David Craig and Richard Brooks London: Constable, 2006, £9.99, p/b When the Blair faction took office in 1997 as ‘New Labour’ we knew that they were going to be pro-American, pro-NATO, pro-business, anti-union and media conscious. What we did not know then was just how completely they had internalised the Thatcher ethos, how […]
[…] a ‘parliamentary fellow’). There is also a section (pp. 336-7) on his attendance at the 1995 Bilderberg conference. Of this he writes: ‘I am sent by the Blair office as none of the front-line Labour spokesmen can go’. Oddly – or not – Bilderberg is not in the index. Generalissimo Somehow it was terribly […]
[…] link with the Americans. Here is the late Hugo Young’s notes on a conversation with the late Robin Cook, when Cook was foreign secretary in the first Blair administration. (2) Young asked Cook why the British government supports the US so slavishly. ‘Because of the Ministry of Defence’s fanatical determination to keep close to […]
From Thatcher to the Third Way: think-tanks, intellectuals and the Blair project Robert Carl Blank Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-89821-277-7 This illustrates the hazards of Amazon’s ‘search inside the book’ feature: I read an interesting couple of pages of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money. This is […]
Rogue State: A guide to the world’s only superpower William Blum Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $16.95 Globalize This! The battle against the World Trade Organization and corporate rule eds. Kevin Danaher and Roger Burbach Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $15.95 I have lumped these together partly because they are both published […]
[…] of the British Medical Association which has.(22) Julie Lloyd and Steve Potter contribute an essay on Cognitive Analytic Therapy and use it to analyse the speeches of Blair and Bush. They show that Bush, Blair (or their speechwriters, more likely) use language to present their case in the best possible light and play on […]
[…] the old money of the landed aristocracy is still very much part of this picture as is the more recently accumulated wealth of those whose company Tony Blair seems to enjoy. Indeed part of Lansley’s indignation at the growing inequality in Britain is directed at New Labour’s support and encouragement for it – and […]
[…] can be learned for the future.’ Not that we’ll ever learn the lessons as the event was ‘off the record’ and closed to the media. Sir Ian Blair on ‘Policing the metropolis: current challenges’. Challenges include ‘…communication and accountability in an increasingly diverse world city…’. This event was also ‘off the record’ and closed […]
[…] I guess, steal – every last barrel of oil on earth to keep its cars and its air-conditioning units running. Even though everyone – everyone bar Tony Blair, it seems – knows it’s about oil, throughout the summer and autumn the media was saturated with stories about about Saddam Hussein, Iraq, its weapons and […]
[…] lobbyist. This isn’t just a matter of old cronies who know each others’ phone numbers. The three principals of LLM each worked as senior advisors to PM Blair during the campaign and individually for Messrs. Straw, Brown and Blair in opposition. They, as other ‘connected’ lobbyists such as Mr Draper, gave me details of […]
