[…] Cabinet, including Harriet Harman, one of his most devoted supporters. And as Blair’s team were battling to protect Liddle they were simultaneously planning the removal of faithful Labour MEPs from winning positions on next year’s Euro election lists and denying Labour MPs and other senior figures in the party the chance to stand for […]
A talk given by Robin Ramsay to Labour Party branches in late 1996This is an adaptation and massive compression of the pamphlet The Clandestine Caucus written and published by Robin Ramsay in 1996. In that the sources for most of the claims contained in this talk are to be found. Dirty tricks and covert […]
Russell Holden Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, hb, £47.50 The author is an enthusiastic supporter of the ‘reforms’ of the Labour Party and a Senior Lecturer in European Studies. His thesis is that the changes in Labour’s policy from anti- to pro-EU membership are the core of the ‘reforming’ of Labour in the 1980s and […]
John Smith: Old Labour’s lost leader? In non-New Labour Labour Party circles the late John Smith is remembered with great reverence.(1) Quite what this is based on escapes me. All I can identify is his dislike of Peter Mandelson: Smith kept him at bay therefore Smith was a good man seems to be the […]
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one […]
[…] College Dublin academic Andrew Finlay, (himself from Rathcoole in North Belfast) it has been ‘erased’. To some extent, this reflects the situation in mainland Britain under New Labour, where Martin Kettle of The Guardian (as an example) disputes the significance of the 1984 Miners’ Strike and the fetish for identity and cultural representation is […]
[…] the Gang of Four in 1981. The avowed intention of the four former Cabinet ministers was to offer Britain a fresh alternative – a replacement for the Labour party in which they themselves had made their name and to which most non-Conservatives in Britain had looked for alternative government for most of the 20th […]
From Les Raphael A comment on Garrick Alder’s reference in Lobster 43 to the Zinoviev letter story. It’s a myth that the letter cost Labour the 1924 election, loaded with false implications, such as: that Labour had a majority to begin with (they only won 191 seats in 1923 – and only contested 427 […]
[…] the third year of the current period of living with a pound valued too highly. Like Thatcher and her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, in 1979-81, Labour has no exchange rate policy. Indeed, Gordon Brown warns of the perils of having one. On 10 June 1999 Brown said that while he understood the […]
[…] Defence’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) has been generally reported as a financial scandal. More important is what it tells us about the politics of New Labour. There are two dimensions to this: first there is New Labour’s commitment to big business and in particular to the arms industry; but second and, arguably […]
