Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
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No 1032 Feb 22 2000                                                                                                                                    10p

Irresponsible Blair government tries to crawl away from its lunatic gaffe over Ireland. Calling London's bluff is just one more triumph for Sinn Féin and the IRA's unbeatable national liberation struggle.

The Blair regime's insane propaganda stunt, trying to force the IRA and Sinn Féin into 'surrender' gestures to keep the powersharing peace process alive, is falling apart at the seams.

A huge climbdown is being prepared by Mandelson from the government's blackmail threat to allow no further cross-border bodies or joint rule over the Occupied Zone of Ireland until some IRA weapons had been decommissioned.

The London Tory imperialist establishment papers, the Mail and the Telegraph, are growing incandescent about a "stench of appeasement" and about "total surrender to the IRA".

The Times is claiming that Army generals are in revolt against the ways being considered by Downing Street for getting out of the hole it has dug for itself via a 'national day of reconciliation' when the Army and the IRA would mutually honourably surrender token arms to each other in recognition of their equivalence, - neither winners nor losers, exactly as the Good Friday peace Agreement generally describes the compromise that has been reached to end the war, - and all sides would acknowledge that 'the war is over'.

The American weekly magazine Newsweek reveals that British troops will be steadily withdrawn in parallel with some IRA arms decommissioning, and that Blair has already agreed to reinstate all the political institutions and to allow them to operate unchallenged at least until the end of the year before any further target dates for decommissioning would become an issue.

All of this represents a humiliating defeat for this sad Blairite government of British imperialism if even a fraction of all these leaked stories to the press prove to have some substance.

Such a catastrophe for this bizarre attempt to govern the decadent British arm of an imperialist economic system in general world crisis as merely an exercise in public relations and in brain-washing spindoctoring skills is exactly what the EPSR has been predictively describing in massive detail in the last two issues, and more today (see subsequent story).

The shallowest culture of capitalism has finally taken over the propaganda management of the system just at the moment when such empty advertising gimmicks are looking increasingly forlorn in market places about to collapse into the most devastating slump in world imperialist history, and when their application to government through hype, and focus groups, and other depraved mercenary manoeuvres is meeting a storm, of hostility in all directions (see last 2 EPSR's).

The politically lightweight Blair opportunists really seem to have started believing in their own PR stunts, imagining that somehow they could hoodwink the Irish national-liberation struggle into renouncing the very triumph of 30 years revolutionary guerrilla war by shamefully handing over their weapons as being the 'cause of the trouble' as sick Unionism wishes to present things, instead of being what they really are, - the only means that have secured a peace process in the first place, which a majority of Ireland have voted to enjoy, and which the British government and Unionism have also been obliged to accept.

Fake-'left' petty bourgeois everywhere, who had ludicrously swallowed imperialist propaganda and dismissed the IRA and Sinn Féin as 'sellouts', have also been humiliated.

The Blairites' ridiculous propaganda game was instantly repudiated by Sinn Féin and the IRA, which withdraw from all further cooperation with the decommissioning part of the arrangements for a completely New Ireland until the devolved government and the cross-border bodies were all functioning again. Reaction's bluff was called. Reaction has collapsed in embarrassment.

Sections of the bourgeois press had already seen the dangers and had started warning Blair, Mandelson, and stupid political decadence everywhere that the one reality in the 30 year turmoil in Ireland was the undoubted colossal triumph of the revolutionary national-liberation struggle, and that this reality could never be less than the main foundations of all subsequent political manoeuvres and compromises, - as the capitalist press itself is being forced to admit:

PETER MANDELSON has been warned by his security advisers that the Army will not countenance participating in a ceremony which would involve a token destruction of weapons by all sides of the Northern Ireland peace process.

The proposal, which is under consideration, has emerged as part of an "equivalence" agenda under which terrorist decommissioning would be matched by demilitarisation in Northern Ireland.

Mr Mandelson, the Northern Ireland Secretary, made the direct link over the weekend. Now it has emerged that one aspect of the IRA's offer on decommissioning was "a national day of reconciliation" in which the Army would be expected to hand over a few weapons at the same time as terrorist representatives. The idea was greeted with revulsion by senior Army officers in Northern Ireland and London yesterday.

One Army source in the Province said: "The Army would resign en masse." Another security source added: "Equivalence, in the view of the Army, is a dirty word."

The Army was reacting after Mr Mandelson used an interview with The Observer to indicate that he was prepared to link decommissioning with demilitarisation. He said: "I do not rule out attaching timeframes to demilitarisation, but that has to be in the context of the threat going away and politics working."

The Government has previously expressed some enthusiasm for the idea of a day of reconciliation. Government sources have also indicated that it is ready to be "flexible and imaginative" on the issue of the Army's presence in Northern Ireland.

But last night Northern Ireland Office officials were adamant that Mr Mandelson did not have in mind any form of ceremony in which terrorists' groups and representatives of the Army would simultaneously hand over token weapons. They also said that any withdrawal of troops would continue to depend on the assessment of the security threat.

Senior officers in Whitehall and in Northern Ireland, however, made clear that the whole concept of "equivalence" - treating the terrorists on the same level as the security forces - was anathema to the Army and played into the hands of the IRA.

One military source in the Province said: "The IRA wants to be given a legitimate status and this is what would happen if the Army had to take part in some symbolic gesture."

The Irish Times claimed yesterday that it had reliable information that Lieutenant-General Sir Hew Pike, the General Officer Commanding in Northern Ireland, had threatened to resign if such a ceremony went ahead. But General Pike, a veteran commander from the 1982 Falklands war, made clear that he had made no such threat.

A spokesman for the general said: "No threat of resignation has ever been made by the GOC, who remains absolutely committed to his role as principal military adviser to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary."

However, the very existence of the rumours indicated the degree of sensitivity over any suggestion that the Army should play a role in handing over weapons.

The notion of an act of reconciliation, demonstrating the end of the "war" in the Province, first came up during the Hillsborough negotiations last year and was included in a declaration agreed by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern. It was supposed to take place a month after ministers had been nominated to a Northern Ireland Assembly executive and was to include arms being "put beyond use on a voluntary basis".

