[…] could possibly quibble with that reasonable-sounding voice when the Foreign Secretary appears barely old enough to vote? But then I read Climbing the Bookshelves by the former Labour Cabinet minister who helped launch the short-lived SDP in 1981. Sure enough the wise words I’d heard on the BBC were there. But so was her […]
[PDF file]: […] Wilson. The Times sections are italicised A KGB plot One conjecture connects Harold Wilson to the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell, his predecessor as leader of the Labour Party. It claims that Gaitskell, a pro-American, had been assassinated by the KGB in order to install a communist sympathiser as probable future prime minister. Anatoly […]
[PDF file]: […] Election. It returned to office in 2010 as senior partner in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat administration and since 2015 has governed alone. It won a thumping victory over Labour in 2019, a return of 365 MPs on 43.6 per cent of the popular vote providing it with a handsome Parliamentary majority of 80 seats over […]
[PDF file]: […] year’s Bilderberg meeting.1 The two names that stood out for me were those of Tom Tugendhat and David Lammy – respectively leading MPs for the Conservatives and Labour. It is nice to see that a blessing from Bilderberg is still an advantage if you are desirous of your party’s leadership. I offer my sincerest […]
[…] his book on the financial crises of the last decade,7 Adam Tooze notes on pp. 191/2: ‘Less charitably it might be said that since the 1990s, New Labour, like the Democrats in the United States, had entered into an enthusiastic partnership with the City of London.8 It was, therefore, no coincidence that it was […]
[PDF file]: […] respected academics has a lot to tell us about how Britain is run. We are told, for example, that at a CBI dinner in December 1971, the Labour Party leader, Harold Wilson, boasted to the assembled businessmen of how, when in office, he had MI5 keep left-wing leaders of the trade union movement under […]
[PDF file]: […] 1987, Jordan and Aaronovitch crossed the Thames with him, leaving their old friend Peter Mandelson, now Lord Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool, in south London as the Labour Party’s director of communications. Aaronovitch, after executive positions at the BBC, left to become a columnist in turn for The Independent, The Guardian and now The […]
[PDF file]: […] these paragraphs: Excessively high interest rates maintained by the Bank of England following independence in 1997 were blamed, largely accurately, for further waves of deindustrialisation under New Labour. The pound was held at a value that made manufacturing exports uncompetitive: 1.5 million manufacturing jobs went, largely ignored at the time, between 1997 and 2009. […]
[…] rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must be a party of duty […]
[PDF file]: […] have been enough to avoid this entanglement. What we have to deal with in both Afghanistan and Iraq is American hubris, something into which Tony Blair’s New Labour government wholly and disastrously bought. One criticism of the book is Farrell’s readiness to sometimes accept official sophistries at face value. So, we are seriously told […]
