Labour Affairs Magazine

PDF of LTUR 72 – February 1998.

• America Right or Wrong – support for the planned new war against Iraq
• We’re all customers now.  Dogmatic Privatisation.
• A Leviathan in Levis?  Tony Blair’s Modern Constitution
• Assessment and Education
• The Next War “Robin Cook continues the Thatcherite policy of using NATO as the military vehicle of the European Union, and uses British influence in Europe to retard the development of free-standing European military forces”.
• MacDonald on Joe Chamberlain (part three of three)
• Parliamentary Diary: Scotland’s water; The Power of Drugs; Pensioner Penny-Pinching; Energy; Housing
• An odd defence of Hereditary Peers
• Newsnotes: Welfare to Poor Law”; White-Powder Tories (opium connections in Hong Kong); It’s NOT the economy, stupid  “The odd hankering for the Victorian Age is based on misunderstanding anyway. It was not our age of greatness, but an incompetent, wasteful era that made the 20th century decline almost unavoidable. It was the less pompous and more realistic Georgian elite that put the greatness into Britain.”; Twilight of the True Blues?; the tragic decay of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchanges; Chinese ‘capitalism’ unhurt by the Asian crisis; Human Rights are Absolute Truths (sometimes)

PDF of LTUR 73 – March 1998.

• W.A.S.P.s Nil; Iraq One.  “Any resemblance between law and justice in international affairs is purely accidental. And when injustice is consolidated structurally in law there is little to be gained by moralistic argument because law, however unjust, carries its own sense of being moral.”
• New Labour Should listen to the CBI.  “Tony Blair is importing the values of the Liberal Imperialists into the Labour Party to be its guiding ideology, pushing Labour values aside.”
• Adam Smith and Slavery
• There You Go Again, Margaret.  “Margaret Beckett has travelled since she was a member of the Supper Club group of Labour MPs, who ,at the time of the Gulf War, stood out against Anglo-American chauvinism.”
• Notes on the News: War Works; Blair as Deputy Dawg; Failed Puritans (Clinton and Lewinsky); The United Republican Front of Saints and Shiners; Asia depressed “While the Cold War was on, East Asia was protected from market irrationality.”
• Parliamentary Diary: Rail Privatisation; Energy-inefficient homes; Trade Not Aid?

PDF of LTUR 74 – April 1998.

• Gordon and the Fat Cat Controller (budget)
• Farewell to the Family?  Angela Clifford examines the schemes being worked out by Gordon Brown and Barclay’s Bank boss, Martin Taylor, to phase out Government support for traditional family life.
• Darwinists and Dawkinists: Unchanging Human Nature Isn’t What It Used To Be
• The bullying of the group around the Living Marxism magazine by the Guardian/Observer group of newspapers. The latter were especially angry at Living Marxism demonstrating that the notorious ‘deathcamp’ run by Bosnian Serbs  was a quite ordinary, if amateurishly-run, POW camp.
• Notes on the News: A Fidget Budget; Diana, Victim of Royalty; Enoch Powell: A Life Without Reflection; Kosovo: Legal Fictions; The Global Three-Card Trick (cheating the Tiger economies); Germs, Drugs and Non-morality; Cosmology; God, Guns and Gracemongers (US mass shootings)
• Parliamentary Diary: It’s Bad (for your health) To Talk (Mobile Phones; Human Rights, Wronged: When it comes to tackling human rights abuses, Indonesia and Saudia Arabia are treated very lightly by the Government; closure of village Post Office
• The Budget by David Morrison

PDF of LTUR 75 – May 1998.

• Good Friday Agreement,  “Northern Ireland is an entirely artificial territorial construction. It is a territory without either natural boundaries or cultural cohesion. Its population is made up of two nationalities, identifiable by religion, whose dearest wish with regard to each other is that they should have nothing to do with each other.”
• Death by a Thousand Cuts.  Chris Smith describes the reality behind the ‘ethical’ sanctions regime in Iraq, with reference to Geoff Simons’s The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural justice.
• What is Christian Democracy?
• Welfare of migrants
• John Prescott
• Notes on the News; Sound-bitten morality; Northern Ireland “The population balance due to tip soon, with Catholics becoming a majority and able to vote themselves out of thUK”;
• Parliamentary Diary; drugs and drug-related crime; Rising Rents; Privatised Railways;

PDF of LTUR 76 – June 1998.

