In love with America
by Robin Ramsay
[ politics | opinion - april 02 ]
"New Labour's solution has been to replace simplistic anti-Americanism with a vulgar Atlanticism, obliging Britain to bow to every American concern, no matter how trivial" - David Clark, aide to former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, in The Observer, 15 July 2001
New Labour leaders think of themselves as pragmatists though they don't use the word (in Labour Party circles it is forever contaminated by its association with Harold Wilson). "We are interested in what works," says Tony Blair. And he has said, "We are beyond ideology." Does Blair know that "beyond ideology" was one of the key slogans in the CIA's psy-war efforts to prevent socialism in Europe after WW2? Probably not; and he wouldn't be interested.
In the 1950s the appeal of "beyond ideology" was obvious. Europe had been wrecked by the war; the US was producing about half the world's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1945. How wonderful the East Coast of the US must have seemed then to the Labour politicians taking the American government-funded trips across the Atlantic. And everywhere they went the heard the same message. Capitalism (American production methods) had cracked it. Redistribution, let alone fuddy-duddy old socialism, will not be necessary to solve the problems of the world. No more class struggle. No more conflict. A rising tide floats all the boats. It is the end of ideology.
Now we are being governed by another group of America fans. Fifty years after their Gaitskellite forbears in the American tendency in Labour, they too believe the Americans have cracked it. Neo-liberalism, as they see it, is not only unavoidable but correct. For the second time this century America is triumphant, and, would you believe it, we have Labour politicians who have got the message. Blair and Brown look at the vast, mineral-rich, largely empty continent of America and see things we should copy here on this over-crowded island. They apparently do not see the two million in jail, the 25,000 gunshot deaths every year, the hundreds of thousands living on the streets, and the corrupt political system. They do not see the America in which the President, his brother (the probable next president), and the most important black leader of his time, were assassinated in five years, by conspiracies which have not been identified, let alone prosecuted. They do not see the America which murdered hundreds of thousands of people in Central America ("fighting for freedom and democracy") while the CIA, with permission from the Attorney General of America, turned a blind eye to the importation of cocaine by its allies in the slaughter of the populations of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. (The events in Central America happened while Blair and Brown were Members of Parliament.) The current American tendency within Labour are simply not looking at that America.
In a sense the question, "Why are they infatuated with America?" is barely worth asking. Added to the vast cultural, historical and political baggage of Anglo-American connections, in the last 40 years or so US popular culture has come to dominate this society; Florida is now one of the leading holiday destinations for British citizens. Why should the leaders of the Labour Party be immune to America's appeal? This writer isn't. Since I was in my early teens listening to Willis Conover playing jazz on the Voice of America, most of the music I have listened to, the books I have read and the films I have watched have been American. As much as anyone I know, I have been colonised by post-war American culture. But it's one thing to be smitten by bits of the culture and quite another to want to imitate its foreign, social and economic policies. But the Brown/Blair group are true believers bent on imitating American policies where possible.
As is now well known, most of the leading players in New Labour, and many of their assistants, have worked or studied in America. David Miliband, Blair's head of policy, did a Masters degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, is a former Foreign Office official whose previous posting was in the British Embassy in Washington. [1] Ed Balls, Gordon Brown's economics adviser, studied at Harvard and was about to join the World Bank with one of his tutors at Harvard before he joined Brown. His wife, junior minister Yvette Cooper, also studied at Harvard. Marjorie Mowlam, an important member of the tendency until recently and formerly Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, did a PhD at the University of Iowa and then taught in the United States in the 1970s. Chris Smith, a Minister until 2001, David Miliband, and Ed Balls were Kennedy Scholars in the USA. [2] Sue Nye, Gordon Brown's long time personal assistant, is married to Gavyn Davies, chief economist with the American bankers Goldman Sachs and one of Labour's main economic advisers since the 1980s. Stephen Pollard, one of the back-room players in the formation of 'New Labour', took the 'freebie' American tour in 1994, while he was working for the Fabian Society. [3]
The entire defence team in the Blair first administration were members of or associated with the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Unity (TUCETU). This began as as the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Unity, set-up in 1976 by Joseph Godson, who had been US Labour Attaché in London in the 1950s and who had recruited the Gaitskellites to the point where he and party leader Gaitskell were jointly writing Labour Party policies and planning strategy against the Labour left. [4]
