As NATO moves to allow Ukraine bomb Russia with its weapons, Kremlin floats possible Ukraine ceasefire
Alex Lantier, WSWS, May 25 2024
Smoke rises after a Russian attack in Kharkiv, May 17 2024
Yesterday, as the Ukrainian regime fired a wave of US-supplied, long-range ATACMS missiles at Russian forces in Crimea, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called for a vast escalation of the war, in which Ukraine would use NATO missiles to bomb Russia. NATO’s escalation, in response to the accelerating collapse of the Ukrainian armed forces, is rapidly exposing its own lies about the war. As Stoltenberg made his remarks to The Economist, Reuters was publishing a collection of interviews with top associates of Putin, appealing to the NATO powers for a ceasefire and warning of the danger of nuclear war. It is not Moscow, but the NATO powers led by Washington that are driving the war, threatening the rapid outbreak of total war in Europe and worldwide. Echoing remarks by Blinken and Cameron, Stoltenberg called for Ukraine to use long-range NATO missiles to bomb Russia.
The time has come for allies to consider whether they should lift some of the restrictions they have put on the use of weapons they have donated to Ukraine. To deny Ukraine the possibility of using these weapons against legitimate military targets on Russian territory makes it very hard for them to defend themselves.
“We will not be party to the conflict,” Stoltenberg promised. However, he promptly argued that NATO should give Ukraine a blank check to use its weapons for whatever strikes it pleases against targets in Russia, stating:
Ukraine has the right to defend themselves. And that includes striking targets on Russian territory.
Stoltenberg hides his reckless proposal for escalation behind the lie that this will not involve NATO in a shooting war with Russia. But in ruling circles, this is well-known to be false. The leak of a call between German military officers revealed that US and British troops are already in Ukraine to help Ukrainian troops target missiles launched against Russia. On this basis, Russian officials have threatened to attack NATO countries giving Ukraine weapons to bomb Russia. Stoltenberg argued that improving NATO’s strategy meant taking all necessary measures to inflict a humiliating and devastating defeat upon Russia. The problem with current strategy, he claimed, is that NATO governments want “Ukraine to win in a way that Russia does not lose.”
A central difficulty the ruling elites face is deep popular opposition to direct NATO involvement in the war. Polls show 68% of Frenchmen, 80% of Germans and 90% of Poles oppose moves like sending troops to Ukraine that could lead to total war. However, there remains a substantial underestimation in the population of the danger that the NATO imperialist powers will succeed in triggering such a war in the near future. Stoltenberg advanced a justification for attacking Russia, even if Russia had not physically attacked NATO. Claiming that NATO allegations of Russian cyber attacks could trigger an invocation of Article 5 of the NATO treaty to justify war, he said:
If there’s a magnitude, then we can trigger Article 5 and respond in cyber, but also in other domains to protect the NATO allies.
This statement is staggering. Cyber attacks are extremely difficult to trace, and a cyber attack could easily be launched from computers based in Russia by someone outside Russia; however, this would nonetheless still serve, by Stoltenberg’s reasoning, as a justification for NATO military action against Russia. In an act of utter and monumental recklessness, he is providing a rationale for military aggression against a major nuclear-armed power.
NATO officials’ calls for military action that Moscow has said will lead to total war shows that, in the ruling classes of key NATO countries, the decision for war with Russia has already been taken. Leading politicians in NATO member states are admitting that such a war is being actively planned. Yesterday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told Russian state media outlet RT his government was wants to find ways to avoid becoming involved in the war that NATO is feverishly planning against Russia. He said:
What is happening today in Brussels and Washington… looks like warming up for a possible direct military conflict. We can safely call it the preparation of Europe’s entry into the war. There are working groups within NATO that are assessing the best ways for the bloc to further boost its participation in the conflict. Hungary’s position must be redefined, our lawyers and officials are working on ways to allow Hungary to continue to exist as a NATO member without participating in NATO activities outside the bloc’s territory. We need to create a new approach, a new definition for our position as a pro-peace force within NATO.
