George Monbiot rips into the image of Clare Short as some kind of morally principled politician with this devastating piece, written a day after she resigned in 2003:
“Short was a licensed rebel...Within her own department, where her decisions made a real impact on people’s lives, she was more Blairite than Blair...
...She was useful to the government because she behaved like someone guided by impulse rather than calculation...
...We have, in other words, been sold Short. Blair told us she had integrity, and, correctly interpreting her role, she acted as if she did. But she knew precisely where the limits lay, and when that “integrity” needed to be jettisoned. Her authenticity was prescribed...
...Throughout her tenure, delegations of squawking NGOs came from the poor world to beg Clare Short not to destroy their lives. They were brushed aside with a ruthlessness which made Peter Mandelson look like Bagpuss. Last year, a group of peasant farmers from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh travelled to Britain to ask the Department for International Development (DFID) not to fund the state government’s “Vision 2020″ programme. Its purpose was to replace small-scale farming with agro-industry. While a few very wealthy farmers, seed and chemical companies, some of them closely connected to the government, would make a great deal of money from the scheme, some 20 million people would be thrown out of work.2 A leaked memo from Short’s own department revealed that the project suffered from “major failings”, threatened the food security of the poor, and offered no plans for “providing alternative income for those displaced.”3 A citizens’ jury drawn from the social groups the scheme is supposed to help rejected it unanimously.4 Yet Short ignored their concerns and instructed her department to give the state government £65million....
...The central project of Blair’s foreign policy is the appeasement of the powerful. Short ensured that this principle informed the business of her department. She was forced to resign yesterday not because she had rebelled, but because she had destroyed her credibility as a rebel. Having squandered her Old Labour credentials, she was of no further use to the New Labour government...”
The full article can be read by clicking here.
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