This is not a sleazy story of spin so much as anti-spin. It starts with the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases and its forensic foragers Annie Rainbow and Lindis Percy, who first found evidence of Britain's participation in missile defence. They unearthed a government press release interred in a local authority planning office revealing that Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire would be updated with space-based and infra-red systems.

They trawled US government websites for a couple of years to find out what this meant. It meant star wars. Menwith Hill would pass on intelligence about missile launches to Fylingdales - the early warning listening station on the moors near Whitby - a link the government has blurred for years.

In February 2000, defence secretary Geoff Hoon admitted he had discussed Fylingdales with US officials. But no, the US had not made a formal request for British facilities. That was that. The Labour party, amazingly, seems to have no position on missile defence. Ask the MoD, says party HQ. Labour's last manifesto merely echoed the Hoon doctrine.

Critics concerned that missile defence is an offensive system which breaches the world's pact to keep space free from human warfare have been trying in vain to ventilate the issue in the Commons. They detected that time was running out last summer, when US officials toured Europe selling star wars. But as late as November 4, Hoon was still operating his defensive shield: questions about British involvement in star wars were "premature", he said.

A week later, however, he told a Foreign Policy Centre conference that missile defence was "the best architecture" for security. So he'd said it. The director of the newly named US Missile Defence Agency toured Fylingdales and said that a star wars deal was "near complete". Indeed it was a "done deal", according to some specialist reports.

Questions to the MoD about the end of the anti-ballistic missile treaty attracted agnostic replies: nothing to do with us mate, ask Russia and America. A US defence commentator, Theresa Hitchens, warned that, despite almost universal international desire to protect space for peaceful purposes, President Bush wanted to shed the ABM treaty to "weaponise space".

On December 9, Hoon submitted a discussion paper including missile defence to the Commons, with no timetable or deadline. On December 10 the MoD was still sticking to the "no request" alibi. A week later, the formal request arrived. Then it was Christmas.

Early in January, Hoon turned up in Yorkshire and local MP Lawrie Quinn hastily convened a meeting with the people. No one quite knew who had been invited or why. The hand-picked audience got only one question each and they weren't allowed to discuss US defence policy.

Hoon finally came out on January 15. He was "minded" to sign up to star wars - he didn't tell us that he would do it by this week, as the defence select committee has just discovered. MPs were outraged - he had gone to the press before parliament, and he had pre-empted the committee's own consultations. Lib Dem defence spokesman Menzies Campbell protested: "This looks like a pre-emptive strike."

The timing was "simply majestic", said Tory MP Crispin Blunt. Since 1998 the government had known that the US wanted UK bases. Blunt had attended a Pentagon briefing in 1998, together with Dari Taylor, the then defence secretary's parliamentary private secretary, at which the US "welcomed full British involvement". "They simply did not face up to the debate," Blunt said. They just wanted to "manage Labour party opinion".

After dumping the "ethical dimension" to foreign policy, New Labour dissembled discussion of missile defence as if star wars was inevitable. By deferring a decision it, in effect, hid its decision.

New Labour is an obliging partner in a system it believes to be so self-evidently right that only crusties, lefties and loonies would complain. It blurs the boundaries between the people and the party, the party and the state. This is soft Stalinism. Abject in the midst of power, and yet authoritarian in the exercise of it, New Labour demeans politics as the art of airing conflict peacefully.