These promises are worthless. If NATO attacks Russia, Hungary—like other Eastern European states whose leaders express concerns over the war, such as Slovakia and Bulgaria—will be swept up in a continent-wide and global war and devastated, whatever their governments’ legal position. Unless the war is rapidly stopped, moreover, they and most of the world will be incinerated by nuclear weapons. There is no national path to averting the catastrophe NATO is setting into motion. The disastrous implications of the Stalinist regimes’ dissolution of the Soviet Union and their restoration of capitalism across Eastern Europe in 1989-1991 are ever more apparent. The imperialist powers were allowed to play the ex-Soviet republics off against each other, using Ukraine as a base for war with Russia, and Eastern Europe joined a NATO alliance that, under rhetoric about human rights and democracy, ruthlessly wages imperialist wars.
The bankruptcy of any nationally-based opposition to imperialism emerges clearly in the policy of Putin. He launched his reactionary invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to try to compel the NATO powers to negotiate a deal with him to stop arming Ukraine against Russia, hoping that Russia’s vast military power would bring the NATO powers to the negotiating table. But this proved to be an illusion. Even as Russia’s military crushes NATO-armed Ukrainian units on the battlefield, the NATO powers are doubling down on plans for regime change or war against Russia. Yesterday, Reuters carried a report titled “Putin wants Ukraine ceasefire on current front lines,” based on interviews with five top Russian officials it described as “familiar with discussions in Putin’s entourage” or as having “worked with Putin.” These individuals all stressed that the Kremlin does not plan to press its military advantage to seize large amounts of Ukrainian territory and is desperate for a ceasefire with NATO. One source told Reuters:
Putin can fight for as long as it takes, but Putin is also ready for a ceasefire, to freeze the war. Putin has expressed frustration to a small group of advisers about what he views as Western-backed attempts to stymie negotiations and Zelensky’s decision to rule out talks.
Another source, stressing that Russia’s current offensive does not aim to crush the Ukrainian army and regime, promised:
Putin will slowly conquer territories until Zelenskiy comes up with an offer to stop.
These sources stressed that Putin is concerned about popular opposition inside Russia to being drafted for the war, and also about nuclear war. Reuters reported:
Two of the sources cited Russian concerns about the growing danger of escalation with the West, including nuclear escalation, over the Ukraine standoff. Three sources said Putin understood any dramatic new advances would require another nationwide mobilisation, which he didn’t want.
The comments of Stoltenberg, Blinken and Cameron show, however, that the NATO powers have no interest in reaching a deal with Putin. They are targeting Russia and Putin in a war for regime change. A catastrophic escalation of what has in effect already emerged as a Third World War in Europe can only be averted by the building of a mass, socialist movement against imperialist war in the working class, unifying workers in struggle against both the NATO governments and their allies, and Putin’s post-Soviet Russian capitalist regime.
Invoking Genocide Convention, International Court of Justice orders Israel to halt Rafah offensive
Tom Carter, WSWS, May 25 2024
Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, May 7, 2024
On Friday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an emergency order against Israel under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Citing reports that “800k people have been displaced from Rafah” as of May 18, the ICJ ruled by 13 votes to 2 that “Israel must immediately halt its military offensive” and cease actions that “inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Political leaders in the US and Israel immediately responded to the ruling with arrogant ferocity, insisting that Israel’s offensive in Rafah must continue. Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich responded to the ruling by comparing the ICJ, in the same breath, to “Nazis,” “Hamas” and “ISIS.” US senator Lindsey Graham, who earlier this month called for Gaza to be bombed like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, responded to the ruling by declaring:
The ICJ can go to hell. It is long past time to stand up to these so-called international justice organizations associated with the UN. This will and should be ignored by Israel.
The responses of US and Israeli officials to the ICJ ruling once again recall the words of US Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson in his opening statement at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals in 1945. Jackson said:
These men are surprised that this is the law. They really are surprised that there is any such thing as law. Any law at all was to these men simply a propaganda device to be invoked when it helped and to be ignored when it would condemn what they wanted to do.