However, the idea was never "fleshed out", and Northern Ireland Office officials said there was certainly no intention of it leading to any formal joint handover of weapons by terrorist groups and the Army.

The concept disappeared from the peace process language after the failure of the Hillsborough deal, but it was apparently revived by the IRA in its proposals to the General John de Chastelain's disarmament commission.

According to a Dublin newspaper report, the IRA had proposed three stages of decommissioning, the second of which would be the day of reconciliation.

The IRA has always argued that it was fighting a war that involved two armies and a day of reconciliation is apparently intended to create the image around the world of those two armies decommissioning after the end of hostilities.

With Mr Mandelson's comments about his readiness to link decommissioning with demilitarisation the language of "equivalence" appeared to have gained momentum. But senior military sources said it would be entirely wrong to compare the security forces who carried arms legitimately with the terrorists.

TONY BLAIR privately offered to postpone the deadline for IRA disarmament from May until the end of the year in an attempt to save the peace process, according to a report last night.

Newsweek magazine said it had learnt that the Prime Minister was also prepared to pull British troops out of Northern Ireland in parallel with IRA decommissioning. He would not agree to a formal link between the two, but Mr Blair would match a clear IRA statement of intent to disarm with an announcement of further steps to implement the peace process.

Jeffrey Donaldson, the hardline Unionist MP, warned the British Government that it would be "extremely foolish" to reduce Northern Ireland's security in exchange for decommissioning.

"If the Secretary of State is going to get into some kind of game where he starts trading off troops for guns, that would be a very dangerous game indeed," Mr Donaldson said: The Government must not allow the Army and the forces of law and order to be placed on the same scales as the illegal arsenal of terrorist organisations."

Yet Peter Mandelson did appear to hint at such a deal when he disclosed that the British Government was willing to consider releasing a timetable for demilitarisation. And the Dublin-based Ireland on Sunday, claimed to have details of the IRA's last-minute offer for decommissioning in exchange for the British Government dismantling its Army border posts.

The newspaper reported that the IRA had offered a three-stage plan for arms decommissioning with each side being involved in a series of choreographed moves.

First, the IRA would state within three months that its war was over. Next, there would be a national day of reconciliation when a "token amount" of arms from the IRA, loyalist paramilitaries and the British Army would be disposed of.

Finally, the IRA would have made a commitment to put its weapons "beyond use", as the British Government launched a programme of demilitarisation.

The details may be out of date. The IRA has effectively withdrawn offers to General de Chastelain in protest at the suspension of the Assembly.

Two of the more conciliatory Protestant politicians - Dermot Nesbitt and Gary McMichael -last night urged the IRA to confirm its terms so that people could decide if it offered hope of a permanent resolution of the arms issue.

Downing Street appeared to distance itself from the report, saying: "We have always been working towards implementing the Good Friday Agreement in full." The agreement lays down a May deadline for decommissioning.

Perhaps it is one of the flaws of human nature that we often appreciate something only when it is gone. So it is with the politicians and people of Northern Ireland now. As the mood in the province sours by the hour, the players in the peace process are suddenly realising how much they had until last week - and how much has been jeopardised. For the atmosphere has turned from one of gradual trust into a throwback to the bad old days of recrimination and suspicion. Until last week, those close to the Unionist leader David Trimble and his Sinn Féin counterpart Gerry Adams would quietly note how the two men had developed a working relationship. Each had realised the other was not a demon, but a politician facing difficulties and internal opposition - just like himself. Until last week, sceptics on both sides were beginning to be impressed by the 72-day-old power-sharing executive in which unionists, nationalists and republicans served alongside each other. A glimpse of a different kind of future was available - one in which two communities so long at war were beginning to see each other as partners.

That was until last Friday. On that day the secretary of state, Peter Mandelson, suspended the new executive, reversed devolution and restored the direct rule which had been in force for the previous century. Both the substance and the manner of that decision have angered republicans - and driven a wedge between London and Dublin. The result is that the highest ambition of all those involved in the peace process is simply to claw their way back to the position they were in seven days ago.

Sinn Féin's fury is directed at every aspect of the Mandelson decision. They believe it was without legal justification, in that the British government had no right to take its action unilaterally. The treaty signed following the Good Friday Agreement required a joint decision by London and Dublin to collapse the executive. More passionately, they argue that it was premature since the IRA had just lodged a new position with John de Chastelain, the Canadian general in charge of decommissioning. They say that represented a real shift by the IRA but that it was simply "binned" by Mr Mandelson. Finally, they accuse the secretary of state of pro-Unionist bias: he suspended the executive in order to save David Trimble who, in the absence of any IRA disarmament, would have been toppled at a meeting of his party's ruling council the next day.

But this situation was partly of his own making - by effectively promising unionism last November that he would fold the executive if there were no IRA guns - and it was made worse by his timing. The secretary of state seemed too dismissive of the IRA move, as if failing to give peace one last chance. His task now is to drop the highhanded manner which has irritated many on the ground, and rebuild the mood of cooperation which was slowly taking root in the province.

This was the moment everyone had feared. From its first faltering steps more than five years ago, the quest for peace in Northern Ireland has hinged on a single fact: the Irish Republican Army's ceasefire. Without that, there would have been nothing - no Good Friday agreement, no overwhelming majorities in referendums north and south, no assembly and, above all, none of that exhilarating sense of possibility, that hint of imminent normality, which has filled the province since the bombs stopped. When the first ceasefire was broken, with the 1996 blast at Canary Wharf, all that hope drained away in an instant. Last night brought a similar moment of dread: the IRA announced its withdrawal from the disarmament talks on which the entire peace process now hangs. The heart began to sink. Could it be that Northern Ireland, having come so close to a peaceful future, was about to return to the bloody past of bombs, shootings and death?

The provisionals were not returning to war; instead they were pulling out in disgust from the process that is meant to secure peace. As one senior republican put it, the IRA's latest action is a "controlled upping of the ante". They want the Ulster Unionists and the British government to realise how bad things have got.