Peter Mandelson; Marjorie Mowlam; former Defence Minister now Secretary General of NATO, George Robertson; former Heritage Minister Chris Smith; junior Foreign Office Minister in the House of Lords, Elizabeth Symons; and Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, have all been members of the British-American Project for a Successor Generation (BAP), the latest in the long line of American-funded networks which promote American interests and thinking among the British political elite. [5] The BAP newsletter for June/July 1997 headlined its account of the 1997 Labour Election Victory, "Big Swing to BAP". [6]
Tony Blair took the US government 'freebie' tour which consists of being given a couple of briefings, a load of money, and told to go and have a look. You would have to work hard to not have a good time in those circumstances. Brown spends his holidays (and had his honeymoon) in New England. He was shown the wonders of neo-liberal economic theory by academics at Harvard. I have been to New England and its charms are obvious. Much of it is very rich and the countryside is beautiful. New England is heaven on earth for many of the rich, white people who live there. But if you visit Yale University in New Haven, the menial work of servicing the (mostly) white students, is done by the poor blacks who live in the town. The New England coastline is lovely but much of it is privately owned and off-limits. In their account of Brown's first year in office Pym and Kochan said, "These holidays [in New England] gave Gordon Brown free access to American culture". But the New England the tourist sees isn't America. [7]
On top of the general admiration of America, there is an identification with the US Democratic Party. A friend of a friend of mine was in the same London Labour Party branch as Tony Blair in the early 1980s and remembers Blair even then talking of changing the Labour Party into something like the Democratic Party. (Given Blair's dislike of the Labour Party, presumably part of the appeal of the Democratic Party was the absence of ordinary members interfering with the deliberations of the élite. Democratic Senators don't have to attend constituency meetings with groups of party members who might not share their high opinion of themselves.) There had always been some links between the two parties and, in the 1980s when they faced the dominance of the Conservative-Republican bloc - the Thatcher and Reagan show - the sense of identity grew; and if the account of Labour pollster and advertising man, Philip Gould, is to be believed, not just on the Labour side. Gould had been visiting the Democrats since 1986 and the occasional Democratic worker came across to help Labour after that. [8] It was in 1992, after Labour had lost, that Labour Party people went across to look at the Clinton election machine. What they saw was a massive system of media monitoring and briefing with which to counter attacks from the Republicans and the media bias against them. Philip Gould (The Unfinished Revolution, p167) refers to that system distributing material to 200,000 media and other outlets! The visitors from London were deeply impressed by this system (and it won the election). After Blair became leader, a version of that machine was created in London in Millbank Tower, the like of which had never been seen in British politics; and a good deal of copying of Democratic slogans and American policies took place amidst what the American political journalist Joe Klein called "a bizarre convergence of political ideas". [9]
Even so, even given all the foregoing, the Blair/Brown fixation on America is odd in a way; and certainly marks a big difference between them and the American tendency in Labour which they have succeeded. While it stood on the barricades of anti-communism with its American colleagues, the central preoccupation of the previous group, led by Roy Jenkins, was with Europe. This simply is not true of Blair and Brown.
"Whatever works" Blair says; but it's a lie. The Blair/Brown group are conspicuously not interested in anything happening on mainland Europe. If they were interested in the EU countries, they would be studying Holland, Denmark, Sweden for social policies; virtually any of the EU countries for how to run a railway or a health care system; Germany for how to be a middle-ranking power without much of an army or intelligence service; Portugal, Ireland, Italy or Spain for how to get EU money without implementing its more ridiculous legislation. None of this is happening. If they meant "whatever works", they would be studying the example of New Zealand, where a neo-liberal minority took over the New Zealand Labour Party, adopted all the American-inspired policies, trashed the New Zealand economy and welfare state, destroyed the party and were eventually turned out of office. [10]
"Whatever works" actually means "whatever the Americans are doing". [11] Peter Mandelson's biographer, Donald Macintyre, commented:
"It would be wrong to exaggerate Brown's enthusiasm for the US... Brown can hardly overlook the existence of the American underclass or the dislocation from American society felt by many blacks."
