Patriots not sneaks After a year of New Labour I feel beholden to write something on this subject, but what is there worth saying that isn’t blindingly and depressingly obvious and predictable? Jack Straw, who took over as Home Secretary, and thus formally as the boss of MI5, is determined to sedate any sleeping […]
[…] old manor house in Lancashire reveal the true depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century. Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines had bailed out both the left-wing News on […]
[…] belief in the market rather then the state, the individual rather than the social – exercised a hegemonic influence over British politics, with the creation of New Labour signalling an abject surrender to the new orthodoxy.’ (1) As if he had nothing to do with it!’ Two of the recipients, Tim Pendry and William […]
[…] was augmented by several others. Foreign Office official Gladwyn Jebb was instrumental in forming the Common Market Campaign, with Roy Jenkins as deputy, which aimed to recruit Labour intellectuals and trade unionists to its cause. Other campaigns were launched by the Conservative and Liberal parties, Federal Union (assisted by a number of former civil […]
[…] the siting of a new generation of nuclear weapons in Britain, a rising trade union official was invited to the west London home of a former US labour attaché. On the recommendation of a colleague who was active in the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding, he had been proposed for a trip to Washington […]
[…] time to be a social democratic ally of the United States. In Britain we had “the Wilson plots’; in Australia Gough Whitlam, Jim Cairns and the Australian Labour Party got Governor Kerr and the CIA; in Germany Willi Brandt resigned after a “security scandal’; in New Zealand a series of domestic scandals blighted the […]
Peter Jones I.B. Tauris, London, 1997, £39.50 hb This is a dull run through the conventional post-war history of the Labour Party in relation to the USA. Jones takes as a given that the Labour Party in the post-war years should be pro-American, and therefore does not think it worth explaining how this came […]
[…] the politicians. Palast’s concerns are the main agenda: America, the power of the corporations; the institutions of the new world order – and, almost a sideshow, New Labour. In the last few years he has exposed the nature of the New Labour government in the ‘cash for access’ affair; discovered how the Republicans stole […]
[…] the Pinay Circle, Interdoc etc. etc. far too many even for a list. But here are some fairly typical snippets. He tells us (p. 108) that when Labour won the election in 1974, IRD dropped its briefings on subversion in Britain. This may explain why Colin Wallace was in such demand post February 1974. […]
[…] Lord Thomson, who shared his son-in-law’s strong interest in defence and Europe, became a European commissioner in 1972, one of the many Atlanticist Gaitskellites to find the Labour Party an increasingly inhospitable home as the Vietnam War, the Chile coup, and other US foreign policies failed to chime with younger party members as they […]
