100 British victims of Blair’s war

ON 31 January, it was announced that the 100th British soldier had
been killed in the war and occupation of Iraq. This government is
risking the lives of young soldiers in order to help fight US
imperialism’s battles to control this vital oil-rich area of the world.

Blair and his government have persistently lied about this deadly war
and occupation. The week before, New Labour Defence Secretary John Reid
had sent 3,300 British troops to the Helmand province, a stronghold of
drugs barons and Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, Bush and Blair’s
other main theatre of war.

They are part of a new 9,000-strong Nato multinational brigade taking
over from US forces in south-east Afghanistan. The deployment will last
three years at a financial cost of £1 billion to Britain’s Treasury. But
it’s the 100 dead British soldiers and the tens of thousands of Iraqi
civilian dead who are paying the highest price for Blair’s bowing and
scraping to George Bush.

The Stop the War Coalition is organising protests at the occupation’s
deadly toll in all major towns and cities in Britain. The Socialist
Party says:

  • End the occupation of Iraq!

  • Bring the troops home now.


Stop and search trebles in four years

IN RECENT years the Blair government has introduced more and more
authoritarian laws that threaten civil liberties. In the year up to
April 2005 nearly 36,000 people were stopped and searched under the 2001
anti-terror laws’ emergency powers.

Every year since the Act came into force, the numbers have soared
from 10,200 people being stopped in 2001 to 35,776 searches of vehicles
and people recorded last year under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. And
these figures don’t include people stopped and searched in the months
following the July bombings in London.

The Terrorism Act, when sanctioned by a senior officer, allows police
to stop and search people even without suspicion. This is seen as a
throwback to the notorious "sus" laws of the 1970s.

The laws give police sweeping powers to stop people even if they have
no grounds to suspect them of a crime. The powers are said to be
essential to disrupt terrorist activity but they have already have been
used against non-violent protesters, such as those arrested under the
Terrorism Act for protesting at an international arms fair in London in
2003.

Now people are being stopped at the rate of nearly 100 a day,
including 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang, stopped for barracking Jack Straw
at last year’s Labour Party conference. Despite the huge number of
people stopped, only 455 were arrested.

They have also been used to whip up prejudice against minorities such
as the Muslim community. In 2003-04, more than one in five of those
stopped were black or Asian. Reports suggest a huge increase in the
number of black and Asian people being stopped since the London bomb
attacks.

Trade unionists, socialists, civil rights campaigners and all who
need to protest at some stage against governments and big business need
to keep fighting all these repressive laws.