[12]Notice Macintyre's use of "can hardly": he doesn't actually know if he does or not. Neither do I, of course; but I think Brown and Blair are precisely overlooking the American "underclass", and America's racism - along with its murderous foreign policy, its imperialism and its plundering of the globe's resources. Against Macintyre, Matthew d'Ancona reported:
"[Brown's] preoccupation with best practice across the Atlantic is all-consuming: one Cabinet minister told me that 'the only sure way to get Gordon to listen to a policy idea is to produce an American who believes in it.'"
[13]It wasn't always thus. In the 1980s it was to the German economy, not the United States, that Labour politicians turned their envious eyes. In the 1980s the German model seemed to offer growth, stability, low inflation and high living standards. The German model has been abandoned. If you asked New Labour why, eventually they might cough up a spokesperson who would tell you about high unemployment, the 'sclerotic' state of the European economy, not enough job creation and unsustainable welfare burdens. But mostly he or she would talk about jobs. Since New Labour believe it is impossible to raise taxes on business and income tax, it is unable to promise much government activity. Not nothing - let's be fair; but not much. [14] The American economic model is perceived as being "more dynamic" (i.e. creating more jobs) than the European model. (The rival far Eastern economic models are simply not considered.)
But does the American system create more jobs? US unemployment figures are distorted by the absence from the figures of some two million male members of the working class, mostly black, many of whom would be unemployed, who are in prison. [15] In a letter to the Guardian (9 July 1999) about what he called the US "penal economy", Professor David Downes pointed out that while the US has an official unemployment rate of 4.5%, if the number of men in the US prison system were taken into account, the unemployment rate rises to between 6.5% and 8.5%, depending on whether or not the count included the penal system's staff! And this is not markedly better than the unemployment rates in the 'sclerotic' EU economies.
Nor is it obvious that the British and American economies can be meaningfully compared.
"The Government is trying to build American-style economic dynamism on top of a foundation of European stability. The problem is that, in a continuing convulsion of wilful innocence, it misunderstands the nature of America's dynamism. Yes, it comes from technology. Yes, it comes from a culture of risk-taking, where failure doesn't equal humiliation. But it also comes from the US's mammoth internal market, its steady stream of legal and illegal immigrants, and its bully-boy tactics in dictating the terms of world trade and financial flows."
[16]Labour's focus on American-style policies goes back to the decisions taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s about economic policy. Between 1988 and 1992 the Labour leadership rejected the post-war consensus that the state could - and had an obligation to - manage the economy to create full employment for its citizens. The Labour leadership was persuaded that the best the state could manage was the creation of economic stability - defined by them as low inflation - and a certain amount of fiddling around the edges: education, training, infrastructure. The rest was up to the dynamic nature of capitalism. In the same period the Labour leadership was persuaded that it could no longer try to use the state to do much to redistribute wealth and income to reduce poverty, as the British electorate simply would not pay the taxes required. (The loss in 1992 was perceived by Labour to be largely down to the success of the "Labour tax bombshell" campaign by the Conservatives.) Poverty reduction would come - if it came at all - chiefly through getting low income groups into work. In effect 'the modernisers' adopted Thatcherism; but could hardly use the name. Adopting American neo-liberalism was a more palatable way of dressing it up for themselves and the party's members.
At the core of the big Labour policy shift in 1988/9 is the belief that the nation state is powerless against the global economy. But while it is certainly true, as the 1992 ERM fiasco showed, that nation states are unable to defend currency rates which the international money markets regard as unrealistic, where is the evidence to support the view that the nation state can no longer manage its own economy? The stock response is reference to the "French failure" in 1983, when the Mitterand Government tried to expand the economy in a pretty traditional demand management fashion. Trying to expand their economy, the French government began spending money. The increased demand generated by their spending increased imports which threatened the value of the franc against the D-mark. At this point the classical expansionist theory said let the franc devalue. But the franc was in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), and while devaluation within the ERM was possible, the French government was pursuing a policy of "le franc fort", the strong franc, in competition with the D-mark, and chose to give up the domestic expansion it had embarked on rather than see the franc devalue. Although this merely demonstrates what everyone knew, that if the domestic economy is expanded it may be necessary to devalue in the short term, this has been almost universally interpreted in Labour circles - especially pro-EU Labour circles - as demonstrating the impossibility of unilateral economic action by nation states. [17] But even the simplest accounts of demand management economics - which is what 'Keynesianism" actually means; few of those using these terms, including this writer, have actually read Keynes - acknowledge that it may be necessary to abandon attempts to maintain fixed currency rates if expansion is pursued. [18] (The real mystery of the French expansion in 1983 is how they thought they could have expansion and a "franc fort".)
