[…] 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 […]
[…] sovereignty was suppressed rather than admit that Parliament would have to accept European regulations that conflicted with its own statutes. Officials were encouraged to spy on the Labour Party’s plans to oppose the terms of entry and even drafted speeches for pro-European Labour frontbenchers to deliver at their party conference. The unit was told […]
[…] 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 […]
[PDF file]: Ten Years Hard Labour Chris Williamson Lola Books, 2022, £19.00 ISBN 978-3-944203-48-5 John Booth This is a revealing and powerful book by a Labour MP who vocally supported the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and paid the price by losing his career. It’s an angry book because he says that this loyalty was not reciprocated […]
[PDF file]: […] of the introduction, this is a talk I gave to the conference on SCADS, state crimes against democracy, in London in October 2011. The rise of New Labour Robin Ramsay I was asked to talk about the rise of New Labour, presumably because in some way it illustrates the notion of a SCAD, a […]
[PDF file]: This is the final chapter of my The Rise of New Labour, published in 2002. It didn’t get any attention and didn’t sell but is still available in ebook form. I was prompted to make this available because of the rehabilitation of Gordon Brown recently. Lest we forget, he is one of the chief […]
[PDF file]: Labour, the anti-semitism crisis & the destroying of an MP Lee Garratt Thinkwell Books (thinkwellbooks.org), 2021, £10.00 John Booth Perhaps this important book may one day be read by those alerted to it by seeing reviews in the mainstream press. But given its subject matter – former Derby North Labour MP Chris Williamson […]
[PDF file]: Bad News Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Schlosberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller London: Pluto Press, 2019, p/b £14.99, h/b £75.001 John Booth Perhaps it was inevitable that the September launch of this book on Labour Party strife during its annual conference in Brighton […]