What explains this crisis? After all, little more than two months have passed since we all witnessed the once unimaginable: Martin McGuinness and Bairbre de Bruin taking their seats as Sinn Féin ministers in a new Northern Ireland executive - sharing a cabinet table with their blood-enemies in Unionism. Just a few days ago John de Chastelain, the Canadian former general charged with overseeing the disarmament process, stepped forward to deliver his first truly upbeat report anticipating, at last, a process of IRA decommissioning. So what went wrong?

The answer, sad to say, may lie with one man: Peter Mandelson. The republican movement is in a state of cold fury with the secretary of state, accusing him of dishonesty and unforgivable bias acting not as an honest broker but as an agent for unionism. Relations have not broken down. Nor have they reached the nadir plumbed by Mr Mandelson's predecessor, Mo Mowlam, in her relationship with the unionists. The distrust is not yet that bad. But, says one Sinn Féin activist,"It's getting there".

At the heart of the problem are the events of last Friday. On that day Mandelson announced the suspension of the fledgling Northern Ireland executive.

It is that decision which has so enraged Sinn Féin. For they believe the IRA had indeed moved - and moved an enormous distance. Admittedly it was at the last minute, late on Friday afternoon, but there is nothing unusual in that - not in a process which saw the Good Friday agreement negotiated at five o'clock in the morning. The IRA's shift was certainly significant enough to put a rare spring in General de Chastelain's step, after hours of intensive work. Dublin and Washington regarded it as a huge breakthrough, too. For what was in the pipeline was a statement declaring an end to the war, a promise for a symbolic yielding of arms before the May deadline agreed on Good Friday and even a possible timetable for decommissioning, dependent on an equivalent move toward demilitarisation by the British government. The critical element for the provos was a national day of reconciliation, one in which they could be seen not as a defeated force but as an army "standing down" along with the British.

When they heard Mandelson on the radio, explaining why unionist patience had finally snapped, they felt their worst fears had been confirmed that they were dealing not with a British cabinet minister but a spokesman for the UUP.

Their fury was stoked yet further by their belief that Mandelson is massaging the truth. He insists that he had no idea what was in the IRA statement when he ordered the suspension on Friday night. Sinn Féin say that is absolutely untrue. As secretary of state, he is kept informed of every step of these ultra-delicate negotiations. They are convinced that he sacrificed a real chance for peace last week - in order to stick to his bargain with David Trimble.

That may be a conspiracy theory too far, but Peter Mandelson does indeed seem to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. His error has been to give the distinct impression - so fatal in a Northern Ireland secretary - that the ultimate veto remains in unionist hands: if events don't run on their timetable, they don't run at all. He has not paused to imagine what his actions on Friday night looked like to nationalist and republican eyes.

No wonder the hardliners are walking away. Peter Mandelson has succeeded in making the moderates in republicanism look like saps and the extremists like sages. He needs to move quickly to turn that around - for a peace process that remains deadlocked for too long can fast become a war.

The children's homes scandal, - a foul tale of capitalist-establishment cover-up after cover-up after cover-up, protecting the bourgeois-freemasonry system because exploiting an underclass is the name of the game, - whatever the nature of that exploitation. Politically correct lunacy around single issue 'reform' delusions is now the key to the survival of the backward capitalist system. Without the naïve and reactionary diversions of feminism and black nationalism, etc, the irrational social disasters of free-market anarchy could be far better exposed. 

Capitalism's sexual exploitation of children's homes is a foul record of systemic inhumanity as cruel in quality as any cold-blooded viciousness in imperialist/colonialist history.

Only a dozen or so were driven to suicide, or died, or were driven mad, but the fact that children were deliberately kept like animals for sex slavery and destroyed as human beings reveals an arrogant contempt on a par with the most infamous ruling-class tyrannies on record.

Most significant of all was how the bourgeois 'democracy' system managed to allow cover-up after cover-up to be 'got away with'; and even more telling is the fact that the establishment's cover-up protective mechanisms are still fully in operation on this issue even now, - as the capitalist press itself struggled to admit:

FOR a decade the dark clouds of suspicion have hung over public figures from the worlds of politics and law enforcement who were rumoured to be part of the North Wales paedophile ring.

They were linked to allegations not only of routine rape and child battering, but also claims of an extravagant national network of abusers in positions of power.

As the inquiry widened the great and the good became part of a perceived conspiracy of paedophiles involving children's homes in North Wales and beyond. There was also a suggestion that some of the perpetrators were Freemasons protected by their powerful contacts in the organisation.

Sir Ronald Waterhouse, QC, ended their agony yesterday when, delivering the verdict of his tribunal, he said: "There was no evidence presented to the tribunal or North Wales Police to establish that there was a wide-ranging conspiracy involving prominent persons and others with the objective of sexual activity with children in care."

But when William Hague, then the Welsh Secretary, ordered the country's biggest inquiry into child abuse in 1996 he knew that he risked a major scandal in the Establishment. When he discussed it with junior ministers, they had heard rumours that a senior politician was linked to paedophile activity in Wales.

They believed that his name might emerge during the hearings. The man was a prominent figure in another political party. A source said: "It was basically decided that it wasn't a problem for us. The Prime Minister [John Major) hated [the rival politician] anyway."

Throughout the duration of the Waterhouse inquiry the identity of some of the unnamed suspects has become known to an ever-wider circle. Now their names will never be exposed in public print or broadcast.

It was only the strict reporting restrictions imposed by Sir Ronald that prevented any names entering the public domain. They were common knowledge in certain circles. Publication of the Waterhouse report will come as an enormous relief to the policemen and leading figures in the community who had also been secretly named as sexual abusers.

About a dozen other men, including an executive with a local authority, a senior probation officer and a director of a major company, were named. They all denied it through evidence to the tribunal or through their lawyers.

When the tribunal was established it was assumed that the press would be able to report proceedings by using the laws of privilege which allow them to name names in court, proceedings without fear of defamation actions.