But while the French failure looms large in the we-are-powerless Labour modernising mind, the experience of the British economy after being forced out of the ERM in 1992, by the same "global market forces", does not. This is not entirely a surprise as it doesn't fit their theories. When the UK joined the ERM in 1990 both main political parties were agreed that this was a guaranteed anti-inflation device. For over a year the Labour leadership badgered the Conservative Government to join this wonderful system. Since the economics policies of the Conservative Party were being written by the City of London, the pound entered the ERM at a rate which could be sustained only by higher interest rates than the rest of the EU. Good for the City; bad for the rest of the economy. Cue the second, major, Conservative-induced recession in a decade; and cue Labour guaranteed to win the next election. But as Mrs Thatcher was wont to say, you can't buck the market; and the world's currency dealers concluded that at D-mark 2.95, the ERM entry level, the pound was seriously overvalued - a view shared by a wide section of British economists and, we are now led to believe, despite their silence on the subject at the time, by the Labour Shadow Cabinet. [19] The currency dealers knew that the British government was obliged to "defend" the value of the pound and the Bank of England proceeded to do so in the usual way - giving its reserves away to the currency dealers - before it recognised defeat and withdrew from the ERM.
The value of sterling duly fell, but none of the predictions of economic disaster turned out to be true. Inflation did not shoot up; domestic production expanded with the more competitive pound, exports grew and unemployment fell. In direct contradiction of everything Labour's economics spokespersons apparently believed, the relatively good economic position inherited by the Blair government in 1997 is a consequence of the British economy leaving the ERM. (Which may explain Gordon Brown's manifest reluctance to rush into the Single Currency.)
We are powerless
The acid test for Labour 'modernisers' has become how completely you accept the powerlessness-of-government thesis. The thesis sounds immediately plausible to those, like New Labour economics spokespersons, with little economic knowledge: it is what they keep reading in the newspapers and being told by their advisers from the City.
In the Independent on Sunday of 15 January, 1996, Alastair Darling, Gordon Brown's deputy at the Treasury in the first term, was quoted as saying, "It is not up to the government to say that the banks can only make so much profit." Here the recent convert to the wonders of the market shows that he hasn't grasped that banks are not just another set of businesses to be left to their own devices. And it certainly used to be "up to the government": even Geoffrey Howe imposed a windfall tax on the banks in 1981. But that was back in those far-off days before the Government handed power to set interest rates, perhaps the most powerful single economic tool and the surest means of regulating how much banks earn, to the people who stand to gain by putting interest rates up! Bankers are always "inflation hawks": it just means putting up the cost of borrowing; and that's how they make their bonuses.
Just before the 1997 general election, Roy Hattersley wrote in his Guardian column of meeting one of the then Labour shadow economics team, who told him that in the new global economy it was not possible for a government to increase taxes. [20] On his visit to the beleaguered Bill Clinton in February 1998, Tony Blair told Guardian journalist and long-time New Labour ally, Martin Kettle, of the "five clear principles of the centre-left". The first of these was: "...stable management and economic prudence because of the global economy." [21] (Emphasis added.)
The powerlessness thesis also has the advantage of being a popular line with Labour supporters of the European Union who can argue, as the Labour Party has done since it became Euro-enthusiasts, that we need European-wide action - and preferably a single currency - to control capital ('the speculators'). Just over a decade ago Gordon Brown sold ERM membership to the Parliamentary Labour Party, most of whom knew even less about economics than he does, as a mechanism to frustrate the speculators. To my knowledge he has never publicly commented on what lessons he drew from sterling's ejection from the ERM after the speculators had made several billion pounds profit from the British tax-payer.
