“All governments are liars,” wrote the great American muckraker I F Stone, “and nothing they say should be believed.” He exaggerated, although not by much.
The lies of new Labour appear more grandiose than those of its Tory predecessors in government, only because of the illusions it is allowed to promote. For example, under headlines announcing a “revolution”, Gordon Brown was said to “hand out” the “historic sum” of ?43bn. The truth was the opposite: new Labour’s spending on public services will be considerably less than in all but three years of Tory governments since 1979.
Under this government, the divisions between the healthy and sick, rich and poor, have grown as never before. However, as the Prime Minister noted in his famous leaked memo, new Labour will “stand up” for Britain. There is some truth in this, if you regard the war industry as Britain. Military spending is to rise for the first time since the end of the cold war. That is to say, the one, true commitment of new Labour is the acquisition, manufacture and selling of the means of killing and maiming, and the pursuit of policies that, by other means, have a similar effect. Here, the attendant lies are spectacular.
On the BBC’s Today programme recently, the Foreign Office minister Peter Hain gave his personal assurance that new Labour had never sold arms to any government that used them for
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 7 Aug 2000