Labour renege on open government

The Blair government is a bastion of secrecy, no different, if not more sinister, than the Tories

NEW LABOUR'S "unbreakable" promise to the British people was open government. This, said Tony Blair in 1996, would be an antidote to the public's "disaffection from politics". There was to be a Freedom of Information Act, which, he said, "is not some isolated constitutional reform", but " a change that is absolutely fundamental to how we see politics developing in this country over the next few years".

The very opposite has happened. Behind a facade of slogan and public relations posturing, the Blair government has become a bastion of secrecy, no different, if not more sinister, than the Tories.

The recent anti-terrorism legislation is a case in point. Blair and Home Secretary Jack Straw planned this repressive legislation long before the Omagh bomb. The Government, wrote Straw in August 1997, "would give to courts jurisdiction over acts of conspiracy performed in this country, in respect of criminal acts committed abroad".

This is now the law, and it means the end of the much-vaunted British "tradition" of giving refuge to exiled political dissidents - Iraqi democrats can now be sent back to the clutches of Saddam Hussein.

The disparity between Blair's words and deeds on issues of liberty and openness has a history. As opposition leader, he played an important part in seeing through the Criminal Justice Bill, arguably the most repressive legislation ever put forward in modern Britain. By tabling amendments to the bill, he conceded its principle of limiting freedom of movement, association and dissent.

The arms' trade is the most vivid illustration. Since taking office, the Blair government has secretly approved more than 150 arms shipments, to some of the most vicious regimes, including the Suharto military dictatorship in Indonesia, described by Amnesty as "casual with mass murder" - at the same time as Robin Cook was announcing his "foreign policy with an ethical dimension." Like the Tories, New Labour has suppressed all the details.

When Ann Clwyd MP asked the Defence Minister, John Spellar, to "publish the minutes of meetings and other documents" relating to the Government's contacts with Procurement Service International, the supplier of "riot control" vehicles, used by Suharto to crush dissent, Speller's reply could have been written by his Tory predecessor. He said: "Details cannot be released due to their commercial confidentiality - I am withholding the information requested..."

When Clwyd asked the trade minister which British banks were funding the sales to Indonesia with millions of pounds of government credit, she was told that getting the information would incur "disproportionate costs" - exactly what the Tories used to say.

Of course, both the arms' trade, and the secrecy by which it prospers, is something of a Labour tradition. In his recent, pathbreaking history, The Great Deception (Pluto Press), the historian Mark Curtis illuminated the common cause between Labour and Tory foreign policies, which in serving "British interests", have played a significant part in many of the century's worst abuses of human rights. It was, after all, Old Labourite Denis Healey who, as defence secretary in 1966, zealously set up the Defence Sales Organisation "to ensure that this country does not fail to secure its rightful share of this valuable market." This included weapons that kill, maim, and distort national priorities: a "market" in which Britain is now second only to the United States.

New Labour supporters hoped a Freedom of Information Act would be the answer to those who suspected that a new Tory party was in power run by spin doctors. One of the new government's first "exemptions" to the FOI proposals, was the secret deals of the new privatised utilities and their fat cats. Last December, the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, stripped the FOI White Paper of its centrepiece proposals, that would bring the police and the immigration bureaucracy within the scope of the bill.

There is a logic, of course. New Labour, we are learning fast, has much to hide - not only in its arming of monstrous regimes, and its secret deals with corporate dictators like Rupert Murdoch, but in its acquiescence to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, perhaps the most effective anti-democratic weapon ever devised. Currently being pursued under diplomatic cover, the MAI will allow the huge , mostly Western, multinational companies, that already control most of the world's resources and trade, to override the rights of elected governments to protect their people against exploitative labour conditions and the destruction of the environment.

In Britain, public health will be at risk, as national and local authorities risk being sued if they try to promote safety at work, a clean transport policy or food standards.

In 1996, Peter Mandelson highlighted Britain's "strengths" as its multinational corporations, as the "aerospace" industry (arms) and "the pre-eminence of the City of London". Unlike the warring Tories, New Labour has become the trusted political wing of the City, and an impeccable branch manager of American imperial economics for the planet, which suppress the very market freedoms used to justify them, while denying any recognition of their current consequences.

Secrecy is vital to this stance. "It may be," said Mandelson, last March, "that the era of pure representative democracy is slowly coming to an end."

When it happens, will we know?