But Sir Ronald was adamant. No one could be identified unless they had previously been convicted of such an offence. The cloud of suspicion had spread far and wide: the political fallout of being named could have been immense.

Some victims still seethe with anger at this local-establishment sex-slave exploitation of them, and convey the feeling that rich or privileged perpetrators are still getting away with it or have connections to a protected elite which remains beyond the reach of so-called 'justice': 

Mr Messham arrived at Bryn Estyn children's home on the outskirts of Wrexham in 1977; a frightened 14 year-old who had had a difficult start in life within a dysfunctional family. He had spent three months before that at another home, Bersharn Hall in Wrexham, where he was labelled a troublemaker after complaining of been beaten and sexually abused by staff.

"It was run very much like a military regime. You were told what to do and you had to do it," Mr Messham said. "From day one, I was beaten up. It went from that to sexual abuse by a number of staff. Not long after that, I was abused by outsiders. They did not abuse everyone: They handpicked the ones they were going for and then they passed us around."

For a spell, he was regularly taken to the Crest Hotel in Wrexham on Sunday nights, where he would be abused by a number of men.

He said his abusers included care staff, such as Peter Howarth and Stephen Norris, both now in prison, as well as police officers and other "outsiders". In all he reckons as many as 89 people could have been involved in the abuse.

He would like to leave North Wales, not least because former staff at the home still call him names if they pass him on the street.

Although lucid and articulate, he remains angry that the abuse occurred and angry, above all, that no one listened to him or others like him. 

He would welcome a payment of sufficient compensation to buy a house, take a college course and enter counselling. He might use such money to fund a private prosecution of some of the people who abused him.

"I want to be able to move on," he said. "I want to have a life in which I am living in the present, not submerged all the time in my past. But I will not let go and I will not give up fighting for the truth to come out, even if it takes until the day I die."

Writing to the Guardian, another victim underlines two suspicions, a) that the ruling class's self-protecting freemasonry works particularly assiduously when it comes to covering up sex crimes; and b) that this is even more the case when the depraved exploitation concerns homosexual paedophiles:

As my peers who grew up with me in the children's homes of the 70s know, the Waterhouse inquiry doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. Suicide, life-crushing depression, alcohol and drug abuse, prostitution, Aids, mental illness . . . the list is endless. This is our legacy.

There is no crime greater than using children for sexual gratification. This society should hang its head in shame. And as for those who whinge about equality and justice because they are not allowed to fuck 16 year-old children, where is the equality for me and my dead and damaged friends? We were just little boys.

Christian Wolmar's article (The untold story behind child abuse, February 16) raises a serious but significantly ignored problem. Is a homosexual who sexually abuses children a homosexual or a paedophile?

The article in question stepped delicately around this challenge to political correctness, resisting the conclusion which the letter-writer clearly intended to draw (that the homosexual condition has more pronounced paedophile inclinations) and stressing instead that the PC policies of local Labour councils in the 1980s pursued the insane goal of deliberately encouraging male homosexuals into child care work precisely because they were NOT 'dangerous heterosexual men':

The abuse scandals described in the Waterhouse inquiry are like the tumour which warns of a widespread cancer. All around the country police forces have launched investigations into historical cases of abuse in children's homes. All but two of the 49 mainland forces in Britain have either completed or are working on such enquiries.

Yet very little effort has been made to tackle this issue on a national basis. No one has collected any statistics on the extent or timing of the scandals. There has been no attempt to standardise the investigation methods, or to analyse the fundamental causes of the scandals.

While it is predictable that most of the abusers are men, a more surprising facet is that a very high proportion of the abuse involves men on boys, rather than girls. Yet in society at large, the vast majority of offences against children - between 80 and 95% according to various surveys - relate to men attacking girls.
This is not a very PC finding and it is difficult to discuss it without risking the wrath of the gay lobby; but it raises questions about the authorities' employment policies. At one time some councils, notably Islington in the 80s, were encouraging the employment of gay men into jobs in children's homes because they were perceived as less of risk than straight men. It is that kind of naïve and misguided thinking which contributed to the extent of the scandal across the country.

This feminist bias IN FAVOUR OF those perceived to be 'disadvantaged' is the poisonous irrationality at the heart of 'political correctness' turning human sympathy for the discriminated-against into class conscious REFORMISM, - (the self-serving political prejudice of the petty bourgeoisie, belligerently urged with the conscious intent of peddling so-called 'piecemeal changes' through 'parliamentary democracy' so as to destroy all thought of revolution in working-class minds. The fact that the entire exploitation and alienation relationship afflicting the masses under capitalism remains totally unchanged is not only of no concern to the petty bourgeoisie, it is precisely what they like about capitalism. Being one step up from the bottom is exactly what makes life worth living for to the petty-bourgeois mentality).

The great new single issue 'reformist' causes of the modern era, - fighting for equal rights and to end all discrimination against women, blacks, homosexuals, animals, children, the disabled, the environment, etc, etc, - have been single-mindedly taken up by the petty bourgeoisie to the point of quite dementedly aggressive self-righteousness because the whole notion of 'reforming' capitalism via 'parliamentary democracy' was otherwise falling into such contempt. It is the last great wave of 'reformist' delusions in history, propping up the capitalist system for one last time. Everywhere else, the promised 'great changes' of postwar life, (supposedly 'totally transforming' the capitalist system which had brought the fascist slump disasters of the 1930s followed by the intolerable degeneration into inter-imperialist World War II by the 'free world'), - had already proved to be just cynical hoodwinking of the masses.

Post-war 'it will all be different' regimes were crumbling everywhere. The fundamentally inhuman and perspectiveless anarchy of capitalism, plus its neo-colonial nastiness and destructiveness internationally, (Vietnam, etc.) was relentlessly reasserting itself. Miraculously, at this critical moment in capitalist history, these great diversions such as the 'feminist revolution' really began to take off. An infinity of 'reformist' illusions, often unconscious, about how 'democracy' could change things, was saved. Every political forum began to be opened up to every kind of single issue crusading, - gay rights, animal lib, positive discrimination, affirmative action, etc, etc, etc. The capitalist system's fundamental inability to stop exploiting and alienating the human condition and the environment was lost sight of completely.

