The unspeakable Martin Kettle of The Guardian is a political journalist who has been pretty close to, and supportive of, New Labour since the 1990s. His article ‘The special relationship that squandered a noble cause’ (27 May 2006) opened with this: ‘The long arc of Tony Blair’s rise and decline has been punctuated by […]
The first of three essays in this issue are about New Labour and its origins. I put mine first because of its general, context-setting nature. The subsequent essays, on the Successor Generation and the operations in the British Unions, deepen and thicken the section towards the end of the opening essay which discusses New […]
[…] eternal, blessed, values of England. Much Conservative history has been written by Conservatives, and a myth has been perpetuated. As Davies points out in his introduction, the Labour Party and its politicians have been the subject of much greater and more critical exposure – as one would expect of anything new. As a consequence, […]
What was Henry Brandon? One of the most interesting secondary sources covering the struggles of the British Labour government under Harold Wilson to prevent the devaluation of sterling between 1964-66 is Henry Brandon’s In the Red, published by Andre Deutsch in 1966. It is a remarkably well-informed text and its reliability is underlined by […]
The personal and the political A small anecdotal footnote to Labour history. One of the great puzzles for those who followed the career of party leader Hugh Gaitskell was why, shortly before his death in 1963, he chose to oppose British entry to the then Common Market when his right-wing party colleagues and American […]
[…] sovereignty was suppressed rather than admit that Parliament would have to accept European regulations that conflicted with its own statutes. Officials were encouraged to spy on the Labour Party’s plans to oppose the terms of entry and even drafted speeches for pro-European Labour frontbenchers to deliver at their party conference. The unit was told […]
[…] whom, and about whose thinking, they knew almost nothing. The readily available sources of information on the Tories were then slight: in practice, there was Searchlight and Labour Research. Pursuing its aim of amplifying the fascist ‘threat’ to bolster support for and the legitimacy of, the state of Israel, Searchlight was then pushing the […]
[…] in the opposition to the Lloyd George Coalition’s Irish policy, in particular the so-called ‘reprisals’ policy with its murder squads and house-burnings. And then he joined the Labour Party. The eagerness with which the Labour Party, including the party at constituency level, welcomed this upper class convert and his wife with their country estate, […]
Peter Oborne and Simon Walters London: Aurum Press, 2004 p/back, £8.99 If you were going to read only one book on New Labour, this account of the New Labour people and their relationships with the media, from the days of opposition through to Campbell’s resignation in the wake of the death of Dr […]
[…] you have to get rid of people: ‘they gum up the works’. That the firm was a little people-light was simply put down to their efficiency. Fewer labour units equalled more profits. Andersen Andersen, the company’s auditor, who let these figures pass, would hardly have survived a moderately close inspection of its own track […]