• What is Blair’s Third Way?
• Pensions: It hasn’t gone away, you know.  At a time when we are told that a mere 10% of under-35s are making any pension provision, Barbara Castle and colleagues have published a pamphlet on the subject, reviewed here by Angela Clifford
• From Here to Blair to Where?  Notes of a talk by Jack Lane to the Reform Society, Dublin ,
• The Right Hand of Anarchy: Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s took an axe to the roots of Britishness.
• Politics on Radio 3.
• Parliamentary Diary: Fuel Prices; Indonesia: Ethics or Economics?; High Pay: No Way
• Newsnotes: Bill Gates and Microsoft are in danger of being punished for doing something that is broadly in the public interest…  The anti-trust suit against IBM had to be abandoned after IBM’ s lawyers had quite legally and properly clogged up the whole procedure with a mass of trivial paperwork. And yet it did indirectly succeed. It had been IBM’s practice that when it had a success in partnership with outside suppliers, it would then buy out and incorporate them. It was IBM’s choice of Microsoft’s operating system and Intel’s chip that made them the standard for personal computers;
• SPAM;
• Natural feeding:  Short of living off locusts and wild honey, you are not going to avoid genetically modified food. The current panic is mainly over how was the modification done.

PDF of LTUR 77 – July-August 1998.

• Tories break Bi-partisanship? How much control does William Hague have over Shadow Cabinet policy?
• Co-determination: the secret history of workers’ control?. By  Christopher Winch.  Part One: the rise of a German institution
• Was Henry Ford a Capitalist?  “Economic ‘freedom’ is a very gerrymandered freedom. America is full of local, regional and state protectionism. Everything that suits the USA is deemed not to be a restriction on freedom. America is full of clever lawyers who have long ago demonstrated that the Constitution can mean whatever the consensus of lawyers want it to mean.”
• “Henry Ford funded a newspaper that was part of the same ideological camp as Nazism. The Nazis boasted that he was on their side, and he may well have funded them.”
• Cheap politics of proselytising, by Greg Sheridan.  “Michael Camdessus, the boss of the International Monetary Fund…  his comments on democracy and financial management were disturbing, for they indicate a confusion of the IMF’s role and will further reinforce Asian suspicion of the political intentions of the IMF.”
• Externalisation.  “Local Government will be the arena in which New Labour will be making new conquests…  Structures will be disrupted to oust Old Labour Councillors, and to disempower them. Practices will be altered to continue the process of giving public services over to the market which the Tories tentatively started.”
• Come off it, Mount! By Seam McGowan “Mount, like a great many bourgeois Brits, is under the impression that there is a large fund of good will towards the UK in the US. Most Americans rarely think of England (which is what Mount means when he writes `UK’ or ‘Great Britain’), but when they do, they regard it as an ex-imperial power.”
• Russia, A History, (Oxford University Press), reviewed by Seam McGowan.  “They say, for example, that the 1932 famine in the Ukraine was not a genocide. It was caused by harvest failures after collectivisation…  Russia, A History is an attempt to take that state down from its ‘Evil Empire’ pedestal, and turn it into a place to be thought about rationally.” 
• [True at the time.  Only later did Putin show too much independence, and Russia was restored to its former status as a Global Menace.]
• Lord Spiv And His Pals, by Max Anderson.  “Richard Heffernan and Mike Marquesee describe the process by which the path to leadership in the Labour Party was cleared for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The latter, famously, fell or was felled at the final hurdle.”
• Balkan Brew, by Seam McGowan.  “It is said that Bin Laden ‘has supported Muslims in Bosnia’, implicitly in the same way as Kosovo: by financing outsiders to go and fight there…  The ethnic Hungarians in Yugoslavia have remained quiet, because Budapest, for the past half-century, has followed a policy of calming national feeling in the region.”
• [This was before the West decided to detach Kosovo from Serbia.]
• Parliamentary Diary: A future for coal?; School journeys; Whither Europe?; Britain is moving towards full sexual equality for gay men.
• Notes on the News: International Financial Terrorism: The world is held to ransom by a pool of speculative money that can vanish overnight;
• Goldilocks and Japanicide: First Japan, which briefly seemed the global winner after the Soviet collapse. And now [former Western friends in] East Asia:
• Human Rights – we’re right and they’re wrong!  (Similar things described differently in the USA and China);
• Goldwater and the [US Republican] United Front of Saint and Sinners. Barry Goldwater’s ancestors were Jews who did well by converting to Christianity and by running a brothel in the California gold rush;