Some of the new single-issue propaganda information has been educative and politically useful. The unnoticed resuscitation of the idea that capitalist society can be 'reformed' into something completely reasonable, purposeful, and equitable, fitting modern mankind's needs, - has been a philosophical catastrophe.

The main casualty has been the temporary death of any understanding of the capitalist system as being nothing but a perpetual inter-imperialist crisis of warmongering and slump-destruction merely interspersed with periods of creative free-market boom, plus the massive posturing pretence that 'new international mechanisms' have been introduced to 'guarantee rational peaceful solutions to all the world's problems in due course', etc, etc.)

On the back of the appeal to extreme selfishness and individualism that the 'revolution' in single-issue life-style causes has provoked whereby slogans such as 'the personal is political' have for the moment undermined all grasp of class-war as the only possibility for further real progress for civilisation, - it has for a while gone unnoticed that 'new capitalism' reforms are not only just as empty a fraud as 'reforms' ever were under free-market greed, but also that the systemic contradictions internationally in private profiteering, which have always periodically erupted in war and destruction again sooner or later, are once more poised to devastate the world in slump and ruthless trade-war conflict such as history has not remotely seen before.

The imminent collapse of all the ludicrously insincere free-enterprise daydreams of an endlessly more prosperous and harmonious world is obviously in no way down to this triumph of single-issue social-'reform' illusions, but the two phenomena are inseparable. The signs that the 'new world order' was obviously anything but that, were plain from the first moment that stock had to be taken of the claims about the Moscow bureaucracy's insane decision to go along with this cosmetic rejigging of unchanging imperialist economic world domination and equally unchanging monopoly-accumulation laws guaranteeing the greatest crash and crisis ever further down the line.

That signs remain unnoticed and politically unacted-upon is down to many things such as the never-less-than-diverting continued technological revolution brilliantly created by the free market, and scoring a 'medium-is-the-message' brainstorming sensation, more captivating (and more vacuous) than any of the previous great technological revolutions of capitalist industry. 

In addition to the new computer communications mania, the very demise itself of the Soviet workers state after 70 years amazing and heroic anti-imperialist struggle and achievement, has obviously killed off most remaining standard revolutionary ideals.

But more is needed to close people's minds to revolutionary understanding than just the latest technological tricks of the capitalist market place, and the further retreat of Soviet Revisionist bureaucracy into total and terminal paralysis, which in itself should actually invite and be the clearing-house to a massive expansion of scientific philosophical analysis (Marxism-Leninism) in order to grasp where world history (the history of class struggle) could lurch next.

It is the active philosophical influence exerted by all manner of personal single issue politics which is the effective block to a revival of communist revolutionary challenge to steadily mounting capitalist crisis chaos. It has rescued the played-out 'reformist' illusions of capitalism by the back door, and it has taken single-mindedness and self-righteous conviction to sometimes near-fascist levels of provocatory diversions, playing right into imperialism's hands.

This self-righteous aggressiveness, - spattering government ministers in animal blood; chaining naked women to City railings; pulling the Archbishop of Canterbury out of his own pulpit; hitting politicians with custard pies; trashing property on 'reclaim the streets' ventures; etc, etc, partly results from advanced capitalism's own further emancipation-evolution via information and communications revolutions, etc, and also the slightly deformed 'rights' mentality produced by Labour's post-1945 attempt through 'welfare-state' measures to pretend that the bad old capitalist system was to be no more. A determination to fight for 'justice' unconnected to an ongoing class struggle against a never-dethroned ruling capitalist establishment can leave people artificially obsessed with the personal as opposed to the political, - a mess of 'democratic' confused aggressiveness of little use to recreating collective communist revolutionary consciousness.

The reactionary potential in this for letting the imperialist system off the hook in favour of 'individual rights' protesting was present, for example, in the matter of NATO's neo-Nazi blitzkrieg destroying Serbia for, in reality, no reason at all, which fascist terror destruction, - illustrating imperialist-crisis rottenness like almost nothing else could and crying out for the relaunch of the Bolshevik science of 'defeat for imperialism' and 'defeat for one's own ruling-class first, etc), - was totally ignored by fake-'left' protest posturing in favour of 'no to war' social-pacifism (which was a particular target for Leninist contempt in World War I) and the even more putridly phoney 'self-determination rights for Albanians in Kosovo'. 

This ludicrously academic posturing (around a completely abstract principle which was lightyears removed from what was really on the cards given the belligerent imperialist involvement at the 1999 stage of world imperialist economic crisis) just played right into predatory imperialism's hands for continuing its aggressive expansionism and military castration against former workers-state territories. What serious 'self-determination rights' with peaceful civilised perspectives is now available for anyone in Kosovo, or is now anticipated for anyone throughout the Balkans, given this NATO-imperialist warmongering fiasco which has merely caused huge regional economic destruction and thereby exacerbated all national and trade-war conflicts, resolving no ethnic problems in the region, but only making all of them worse?

And in addition to this generally disastrous political confusion, of course, - sown by the modern triumph of petty-bourgeois single-issue politics, - must be added the specific catastrophes from self-righteous zealotry such as the tragedy of the children’s homes in Britain, where the sheer stupid artificiality of not being prepared to be just naturally vigilant (about potential homosexual emotional/sexual instability where especially-vulnerable minors are concerned) has resulted in such humiliation, damage, and possibly increased prejudice all round.

Another long-running politically-correct scandal is at last emerging over the cruel denial of adoption homes to black children-in-care because the potential families were white. Increasing research evidence is available (aired last week on the Channel 4 'Colour of Love' documentary) to show that the self-righteous black nationalists, who rose so prominently in the Labour Party with their petty bourgeois single-issue
posturing, did untold harm in every direction with their self-promoting local-council and national government insistence that only those from really ethnic black cultural stock should be allowed to adopt black children or have the power to dictate policy in such matters.

