino. It's astonishing that any politician could attack a public money creation scheme designed to improve infrastructure and services, yet implicitly endorse a private money creation system that is mainly used to inflate vast unsustainable property bubbles and reckless gambling in the shadow banking sector.

• Cooper is also wrong to claim that Corbyn plans to use QE to pay for things we "can't afford". The idea that the UK can't afford modern infrastructure, decent services, high quality education and investment in high-tech industries is completely backwards. What Britain can't afford is to continue our long track record of catastrophic underinvestment in these things. It hardly takes a genius to realise that investment will be far more likely to flow into countries with modern infrastructure, good services and highly skilled workforces, than those which have deliberately curtailed investment in such things as part of an economically illiterate austerity agenda. 

• Another bizarre claim from Cooper is that she has historical evidence to support her assertion that using direct QE to invest in infrastructure and services "hits your currency", "hits investment" and "pushes up inflation". I'm not really sure what historical data she is even alluding to. Perhaps she's just fearmongering by trying to claim that direct QE would turn the UK into the equivalent of Weimar Germeny or Mugabe's Zimbabwe, even though neither of those historical examples of hyperinflation are remotely similar to Corbyn's proposal for direct QE? She certainly can't be alluding to previous examples of orthodox QE, because it's absolutely clear that Japan has not suffered hyperinflation even though it has been doing QE since the 1990s. The UK, US and Eurozone haven't suffered hyperinflation either since they started using QE to prop up their insolvent banks. It seems that Cooper has no actual idea what effect direct QE would have, and is just lashing out in the hope that the public can be fearmongered into believing that it's better off to just leave money creation to the private banks, rather than trying to direct newly created money towards anything economically beneficial.

All in all, Cooper's criticism of direct QE reads like the rambling of someone who is far too wedded to the crony capitalist orthodoxy to even understand the alternative that is being proposed, let alone assemble a coherent critique of it. If anyone's economic policies are "not credible" it's Yvette Cooper's, because she's incapable of seeing the problem that the private banks will never have any interest in using their money creation powers to do what's best for the UK economy as a whole. All they'll ever do is use their money creation powers to chase quick profits with property speculation schemes and gamble on the global derivatives casino, safe in the knowledge that the taxpayer will bail them out again the next time they render themselves insolvent. 

Not only is she incapable of seeing the problem, she's also incapable of offering anything even remotely resembling a coherent critique of Jeremy Corbyn's proposed alternative.

Conclusion

As I've pointed out before the hysterical ranting of the Blairite old guard about the rise of Jeremy Corbyn is spectacularly counter-productive from their perspective, since condemnation from the likes of Tony Blair (warmonger), Jack Straw (discraced "cash for access" scammer), John McTernan (hilariosly incompetent election strategist) and Chuka Umunna (the living embodiment of the self-serving Westminster careerist) sound like ringing endorsements in the ears of millions of people, meaning the more they attack him, the stronger he gets.

The sheer stupidity of sticking with such a counter-productive strategy is bad enough, but the damage that all of these attacks is doing to the credibility of the Labour Party is even worse. It seems as if the Blairites would rather ruin the Labour Party completely than relinquish control of it to a genuine grass roots social democratic movement.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Jeremy Corbyn: The more they attack him, the stronger he becomes

One of the most pivotal moments of the General Election in 2015 came when Ed Miliband made the utterly bizarre assertion during the leaders' debate that he'd rather see the Tories form the next government than try to form a progressive alliance with the SNP.

If he thought that taking such a viscerally anti-SNP stance was going to help Scottish Labour avoid a catastrophic defeat, he was utterly wrong (they lost 40 of their 41 seats to the SNP), and if he thought that such a stance would play well with the English electorate, he was wrong again because it simply reinforced the right-wing media narrative that the SNP are far too evil and dangerous to be allowed any authority in Westminster, which massively bolstered the Tory election campaign. It's inconceivable that taking such a visible anti-progressive stance attracted anyone to the Labour Party, and in all likelihood it drove hundreds of thousands of progressive people away.

The sad thing is that many in the Labour Party don't seem to have learned any lessons whatever from their defeat. In fact Tony Blair even repeated Miliband's absurd stance when he said he'd prefer the Tories to win in 2020 than see a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn.