The ICJ ruling massively discredits and exposes US-NATO imperialism, which has backed the Gaza genocide to the hilt while at the same time draping its war plans against Russia, China, and Iran in the guise of supposedly “preserving a rules-based international order.” The defiant responses to the ICJ ruling by US and Israeli political leaders have far-reaching historical implications, both as a milestone in the collapse of the postwar international order, which has accelerated following the dissolution of the USSR, as well as in terms of its inevitable impact on global popular consciousness. The ICJ ruling vindicates the participation of millions of people around the globe in demonstrations against the Gaza genocide, in the face of dishonest attempts to label them as ‘antisemitic.’ The ruling will be celebrated by students and academic workers, like those who voted to strike at the University of California, who have braved a bipartisan campaign of police beatings, rubber bullets, pepper spray, expulsion, slander, and mass arrests for attempting to say out loud, in peaceful demonstrations, what the chief justice of the ICJ said Friday in The Hague.
The ICJ, the highest court of the UN, issued its ruling Friday in response to the latest request by South Africa for “preliminary measures,” or emergency interim orders, as part of proceedings against Israel under the Genocide Convention that have been underway since December. In hearings last week, South Africa’s representatives accused Israel of pursuing a “coordinated plan aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of Palestinian life.” The ICJ’s ruling Friday places particular emphasis on the Israeli military assault on Rafah, the “last refuge” of hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced from other areas of Gaza, often multiple times. Under these conditions, Israel’s mass “evacuation orders” amount to orders for the affected people to cease to exist, because there is nowhere else in Gaza left for them to go. After previously calling an Israeli military offensive in Rafah a “red line,” the Biden administration subsequently relented and allowed the operation to go forward this month. To date, this operation, a murder spree targeting starving refugees, not a military offensive in any conventional sense, has in fact displaced nearly a million people in total.
In addition to demanding an immediate halt to the assault on Rafah, the ICJ’s ruling insists that Israel allow access to Gaza by UN war crimes investigators. It also accuses Israel of violating its January order requiring the “preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of” the Genocide Convention. While the ICJ’s ruling is written in a formal, mechanical style, these details send an unmistakable signal that prosecutions for the crime of genocide are not foreclosed. The ICJ also accused Israel of ignoring its March 28 order requiring the “unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.”
The ICJ’s ruling comes days after the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that he would seek arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, accusing them of “murder” and “extermination” of civilians. The Biden administration responded to the requests for arrest warrants by calling them “outrageous,” despite having celebrated the ICC arrest warrant against Putin last year. But while the ICC was created by a treaty that neither Israel nor the US have signed, the ICJ derives its authority from the UN charter, which the US ratified in 1945. The US formally ratified the Genocide Convention in 1948. While the ICJ’s ruling is significant, it is both long overdue and lacking any means of enforcement within the existing imperialist framework. The Israeli government, as South Africa’s representatives have effectively demonstrated throughout the ongoing ICJ proceedings, disregards international law, the binding decisions of the UNSC, and the rulings of the ICJ with impunity. Barrister Vaughan Lowe, arguing the case on behalf of South Africa last week, directly told the assembled judges:
The Palestinian people are facing genocide in Gaza, and your previous orders have not succeeded in protecting them against that.
In response to ICJ proceedings in January, Netanyahu openly boasted that he would ignore any rulings the court handed down, saying:
No one will stop us — not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anyone else.
With the support of the Biden administration in the US, Israel is expected to continue its military operation in Rafah without regard for the ICJ ruling. Gallant said Thursday:
We are strengthening our effort in Rafah. This operation will grow, with more forces on the ground and more forces from the air.
The global protest movement against the Gaza genocide will justifiably be encouraged by the ICJ ruling. Lately, these protests have seen the working class begin “flexing its muscle on a political issue,” to use a phrase employed by the LA Times in connection with the powerful strike movement among academic workers in the UC California system. The power of the international working class is, in fact, a thousand times stronger than the forces behind genocide and repression. But bringing that power fully to bear requires a struggle for its political independence, freeing it from the crippling influence of bourgeois political institutions and ideas in each country, and orienting it towards socialism.