This monstrous racist doctrine was so capitulated to by opportunist PC political circles that the proportion of black children left rotting in children's homes was double that of white kids throughout a whole generation of artificially banning perfectly suitable and loving white families from being allowed to adopt a little black boy or girl to raise and cherish as their own. Nazi race theories had nothing on this 'reformist' middle-class PC self-righteousness.

But potentially even worse than the hundreds of black children artificially denied a far better life to suit the posturing middle class careerism of black political opportunists was the damage which reactionary black nationalism added to the PC 'reformist' mindlessness already in vogue.

Nowhere is this more evident than on feminist issues. It is because of the inbuilt nature of capitalist exploitation and alienation that male chauvinism has been a real additional burden for women to have to bear in class society. But making a rod for the back of male chauvinism while the capitalist-system origins of prejudice and discrimination still persist is just to invite more and more confusion, and more and more frustration.

Thirty years of intermittently-successful feminist campaigning has left neither women, children, families, men, or society in general, any happier with any aspect of human relationships. The idea of increased stability or contentment for women, children, families, or men from the ever-rising volume of divorce court or CSA settlements is an obvious joke. The world of working women is known to be raising as many problems as it solves because capitalism still rules and not just because 'men still rule' as feminism claimed. And while life can never be made of anything but contradictions, what the advance of women through the glass ceiling demonstrates is that capitalist big business works through an unchangeable culture of exploitation and alienation afflicting all human relationships, - in work and beyond, - no matter what the boss's gender is. And it is capitalism which is making the increasingly more advanced and cultured workforces of the world sick, - nothing else.

And yet the perfectly insane one-sided feminist approach to human problems still persists, - as in last week's government report promising a veritable jihad against male violence on the bizarre grounds that the incidents of rape and domestic assault were 'possibly' ten times greater than the government's own figures indicated.

As a former leading feminist Melanie Phillips commented in the Sunday Times:

What tripe. This is no new study. It is just bits of previously published reports and old crime figures cobbled together with some wild extrapolations to produce a figure alarming enough to justify the £6m being poured into women's aid bodies who have been invited to bid for the cash.

It is true that there is a "dark area" of crime that happens but, for one reason or another, does not appear in the statistics. So rates of domestic violence, like other crimes, are likely to be higher than reported. What the Home Office has done, though, is to produce a skewed account that is not only alarmist but a group libel upon men through statistical jiggery-pokery of a high order.

Second, the report pointed out that the most common reason why the police decided not to record these reports as crimes was that they believed the women's complaints were false or malicious.

The fundamental assumption beneath this inflationary calculation is that women claiming sexual assault are always telling the truth. Not so. Only recently Martin Garfoot, a pharmacist, successfully sued his former colleague Lynn Walker for libel after she had falsely accused him of raping her. Some women do make such false accusations.

Nevertheless, the assumption that women are always victims and men their victimisers underpins government policy. It is the rationale for giving public money to women's aid.

The striking fact is that the Home Office has chosen to ignore altogether its own research, which reported an equal number of men and women saying they had been assaulted by their companions. Indeed, as I show in my book, The Sex-Change Society, there is now a huge body of international research showing that women initiate often serious violence against their companions as frequently as men initiate it against them - and sometimes more often.

The crucial point is that these studies ask both men and women whether they have been at the receiving end of violence from the opposite sex.

Most British domestic violence studies - the ones on which the Home Office relies - are effectively rigged. They ask only women, often in self-selecting samples, about their experiences as victims. They also absurdly broaden the definition of violence to include "ridicule" or "control" or "shouting".

Such worthless "research" has produced the risible claim that one in four women experiences domestic violence. Yet there was Jay regurgitating this old chestnut last week, as she did last year when she launched the Women's Unit campaign to "change the culture" of violence against women.

When challenged about her strange omission of the victimisation of men by women, she admitted that domestic violence was not "gender-exclusive", but said the government could not get involved in such "subtle issues". Anyway, it was women, not men, who mainly got injured.

Well, of course some women are grievously injured by men. Yet the remarkable fact is that, despite men's superior strength, about one third of people injured through domestic violence are known to be men and this is likely to be a gross underestimate. Male victims overwhelmingly say their complaints are not taken seriously by the police. Worse, they are likely to find themselves arrested by officers who cannot believe that women can injure men.

So few ask for help or report what has happened. Data analysed last year by Professor Kevin Browne, of Birmingham University for the Dispatches TV programme showed that more than half of male victims had put up with persistent domestic violence for two years before telling anyone, because of the shame and humiliation of admitting to being assaulted by a woman.

In other words, it is now men as well as women who are likely to be under-reporting sexual assaults against themselves. The culture certainly needs to be changed; but not in the discriminatory way that Jay wants. We have to replace the false view that men are always victimisers and women their victims by the more realistic acknowledgement that each sex equally perpetrates violence on the other.

This, of course, would hurt the women's aid industry that attracts funds on the back of the belief that men are invariably victimisers and women their victims. Not surprisingly, therefore, hapless Home Office officials have come under severe pressure to destroy, repudiate or obliterate their own research showing sexual equivalence in domestic violence.

Nor is this all. Rape by strangers has declined while acquaintance rape is up. Rape convictions, meanwhile, are down. This is not surprising, given the ambiguities of a mating game whose rules have changed.

Yet the government wants more men to be convicted of rape and does not much care how it is done. So what if a new offence of date rape, or changing the definition of consent to sex, results in manifold injustices against men? Aren't they all guilty, after all, unless they prove themselves to be innocent?

What an ugly and dangerous situation. The government is stoking up a hysterical and false animus against men. What is the Home Office doing lending its once-illustrious research reputation to such a farrago?

What has this government, composed of so many Jack the lads, got against men that it should unleash Jay upon them?

Routine male-chauvinist violence remains intolerable, but the real problem is the frustrated violence all round, throughout capitalist society, arising directly out of capitalism's problems and not out of men's problems as such. The overwhelming majority of murdered victims in capitalist society are young men, killed by other young men. And even out of domestic violence, men get their (surprisingly large) share of injuries as Phillips reports of the government's own figures. Men also top the league tables of violence done to the person by the capitalist state itself (prison sentences, executions (abroad), killed in pointless wars for the ruling class state's benefit, etc, etc). But what is the point of all this genderist diversion?? Purely to hide, in objective effect, the responsibility of the capitalist system for the present sum total of human misery, - regardless of what any feminists subjectively claim their purpose to be.

