I met Paul Routledge, the biographer of Gordon Brown, a couple of years ago. ‘Does Brown understand economics?’ I asked him.
‘Well, he reads lots of big books,’ said Routledge.
‘This is not the same thing.’
Of course I asked the wrong question. What I should have asked was: does Gordon Brown understand British economic history? Or: does he understand economic politics? In any case, I would have been asking a question to which I knew the answer. Brown knows little of British economic history: he demonstrated this when he gave away control of interest rates to the Bank of England on day one of his term as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In an economy as open to the world as the UK’s, exporting and importing as much as this country does, the single most important decision is on the exchange rate. If the pound is too high, British export prices are too high to compete abroad. We are now into 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 concerns of exporters:
‘Anyone who thinks that dropping the inflation target to replace it with an exchange rate target, or running inflation and exchange rate targets at the same time is the right way to achieve domestic stability is failing to learn the lessons of the 1980s.'(1)
He said the same thing again in early April 2000. Nine months have rolled past, another 120,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost,(2) and the penny in the slot produces the same snippet of Brown-speak. Quite which ‘lesson of the 1980s’ he is thinking of is unclear to me. Certainly not the lessons of the early 1980s when Thatcher and Howe followed a policy identical to Brown’s, with the same consequences – destruction of manufacturing jobs. Lest we forget: Thatcher and Howe took office and put up interest rates. This pushed up the value of the pound, making British exports expensive and foreign imports cheap. Cue the recession of 1980-83 and the collapse of a large chunk of British manufacturing. Gordon Brown took office, handed over interest rate policy to the bankers, and up went interest rates and the pound rose – albeit not as dramatically as it did in 1980/81. New Labour’s economic policy is simply Thatcherism mark 1 without all the pseudoscience about the money supply. Because it has started from lower inflation than existed in 1980 the interest rate rises under Brown/Blair have not – yet – had to have been to be as savage as those of Thatcher/Howe in the early 1980s. Even Hugo Young has noticed that:
‘…the sounds of therapeutic Thatcherism, defending the industrial destruction of the early 1980s, begin uncomfortably to echo.'(3)
The oddity is that Brown appears to believe that something new is going on. Yet in the 1950s and early 60s the policy of putting up interest rates as soon as a little inflation appeared was derided by Labour spokespeople as ‘stop-go’ economics. Apparently Tory stop-go economics are better than ‘Tory boom and slump’ to use another of Brown’s current sound-bites.
As in the 1980s, the prosperous, City-driven, greater London area can experience growth while large chunks of the rest of the country are close to recession. In May 1999 the TUC reported that in the 106 constituencies where manufacturing employs more than 30% of the work force, half had have recorded a rise in unemployment in the previous six months.(4) At present this has little political significance. Unemployment nationally is falling in part because the growth of the City/London/service sector has outpaced the lost jobs in manufacturing in the North, Midlands,Wales and Scotland (and in part because the government, like its predecessors, is massaging the figures).
Don’t mention the Germans
Last year Gordon Brown’s camp were saying Brown got the idea of the independent central bank from America, from whence, as we know, everything good must now come. In early April this year, with the appointment of a New Zealander to the Treasury to the position of Chief Economist in the Public Services Directorate, it was suggested that it had come from NZ.(5) In fact the idea came from Germany. In the 1980s it wasn’t America whose economy Labour politicians looked at with envy but pre-reunification West Germany, which had higher growth, higher investment, higher productivity, higher living standards – and an independent central bank which controlled the interest rate. A decade or more later all that remained of the German model in New Labour thinking was the one part of it which the City wanted – the independent central bank. Giving to the ‘core financial nexus’ of City-Treasury-Bank of England the right to set interest rates was the final piece in Brown’s policy of capitulating in public, in advance, to that nexus lest they…. well, precisely what it was Brown feared they would do is unclear to me, and probably to him, were he ever asked; but fear them he did.
ERM precedes EMU
The government’s present macroeconomic policy consists of one item: inflation must be kept at or less than 2.5%. The trick is going to be to sustain this if Britain begins the process of joining the euro. Before formal entry into the euro, the UK economy will have to be a member of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) for two years and maintain a stable relationship with the euro. That this is the formal requirement of entry, that there will be no short-cuts for sterling, was reaffirmed by Wim Duesenberg, Head of the European Central Bank in January.(6) In ‘liberal economics’ a stable relationship with the euro will be accomplished by using the interest rate. If the value of the pound falls beneath the agreed level with the euro inside the ERM, interest rates have to rise. And vice versa. The level at which sterling enters the ERM prior to euro entry is the most important economic issue facing this economy if the government decides to enter: for sterling’s exchange rate with the euro will not only determine whether or not exporting companies can compete abroad, it will determine the domestic interest rate.
