"THE LABOUR leaders appear like the swan gliding serenely on the surface of the water. But like the swan they are paddling like hell underneath. The impact of millions on the streets is immense. And what millions! A large proportion were people who voted for Tony Blair at the last election.
WHAT WE saw on 15 February was incredible. It was not just the demonstrations in Britain - it was the protests right around the world. The Financial Times said they were the biggest demonstrations since the Vietnam War. In fact, there was nothing coordinated on this scale during Vietnam.
Tariq Ali, writer and broadcaster, has been an anti-war activist since the 1960s
GEORGE BUSH and his business backers are sentencing millions of people to death by withholding drugs required to combat HIV infection and AIDS. Bush has worked alongside the world's biggest pharmaceutical firms to defend the patents that keep up the prices of anti-HIV and anti-AIDS medicines.
PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURES will not stop this war. That much is clear from the way Tony Blair has arrogantly dismissed the enormous groundswell of feeling against attacking Iraq. It's a characteristic of the undemocratic system we have that governments can implement unpopular policies while keeping most MPs firmly under control, whatever their private misgivings.
ONE OF Latin America's richest men, Gustavo Cisnero, was on holiday at his luxury villa in the Dominican Republic just over a week ago. His old friend, former US president George Bush Sr, was with him. But Cisnero could not have been happy.
THE US and British governments churned out a barrage of claims to justify war over the last week. US Secretary of State Colin Powell marshalled his case speaking to the United Nations. The British government produced yet another dossier. Barely had Powell finished speaking and the British document been published before much of their "evidence" fell apart.
£22,691 a year. Many workers in Britain dream of getting that amount. That was the amount of the pay rise awarded to Tony Blair's friend, the Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine, last week. Public outrage forced Irvine to put it on hold.
TONY BLAIR wants to force the victims of war on Iraq back into the path of bombs and bullets. He announced last week that he wanted to halve the number of refugees coming to Britain by September. Iraqis are the single largest group of refugees who come to Britain.
WHY DO George Bush and Tony Blair want to attack Iraq? Colin Powell gave the official answer to the United Nations last week - Saddam Hussein either has, or plans to develop, weapons of mass destruction. Few really believe this, although Tony Blair certainly says he does. A couple of weeks ago he also suggested taking on North Korea once Saddam Hussein had been "dealt with"!
TONY BLAIR is not only kowtowing to US power in acting as George Bush's poodle. Britain's rulers have their own interests in dominating the Middle East and ensuring that "rogue states" do not threaten the profits of multinational corporations. BP - one of the world's biggest oil companies - is British owned. Half of another, Shell, is British.
FOR WE who live on this planet under capitalism, there is the daily drip, drip, drip of frustration and resentment. And then, with eerie regularity, there are the horrors of famine, plague and war. The horrors have their roots in the daily apparatus of pedestrian human suffering. Thirty years ago I became a socialist and a revolutionary. Two things drove me to it.
