BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made […]
[…] peculiar letters from a Wilson enemy Hartley Shawcross. What the Tribunal did reveal was the involvement of the newly created Foreign Office propaganda unit, IRD, within the Labour movement. There was considerable press interest in 1962 in the East-West Traders who went to the Leipzig Trade Fair. Questions were asked in the House of […]
[…] in Buckinghamshire, for a seated banquet for 100’. Just imagine how this Clinton-Mandelson-Rothschild link is going to be treated by certain American conspiracy theorists! Lobbying news The Labour government’s bizarre decision to follow America down the casinos-are-good-for-you route (See Lobster 43 p. 33) was the result of lobbying by a firm called Good Relations […]
[…] the 1930s. Nevertheless, it does make clear that Orwell had publicly identified himself as a socialist concerned to make the socialist movement more effective. He rejected the Labour Party as hopelessly compromised and the Communist Party as in thrall to Moscow, calling instead for the emergence of a new Socialist Party. The last paragraph […]
The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945-2006 Mark Phythian London: Routledge, 2007, £19.99, p/b Reviewed by: Bernard Porter The title of this book is slightly misleading – at any rate, it misled me. I was expecting a broader treatment of Labour’s debates over issues of war and foreign relations, which would have included […]
When Labour narrowly won the October 1964 election they were greeted by dismal balance of payments figures. An external deficit in the region of £800 million was forecast, twice what had been expected (although the actual figure has since been revised down to £372 million). The government attempted to manage the crisis by a […]
[…] mentioned. (1) Blair had always been sympathetic to Israel, had shared chambers with Board of Deputies of British Jews President Eldred Tabachnik, (2) and had joined the Labour Friends of Israel on becoming an MP. Two months after returning from Israel, Tony Blair was introduced to Michael Levy at a dinner party by Gideon […]
[…] to add a footnote for the historians and, for others, a bit of analysis. The story is that Simon Haskel (later Lord Haskel), then Chair of the Labour Finance & Industry Group (LFIG), asked me to help out Geoff Mulgan. I had been active in the LFIG aspects of the media communications programme which […]
[…] Blair is Man of the Year, 1996 – or would have been, had this delightful scam not been discovered and the BBC suspended voting. (1) Jules Hurry, Labour party member and former civil servant from the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food, had signed a letter from Labour’s campaign HQ that was circulated to […]
I was born in a working class area of Leeds in September 1919. My parents were Quaker-ILPers and it was natural for me to gravitate to the labour movement. In 1934 I left school and joined the South Leeds Labour Party. The Labour League of Youth of the pre-war period had been heavily infiltrated […]