There is a degree of agreement among those representing the manufacturing economy that the appropriate rate of entry is around D-mark2.40-2.50. Will Hutton, now director of the Industrial Society suggested D-m2.50 – a devaluation of 20% from the D-mark/pound level in March.(7) James Dyson, the inventor and manufacturer of the Dyson vacuum cleaner believes it should be around D-m2.40.(8) A working paper from the IMF in early January reported the pound could not enter without a 20% devaluation from its then D-m2.95 – that is to around D-m2.40.(9) In January the Confederation of British Industry said it would not want to enter the euro at above D-m2.65.(10)
William Keegan wrote in The Observer (16 April):
‘even the most hardened proponent of the pound’s entry into the single currency knows that a substantial devaluation of the pound is one of the necessary conditions attached to taking such a step’ (emphasis added).
‘Necessary conditions’? This is neither generally nor specifically true. There are many proponents of UK entry in the euro who are entirely sanguine about it happening without a ‘substantial devaluation’. There is most of the City of London which, if one is to believe financial journalists, wants a devaluation of sterling like it wants government regulation of its its activities.There is Wim Duesenberg, the President of the European Central Bank: in the course of an interview with Will Hutton, Duesenberg made it quite clear that, if the pound entered the euro, no efforts would be made by the other euro members to reduce the pound’s value before entry. Hutton wrote at this point:
‘That implies a very demanding exchange rate …… the price you pay for joining late. “It’s the price you pay for staying out,” counters Duesenberg.
Hutton commented on the interview:
‘Duesenberg’s words make it clear that if a UK referendum on the euro were won in 2002, Britain would have to accept entry at an exchange rate close to current levels.’
In the last few months there have been many hints from the financial sector and their spokespersons in the Bank of England and Monetary Policy Committee that the British economy is just going to have to get used to living with a high pound. In a piece in The Guardian, Economics Editor Larry Elliot quoted David Owen of Dresdner Kleinwort Benson: ‘There is a general feeling that we are going to have to learn to live with high levels of sterling’; and four paragraphs later quoted Sudhir Junankar of the Confederation of British Industry: ‘There is a lot of talk about industry learning to live with a high exchange rate, but it is clearly too high.'(11)
A variety of lines have been offered to rationalise this. There is the ‘over valued pound is good for you’. I heard this put in a naive way by Brown’s former spin doctor, Charlie Whelan, a man who knows even less about economics than Gordon Brown. Though formally no longer Brown’s mouthpiece, Whelan is still close to the Chancellor. Germany had a strong currency and look how well they did, said Whelan on Radio 5 in March, showing he hadn’t understood that the high D-mark was the product of economic success not a means of getting it. Making the same error, this was echoed by Bill Jamieson of The Sunday Telegraph who asked in his column, ‘Why should a strong currency be good for Japan but bad for Britain?'(12) In April, Brown told the annual conference of the British Chambers of Commerce that they should stop complaining about the pound and concentrate
- on increasing their productivity and
- using the Internet.(13)
It’s enough to make you wonder why Ford didn’t think of this before closing their car plant at Dagenham.
The Prime Minister has been given a variety of strategies for fending off the arguments about the over-valued pound. In March he accused those who spoke of it of as seeking ‘perpetual devaluation’, reiterated the Treasury line about increasing productivity, finally denying that manufacturing was really suffering that much any way.(14) In May he was at it again. In briefings to the Sunday Telegraph (14 May) and to the Guardian (15 May) the Prime Minister’s spin-doctors rejected ‘quick fixes’ and ‘short-term effects’ which would put at risk the ‘long-term stability’ the government – i.e. the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee – had achieved. The Thatcherite acronym TINA, there is no alternative, is back on the computers of those writing the briefings for our leaders. For the Treasury and those taking their briefings from it, manufacturing is now being treated as something like the farming and fishing industries, another basket case, always whining and complaining about the conditions under which it has to work.(15)
However, no matter which rationalisations the Prime Minister’s and Chancellor’s advisers come up with about the over-valuation of sterling, as long as the interest rate is set by the Monetary Policy Committee and as long as its brief is creating inflation at no more than 2.5% using only interest rates, we are going to have higher interest rates than the euro zone and thus an over-valued pound. Bank of England Governor, Eddie George, more or less admitted this at the beginning of April.(16)
The five steps to euro heaven
Specifically it is quite false to state as Keegan did above, that
….even the most hardened proponent of the pound’s entry into the single currency knows that a substantial devaluation of the pound is one of the necessary conditions attached to taking such a step.
