Don't Believe The Truth!

In a vain attempt to get away from thinking about the latest terrorist developments or my own penchant of campaigning for electoral reform, I settled down with the new excellent Oasis album 'Don't Believe the Truth'.

For a moment it worked, then being the sad politico I am, it suddenly hit me! With the terrorist activity in London, every other issue but 'the war against terrorism' has become a fringe issue. This plays so beautifully into the right wing agenda that it's no wonder that young Muslims believe conspiracy theories about 9/11 and 7/7 being staged to discredit Islam.

The right wing can now plough ahead with authoritarian controls, as all opposition is swept aside as 'unpatriotic' and 'dangerous'. And if you don't believe me, we only have to look to how the campaign against the Republican disenfranchisement of African American voters, that was going from strength to strength, disappeared without a trace after 9/11.

I now realise my support of the campaign for electoral reform which was just garnering some excellent mainstream support in the media (particularly the Independent), is now dead in the water.

This is especially disheartening if you believe as I do, that electoral reform and media reform are the democratic drivers of improved decision making. With a government elected under PR, would our support of Bush's Iraq invasion even have happened?

In most areas, hard as it might be to believe, I am a Blairite. Over the backing of the Bush invasion of Iraq, I oscillate between believing it was a 'massive' mistake, to a Blairite loyalty that 'he must have some good reason'. The reasons I thought he had, such as levering the US position over Climate Change and African Debt, I'm not so sure the gains are important enough to justify the extra terrorism we have brought to our shores. Whatever anybody says, Blair's decision has brought the London bombs. As John Pilger says today in the New Statesman they are 'Blair's bombs'.

By the way, every track on the new Oasis album is great but, track 11, 'Let their be love' and track 7, 'Guess God thinks I'm Abel' on their own, make 'Don't Believe the Truth' an essential purchase. If only politics was so easy to judge, there are many people who don't believe the truth about the Iraq war.