[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] whom, and about whose thinking, they knew almost nothing. The readily available sources of information on the Tories were then slight: in practice, there was Searchlight and Labour Research. Pursuing its aim of amplifying the fascist ‘threat’ to bolster support for and the legitimacy of, the state of Israel, Searchlight was then pushing the […]
Peter Oborne and Simon Walters London: Aurum Press, 2004 p/back, £8.99 If you were going to read only one book on New Labour, this account of the New Labour people and their relationships with the media, from the days of opposition through to Campbell’s resignation in the wake of the death of Dr […]
[…] you have to get rid of people: ‘they gum up the works’. That the firm was a little people-light was simply put down to their efficiency. Fewer labour units equalled more profits. Andersen Andersen, the company’s auditor, who let these figures pass, would hardly have survived a moderately close inspection of its own track […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] 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, […]
