[…] eternal, blessed, values of England. Much Conservative history has been written by Conservatives, and a myth has been perpetuated. As Davies points out in his introduction, the Labour Party and its politicians have been the subject of much greater and more critical exposure – as one would expect of anything new. As a consequence, […]
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 […]
What was Henry Brandon? One of the most interesting secondary sources covering the struggles of the British Labour government under Harold Wilson to prevent the devaluation of sterling between 1964-66 is Henry Brandon’s In the Red, published by Andre Deutsch in 1966. It is a remarkably well-informed text and its reliability is underlined by […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] in the opposition to the Lloyd George Coalition’s Irish policy, in particular the so-called ‘reprisals’ policy with its murder squads and house-burnings. And then he joined the Labour Party. The eagerness with which the Labour Party, including the party at constituency level, welcomed this upper class convert and his wife with their country estate, […]
[…] 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 […]