There is no reference to the level of sterling in the five conditions of entry into the single currency pronounced by Gordon Brown just after Labour took office in 1997. These conditions are:
- Would joining EMU create better working conditions for firms making long-term decisions to invest in the UK?
- How would adopting the single currency affect our financial services?
- Are business cycles and economic structures compatible so that we and others could live comfortably with euro interest rates on a permanent basis?
- If problems do emerge, is there sufficient flexibility to deal with them?
- Will joining EMU help to promote higher growth, stability and a lasting increase in jobs?(17)
The striking thing about these conditions is that the only sector of the economy specifically referred to is the City of London (‘our financial services’) – a sector which, according to the City-funded propaganda organisation British Invisibles, is only 6.4% of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product.(18) There is no reference to the rest of domestic economy or to the exchange rate.(19)
What the five conditions do is make it impossible for the pound to join the euro – if the government is so minded to use them that way. For example, it is hard to see how it will ever be in the interests of the City to join the euro. To maintain its position as the world’s leading off-shore financial area the City apparently needs (a) higher interest rates than its major competitors to attract money to London and (b) as little regulation as possible; and neither of these will be forthcoming in the euro zone.
On the face of it, then, there appears to be little chance of sterling joining the euro: at least one of the five conditions can never be met. This was undoubtedly the aim of whoever it as within the Treasury who drew up the conditions and dropped them into the Chancellor’s red box. The Treasury opposes UK entry into the euro – just as it opposed UK entry into the EEC in 1973. The Bank of England, which would lose much of its power if the UK joined the euro, is now openly sceptical about UK membership of the single currency.(20)
Brown versus Blair
In March this year there was a briefing exercise by the Brown camp in the ongoing struggle with Blair.(21) Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer (5 March), ‘How Gordon has trussed up Tony’, and Joe Murphy and David Cracknell in The Sunday Telegraph (19 March), ‘Mr Brown closes in for the kill’, wrote large pieces describing Gordon Brown’s dominance of the Labour government. Rawnsley’s piece was subheaded, ‘Gordon Brown still burns with ambition to be Prime Minister. I wonder why he bothers. In all but name, he is already.’ On the same day as the Rawnsley piece Bill Jamieson in his column in The Sunday Telegraph commented that:
….recent declarations by Brown….on the importance of enterprise, innovation and entrepreneurialism have had an almost Thatcherite ring. The City is warming to him. As Blair is run ever more ragged, it is Brown who will prove the powerhouse of Labour’s re-election prospects.
Rawnsley noted that, ‘Entry into the single currency will be determined by Brown’s assessment of whether his five economic tests have been passed. Blair is in a box on Europe which only Brown can unlock.’
This is not a box Brown is likely to unlock. When Labour took office Foreign Secretary Robin Cook was against membership of the single currency and Brown for it.(22) Both men have since adopted the position of their departments. The Foreign Office has always been the major lobbyist for increasing involvement in Europe; Cook is now keen on entry into the euro. (23) The Treasury was against EEC entry in 1973 on economic grounds and has opposed entry into the single currency; and Brown is now – apparently – against it. Or rather Brown is officially in favour – if the conditions are right – knowing that since the five Treasury conditions he adopted make entry impossible if he choses to interpret them that way, he need not express a public view either way.
From a distance
When I was out of the country last October, I watched as the French government found some new quasi-scientific pretext to extend its ban on the import of British beef. As the Eurosceptics in the Tory Party got another batch of press coverage, it suddenly seemed blindingly obvious that the French government was doing this to try to boost the British Eurosceptics with the long-term aim of keeping Britain out of the single currency and thus marginalised in the EU. Direct evidence to support this view there is none; but I spotted this paragraph in a Stratfor bulletin on France on 6 March.(24)
Viewed in this way, we can see now that the collapse of the Soviet Union posed a mortal threat to France. Without the counterweight of the Soviet Union, France was in danger of being completely overwhelmed by the Americans. The French response was logical. First, it intensified its drive for European integration, extending it from the purely economic, to the political and military. Second, it intensified its drive to maintain influence in its former colonies.