The striking thing about New Labour is the way they have managed to convince themselves that the free market is the only possible (or successful) model when that proposition is immediately falsified by the experience of Norway, say, or the Asian variants of corporatist, nationalist, restrictive, trade barrier and exchange control-laden economies. The so-called Asian 'tiger' economies had developed and grown in defiance of Anglo-American, neo-liberal, free market theories. [22]
Why have New Labour leaders adopted the powerlessness thesis? In part, it is simply that they are in the grip of theories and exclude information which might challenge them. The theories are reinforced by being those currently approved of by their mentors in the United States and the British financial establishment. In so far as alternative views are perceived, they are offered by people who, for one reason or another, are regarded by New Labour as either discredited, such as the Labour left, or beyond the pale, such as the Tory Europhobes. I also think that New Labour politicians rather welcome the belief that they are powerless against the world's financial markets. Since they are powerless, a range of things that Labour leaders used to have try to deliver - growth, economic justice, redistribution - have ceased to be rational expectations of them. Nothing can be done short of European-wide action; and maybe not even then. [23] Life is infinitely easier for Labour economic ministers when all they have to do is follow the neo-liberal line coming from their City advisors.
Blair and Brown give every indication of being as naive as they appear. [24] They really do believe this stuff. Forgive me if this is repetitive but, like others, I still have trouble occasionally grasping they could possibly see US-dominated globalisation as the solution. Do we really have to recite highlights of the post-war encounter between the Third World and the United States to these people? A little matter of several million dead people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, for example? How about Chile? Guatemala? How about 'Blowtorch Bob' d'Aubuisson, the American's proxy killer in El Salvador? Do we really have to re-critique the IMF and World Bank as the agents of imperialism? I have to remind occasionally myself that this New Labour thing isn't a great con, with Gordon Brown about to nip into a phone-box rip his shirt off and reveal himself as Social Justice Man.
The sad and fascinating thing is that a considerable chunk of the Labour Party believed that Brown in particular - and New Labour generally - were running this con right up to the 2001 election. They told themselves things like this: their first term - OK, a necessary temporary pretence at being true believers in the current ideology. But you wait till they get reelected... Sympathetic journalists were being briefed with this line in the run-up to the election, little hints for the disgruntled members and some notional left constituency.
Can they really believe that the multinational drug companies are just itching to sell their products at cost price to the Third World?
Apparently so.
Can they really believe that the West's bankers are willing to write off the debts owed them by the Third World?
Apparently so.
Can they really believe that British/multinational companies feel some moral obligation to invest in the infrastructure of Britain?
Apparently so.
Can they really believe more American-style 'freedom' is what the developing world needs?
Definitely so.
Look, for example, at the absurd piece co-authored jointly by Gordon Brown and Clare Short, "Our answer to protesters" - the protesters being those in Genoa in July - which announces, inter alia,
"...the IMF, the World Bank, the UN and OECD - and individual governments - have signed up to challenging 2015 targets: that poverty across the globe is cut by half; that every one of the 120m children in the world currently denied primary education receive it; and that infant mortality is cut to one third of its present level." [25]
As if the wishes of organisations such as the OECD or the UN carried any weight with the global corporations! As if signing up to targets 15 years down the road - after all the signatories have retired or moved on to other jobs - means something!
There was an ad in The Economist, 26 May, 2001, for a Trade Policy Programme Co-ordinator for Africa in the Department for International Development, for which Ms Short is the Minister. This tells us that applicants:
"must bring an understanding of globalisation and development and the links between trade and poverty reduction."
The ideology of globalisation is now institutionalised in that department. It is official Labour government policy that poverty reduction in the world is soluble only by giving the developing countries more of the US-led imperialism which dropped them in the mire in the first place!
The seriously excellent Gregory Palast noted in a piece in May 2000 that while the US in trade politics were the predictable hypocrites - preaching free trade but practising domestic protection when it suits them - the Labour Government were far more willing to accommodate the wishes of global business. [26] New Labour's leaders are zealots who lecture the world on how to make globalisation work better and faster. In July and August 2001 we had Gordon Brown calling for Europe and the United States to form "a transatlantic alliance for prosperity" by knocking down the remaining tariff walls between their economies; [27] while Tony Blair lecturing the EU countries that they had to get on and copy America, [28] and praising Mexico for embracing free trade. [29] I wonder what the leaders of the other EU countries thought of being lectured by the leader of a country which has a failing public health care system, a failing rail network, and cannot attract enough teachers to education its children?