Chinese mounts military exercises near Taiwan after new president inaugurated
Peter Symonds, WSWS, May 25 2024
Taiwanese destroyer Ma Kong monitors Chinese destroyer Xi’an near Taiwan, May 23 2024
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army has carried out two days of military exercises in the Taiwan Strait including near the Taiwanese-controlled islands of Kinmen, Matsu, Wuqiu and Dongyin, just kilometres off the Chinese mainland. The military drills come just days after Lai Ching-te from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was inaugurated as Taiwan’s new president. Lai is known for his stance in favour of Taiwanese independence. China has repeatedly warned that it would respond to any formal declaration of independence with force to reintegrate the island with China. China’s Xinhua news agency reported that the exercises were the largest for over a year, and were intended to “serve as a strong punishment for the separatist acts of ‘Taiwan independence’ forces and a stern warning against the interference and provocation by external forces.” PLA spokesman Li Xi told the news agency that the “Joint Sword-2024A” exercises were focused on “sea-air combat-readiness patrol, joint seizure of comprehensive battlefield control and joint precision strikes on new targets.”
The drills have been accompanied by nationalist rhetoric from Beijing, amplified further in the Western press, but the exercises have been on a smaller scale than those held in 2022 and 2023. According to the Taiwanese military, Beijing did not declare any no-fly zones and no live fire took place, other than in military areas on the Chinese mainland. US and international media reports featured maps showing the Chinese military “encircling” Taiwan and comments from the Chinese defence ministry declaring the PLA was testing its ability to “seize power.” In reality, the exercises were largely limited to the Taiwan Strait between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, with some Chinese coast guard vessels staging mock inspections of civilian vessels to the east of Taiwan. On Thursday, the Taiwanese military detected 35 PLA navy and coastguard ships and 49 aircraft, and on Friday, 27 PLA naval ships and 62 PLA aircraft. Some aircraft crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait—regarded by the US as international waters and airspace, but none entered what Taiwan treats as its immediate territorial waters and airspace. Chinese defence ministry spokesperson Wu Qian said Taiwan’s new president had “seriously challenged the one-China principle, pushing our compatriots in Taiwan into a perilous situation of war and danger.” He warned of “countermeasures” in response to further provocations by Taipei.
During his inauguration on Monday, Lai, who represents the DPP’s more hardline, separatist wing, stopped short of hinting at any formal declaration of independence. During the election campaign, well aware of widespread popular fears of war with China, Lai toed the more moderate line of his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen, that Taiwan is already a sovereign country and has no need to declare independence. Nevertheless, Lai’s speech, replete with peans to “peace” and “democracy” was highly provocative. After declaring that Taiwan and China were “not subordinate to each other,” he stated:
All of the people of Taiwan must come together to safeguard our nation; all our political parties ought to oppose annexation and protect sovereignty; and no one should entertain the idea of giving up our national sovereignty in exchange for political power.
The statement is not only a complete repudiation of the “One China policy” that underpins international relations with China. It is also a threat directed against the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and any other party seeking to improve relations with Beijing or willing to enter negotiations for its peaceful reunification with China. Following the 1949 Chinese Revolution, the hated KMT regime retreated to Taiwan under the protection of the US Navy and established a brutal military dictatorship. Both Taipei and Beijing claimed to be the legitimate government of “One China,” while a layer of indigenous Taiwanese elites now represented by the DPP pushed for “independence” for the island. While formally the junta has been disbanded and the façade of democracy erected, much of the old anti-democratic state apparatus remains intact, with power heavily concentrated in the hands of the president. Far from Lai receiving overwhelming popular support, he won the January election with just 40% of the vote, ahead of candidates for the KMT on 33.5% and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on 26.5%. Under the Taiwanese electoral system, there was no run-off second round, which Lai would likely have lost.