A much less reconstructed feminist, Ros Coward, turned in the Guardian precisely to capitalist society's mess in relation to the repeal-of-clause-28 controversy, strongly supporting the repeal, and challenging the Blair government's sincerity in the matter, but at the same time inadvertently throwing the whole question wide open to show the capitalist system at the core of far more worrying questions about sexual education and sexual orientation, and effectively saying that the whole Clause 28 debate, with prejudices on both sides, is itself the real problem because the actual happiness threatening difficulties of capitalism are infinitely greater for all people, whatever their views on such specific minor questions of legality and discrimination:

Over the past few weeks, endless bleeding hearts accounts of growing up gay in a homophobic society have implied nothing has changed around sex. This is nonsense. But the changes are seismic and children need different guidance in this sexually very literate society. Contemporary children are saturated with sexual imagery and information. The major soap operas regularly tackle homosexuality. It's also widely discussed in teenage magazines, along with how to do a blow job, premature ejaculation and so on. On Channel 5, there's all-night porn. With a couple of clicks they can (and do) download anything they like from the internet. Homosexual buggery is the least of it. If they prefer they can have bestiality, coprophilia, sex with tiny children.

In such a context it is frankly absurd to be struggling over these Janet-and-John versus John-and-Jim versions of sexuality. The terrain is infinitely more difficult and all adolescents - regardless of gay or heterosexual identity - are struggling with much more complex issues. How can they avoid damaging sexual diseases? What is safe sexual behaviour? What should they agree to do or ask someone else to do in sex? Most critically, how does the experimental, transgressive sex with which they are bombarded ever become the "normal" family life most of them see around them?

It is not gay adolescents who are at sea; it is all of them. None of them knows where to draw boundaries or how to understand what they really want, as opposed to what is being fed to them by outside interests. Girls remain particularly vulnerable to the flood of endorsing and inciting material. To find their way through all this, children have no need at all of these old-fashioned political ideologies, whether libertarian or conservative. They need basic facts of life; and information about health and contraception. More importantly, they need help developing self-esteem and confidence so they can chart their way through the sexual landscape, making choices which do not hurt others or damage themselves.

The real issues are emotional literacy, self-awareness and confidence to protect yourself: This is what the government should be addressing, not how to satisfy the outmoded ideologies of the sexual campaigners.

Phillips touched on similar themes in an earlier Guardian piece:

Equality once meant the equal worth of persons expressed through fellowship, shared experience and mutual respect. Now it has come to mean identical material ends and outcomes. Yet people are not identical. Their behaviour and circumstances are very different from each other. To treat them as identical may therefore be unfair or harmful. That is why, for example, the woman who doesn't want a man around but gets pregnant via a sperm-bank - on the basis that she has the right to be a mother "like any other woman" - is reckless of the disadvantage to her child.

That is why divorce court judges who award children and assets with no regard to behaviour routinely cause the manifest injustice of rewarding wrongdoing and punishing blamelessness.

How can any of this possibly be considered progressive? This radical individualism worships autonomy and deems obligation to be oppressive. Yet without obligation there can be no such thing as society. Isn't this what liberals were supposed to find so objectionable about Thatcherism? Progress has been reduced to a hedonistic selfishness which unites the so-called progressives of the left with the so-called conservatives of the right.

Consumerism rules in personal relations as much as in economics. Our most advanced thinkers regularly genuflect before the altar of globalisation, loudly reasserting their powerlessness to make a fairer society in the face of market forces. In such a world, it has become a positive merit to stand for nothing because this means that nothing can stand in the way of change and the march of global capital.

Capitalist society's deliberate philosophical shallowness is the obvious problem afflicting all mankind, which is what makes capitalist 'democracy''s ability to endlessly confuse and cover things up its most obviously frustrating feature. For all its shocking revelations, it is the Waterhouse tribunal's essential refusal to link this particular aspect of social breakdown to any ruling establishment responsibility for what goes on and what goes wrong under capitalism, which makes the greatest impact, as a variety of responses indicate:

Of course Danny Carrick (Letters, February 17) is quite right to say the Waterhouse inquiry doesn't begin to scratch the surface of child abuse but at least, for once, there has been an inquiry, no matter how pathetic it may appear to those of us who have been abused. In my day (Dr Barnardo's 1944-51) there were no effective channels of complaint and nobody inquired into anything. When I obtained my records last year they revealed my social worker (if that was what he was) saw me two days after admission and the day I left. It wasn't child care - it was child abandonment.

I've been abused by the best of them. One, a well respected lawyer, later became Tory mayor of an outer London borough. Another, a City businessman, became chairman of a renowned public company. Others attracted rave notices from theatrical journalists. These people were not staff. They were approved as "friends of the institution". Try complaining about their inappropriate behaviour in house and if the result wasn't the routine thick ear for being a "lying little tyke", it was just as likely to be a fumble up the trouser leg.

The tribunal was appointed in 1996 by William Hague, who was then Welsh Secretary, after Clwyd County Council decided against publishing a report by a social services expert, John Jillings, into abuse of children in care. The council feared that it would be sued for defamation; it was also warned against publication by its insurers because of the possible effect of compensation claims.

Although by 1996 12 people in North Wales had been convicted of abusing children, there was speculation that the abuse was on a much greater scale. In 1986, Alison Taylor, officer-in-charge of Ty Newydd local authority children's home in Bangor, had complained to her superiors in Gwynedd County Council about alleged assaults on children. Dissatisfied with the response, she spoke to Keith Marshall, a county councillor, who reported her concerns to the Chief Constable of North Wales.

A police investigation was carried out by Detective Chief Superintendent Gwynne Owen, head of North Wales CID, from 1986 to 1988. The Crown Prosecution Service recommended no criminal proceedings. The investigation is described in the report as defective, sluggish and shallow.

