When Blair was first elected he promised his government would be ‘whiter than white’, a phrase meant to distance himself from the sleaze of the Major years. Now Blair is immersed in sleaze himself. From the lies over the Iraq war we now have the scandal of selling peerages to the biggest bidder. Blair has done his utmost to destroy the Labour Party. It will be up to the trade unions and the ranks of the party to rebuild it as a fighting workers’ organisation.

On March 8, the British Parliament held a debate on Venezuela, proposed by Labour MP Colin Burgon, who sparked off Blair’s attack on Hugo Chavez by posing a question to him on Venezuela. “Indeed, some people in Latin America found [the answer] more than disappointing, and it created a minor political tsunami.”

The Blair government is discussing all kinds of schemes to curb long established democratic rights. They are doing this using “Islamic terrorism” as an excuse. In reality their measures will in no way fight terrorism, but they will give them more instruments in their attempts to stifle criticism and protest. They are preparing for the future when the workers of Britain will move against their real enemies, the British bosses.

The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) was seen for a period as a success story for anyone looking for an alternative to Labour. Now it is in decline. It is paying the price for abandoning a genuine socialist programme, making concessions both to nationalism and reformism.

While Blair continues to support his friend Bush in the war in Iraq, he is conducting another little war on the home front, this time against the sick and disabled! Up to a million workers who have been declared too sick to work now face the possibility of new and humiliating procedures aimed at forcing them back to work. This is a more silent, less obvious war, but a war nonetheless, a class war.

If you want to win elections you must aim at the centre ground. At least that is the official line. But what is the centre? The centre between what? The centre the media refer to, in reality is an extreme expression of the interests of the bosses. The latest attack on education is an example. It goes against the interests of the overwhelming majority of people in Britain, but no doubt the right wing of Labour and the Tories will meet in the “centre” and vote for it together.