In the emulation of America nothing is too absurd, no comparison is too specious. After the 2001 election, Brown noted that the rate of formation of small businesses was lower in the UK than it is in America. Not only that, Brown had discovered that "the rate of small businesses formed in the poorer areas was just one sixth of the more prosperous areas". An astounding revelation! The poor don't start businesses? Would this have something to do with, er, lack of money? To rectify this we apparently need "an enterprise culture genuinely open to all...", whatever that might look like. Thus, the semantic journey away from the old Labour Party is complete. Talk of equality, with its implications of redistribution, gave way to talk of equality of opportunity in the later 1950s under the impact of the first wave of naive fans of America. In the early 1990s talk of equality of opportunity was abandoned because it sounded too radical and Brown talked of "opportunity for all" for a while. Now that has given way to "an enterprise culture open to all". [30]
With the infatuation with America comes a naive infatuation with the market economy. This cabinet, without any business experience, truly believes the market is magic and all problems can be resolved by letting the consumer chose. In a piece about Railtrack and the chaos of the privatised rail network, the journalist Christian Woolmar reported thus:
"Capitalism functions best when there is a clear product to market, sold in the face of competition from rivals, and the reward for more investment is the ability to increase output thus boosting sales. Railtrack fits none of this model. Its raison d'etre is to provide 'train paths' for the operators but these are in limited supply since much of the network is full and the cost of investment prohibitive. I tried recently to explain this at great length to a highly intelligent senior government minister but he utterly failed to understand that Railtrack is different from Coca-Cola."
[31]The last British politician in office who was as naive as this lot about business was Edward Heath, who thought they would all be behind him in his push to remake Britain as Germany and got cross when he found them dragging their feet. [32]
In the beginning these policies were presented as "the Third Way". The first two ways were capitalism and socialism, so the third way is...? capitalism fronted by a notionally socialist party? The concept was fairly quickly ditched by Blair/Brown after a deluge of intellectual contempt and general hilarity. This seemed to show the cynics amongst us that we were right: there was little more to "the Third Way" than there was to "Britain: A Young Country"; just more slogans and 'branding'; advertising guff in, advertising guff out. In fact it was worse than this.
What was on offer was a kind of parody of corporatism. The old corporatist model of the 1960s and 70s, from which Blair/Brown are so keen to distance themselves, was a three-legged stool: the unions, managers of capital and government. The new model excludes the unions and is a putative partnership between capital and the government. The unions? Embarrassing hangovers from the bad old days of old Labour and tax and spend government. Now government and business, private and public, will work together to rebuild British society. But the new model rests on beliefs about corporate identity with this country and its fate, which are foolish and naive in the extreme; beliefs which are strikingly at odds with New Labour's belief in globalisation. For at the bottom of the theory - if we can call it that - of globalisation is the belief that it is a good thing, the best possible thing, for companies to pursue profit wherever it is highest. Why then should the global companies give a monkey's about social conditions in the UK (or anywhere else)?
This new model was offered to the corporate world which provided people for a vast array of 'task forces' on various areas whose reports will end up in waste bins all over Whitehall, [33] took what it could get, notably access to the assets still owned by the public sector, and has given almost nothing back. Companies will do a bit if it makes for good PR - responsible, caring for the environment; Tesco computer vouchers for schools - that sort of thing; they've got PR budgets which cover it. But beyond that it only happens when there are sales and market share to be gained. [34] And why would it be any other way?
