Sir, - In "The Rise of the `New Democracy'," (The Ecologist, July 1999), John Pilger writes that democracy is a clear loser in the process of globalisation. With every step of trade deregulation, he says, nations are signing away their powers of self-governance to unaccountable transnational corporations and investors.
"The rising number of poor people is the mark of a New Democracy; and Britain is the laboratory to the First World that Chile was to the Third. No modern ideological figure created more poor and more rich so rapidly as Margaret Thatcher. The UN Human Development Report for 1997 says that in no other country has poverty `increased as substantially' since the early 1980s, and that the number of Britons in `income poverty' leapt by nearly 60 per cent under her government.
"Thatcher and her successors made Britain into a two-thirds society, with the top third privileged, the middle third insecure, and the bottom third poor: a rigid class stratum copied by other former social democracies. So it made sense that she was among the first invited by Blair to Downing Street for `consultations'."
Tony Blair's New Labour government now seems not so different to that of Margaret Thatcher's. As Pilger points out, the Blairites have become the political wing of the British multinational corporations and American economic and military hegemony. "They are indeed more trustworthy and more `modern' than the Tories, many of whom are still smitten by English nationalism, some even by paternalism. New Labour and its ermine-rack of Lords and bankers and downsizers will not allow unprofitable spending on the relief of poverty. After all, the poverty that exists is a condition of their wealth, as it is of the affluence of the middle class."
The UN Human Development Report for 1998 points out that, of 17 countries of the industrialised world, only the US has a higher percentage of its population in poverty than Ireland. Why do we persist in following these unjust and failed models?
The "New" (i.e. corporate) Democracy is in high gear here too. Our intrepid leaders have taken to Thatcherism with great gusto. The Telecom privatisation is symptomatic of the celebration of greed which pervades our economy. But the bubble will burst and the social consequences will eventually have to be faced. Is it too much to ask for politics that puts people before profits? - Yours, etc., Myles Crowe,
Old Brewery Lane, Clonakilty, Co Cork.