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item0079C  1094, 1095

1094   16 June 2005  

To: Tony Blair, Prime Minister  10 Downing Street                   London SW1A 2AA

Dear Tony

This letter is written with a heavy heart.  I have been in continuous membership of the Labour Party for 42 years, since June 1963.  I have been a true activist and Councillor, both in London and in South Wales, holding all local Branch and some Constituency offices.  I have been active in the Fabian Society and the Society of Labour Lawyers.  I was Industrial Adviser on Construction to the 1970s Labour Government.  And I have campaigned actively for the Party in every Election since then, including the 2005 Election. 

  • But I have reached my own breaking-point.  I disagreed with the Iraq invasion, and joined the two Great Marches in London; but I reasoned that this was an error of judgment by yourself, and not a general misjudgement by the Party.  So I bit my tongue, and remained faithful to the Party.  And through many of the rambling errors of judgment made by Labour in continuing with Thatcherite privatisation, I found excuse after excuse for my blundering Party.  And I was greatly encouraged by the record of Labour in Wales, on a number of fronts.  I considered that on balance much good was being done, and I was content to allow the minuses to be countered by the evident pluses of Labour Government. 

My sticking point, however, is the disregard, right across the Labour Party, for human and individual rights, most dramatically displayed in the inhuman treatment meted out to asylum-seekers seeking refuge in this country.  Ministers repeatedly pour public scorn on liberal values, as being the fantasy province of “Guardian-reading”, middle-class idealists, remote from the “real world”.  The draconic treatment of terror suspects has drawn to Britain the opprobrium of Europe, and of all civilised opinion: the Government has been forced to retreat on these measures, and I pray that reason and fairness will achieve further changes.  

The continued unquestioning support for “drugs prohibition” is another demonstration of this lack of understanding, which continues to cause gratuitous distress and injustice to hundreds of thousands of our fellow-citizens.  The unprincipled appeal to “working class concerns”, in the Government’s defence of ASBOs, is another example.  ASBOs constitute an  unjustifiable invasion of human rights, particularly of young people: in claiming to tackle “young thugs” and “yobs”, the Government has itself become more and more thuggish, by turn. 

But let me return to asylum policy.  The UK asylum regime is a disgrace, condemned by many international authorities.  Under successive Ministers (Straw, Blunkett, Clarke) the Government has bowed to populist pressures, and has evinced a profound lack of understanding, of sensitivity to human and individual rights.  That insensitivity, I accept, is very widespread within the Labour Party, for “liberal” decency is held in low regard within the Party, at every level.  You and your Ministers are not alone, and I accept that mine is the minority position.   I appreciate too that Labour has always been an authoritarian, collectivist, Party, with little grasp of the huge political potential of human-rights thinking. 

It is that continuing insensitivity that has now driven me away from the Party.  The time for "balancing" is past.  Worst of all for me, as a Barrister, is the systematic withdrawal of Legal Aid from asylum-seekers, within the framework of an adversarial system in which justice cannot be done without effective parity of professional arms.  Ministers have been like small boys, pulling wings from butterflies, and destroying the dignity of those who look to us in hope. 

  • In 2003 I tried, working with colleagues, to establish a “Socialist Civil Liberties Association”, designed to work as an affiliated society within the Labour Party, to try and wean the Party away from its own insensitivity and authoritarian tendencies.  We were met with stony silence, and a sullen lack of understanding. 

And now there is the Government’s commitment to the imposition of compulsory Identity Cards, without any proof that they will make the slightest difference to the conduct of any of the "wars" which the Government is purporting to “fight” on behalf of its people.  My beloved Party is becoming a co-conspirator with those committed to the creation of fully-policed fully-enumerated State, in which individual freedom is progressively whittled away by a minuscule group of leaders who gain and keep power only by way of populist electoral success.   

I cannot take any more.  My heart is broken, as is my political morale.  I return herewith my current Labour Party membership card, duly cancelled – half goes to you, and half to Matt Carter.  No decision in my life has caused me greater anguish than this one.  I realise that many will criticise me for “quitting” the Party, as I have criticised others before me.  I realise that I will lose, by leaving Labour, whatever small contact with the levers of power that I may have hitherto enjoyed. 

But it must be done.  I have no intention of joining any other Party.  I will seek to continue my work for the Fabian Society, and continue to direct my personal political efforts to the promotion of a new liberal socialism the world over.  Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be able to rejoin the Party at some future date. 

  • But for now, our paths have parted.  I hope that,
    some day, they may cross again. 

Roger Warren Evans 

former Party Member No A114727

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1095  8 July 2005  

Revenge Attack 

Friday 8 July: That is what I believe the London bombings were - a revenge attack, a cry of pain. This was no simple "Iraq" issue: the motives were much more complex - revenge by some Muslims against the desecration of their holy lands by Western forces, and the sheer success of many Western values - revenge by the poor against the rich - revenge against the insensitive swagger of the Americans, embodied in George Bush - revenge for the ravages past imperialism - revenge for the indignities heaped upon the world's poor by the dominant West - revenge for the devastation caused by unleashing the business corporations upon the "Third World" without proper state regulation. 

  • Sheer blind rage, for a thousand complex reasons. 

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