The DPP also lost control of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan or parliament. This is plunging the island into political crisis as the KMT, with the backing of the TPP, enacts legislation to put the president and his administration under closer parliamentary scrutiny. KMT/TPP legislators pushed through laws on Friday to ensure cooperation from administration officials and to expand parliamentary investigative powers, including access to classified military information, while tens of thousands of DPP supporters protested in the streets. Justifying the new legislation, Wu Tsung-hsien, the KMT’s convener of the judiciary committee, asked rhetorically:
In what country in the world is the executive not supervised by anyone?
Of course, he did not point out that the KMT had established the current presidential system after disbanding its dictatorship, confident that the presidency would always be in its hands. Echoing Lai’s comment that all Taiwanese must come together to protect “the nation,” DPP lawmaker Kuo Po-wen challenged any disclosure of military documents and effectively branded the KMT as traitors. saying:
Do you want to get hold of intelligence that you can then bring as gifts the next time you visit China?
The rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait, which are precipitating the political turmoil in Taipei, are being deliberately stoked by US imperialism. Washington embraced the One China policy in the 1970s and effectively acknowledged Beijing as the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan, when it established diplomatic relations with Beijing and cut all formal relations with Taipei. Now Biden, following Trump, had virtually abandoned the One China policy, tearing up longstanding diplomatic protocols, boosting arms sales to Taiwan, sending military “advisers” to the island and carrying out naval provocations through the Taiwan Strait, as his administration prepares for war with China.
The Biden administration condemns Chinese “aggression” and “expansionism” toward Taiwan and in the East China and South China Seas, that is, military drills in waters and airspace close to the Chinese mainland that it regards as its own. Yet the US military routinely engages in naval operations thousands of kilometres from its nearest territory. As the Chinese military drills were taking place on Thursday and Friday, the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its associated battlegroup were conducting “routine” operations in the vicinity of Taiwan in the Philippine Sea. On Wednesday, the US Navy and the Royal Netherlands Navy conducted joint operations in the South China Sea, just the latest in escalating joint military drills in the western Pacific involving European NATO allies. Even as it wages war against Russia in Ukraine as part of the NATO alliance and backs the Israeli genocide in Gaza as part of a wider conflict against Iran in the Middle East, US imperialism regards China as the chief threat to its global dominance. Already engaged in an economic war against Beijing, Washington will use all means, including military, to undermine and subordinate China, despite the dangers of nuclear war.
UK Infected Blood Inquiry report: “Justice delayed is justice denied”
Robert Stevens, WSWS, May 24 2024
The UK’s six-year-long public inquiry into the contaminated blood scandal announced its findings this week, confirming a scale of state criminality against tens of thousands of people that its chair, former High Court judge ‘Sir’ Brian Langstaff, said caused a “level of suffering which it is difficult to comprehend.” Without minimising the scale of previous state malfeasance and cover-up, including at Aberfan (1966), Hillsborough football stadium (1989) and Grenfell Tower (2017), the infection of more than 30k NHS patients with blood containing hepatitis C or HIV over a period of three decades, resulting in social murder on a mass scale, is a staggering crime. At least 3k died and the rest were left severely ill. Those infected with hepatitis C and/or HIV by contaminated blood or blood products included 380 children. The death rate among survivors is extremely high, with roughly one person affected dying every four days. Survivors have had their lives destroyed. Its ongoing impact was on display at Central Hall, in Westminster, where the inquiry’s report was released Monday before an audience of more than 1,000 people impacted by infected blood transfusions. These included the sick and dying, and relatives of the dead who waged a decades-long campaign for justice.
Between 1970 and the early 1990s, thousands of patients treated by the NHS received infected blood and blood products, including an estimated 3,650 people with haemophilia, a condition that affects the blood’s ability to clot. During this period major pharmaceutical companies supplied Factor VIII (“Factor 8”) infected blood products, leading to thousands of deaths in the UK and internationally. The NHS sourced around 50% of its blood and blood-derived products from abroad. In the US, donors were paid to give blood, attracting individuals, including drug addicts, more likely to have hepatitis C or HIV. The blood was initially not screened. Government after government ignored every warning. As the Hep C Trust charity notes:
In 1982 the first warning of the danger of contracting HIV/AIDS from contaminated blood products was published. The following year, The Lancet and WHO stated that people with haemophilia should be warned of the risks of using blood products.