PDF of LTUR 78 – October 1998.

• The Prospects for Pensions: Serps.
• Workers’ Control in Germany: Part two: Does Co-Determination give the German economy a competitive advantage?
• The Future Of Welfare: A Guide To The Debate..  Book Review by Angela Clifford
• Newspapers: the fates of the London and Dublin Independents
• Mountain Greenery, by Sean McGowan.  “Not every argument put forward by the Greens is inherently wrong: it is just that they are taken to a point of absurdity. It is a great pity that many species are dying out, but it is not in the least a pity that the human race is growing. We live in a world of abundance (superabundance, even): the environmentalists, and ecologists have put the horse before the cart. (They would probably approve of this image.)
• “The world, as we all know, is ill-divid’ [sic] — or, to put it another way, the philosophers (aka ecologists) have described society: the point, however, it to change it.”
• Russia’s Decline and Fall: “ What do you call a bankrupt debtor with a nuclear arsenal? A case meriting sympathetic treatment.
• “America has managed to turn its bloodless victory in the Cold War into a global disaster by thinking that freedom was whatever they chose to say it was. It imagined that a Cold War victory stemming from Keynesianism and intelligent social planning was a vindication for New Right ideals.
• [True at the time.  Hostility happened later, when Putin as Yeltsin’s replacement showed more of an independent spirit.]
• More on Russia, by Sean McGouran.  “The Russian Republic in 1917 was in danger of being dismembered if it did not deal with the far from defeated Kaiserreich [Imperial Germany]…
• “If Lenin had pursued a ‘cynical’ foreign policy, it would have consisted in openly allying Russia with Germany (he was accused at the time of being a covert German agent), thereby wasting the time of possibly millions of Allied troops, and huge quantities of equipment The Soviet government simply let the world know about the dirty and dodgy deals the Entente had done to get the war off the ground (the defence of the rights of small nations quite emphatically did not enter into it).”
• New World Market Order, by Brendan Clifford.  “The world market—the market which embraces the world in a single economic form—globalism: this is less than ten years old. But already in mid- September 1998 has the feeling of having escaped catastrophe.
• “It missed catastrophe by a wide margin. But the miss was close enough to cause Will Hutton, on Channel 4 in early September, to see catastrophe as barely avoidable…
• “A few Asian countries constructed forms of national capitalism which enabled them to operate in the obligatory world market at a profit instead of being victims of it. Chief among these was Japan. It was followed by a few others which had come under Japanese rule in the Second World War and followed the Japanese example. In all these countries the state played the part of regulator of capitalist development, and the organisation of society for the purpose of enabling the economy to operate with advantage in its relationship with the world market was corporatist in one form or another. In this way the Asian Tigers were able to produce goods that sold in the world market.
• “During the era of the Cold War— which was the inevitable outcome of Britain’s Second World War- Ameranglia was grateful that countries should develop any kind of capitalism because the very capitalist system itself was at stake. But when the Cold War ended—when the other system, which was challenging the capitalist system throughout the world, collapsed—then Ameranglia began to resent the activity of the natural capitalist economies in Asia which were successfully producing goods to sell in the world market but were not themselves open to the Ameranglian financial system. And so a campaign of intimidation was launched against the Asians. Their systems were declared to be paternalistic, bureaucratic, corrupt.”
• Reprinted from 1993: “Yeltsin Upholds Democracy” [meant ironically].  “Yeltsin acts on the assumption that, because he was elected President in a freer atmosphere (although not on a wider franchise) then the Parliament, all that was done before his election falls away as invalid, and that the only valid legislative and judicial functions are those latent in his will…