For this strategy to work…… Great Britain must be kept out of as many European institutions as possible, or induced to decline membership, since London waters down French influence while, at the same time representing U.S. interests.
Stratfor’s prediction of an increased French drive towards integration was followed by a report in the Daily Telegraph on 20 April, ‘Germans and French look to full union in 10 years’ by Toby Helm and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, which described plans ‘to revive the flagging Franco-German axis’, via ‘an inner core of European Union nations to achieve full political union within a decade’. The report noted that ‘the French ambassador to the EU, Pierre Vimont, told the European Parliament this week that France was going to use its EU presidency to press for reforms that would include abolition of the national veto on taxation, social issues and the environment.’
Struggle for the shape of the EU
On 3 May, the Daily Telegraph quoted extensively from articles in Le Monde the day before which showed what the French were opposing in the EU from Britain. According to Le Monde, it was Britain which was making a successful push inside the EU. Britain had:
…taken advantage of the conceptual void and filled it… on a range of subjects, it is British influence which has prevailed. Not content with foisting its policies on Europe, Britain is also doggedly blocking developments it does not like, notably moves to harmonise taxation across the European Union.
(The UK is also encouraging expansion of the EU. It has been UK foreign policy for many years to encourage expansion of the EU membership (a) at minimum, to frustrate the Franco-German drive towards full federal Europe; and (b) at maximum to cause the entire structure to collapse.)
This Le Monde piece is part of the contextualising of a French-German diplomatic initiative to ‘reverse the the euro’s relentless slide by launching the EU on a fresh course of political integration’. In advance of the EU summit at Rambouillet which began on 19 May, the content of a speech by the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer was given to the media. After prolonged consultation with his French counterparts, Fischer said that the currency union means a complementary political union and proposes increased political integration, a ‘single European government’, and an elected President of Europe.(25)
There is federalising pressure elsewhere. In the Sunday Times of 5 December 1999 Stephen Grey reported:
Tony Blair is under pressure from European leaders to support the creation of a ‘federalised’ EU intelligence service to help manage world crises. The move, proposed by Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, and President Jacques Chirac of France, is seen as the first step towards the creation of Europe’s own spy agency, based in Brussels.
And in the Daily Telegraph of 28 February 2000, Alan Judd, the former (?) SIS officer Alan Petty (26) warned of plans to create an EU army.
All of which is indigestible to sections of the British state, virtually the whole the Conservative Party, a large chunk of Labour, much of the British media – and would be to the British electorate were they ever to be asked to approve them.
euro bound?
I don’t know if the Blair government is going to try to get us into the euro. The political/financial media are uncertain. There is no serious-minded government campaign for the euro – nor will there be one until after the next election. After that, in theory, there will be a referendum in the UK on entry. The government has been tweaking the referendum process to reduce the potential spending of the ‘no’ campaign. Could a big government-funded ‘yes’ campaign defeat a ‘no’ campaign led by the Mail, the Telegraph and the Murdoch papers?
Unremarked by most of the media, what looked like a pretty serious hint at the government’s position was dropped on 2 April. The content of a paper delivered by Tony Blair’s economics advisor, Derek Scott,(27) was reported in the Sunday Telegraph. At the annual gathering of the Anglo-German political elite at the Konigswinter meeting in Oxford,
…flanked by David Miliband, the head of the Prime Minister’s policy unit, and Ed Balls the chief economics adviser to Chancellor Gordon Brown, Scott said that ‘it would be many years before Britain could safely take the risk of adopting the new currency.'(28)………….. According to the Treasury insider, Mr Scott warned of the danger of Britain pegging its exchange rate to the euro……Mr Scott also highlighted the political difficulties that a re-elected Labour government would face if it attempted to persuade Britons to give up the pound early in the new parliament……this disclosure of Mr Scott’s speech will fuel the belief in Westminster that Mr Blair is under pressure to abandon the single currency. The chancellor has let it be known that he is sceptical about the benefits of monetary union and the he favours following the American model of an enterprise economy….
So: what is the status of this? A ‘Treasury insider’, one of the Brown team, leaks this because Scott’s views as reported here are those of the Treasury – and the majority of the City and Bank of England. But is all what it seems? The Telegraph piece concluded with the comment that the Conservatives
believe that Labour is leaking the anti-euro views to give an impression of backtracking on the single currency, while secretly planning to campaign for membership after the general election.