Eric Davies, chairman of Clwyd social services, wrote a memorandum about Ms Taylor saying: "She is a blatant troublemaker, with a most devious personality...I would very humbly suggest...that this lady's services be dispensed with at the earliest possible time." Ms Taylor was suspended and eventually accepted voluntary redundancy.

However, she contacted the Prime Minister, Welsh Office, Health Secretary and Local Government Ombudsman. She compiled a voluminous document that was presented to the new social services chairman, Malcolm King, in 1991. He reported it to the police.

The report states that without Alison Taylor's complaints, there would have been no public inquiry, into the alleged abuse of children in Gwynedd. In general terms, she has been vindicated. The response by senior management at Gwynedd County Council to her complaints was discouraging and inappropriate. The Welsh Office's response was inadequate.

The ensuing North Wales Police investigation, from 1991-93, took statements from more than 500 former children's home residents who complained of abuse. Some of the most chilling came from beyond the grave. At least 12 children formerly in care have died, most by their own hand. Statements made by six who died after telling police in the early 1990s about abuse and brutality in the Bryn Estyn community home in Wrexham, were read to the inquiry.

As the police investigation continued, newspaper articles, beginning with the Independent on Sunday, linked a former police superintendent, Gordon Anglesea, to child sexual abuse. He successfully sued for libel, receiving damages of £375,000, in 1994. The tribunal heard evidence alleging that Mr Anglesea did commit serious sexual misconduct at Bryn Estyn, but were not persuaded that the libel jury's verdict was wrong.

Although Ms Taylor won an award from the Campaign for Freedom of Information for her revelations, one of the shocking findings of the tribunal was that she was not the first to do so. Another Gwynedd staff member complained as long ago as 1980 and was also dismissed.

Ms Taylor is still haunted by the decision to sacrifice her career to report the child abuse she witnessed.

During the inquiry, it emerged that the insurers had repeatedly advised Clwyd County Council not to make any public statements concerning the allegations of abuse. They said that councillors risked becoming personally liable for any compensation awarded by the courts to victims of abuse or individuals falsely accused of abuse. Representatives of the insurers emphasised that their priority was "legal, as opposed to moral, liability".

In the early Nineties, when the council was considering whether to publish a highly critical abuse inquiry report by John Jillings, the former director of social services in Derbyshire, the insurers advised against it.

A letter to Andrew Loverridge, Clwyd County Council's solicitor, in November 1993 from Tom Huggon, a representative of the insurer, which has been seen by The Times, said: "Nothing must be done or said which is I likely to prejudice your insurers' position. In particular, statements which are likely to provoke further claims...are highly prejudicial."

The letter even suggested that the council consider removing from office Councillor Malcolm King, chairman of the social services committee, who had pushed for a public inquiry.

"Draconian though it may seem, you may have to consider with the elected members whether they would wish to remove [Mr King] from office if he insists on having the freedom to speak, so as to protect the council's insurance position,' Mr Huggon stated.

Sir Ronald concluded that it would be unfair to blame Clwyd for suppressing both the Jillings report and a previous report into alleged abuse at the Cartrefle home. The insurers' representatives had acted with the "honourable intention" of preventing Clwyd County Council, its officers and members from acting in breach of their insurance policy, he said.

Mr King welcomed Sir Ronald's call for a Law Commission. "I think I hate the insurers more than the paedophiles," he said. "The idea that a commercial company can lean on an elected body is outrageous."

It is a view shared by Billhar S. Uppal, of Nelsons Solicitors which represents about 70 of the abuse victims, who said: "We need to create a system whereby the hands of the local authorities are not tied by their insurers. What we have are elected bodies being governed by insurers. How democratic is that?"

IN ALL THE thousands of words I have read and heard during the past week about the Welsh child abuse scandal, one word has never been mentioned. That word is 'gay'.

This omission ought to strike us as odd, to say the least, considering that nearly all those people convicted or accused of gross indecency with boys over many years were homosexual men.

It is even odder when you consider that nowadays the daily bulletins invariably contain an item of 'gay news' - gays in the services, gay priests, gay victims of the holocaust, Clause 28, gays at the Dome, etc., etc. However, it seems that when gays are shown to have engaged in acts of dreadful cruelty and depravity they are invariably to be described as 'paedophiles', a term which denotes those (male or female) who are sexually attracted to children (also male or female) and therefore having no specifically gay or even male connotations.

This euphemistic usage is very helpful to those like Mr Peter Tatchell who are keen to impress on us that the sexual behaviour of gays is no different from that of heterosexuals except in certain minor physical respects. If people were to start asking why it was that those men in Wales acted in the way they did, it could do much to upset the happy Tatchell-ite consensus that has recently gained ground, and not only in the pages of the Guardian, that gays and straights are to all important purposes just the same.

It might also derail the moves afoot to lower the age of homosexual consent to 16, as Tony Blair is so keen to do, were it to be thought that this would remove a valuable deterrent to potential abusers. So long as the Government and the media are careful to preserve the helpful distinction between gays and paedophiles this is unlikely to happen. Anyone who opposes the new legislation can be safely dismissed as out of date, homophobic or some kind of crazed born-again Christian.

The final comment from former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams in the Observer is obviously being grossly politically incorrect in not making it clear that the overwhelming majority of paedophiles are obviously heterosexual, or that the majority of homosexuals are not necessarily paedophiles too. 

And he also fails to identify emotional/sexual instability and immaturity (both reflecting on capitalist society itself and on the people and human relationships it creates throughout) as the educative/analysis issue raised by the homosexual phenomenon. But his main charge of how political correctness just addles brains (in all directions) from recording even the simplest facts about societal breakdown, and drawing conclusions from them about what is wrong with capitalism, - is well observed. 

Prejudice of all kinds shames human society. But letting capitalism escape responsibility because of the self-righteous conceit of middle-class single-issue martyrdom just amounts to one of the darkest and daftest periods of reactionary irrationality in modern times. 

Build Leninism. 	Royston Bull