• “It is not surprising that he should have that attitude. He is a man with a blurred sense of mission and he accidents of fortune have favoured him so far…
• “Western liberalism, having deluged Leninism comment with ridicule, should out of unreflecting admiration for Yeltsin have given new life to the concept of democratic dictatorship…
• Reprinted from 1993: Yeltsin Shells Parliament,  “At crucial moments (as determined by the state) the [British and US] media-creature must have the mentality of a serf. At less important times he is permitted to mimic a journalist of the Fourth Estate, but not when it counts…
• “John Lloyd, the Moscow man for the Financial Times, formerly of the Communist Party, reported the shelling of Parliament under the headline: ‘Hellish battle spells ignominious end for instigators of revolt’…
• “Khasbulatov, as Speaker of Parliament, had been on the barricades with Yeltsin in August 1991. He was anxious to make functional compromises between Parliament and the Executive, but was not prepared to collaborate in reducing Parliament to a Presidential rubber stamp. Yeltsin had majority support in Parliament to start with. He lost that majority by a blend or arrogance and incompetence. He was given extraordinary powers by Parliament for a year to improve the economy and the system of government. When he failed to do either, parliament refused to renew his emergency powers. But he held on to them anyway in defiance of Parliament. Then he declared Parliament to be dissolved though he had no Constitutional authority for doing so.”
• [Similar to the 2014 hijack of the government of Ukraine.  A new Presidential election was offered, but instead to the pro-Western politicians illegally seized power, only later having an election to make them look better.  And never curbing violent right-wingers, who became part of the army that fights secessionists.
• [We republished these remarks in 1998, when Yeltsin had visibly failed.  He handed over to Putin in 1999.  And the 1993 article is available: https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazines-020-to-029/magazine-035-not-yet-scanned/yeltsin-becoming-dictatorial-with-western-approval-1993/. 
• Parliamentary Diary: Crime Rates; Health Spending; Criminal Justice; Energy;
• Notes on the News: Clinton Sex Scandal: The attitude of the Clintons is unhelpful. They weaken their case by talk of ‘conspiracy’. Rather, there was a widespread campaign to limit the power of a President who sounded as if he might do something for the whole society rather than just the top 10%. One should remember the abnormality of American economic life since the 1970s. The whole benefit of a flourishing economy has gone to the Overclass, or top 10%. By contrast, in `deferential’ Britain the majority of the society did OK under Thatcher, even though our Overclass got an unfair share of the cake. Only in ‘free’ America can the majority of the society be cheated out of their normal rights.
• Productive murderers:  To generate one murder needs almost 160,000 Belgians, but a mere 1587 inhabitants of Washington DC. Amazing, isn’t it?
• Rolls Royce (Volkswagen) and Rolls Royce (Bavarian Motor Works): New owners.  “’Privatisation’ is a meaningless rebranding of denationalisation. And denationalisation denationalises. As a part-Welsh British- European, I am not greatly bothered. But I am amazed that those who ought to care seem not to.
• Don’t Mention the War!:  If all else fails, Britons perhaps have a role as global bother-boys. There are no longer any meaningful defence needs, as there genuinely were when the Warsaw Pact was in business. But there still is a world role for an army that can meddle in an inherently chaotic New World Order. World War II was a War of Alternative Evils. Britain’ s mismanagement in the 20th century was due to its loss of a secure economic position.
• Bad and worse on Welfare (the departure of Frank Field; Genetic Engineering;

PDF of LTUR 79 – November 1998.

