[…] old manor house in Lancashire reveal the true depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century. Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines had bailed out both the left-wing News on […]
[…] was augmented by several others. Foreign Office official Gladwyn Jebb was instrumental in forming the Common Market Campaign, with Roy Jenkins as deputy, which aimed to recruit Labour intellectuals and trade unionists to its cause. Other campaigns were launched by the Conservative and Liberal parties, Federal Union (assisted by a number of former civil […]
[…] belief in the market rather then the state, the individual rather than the social – exercised a hegemonic influence over British politics, with the creation of New Labour signalling an abject surrender to the new orthodoxy.’ (1) As if he had nothing to do with it!’ Two of the recipients, Tim Pendry and William […]
[…] the siting of a new generation of nuclear weapons in Britain, a rising trade union official was invited to the west London home of a former US labour attaché. On the recommendation of a colleague who was active in the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding, he had been proposed for a trip to Washington […]
[…] time to be a social democratic ally of the United States. In Britain we had “the Wilson plots’; in Australia Gough Whitlam, Jim Cairns and the Australian Labour Party got Governor Kerr and the CIA; in Germany Willi Brandt resigned after a “security scandal’; in New Zealand a series of domestic scandals blighted the […]
[…] to their reputation(s).(6) In the early Thatcher years Tory Party central office set up a section to trawl for, collate and occasionally invent, local government (i.e. anti- Labour) ‘stories’ that were then fed to the media, giving birth to the ‘loony left’.(7) Through the ’80s and ’90s, as TV programmes such as Beadle’s About […]
[…] the Pinay Circle, Interdoc etc. etc. far too many even for a list. But here are some fairly typical snippets. He tells us (p. 108) that when Labour won the election in 1974, IRD dropped its briefings on subversion in Britain. This may explain why Colin Wallace was in such demand post February 1974. […]
[…] Lord Thomson, who shared his son-in-law’s strong interest in defence and Europe, became a European commissioner in 1972, one of the many Atlanticist Gaitskellites to find the Labour Party an increasingly inhospitable home as the Vietnam War, the Chile coup, and other US foreign policies failed to chime with younger party members as they […]
[…] Margaret Thatcher, and later with John Major. This material is extremely interesting, providing, among other things, an insider’s account of Murdoch’s embrace of Tony Blair and New Labour. In a country with a more robust democratic tradition what Wyatt reveals would be a scandal, in Britain we have become so used to governments courting […]
[…] the spook Since the last issue I have skimmed Paddy Ashdown’s two volumes of diaries. While dominated by his attempt to do a deal with the Blair-led Labour Party, there are some other interesting snippets; and, through Ashdown’s eyes, there is a detailed portrait of Tony Blair which suggests that Rory Bremner’s impersonation of […]
