[…] to pollster and ‘strategist’ to the prime minister and if we are to believe him, senior US and Israeli politicians coincided with that of New Labour. His associate for much of that time, Deborah Mattinson, now heads Opinion Leader Research (OLR), part of the Chime Communications empire of Tim (since 1990, Lord) […]
[…] a handful of socialists featured here. Some, like Stokes, were more Right wing than Conservatives like Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. Others, like Maxton and the Independent Labour Party group, operated from a conviction that war was a product of imperialism, which in itself was the highest stage of capitalism. It was therefore the […]
In 1998, I left the New Labour Party, more out of exhaustion than anything else. For two or three years, I had been at the forefront of the drive to modernise the Party through promoting internal party democracy, first as Deputy Chair and Founding Member of Labour Reform, and then as Coordinator of the […]
[…] New Labourites. On the same day that H’Angus was elected in Hartlepool, Islington South – the constituency as near as anywhere to the spiritual home of New Labour – lost its last few Labour councillors. Sacked New Labour Cabinet minister Chris Smith now finds himself without a single Labour councillor in his constituency and […]
[…] three BAP veterans, though less publicly so, was another early member of the BAP, Gloria Craig. Twenty-six years in the Ministry of Defence when Robertson became New Labour Defence Secretary in 1997, she is now its director of general security and safety. Her former MoD colleague, Jonathan Day, moved with Robertson to NATO HQ […]
[…] these have been (or are imagined to have been) under threat from the Left. Notable examples are the anti-Bolshevik panics of the 1920s, the attempted destabilisation of Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s, and the surveillance of trade unionists (notably the striking miners) in the 1980s. This is an important historiographic breakthrough which […]
[…] police state. The evidence for true tyranny in either country is weak. However, since it came to power in 1997, it might be reasonably argued(1) that New Labour has brought the United Kingdom one third of the way towards a ‘tyranny’ if we look closely at what the Blair Government has actually done since […]
[…] 43, more news on the gentle art of perfuming a skunk. First Pick Your Voters Some strong contenders here. But first out of the hat is the Labour Party for performance during the all-postal voting experiments that were tried across the country in the May local council elections. All-postal may have increased turnout to […]
[…] of The Independent. His wife, Jackie Ashley, a Guardian columnist, was previously a political journalist for the New Statesman and ITN News. Ashley, the daughter of former Labour MP Jack (now Lord) Ashley, grew up close to the powerful in the party and the careers of both have prospered mightily under New Labour. When […]
[…] there are always those who see an inevitability that may never have been there in the first place. So it is with the current problems of New Labour, the shift of economic power to the East, the global credit crisis and a food crisis that might turn tin-pot tribal insurgencies into the real thing […]