The government is still, formally, preparing for euro entry. A number of preparatory moves were announced by Chancellor Brown in October 1997; and Bradford University’s Brian Burkitt usefully reminded us in a recent issue of Spectre, that the British economy is being squeezed to meet the financial criteria set by the Maastricht Treaty deemed necessary before entry.(29) In Gordon Brown’s inane cliché, if prudence is for a purpose, part of the purpose appears to be joining the single currency.
Assuming a ‘yes’ vote in a referendum, the next hurdle is the five conditions that have to be met laid out by Brown at the beginning of Labour’s first term: specifically, how does it get round the ‘City interest’ clause among the five conditions of entry? This may not be the hurdle it may have seemed once. The actual wording of the ‘City interest’ clause refers to ‘our financial services’. What does the ‘our’ in that expression refer to? British-owned? Based in London?
Before he set up the very free market-oriented, City-friendly Independent, Andreas Whittam-Smith was City editor of the Telegraph. Belatedly he has begun to wonder if allowing the City’s institutions to be bought by foreign capital was such a good idea. In the Independent of 13 March he noted that ‘Ownership of [the City]…has recently, piece by piece, passed into foreign hands’, mused on the previous threats to the City’s prosperity going back to the South Sea Bubble, and concluded:
I confess, however, to a bit more unease than usual, for in effect we have given the keys to the City of London to its global competitors. They could, if they chose, on grounds of national rivalry rather than pure commercial calculation, set about dismantling it.
Less than two months later, on 4 May under the heading, ‘City must reject the Exchange’s preposterous proposals’, the Telegraph railed at the plan to merge the London stock exchange with that of Hamburg – hitherto London’s major rival in the EU in the provision of financial services. The scheme, the Telegraph tells us,
…… has been railroaded through by the big American banks. They have long been frustrated by the parochial, fractured nature of share markets in Europe, and as their power has grown in London, so they have piled on the pressure to get things changed to their liking. From their perspective, arguments about the euro are a mere irritant, something in the way of their global money-malting machines. How much simpler and easier to impose one Europe-wide settlement and in one currency – and what a shame it couldn’t be the dollar, but these Europeans have to be indulged, for the moment at least (emphases added).
Does the City matter as much as it did? Now that it is largely foreign-owned, can its reactions be predicted?
End games
It is possible that Britain will stay out of the euro – the Labour government may back away from a referendum campaign it might lose – and the Franco-German core group will form with the British government accepting, if not admitting, that it will never be ‘at the heart of Europe’. Even given a ‘yes’ vote in a referendum, a large number of scenarios are plausible. But almost all of them now seem to include the UK joining the ERM (and then the euro) at a level close to contemporary (early May) D-mark levels; and at this level UK manufacturing will continue to be destroyed.(30) Duisenberg’s comments quoted above, plus the apparent desire of the French and German governments to push forward the creation of an inner core group within the Union – and one that would exclude Britain – make this seem very likely indeed. However, for what it’s worth, here is my candidate for the likely scenario.
At the next general election Labour loses at least 100 seats and its overall majority depends upon the Campaign group of left-inclined MPs, most of whom are not europhiles. Even with a greatly reduced majority, and faced by a press and financial sector largely hostile to euro entry, the focus group-dominated Labour government risks a campaign for euro entry. For many of those around Blair, and most of the managers of the big companies who are bankrolling the ‘New Labour’ project, full-scale UK membership of the EU is still at the top of the agenda. With a much reduced majority in the Commons, Labour is forced to cooperate more closely with the Liberal-Democrats, whose numbers rose as Labour’s fell at the election. This is no bad thing where the euro is concerned for the Lib-Dems are very pro. Increased Labour-Lib-Dem cooperation pushes to the forefront the Labour-Liberal realignment which, with EU membership, is at the heart of the Blairite project.
Urged on by those who want sterling to join the euro to reduce interest rates – ‘Say yes to the euro to save British jobs’ – the Labour-Lib-Dem alliance leads a campaign to join the euro (via two year membership of the ERM) with the great and the good, the CBI, the big multi-nationals and the BBC and ITV. This succeeds narrowly and the UK duly enters the ERM – at around 3 D-marks to the pound – too high for the manufacturing sector.