Among the most heinous crimes committed were medical trials involving children with blood clotting disorders, who were infected with hepatitis C and HIV over a more than 15-year period. In many cases this was done without parental consent. The majority of the children enrolled in the trials, known about by government, are now dead. Colin Smith, whose seven-year-old son—also named Colin—died in 1990, spoke for many of the relatives when he told Sky News as the inquiry report was released:
I want justice to be served properly not hypothetically. Let’s see the people who did this, hopefully criminal charges. It is manslaughter at least. I gave my son over to his killers, you know, and I can’t get to grips with that.
When Colin died, his body was so ravaged by the symptoms of hepatitis C and AIDS that he weighed just 13 pounds. Successive Conservative and Labour governments going back more than 50 years refused calls to investigate deaths caused by infected blood, engaging in a concerted cover-up. The present inquiry was finally launched in 2017 under pressure from victims and their families. Langstaff’s 2,500-page report, published over seven volumes, describes a “catalogue of failures” that led to illness and death over decades. It states:
Each failure on its own is serious. Taken together they are a calamity. The scale of what happened is horrifying. The most accurate estimate is that more than 3k deaths are attributable to infected blood, blood products and tissue. Patients died not as a direct result of the underlying condition or illness that took them to the NHS in the first place, but as a result of the treatment itself. The death of patients was “catastrophic” and their partners, family, children and friends had also suffered, some by being themselves infected, some by having to watch loved ones die, some by having to give their lives to caring; and almost every one of them, infected and affected, suffering in almost every aspect of their lives. Systemic, collective and individual failures by government departments and various parts of the NHS killed thousands and destroyed friendships, families, finances. The disaster was not an accident. The infections happened because those in authority, doctors, the blood services and successive governments, did not put patient safety first. In general I can say that responsibility for much lies with successive governments, even though others may share some of it.
Langstaff concluded the harm and suffering of victims was compounded by:
- Repeated and ongoing failures to acknowledge that they should not have been infected.
- Repeated use of inaccurate, misleading and defensive lines to take which cruelly told people that they had received the best treatment available.
- A lack of openness, transparency and candour, shown by the NHS and government, such that the truth has been hidden for decades.
- Deliberate destruction of some documents and the loss of others.
- Refusal to provide compensation (on the ground there had been no fault).
By 2017, it was no longer possible to continue stalling the inquiry long demanded by campaigners. This was accepted by Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May. Langstaff notes in his report’s summary that the inquiry’s terms of reference included consideration of “whether there was a ‘cover-up.’” He concluded:
A better expression to convey what happened is ‘hiding the truth.’ Hiding the truth includes not only deliberate concealment but also a lack of candour: the retelling of half-truths such as the ‘no conclusive proof’ line; and failing to tell people about the risks inherent in treatment or the alternatives to that treatment, that they had been tested for infection, or been used in research, or were suffering from a potentially serious and fatal disease.
Now that the Inquiry is over, the ruling elite are moving to wash their hands of decades of crimes via a compensation scheme that had to be wrung out of them. Sunakt immediately announced £210k in interim payments will be made to victims, ahead of a collective final settlement that could total £10b. None of those responsible will suffer financially, with the cost of the compensation scheme designated as capital spending and funded by central government borrowing. Those who have suffered will have to jump through hoops to get payouts which in no way compensate for their loss. Just as grotesque is the fact that no-one is facing legal prosecution. A few MPs backing calls for 83-year-old former Tory Health Minister ‘Lord’ Kenneth Clarke, to lose his peerage is as far as it went. Langstaff’s inquiry was held under the 2005 Inquiries Act, put in place by Tony Blair’s Labour government of war criminals. It states:
An inquiry panel is not to rule on, and has no power to determine, any person’s civil or criminal liability.
