[PDF file]: […] it by two events. The first was the death of its author earlier this year; the second has been the recurrence of the ‘doom’ narrative of the Labour Party. This fatalistic style of thinking has reappeared following Labour’s fairly dismal election results in May 2021, and its previous drubbing in the 2019 general election. […]
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 […]
[…] But there was also a history that ‘endowed the City with a talent pool and an infrastructure that enabled it to seize the moment’ and a New Labour government that ‘through a mixture of good luck and good judgement, enabled the City to make the most of these opportunities’. Augar sees Brown’s creation of […]
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, […]
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 […]
Edward Pearce London: Little, Brown, 2002, £25, h/b. Compared to the present crop of media-trained, PR-conscious, line-following, careerist pigmies who comprise the current Labour Cabinet, Denis Healey looks like a giant from a golden age. Before his well known roles as Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer (during the Tory-induced inflation […]
[…] mystery surrounding David Williams/Jack Hill, the major contributor to the Common Cause Bulletin. Harold Smith writes: Jack Hill was the name of a young, bright, good looking Labour Agent who, in the late 1940s (when I was the Labour Candidate in Rusholme Ward for Manchester City Council) was Assistant or Deputy to Reg Wallis, […]
[…] Andrew Gilligan blamed by the internal BBC inquiry while all his superiors escaped censure throws a little more light on the tightness of the New Labour network. Conducting the investigation was Caroline Thomson, the BBC director of policy, who is married to Roger Liddle, Tony Blair’s adviser on defence. Thomson and Liddle, […]
[…] book on the Miner’s strike; fell in love with Thatcherism; studied in the States; joined a think tank and St Antony’s College (1996-99); and fronted for New Labour via the Foreign Policy Centre (1999 onwards). He is unclear when he left the Communist Party but by 1997 he was sitting next to John Bolton […]
