Mendelsohn and Labour funding For a party already £20m in debt, Labour’s reported spend of £1m on the autumn election-that-never-was doesn’t chime well with the prudence on which Prime Minister Gordon Brown built his reputation. The man tasked with sorting out the financial mess now that Lord Levy has followed Tony Blair into the […]
BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made […]
[…] policies. This appears still to be the basic assumption of most academic teachers of politics, most of the mass media, and, I fear, most of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The importance of Wallace, Holroyd, Peter Wright, Cathy Massiter et al in the 1980s was their falsification of this theory. MI5, the FBI and the […]
[…] peculiar letters from a Wilson enemy Hartley Shawcross. What the Tribunal did reveal was the involvement of the newly created Foreign Office propaganda unit, IRD, within the Labour movement. There was considerable press interest in 1962 in the East-West Traders who went to the Leipzig Trade Fair. Questions were asked in the House of […]
[…] the 1930s. Nevertheless, it does make clear that Orwell had publicly identified himself as a socialist concerned to make the socialist movement more effective. He rejected the Labour Party as hopelessly compromised and the Communist Party as in thrall to Moscow, calling instead for the emergence of a new Socialist Party. The last paragraph […]
When Labour narrowly won the October 1964 election they were greeted by dismal balance of payments figures. An external deficit in the region of £800 million was forecast, twice what had been expected (although the actual figure has since been revised down to £372 million). The government attempted to manage the crisis by a […]
The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945-2006 Mark Phythian London: Routledge, 2007, £19.99, p/b Reviewed by: Bernard Porter The title of this book is slightly misleading – at any rate, it misled me. I was expecting a broader treatment of Labour’s debates over issues of war and foreign relations, which would have included […]
[…] mentioned. (1) Blair had always been sympathetic to Israel, had shared chambers with Board of Deputies of British Jews President Eldred Tabachnik, (2) and had joined the Labour Friends of Israel on becoming an MP. Two months after returning from Israel, Tony Blair was introduced to Michael Levy at a dinner party by Gideon […]
[…] in Buckinghamshire, for a seated banquet for 100’. Just imagine how this Clinton-Mandelson-Rothschild link is going to be treated by certain American conspiracy theorists! Lobbying news The Labour government’s bizarre decision to follow America down the casinos-are-good-for-you route (See Lobster 43 p. 33) was the result of lobbying by a firm called Good Relations […]
[…] to add a footnote for the historians and, for others, a bit of analysis. The story is that Simon Haskel (later Lord Haskel), then Chair of the Labour Finance & Industry Group (LFIG), asked me to help out Geoff Mulgan. I had been active in the LFIG aspects of the media communications programme which […]
