Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials, 10 April 2007

After the outraged hype generated by Blair and his ministers over the 15 British sailors who were "paraded" on Iranian TV, the Ministry of Defence has now allowed them to be "paraded" in the British tabloids -as part of six-digit deals.

Ironically this is being presented as some sort of "compensation" for what the 15 went through. Of course, for the powers that be, there cannot be anything wrong with this, since anything can be bought and sold in their society!

However, coming from a government which has no concern for the fate of the soldiers it sends to the killing fields of Iraq, this is not innocent.

Indeed, what does it care about the mental disarray of men and women who were ordered to turn their weapons against the Iraqi people they were supposed to "free"? Or about the ordeal experienced by wounded soldiers returning from Iraq, which may still be shrouded in secrecy, but is, nonetheless, nothing short of a scandal. And what does it care, of course, about those who will have lost their lives just to tighten the stranglehold of a handful of big City players over the Middle-East?

If, for once, this government had any concern for the fate of these 15 soldiers, the MoD's huge budget would have been enough to grant them a more dignified compensation, including a decent job away from the bloody chaos of Iraq.

But the whole point of this is elsewhere. Over the past 4 years Blair and Brown have been waging a criminal war against the Iraqi people. But, at the same time, they have been waging a propaganda war against the rest of us. This media business is part of this propaganda war - to give credit to the idea that the Iranians are the "bad guys" and British commanders the "good guys". The trouble is that, whatever ministers may say or get the soldiers to claim, no-one will ever believe that they were closer to Britain's territorial waters than to Iran's.

The point is that British troops have nothing to do anywhere in the Middle East and they should be withdrawn now!

It sounded like an April Fool's joke, when it was reported that Middlesbrough's "talking" CCTV cameras - warning litterbugs "you are being watched" - will be extended to the rest of the country. But no, Big Brother is soon to come to a camera near you. After all, there are 4.2m CCTV cameras here, more than anywhere else in the world - one for every 14 persons.

And as if this was not bad enough, last week Blair's Work and Pensions secretary, John Hutton, made an announcement that also sounded like "April Fool"!! Only this too, was deadly serious.

Harrow Council's benefit staff are to pilot the use of a lie detector to "strengthen the fight against benefit fraud". "Voice Risk Analysis" technology will analyse changes in a caller's voice, during applications for housing or council tax benefit. It will register changes in intonation and assess who sounds "suspicious" and then the person would be asked to provide further "evidence" for their claim.

We are told this "ground breaking technology" has already been used successfully in the insurance industry. Later in the year, Jobcentre Plus will begin using it on their systems as well.

In other words, anyone who is poor enough (a large proportion of pensioners, the low paid and those who have lost their jobs) will now risk being criminalized on the strength of a phone application for benefit!

But, says Hutton, the phone operators will be "trained in intelligent questioning... which allows them to assess the risk in a conversation through the identification of categories of emotional content"! Sure, we can trust them!

And just why is the government choosing to do this? Benefit fraud apparently accounts for around 4.7% of expenditure, already down by two thirds since 2001. We are not told the price tag for the lie detectors compared to such chickenfeed savings to the benefits system. Yes, chickenfeed, compared with the losses from tax evasion by the rich! Yet we can be sure the rich are not going to be subjected to lie detectors when filling in their tax forms! But Blair's measures against the poor always appeal to these same rich people, who despise the working class and regard their own theft as just playing the system and "being smart".

And while the poor are criminalized, who will really benefit? You guessed it! The ever-growing private parasite Capita, which feasts almost solely on government contracts, and which along with Digilog UK, will supply the system and "advise on its use and training". So there, at least, is part of the answer.