The Act repealed the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921 which had allowed Parliament to vote on a resolution establishing a tribunal that had “all such powers, rights, and privileges as are vested in the High Court.” Blair’s 2005 Act placed this power to call inquiries solely under the control of a government minister. So all-embracing is the power of a sitting government over the public inquiry process that Amnesty International has called on British judges not to serve on an inquiry held under the 2005 Act, noting:
Any inquiry would be controlled by the executive which is empowered to block public scrutiny of state actions.
A number of individuals are named by Longstaff as having played a key role in the infected blood scandal, including Thatcher and Clarke. Clarke was a health minister from 1982 to 1985 and health secretary from 1988 to 1990. In Sep 1983 he issued a press release asserting:
There is no conclusive proof that Aids is transmitted by blood products.
At the inquiry he stood by the statement as being correct at the time. Yet in May 1983, the director of the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre in England and Wales had notified the Department of Health and Social Security of the death from AIDS of a haemophiliac who had been given Factor 8 imported from the US. In his Jul 27 2021 testimony to the inquiry, Clarke let rip his irritation at the line of questioning by lead counsel Jenni Richards QC, dismissing the inquisition as “pretty pointless” and complaining:
Why do we have to go through such meticulous detail through who said what when, when did he change his mind?
Langstaff says of Clarke in his report that his evidence was “disparaging’ towards those who have suffered, and that Clarke had played “some part” in that suffering. Of the “successive governments” involved in the blood scandal, Langstaff specifically criticises the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments of the 80s and 90s, which maintained, contrary to evidence, that haemophiliacs had received the “the best treatment available on the then current medical advice.” Langstaff concludes:
By 1986 the government can have been under no illusion about the scale of what had happened to people with haemophilia. For example, Thatcher’s government knew there was a much higher incidence of Hepatitis in prisoners, yet no action was taken to stop blood donations from them, which increased the risk of transmission.
Also criticised is the Blair government, which refused to even countenance a public inquiry. But every government since 1970 bears responsibility for the murders, suffering and cover-up: the 1970-74 Heath Conservative government; the 1974-76 Wilson Labour governments; the 1976-79 Callaghan Labour/Lab-Lib governments; and the 1979-90 Thatcher Conservative government. The successive governments overseeing the cover-up and denial of justice were the 1990-97 Major Conservative government; the 1997-2010 Blair/Brown Labour governments; and the 2010-2024 Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak Tory governments. The prime ministers and most of the key figures in these governments from the 1970s and 80s have escaped prosecution. Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, and Thatcher are all dead. Major is 81 and Blair 71. Two of the doctors named by Langstaff who carried out the Nazi-like medical trials on children are also dead. Langstaff said:
Leading haemophiliac specialist Professor Arthur Bloom must bear some of the responsibility for the UK’s slowness in responding to the risks of AIDs to people with haemophilia.
Bloom died in 1992. Labour leader ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer moved swiftly to ensure the criminal role of successive governments will be swept under the carpet once and for all via compensation payouts. He has refused calls for criminal prosecutions. As DPP at the CPS between 2008-2013 he did nothing to bring anyone involved in the infected blood scandal to justice. He tweeted:
Intervening several times at this week’s PMQs, Starmer never once raised the question of anyone being prosecuted for their crimes. Despite noting that ‘Sir’ Brian “identified a number of individual failures, even cover-ups,” all he called on Sunak’s government to do was to implement a “duty of candour” that should “apply to all public servants across the board,” as recommended by Langstaff. Sunak should also “ensure compensation by the end of the year” and deliver on all the recommendations in the same timeframe.” Andy Evans, the chair of the campaign group Tainted Blood, in a press conference as the inquiry report was released:
Justice delayed really is, in this case, justice denied. This has gone on for so long now that people that were around at the time will be very hard to track down, if they’re even still alive.
This is the reality facing all seeking justice from the British ruling class. But while many who organised and carried out hideous crimes against thousands of people are dead, those alive cannot be allowed off the hook. They must be charged with murder, prosecuted and imprisoned.
Niqnaq 