And thus we have the delirious prospect of another ERM crisis as the Bank of England tries to maintain sterling at its agreed ERM level by putting up interest rates; destroying more of what is left of British manufacturing; creating a recession; and climaxing, as it did in 1992, with the same absurd, final act: the UK forced to drop out of the ERM after giving a large proportion of its foreign currency reserves away to the speculators while trying to defend the sterling/D-mark rate demanded by ERM membership.
Could they really be this stupid?
Oh, yes.
Notes
- The Guardian 11 June 1999
- The figure is a guess on my part. 122,000 were lost January 99 to January 00. See The Independent 16 March 2000.
- Guardian 6 April. Young, of course, thinks we should join the euro, though it isn’t clear from his recent writing if he is aware of the two year period spent in the EMU which will precede it.
- Will Hutton, The Observer 2 May 1999. The Labour Party is now the two economies grafted together and splits along Old Labour/New Labour; centre/ periphery; industry/City; national/transnational.
- Daily Telegraph 1 April 00 – and no, I don’t think it was an April Fool’s Day joke. Considering the devastation wrought on the New Zealand public services by ‘liberals’ in New Zealand, this is ominous news for the public sector in the UK.
- In an interview with Will Hutton in The Observer 23 January 2000.
- Observer 19 March
- Guardian 16 February
- Guardian 11 January
- Quote by William Keegan, The Observer 23 January 2000. The man who may be said to be one of the founding fathers of the single currency, Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Mundell, predicted that the UK would join the Euro at around Dm2.95. Guardian 10 January 2000. As the Guardian writer commented, Dm2.95 is ‘the level at which the pound crashed out of the exchange rate mechanism in 1992.’
- Guardian 12 October
- Sunday Telegraph 30 January 2000
- Independent 5 April 2000.
- Guardian 24 March 2000
- For example, Joanne Hart, Deputy City Editor of the Evening Standard wrote of the British manufacturing sector ‘whingeing’ about the value of sterling. Evening Standard 5 April 2000.
- See ‘I can’t weaken pound, says Bank governor’ in The Independent 5 April 2000.
- I’m quoting from Robin Marris in The Guardian 1 February 2000 who quoted the Treasury Web site.
- The Guardian 6 January 1999. British Invisibles may be presumed to exaggerate in favour of its employers, The City.
- This was commented on by the chief economist of the CBI, Kate Barker in ‘Euro tests fall short’ in The Observer 30 January 2000.
- See, for example, Hamish McRae in The Independent 16 December 1999, ‘The City shows the way to an off-shore future’, which begins ‘So Eddie George, governor of the Bank of England, thinks the City is doing better with the pound out of the euro…’; Daily Telegraph (Business news) 12 April, ‘George “glad Britain stayed out of the euro”‘; and Janey Bush, ‘Economic Agenda’ in The Sunday Telegraph 16 April 2000 commenting on George’s remarks.
- The best short account of this conflict is in Peter Oborne’s excellent Alastair Campbell: New Labour and the Rise of the Media Class, (London: Arum Press, 1999), especially chapter ten.
- See for example Paul Routledge, Gordon Brown, (London: Simon and Schuster, 1998), pp.327/8.
- In The Sunday Telegraph 12 December Matthew d’Ancona claimed that Cook had been offered the job of Secretary-General of NATO. This presumably was an attempt by Blair to get him out of the Cabinet. With Cook out of the way Blair could have made Peter Mandelson Foreign Secretary.
- www.stratfor.com/
- ‘Closer EU ties “will salvage sinking euro”‘, Sunday Telegraph 14 May 2000
- According to Steve Dorril’s new book on SIS, reviewed in this issue, Petty was assistant to SIS chief Sir Colin McColl.
- One of the many former members of the SDP in the Blair entourage. On Scott see Tom Easton in Lobster 33.
- The quotations marks indicate this is what was printed by the Telegraph, not that this is an exact quote from Scott.
- Brian Burkitt, ‘Gordon Brown’s Budgetary Policy and the Maastricht Convergence Criteria’ in Spectre no. 9. BP5, Bxl 46, rue Wiertz, 1047 Brussels, Belgium. www.sp.nl/spectre/ Burkitt’s article was used by Christopher Booker in his column in the Sunday Telegraph London 14 May.
- This is discussed in Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer, ‘History shows ditching pound at this level could lead to disaster’, The Guardian 3 April 2000.