[…] in the British League for European Freedom’s “purely political work” (whatever that means) to the formation of Common Cause. (20) Dr. C.A.Smith, former Chair of the Independent Labour Party, was Secretary of Common Cause from 1954-56 (21), presumably from its inception, apparently in 1952: a piece in The Times announced Lord Malcolm Douglas-Hamilton and […]
[…] of the Peoples of Russia was drafted which could, if stripped of its contingent allegiance to the German war effort, pass as a neo-conservative or even New Labour manifesto sixty years later. () It was naive in its time and it slipped through the Nazi system of ideological control in the chaos of those […]
[…] of political economics. For years now Chancellor Gordon Brown has taken the credit for the UK’s low interest rates and low inflation. In his speech to the Labour Party conference on 27 September this year he said, for the umpteenth time: ‘Britain today has the lowest inflation for thirty years…. the lowest interest rates […]
[…] Smith picked up the Fabian version of the white man’s burden concept and went to Nigeria in the early 1950s for the Colonial Office. Working in the Labour Ministry, he drafted some of Nigeria’s labour and factory legislation. His memoir is a fascinating insight into the underbelly of British colonial administration. Smith not only […]
[…] up to the spook problem and turns away again. Of Harold Wilson’s second term he writes: ‘There was, too, a trace of paranoia, not this time about Labour rivals but about something far more sinister. It’s impossible for outsiders – and, indeed, for most insiders – to reach an informed judgement about the alleged […]
[…] institutional palsy, rigor mortis disguised as resolution, and fixed-grin happiness with a resplendent past.’ (p. 31) ‘It was in the late part of this era that the Labour Party graduated into that original “Establishment”; by the fifties it had completely absorbed most of its world view. Such assumptions are extraordinarily tenacious – as “Blairism” […]
[…] 14th February 1988, front page story in the Sunday Express based on leak from MI5 – complete with surveillance photograph – on alleged contact between the then Labour MP John Diamond and two Yugoslav women. The article contained the women’s passport numbers and the flights they came into Vienna on. The point of this […]
[…] economic imperialism in order to achieve trade surpluses. The post-1919 system had generated deflation, had wrecked efforts to sustain international cooperation such as those of the 1929-31 Labour Government in Britain and had prevented the full exploitation of the wealth-creating potential afforded by technological progress. This was why Keynes argued that it was ‘ideas, […]
[PDF file]: Rehabilitating the jailbird? Labour Takes Power: The Denis MacShane Diaries 1997-2001 Denis MacShane London: Biteback Publishing, 2023, £25, h/b In his Preface to this volume, MacShane hopes that ‘it may be of interest to anyone who wants to know how politics works and to Labour MPs who have the honour of being asked to […]
[…] This point was again made by Holroyd himself, in evidence given to the Barron Inquiry in Dublin in 2003. At its simplest, and to paraphrase what Irish Labour Leader Pat Rabbitte recently said about Jonty Brown’s disclosures, in the Irish Dail in October 2005: when credible allegations as serious as this are made, they […]