Notes
1 Ken Coates and Michael Barratt Brown suggested in their book The Blair Revelation (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1996) that Powell's job in the British embassy in Washington concealed a role as the liaison officer between British intelligence and the CIA, but they have no evidence. Powell's career summary as given in The Diplomatic Service List for 1995 contains nothing from which to infer an intelligence role. He was born in 1956 and joined the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) in 1979. Since then he has been Third later Second Secretary in Lisbon, 1981; Second later First Secretary at the FCO, London; UK delegate to CDE Stockholm 1986; UK delegate at the CSCE in Vienna 1986; First Secretary FCO, London 1989; then First Secretary (Chancery) Washington 1991. His role in America has been elsewhere described as Political Officer which, in my limited experience, usually does not denote a cover role for MI6. They may turn out to be right but they have no evidence. [Back]
2 Peter Hennessy, 'The View from Here', in the Independent (Education), 1 May 1997. [Back]
3 See Stephen Pollard, 'Labour should follow Bush, not sneer at him', the Sunday Telegraph, 29 April 2001. Pollard was the author of an influential study of the perceptions of Labour found among the southern middle class, 'Southern Discomfort'. [Back]
4 On TUCETU see David Osler, 'New Labour, New Atlanticism: US and Tory intervention in the unions since the 1970s' in Lobster 33 (June 1997). TUCETU is now funded by NATO. [Back]
5 See Tom Easton's 'The British American Project for the Successor Generation', in Lobster 33. BAP have now dropped "for the Successor Generation" from their organisation's title, apparently as a result of Easton's pointing out that the phrase first appeared after a meeting between Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch and Sir James Goldsmith in 1983. BAP deny that its formation had anything to do with that meeting and, given the political orientation of its co-instigator, the industrialist Sir Charles Villiers, I am inclined to believe it. [Back]
6 BAP published a pamphlet to counter the view of it given in the first big piece about it in Lobster (see preceding note): Martin Vander Weyer, A Common Bond: the Origins of the British-American Project (no date, but 1998 or 1999). In it one of its founders, Nick Butler of BP, tells us, he "originally thought of the Project as a way of putting Labour people like himself in touch with American ideas - but on economic and social issues." Butler, it was announced shortly after the 2001 election, is going to be put in charge of overseeing the introduction of private sector money into the public services. [Back]
7 Hugh Pym Nick Kochan, Gordon Brown: the First Year in Power, (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p113. [Back]
8 Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, (London: Little Brown, 1998) pp162-3. After the 1997 election Gould and the Democratic Party pollster, Stan Greenberg, set up a "transatlantic consultancy". Anne McElvoy, 'Fanatic of the focus group', Independent, 22 July 2000. [Back]
9 Joe Klein, "The party's over' in the Guardian 2, p2, 24 May 2001. Klein wrote the roman à clef about the Bill Clinton campaign for the Democratic nomination, Primary Colours, subsequently filmed with John Travolta as the Clintonesque character. [Back]
10 The best account of the New Zealand version of American neo-liberal economics is Jane Kelsey, Economic Fundamentalism (London; Pluto Press, 1995). [Back]
11 Or, maybe, the Australians. There is some evidence of New Labour picking up ideas from Australia - another vast, empty continent like the United States, dominated by American social and economic thinking. [Back]
12 'Why is Mr Brown so fascinated by America?', Independent, 8 August. Notice Macintyre's phrase "under class and... the dislocation from American society felt by many blacks". Woke up this morning, felt dis-loc-cated... doesn't make it, does it? Macintyre would have his readers see the underclass and dislocation not poverty and racism. Macintyre has been close to New Labour, especially Peter Mandelson, whose biography he wrote. Part of the New Labour programme is the attempt to 'rebrand' things like poverty and racism into not-so-nasty-sounding things like 'social exclusion'. In the 1950s sociologists 'rediscovered' poverty in Britain; in the 1990s they attempted to rebrand it. This must be ironic... [Back]
13 The Sunday Telegraph, 14 January 2001. [Back]
14 The extraordinary and blatant rip-off which is the Private Finance Initiative is an expression of the same thing: unwilling to raise taxes to the level of the rest of the EU, the only way Labour can deliver on its promises to improve the public services is to invite the private sector to do it; and since the private sector knows this, it can secure ludicrously generous contracts from the government. [Back]
15 An Asssociated Press story on 27 August 2001 reported that: "The number of adults behind bars, on parole or on probation reached a record 6.47 million in 2000 - or one in 32 American adults, the government reported yesterday... Jails and prisons held 30 per cent of the adults in the corrections system, or 1,933,503."