• Punishing The Victims:  Government Collusion in Pension Scam
• Whither Welfare Reform?  By David Morrison
• Barbara Fights On:  a transcript of Barbara Castle’s speech at the meeting of the Bevin Society at Blackpool
• Education, Training and the Global Economy By David Ashton and Francis Green Edward.  Reviewed by Christopher Winch
• More On Pensions by David Morrison
• Is Torture Legal? By Chris Smith
• Our roving Conference correspondent, Hoey Polloi, recalls some Blackpool fringe meetings.
• The Minimum Wage by David Morrison
• Notes on the News; East Atlantic Blues (Britain to align more with the USA;
• Clinton: low crimes and Misdemeanours “The USA has never been a parliamentary system, where the majority in the legislature can bring down the chief executive. Impeachment would offer a way of achieving this, if it were allowed for every bit of Presidential misbehaviour… 
• “Even in America, it is being noticed that the new economics has done nothing at all about the decline of traditional morals. The New Right promised that if they were allowed to turn the clock back to the times before Keynesianism, traditional morality would automatically be restored, and without any unpleasant interference with personal freedom…
• “The traditionally-minded part of the electorate have been a bunch of goldbearing asses for listening to the New Right. But is the combination now coming apart?”
• [Sadly, in as far as it happened, it raised up Trump.  Bernie Saunders was a real alternative, but cheated out of a chance to run for President]
• Saving Private Ryan; Russia: asset strippers; Russia: asset strippers; Serbian shadowboxing [predictions  about Serbia and Tibet, which sadly turned out to be wrong];
• Law of Straw:  Could the root cause of Pinochet’s arrest be a desire by President Clinton to remind his Republican foes that a sitting President always has a clout well beyond his official powers?
• Everyone knows that Pinochet was acting on behalf of Nixon and Kissinger when he overthrew the democratically elected Marxist Salvador Allende. Hence his subsequent reign of terror must also have been approved by them as well. It has been noted that Chile was a pioneer of New Right policies, as well as an object lesson in the cost of going against US wishes.

PDF of LTUR 80 – December 1998.

• Don’t Worry… Be Tony   “There is little sign of the Tories becoming an effective opposition, let alone an alternative government. They haven’t been able to construct a coherent alternative to New Labour on the economy. Their fundamental problem is that as a party they have refused to accept that New Labour has stolen their ground and that it is impossible to get elected on a programme which is further to the right.”
• Lord Jenkins’s Proportional Representation Recommendations. By David Morrison
• Leaflet advertised the meeting addressed by Barbara Castle: “Neil Kinnock has suddenly decided to re-enter Labour Party politics with an attack on a Socialist grouping in the Party.”
• Fairness at work by David Morrison
• Wind in the Straw: David Morrison examines the implications of the recent Parliamentary row about the ‘closed list’ voting system for European elections.
• John Gray Interviewed by Max Anderson
• Parliamentary Diary: Fairness at work; Water Prices To Dive; Paddy Ashdown unexpectedly criticises the Government; Environment Taxation
• Notes on the News: Liberal Autocracy, “ The precipitous decline of Russia under Liberalisation has naturally left a lot of ordinary Russians angry and confused…  Liberal Autocracy was not tried. It had worked passably well in a number of societies, beginning with Cromwell and doing wonders for France under de Gaulle.”;
• Sound-bitten politics, “You can underestimate the intelligence of the American public: the recent US elections showed that. The notion that lying about his private life made Clinton unfit for office was obvious nonsense”;
• Get-poor-quick:  The defect of any get-rich-quick scheme is that the money has to come from somewhere, often the greedy investor, which causes me no grief. But also sometimes from poor and needy people.
• Microsoft – Big Bill Knows Better Than You.  “Bill Gates is very much the product of corporate America; changed, but retaining many old features, including retaining the standard view of life as a burden on money.”
• Internet news:  The Internet may have developed as a vehicle for pornography and peculiar discussion groups, but it has gone far beyond that. It also grew as a vehicle for many other sorts of specialist dialogue, including the rapid exchange of information between scientists and mathematicians working in dozens of specialist areas. And now it is also becoming a means of mass publishing. A recent survey found that BBC Online was the most popular Website in the UK, with as many as a million page-views for top items like the Leonid meteors and the Starr report. It deserves it too. Online is much more informative and detailed than CEEFAX and resembles a news bulletin, except you can go right to the items that interest you.