Another thing that so many Labour Party politicians have utterly failed to understand is that offering a watered down version of Tory ideological austerity cost them dear too. I mean how many people other than die-hard Labour Party tribalists could have been enthused by the policy of promoting exactly the same failing pseudo-economic ideology as the Tories, just not quite as nasty about it?

The fact that so many Labour Party politicians are incapable of understanding where they went wrong is abundantly clear from the way that so many of them have queued up to slag off Jeremy Corbyn, and provide the Tories and the right-wing press with a huge supply of ammunition should he actually win the contest (which seems likely given that he's the only one who isn't bitterly slagging off his opponents and sticking instead to clearly explaining his policies and offering a message of party unity).

It's absolutely clear from the terrified rambling of so many right-wing Labour Party politicians that they really rather would see the Tories win in 2020 than be part of a government led by Jeremy Corbyn.

Here are just some of the most egregious examples of these kinds of self-destructive attacks on one of their own MPs.

Liz Kendall (Labour leadership candidate): "[A Jeremy Corbyn win] would be disastrous for the party and disastrous for the country and we would be out of power for a generation" - Not only has she attacked the potential future leader of her party as unelectable, she's also stated that she wouldn't serve in his cabinet.

Yvette Cooper (Labour leadership candidate): "[If Jeremy Corbyn wins] we will be condemning our world to a Tory future."  - Yvette Cooper predicts a win for the Tories if Jeremy Corbyn is elected Labour leader and she too has declared that she wouldn't serve in his cabinet.

Andy Burnham (Labour leadership candidate): "[If Jeremy Corbyn wins] there's a real risk that the party could split." - The bizarre thing about this claim is that just a few days after talking up the prospect of the Labour Party disintegrating if Corbyn wins, Burnham then tried to rephrase his own fearmongering rhetoric about the future of the party as an accusation against Jeremy Corbyn's supporters! To his credit though, he's the only one of Corbyn's rivals not to have ruled out serving in the cabinet should Corbyn win.

Tony Blair (Former Labour Party leader, alleged war criminal): "Let me be absolutely clear: I wouldn't want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn't take it." - An explicit admission that he would rather see the Tories win in 2020 than a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn. If this isn't evidence that Tony Blair is an enemy of the Labour movement, I don't know what is.

Chuka Umunna (the kind of toxic self-serving careerist that has completely infested Westminster politics): Accused the Labour Party of  "petulance" and"screaming at the electorate" then went on to arrogantly presuppose the intentions of the electorate by describing Corbyn's policies as "not a politics that can win". As I said at the time, if anyone is guilty of petulance it's clearly Chuka Umunna as he throws his toys out of his pram as he sees his career prospects dwindle by the day (unless he crosses the floor to join the Tories of course). Another one to rule themself out of serving in a Corbyn led Labour cabinet.

Jack Straw (Corrupt "cash for access" guy and Blair's biggest cheerleader for the invasion and occupation of Iraq): "Overall his policies are not policies that can conceivably win an election." -  Yet another arrogant presupposition of what the electorate might or might not want. Who knows what the political landscape will look like in 2020? Jack Straw may consider himself a great futurologist, but given how he utterly failed to predict the sectarian violence culminating in the rise of ISIS that came about as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq that he pushed for so vehemently, I'll be taking his futurological predictions with a massive heap of salt.

Chris Leslie (Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and the guy who helped formulate Ed Miliband's woeful austerity-lite economic policy and then took over as Shadow Chancellor after Ed Balls lost his seat) - decided to launch a furious attack on Jeremy Corbyn's economic policy of using quantitative easing to fund infrastructure investment and public services, instead of using it to prop up the insolvent financial sector and enrich the wealthiest people in society (as was the case with the £375 billion in QE that's already been done). Chris Leslie's argument that investing in infrastructure and services is bad because it would cause inflation is laughable, as is his petulant decision to say that he'd refuse to serve as a minister in a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn.

John Woodcock (Labour MP and Liz Kendall supporter): "If you want to have a debate, it is absolutely essential that if you don’t agree with the ideas that he’s putting forward then you say why and you say why they wouldn’t work and why your alternative is better" - This is a quite extraordinary assertion from the MP for Barrow and Furness in defence of his decision to publicly attack Jeremy Corbyn's economic policies. It's extraordinary because it shows that he understands the importance of not accepting your opponents proposition, yet in January 2015 John Woodcock actually voted in favour of the continuation of George Osborne's socially and economically destructive ideological austerity agenda. This shows that John Woodcock clearly considers George Osborne more of an ally than Jeremy Corbyn when it comes to economic matters. Maybe he should just cross the floor and join the conservatives?