In Britain in the 1980s the unemployment figures were faked by allowing a vast expansion in the number of people taken off the unemployment register as suffering from long-term illness. This continues today. See, for example, the report in 'Sickness claims mask jobless rate', Guardian, 5 September, 2001, in which David Webster told a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that perhaps 7% of the UK workforce is off the unemployment register because registered as long term sick. [Back]
16 Peter Koenig, 'Wake from your American dream, Gordon', Independent, 14 March 1999. [Back]
17 For an example of the left's interpretation of the French experience proving the impossibility of national action see Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann, Safety First: the Making of New Labour (London: Granta Books, 1997) p80. For the contrary view see Seamus Milne, 'A French lesson for the left' in Tribune, 26 March 1993. [Back]
18 If Keynes were alive he might well proclaim that he isn't a Keynesian, just as Marx famously said, "Je ne suis pas Marxiste". [Back]
19 Neil Kinnock's assistant at the time, Neil Stewart, commented that the reason Kinnock did not express his belief that pound was over-valued was, "It's a dickhead says it before the Tories." John Rentoul, Tony Blair (London: Little Brown, 1995), p267. This is worth spelling out. At face value, the story is this: although Labour wanted British entry into the ERM, and although they saw that the pound had gone into the ERM at an unsustainably high level, rather than be perceived to be calling for devaluation of sterling, Labour spokespersons said nothing - and so assisted in the failure of the pound in the ERM. [Back]
20 Hattersley declined to tell me the name of this person. This was an echo of Tony Blair's 1996 comment in Japan that, "We also recognise that in a global economy... our tax rates need to be internationally as well as nationally competitive." Tony Blair, New Britain (London: Fourth Estate, 1996), p123. [Back]
21 Guardian, 7 February 1998. [Back]
22 This paragraph was written for Prawn Cocktail Party just before the 1998 collapse of the so-called Asian 'tiger' economies. The collapse is chiefly the result of those economies reducing the restrictions which used to exist, in pursuit of the western free market model, thus encouraging speculation (a.k.a. 'investment') by the Euro-American financial sectors - with the usual disastrous results. See, for example, the brisk, clear account in Chapter 9 of Chalmers Johnson's Blowback: the Costs and Consequences of American Empire (London: Little Brown, 2000). On Norway, see Larry Elliot in the Guardian, 6 April 1998. [Back]
23 As the corporations extend their reach so the trade union bureaucrats stretch their rhetoric to match. In the late 1970s and 1980s they talked of European-wide action - but never managed to deliver much of it. General Secretary of the TUC and Bilderberg meeting participant John Monks, called in 1996 for "world works councils for each major international company", Guardian, 31 January 1996. (Emphasis added.) International capitalism did not noticeably tremble at this absurd prospect.
Against the nation-state-is-powerless thesis, see for example, Larry Elliott, and Dan Atkinson, The Age of Insecurity (London: Verso, 1998), pp260-264; Martin Wolf 'Far From Powerless' in the Financial Times, 13 May 1997; Larry Elliot,'Grand National idea produces winners' in the Guardian, 20 October 1997; 'Don't be fooled: multinationals do not rule the world', Independent on Sunday, 12 January 1997; and 'Globaloney', Paul Hirst in Prospect, February 1996. [Back]
24 In his profile of Blair in the Sunday Telegraph, 3 June 2001, Matthew d'Ancona wrote this: "In his dealings with EU heads of government, Downing Street aides say that he has learned - bitterly and to his astonishment - that the force of his arguments are not enough" (emphasis added). Granted "his aides" isn't much of a source, but still: a middle-aged politician who had to learn that it isn't about arguments? [Back]
25 Guardian, 4 July 2001. See also Clare Short's banal attempt to elaborate her thesis that globalisation-is-good-for-the world's-poor in 'The Challenge of our age", New Statesman, 16 August 1999. [Back]
26 'Tony rushes in where Bill fears to tread', Observer, 21 May 2000. [Back]
27 Charlotte Denny, 'WTO takes reality check' in the Guardian, 26 July 2001. [Back]
28 Guardian, 31 July 2001. [Back]
29 Guardian, 3 August 2001. [Back]
30 'My Maggie Mission', Daily Mail, 19 June 2001. [Back]
31 'The terminal failure of Railtrack', Guardian, 7 June 2001. [Back]
32 "Whatever Mr Blair might think about the leaders of Old Labour, at least they had no such illusions about the capacities of the average British businessman" - Ross McKibbin, 'Make enemies and influence people', London Review of Books, 20 July 2000. [Back]
33 On the task forces see Stuart Weir, 'The City has taken over the quangos under New Labour', Independent, 23 November 1998, and Rosie Waterhouse and Richard Woods, 'Labour's task force kings', Sunday Times, 21 November 1999. [Back]
34 On the corporate-political connections under New Labour see the important book by George Monbiot, The Captive State (London: Macmillan, 2000), the commentary on it, Michael Barratt Brown's The Captive State; how Labour was taken over by capital (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 2001), and the various essays on the subject by Greg Palast at his Website www.gregpalast.com/ [Back]
Excerpted with permission from Robin Ramsay's The Rise of New Labour (Pocket Essentials, 2002, www.pocketessentials.com).
