[…] But there was also a history that ‘endowed the City with a talent pool and an infrastructure that enabled it to seize the moment’ and a New Labour government that ‘through a mixture of good luck and good judgement, enabled the City to make the most of these opportunities’. Augar sees Brown’s creation of […]
The unspeakable Martin Kettle of The Guardian is a political journalist who has been pretty close to, and supportive of, New Labour since the 1990s. His article ‘The special relationship that squandered a noble cause’ (27 May 2006) opened with this: ‘The long arc of Tony Blair’s rise and decline has been punctuated by […]
Edward Pearce London: Little, Brown, 2002, £25, h/b. Compared to the present crop of media-trained, PR-conscious, line-following, careerist pigmies who comprise the current Labour Cabinet, Denis Healey looks like a giant from a golden age. Before his well known roles as Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer (during the Tory-induced inflation […]
The first of three essays in this issue are about New Labour and its origins. I put mine first because of its general, context-setting nature. The subsequent essays, on the Successor Generation and the operations in the British Unions, deepen and thicken the section towards the end of the opening essay which discusses New […]
[…] mystery surrounding David Williams/Jack Hill, the major contributor to the Common Cause Bulletin. Harold Smith writes: Jack Hill was the name of a young, bright, good looking Labour Agent who, in the late 1940s (when I was the Labour Candidate in Rusholme Ward for Manchester City Council) was Assistant or Deputy to Reg Wallis, […]
[…] and the attack on dictators is even-handed to include Castro, Mugabe and Chavez alongside Pinochet and other hate figures of the Left. Furthermore, many of the New Labour foreign policy elite cut their student teeth on campaigns against ‘fascist’ dictators and would have had a sympathetic ear from State Department officials who disapproved of […]
[…] called “new” as had the “New Left’ a decade earlier. Although the Tory right has a history with the same kinds of continuities and discontinuities as the Labour left, it lacks a detailed historical record like there is of the Labour left, for the Tory right has mostly organised semi-clandestinely.(2) The best example of […]
[…] Andrew Gilligan blamed by the internal BBC inquiry while all his superiors escaped censure throws a little more light on the tightness of the New Labour network. Conducting the investigation was Caroline Thomson, the BBC director of policy, who is married to Roger Liddle, Tony Blair’s adviser on defence. Thomson and Liddle, […]
[…] book on the Miner’s strike; fell in love with Thatcherism; studied in the States; joined a think tank and St Antony’s College (1996-99); and fronted for New Labour via the Foreign Policy Centre (1999 onwards). He is unclear when he left the Communist Party but by 1997 he was sitting next to John Bolton […]
The personal and the political A small anecdotal footnote to Labour history. One of the great puzzles for those who followed the career of party leader Hugh Gaitskell was why, shortly before his death in 1963, he chose to oppose British entry to the then Common Market when his right-wing party colleagues and American […]