John McTernan (The electoral strategist who oversaw Labour losing 40 of their 41 Scottish MPs): This guy should be an absolute laughing stock after overseeing the most catastrophic collapse in support in UK political history, yet the mainstream press tend to treat him as some kind of sage expert on Labour Party politics (presumably because he comes out with the furious anti-Corbyn bile they want him to). Not only is McTernan so delusional that he thinks Labour can actually win in 2020 with his prescription of even more Blairite Tory-lite rubbish that has lost two consecutive General Elections and completely annihilated the traditional Labour heartland of Scotland (because the SNP outflanked them on the left with a clear anti-Tory anti-austerity narrative), he also thinks it's acceptable to go around publicly declaring people "morons" for supporting Jeremy Corbyn (as if mental health based slurs are an acceptable form of political discourse).

Kezia Dugdale (The favourite to take the poisoned chalice of leading Scottish Labour into another catastrophic defeat in the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections): Yet another Labour politician to presuppose what the electorate want by declaring Jeremy Corbyn would be unelectable and leave Labour "carping from the sidelines". Not only is this kind of attack on a potential future leader of the Labour Party really counter-productive, it's also an illustration of how crazily out of touch the Scottish Labour Party are with their own electorate. One of the most oft repeated messages I've heard from people on the Scottish left is that Jeremy Corbyn is Labour's only hope of trying to win back some of the 300,000+ supporters they've lost over the last five years. Her comments would also carry more weight if she hadn't been such an appallingly ineffective deputy leader of Scottish Labour, and not had her own "carping from the sidelines" embarrassingly torn to shreds by Nicola Sturgeon so often in the Scottish parliament.

If only they attacked the Tories with such gusto

It is astonishing to see so many Labour politicians launching such visceral attacks on one of their own. Where was this passion in the last five years? Why didn't these people attack the malice and incompetence of the Tory led coalition government with such determination.

The only answer seems to be that these people are ideologically much closer to the likes of David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne, Michael Gove and Theresa May, than they are to Jeremy Corbyn and the huge number of grass roots Labour supporters who are backing his campaign to become the next Labour Party leader.

The fact that so many of these people have said they would refuse to participate as ministers in a Corbyn government is a good thing. Yet another reason for people to get behind Jeremy Corbyn's leadership bis is that his Labour front bench would definitely not feature people like Liz Kendall (the most right-wing labour leadership candidate ever), Yvette Cooper (horribly tainted by her association with Blairism, her pompous fool of a husband and the bizarre expenses scams they concocted together), Chuka Umunna (the living embodiment of the self-serving career politician) and Chris Leslie (one of the guys who helped devise Ed Miliband's inept election losing "austerity-lite" policy).

David Cameron's useful idiots

The Daily Mirror columnist Kevin Maguire referred to the Labour Party politicians making these attacks as "David Cameron's useful idiots" and he's absolutely right. Every piece of fearmongering rhetoric about Corbyn now will be ammunition for the Tories to use against him for the next five years should he actually win. Instead of confronting Corbyn with arguments about why their favoured candidate might be better, they've gone for the kind of feamongering muck-raking political attacks that can only harm the Labour Party in the long-run.

It's easy to imagine Darth Blair saying "your powers are weak old man", to which Obi Wan Corbyn replies "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine".

Corbyn the anti-politician

There is a case to be made that attacks on Corbyn from despised and discredited individuals like Tony Blair, Ed Balls and Jack Straw actually come across as ringing endorsements in the ears of millions of people who are utterly sick of the unprincipled, expenses scamming, cash-for-access offering, self-serving careerist class of politician who have come to completely dominate Westminster politics.

It seems likely that the more of these despised people who come out of the woodwork to condemn Jeremy Corbyn's brand of conviction politics, the more everyday people are going to see him as the anti-politician who is going to ride in and rescue us from the self-serving careerists who have ruined politics with their greed and self-interest.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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