Labour Affairs Magazine

Beginning 1996, issues 60 to 71. Note that some of the PDFs have a 1997 date wrongly shown as 1996.

PDF from LTUR 60 – November 1996.

• Editorial:  John Prescott  stifling criticism of the Blair leadership.
• Barbara Castle speech on Pensions
• People without any class: how a system of privilege has been replaced by a system of random unfairness and continuous stress.
• Demos on stakeholding
• Blairspeak.
• Prior’s plans on secondary picketing
• Chirac, Cook, Balfour and Bevin on Palestine
• Trade Union Diary; Computers, John Edmunds, Prescott, Robert Maxwell, Bill Morris.
• Newsnotes; Channel Tunnel privately-finance fails; Yeltsin, Chechens and General Lebed; Virginia Bottomley keeps British sexual censorship irrational, intrusive and basically pointless; Afghans – Slaves of God (predicting in 1997 that serious Afghan modernisation had ended with the killing of Marxist President Najibullah)

PDF from LTUR 61 – December-January 1996-7.

• Will Hutton: In a state?
• Hutton’s book reviewed by Brendan Clifford
• Working Time Directive
• Helmut Schmidt—the Bundesbank
• GP Fundholding
• All must have prizes: Melanie Phillips on education, reviewed by Chris Winch
• Newsnotes: Tax; Privatisation; Clinton, a nice crook; Diane Abbot, Gun Law and Dunblane
• Parliamentary Diary: Arms Sales, Schools, Privatising Britain’s Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors
• Trade Union Diary: Criminal Classes; French Lorry Strike; Gordon Brown; The 48 hour directive; Islington Council Abolishing May Day holiday; Blair on hereditary peers.
• The Budget

PDF from LTUR 62 – February 1997.

• Editorial:  Strikes in South Korea
• Chris Smith reviews The Unknown Lenin, edited by Richard Pipes
• More on Will Hutton
• Democracy in Serbia by Angela Clifford
• Rape on Trial
• Trade Union Diary: Tony Blair against “corporatism”.
• Parliamentary Diary: housing benefit fraud; British aircraft killing people in East Timor; the left against the Common Market, Hillsborough
• Newsnotes: Eurosceptics (“A policy of withdrawal means to put one’s head on the block and hope that France and Spain and Germany will not wield the axe”; Cardinal Hume’s inhumanity to women
• Laws on Rape: Review of ‘Carnal Knowledge’, by Sue Lees

PDF from LTUR 63 – March 1997.

• Editorial: “Britain is Britain”: Can there be change under Labour?
• Corporations and Corporatism
• Exports as a Drug: How The External Trade Fix Pulls Down Wages And Society—An Economic Trap
• Corporations Good, Corporatism Bad ?  (People do not remember how successful corporatism was in the 1950s in ending the miseries of the 1930s and ’40s.)
• Molesworth: 48-Hours Directive; Inward Investment; Job Insecurity; “Why The Workers Deserted Australian Labor; Women/Middle Class Labour Take-over?
• Newsnotes: Fear and loathing in West Lothian (Scottish Devolution); A lovely economy?; Crime, fear and ignorance; Guilty and not guilty (OJ. Simpson)
• Parliamentary Diary: Liberal Democrat spending, royal yacht
• Media Manipulation And Cuba
• Serbia And Democracy: A Constitutional Postscript by Angela Clifford

PDF from LTUR 64 – April 1997.

• Editorial: Why not vote Labour?
• A Yuppie’s view of the British Empire, by Sean McGouran
• Pensions: the facts of life
• A recent Russian view of Trotsky.  Brendan Clifford reviews Dmitri Volkogonov’s Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary.
• Letter from Australia.  Patrick O’Beirne on Australia’s New Industrial Relations Act.
• Michael Foot’s varying views on N. Ireland
• Parliamentary Diary: Sale of London Underground; The Price of Privatised Energy; Labour and Tax; Punishment shootings in Northern Ireland; Armchair Voters
• Molesworth: European Realities; EMU Will Counter Recession; G7 And The Dollar; German Miners; UK Trade Union Legislation;
• Europe Is more Than The Euro. Why The Finance Ministers Of The Union Cannot Have Exclusive Power An Interview with Victor Klima, Austria’s new social Democratic Chancellor, in which he warns of false priorities. Translated by Angela Clifford.

PDF from LTUR 65 – May 1997.

• The Last Landslide? Will Blair deliver on P.R?
• Letter from Northern Ireland
• David Dimbleby Misunderstands Scots and Welsh nationalism
• Hong Kong Shanghaied.  Human Rights considered in the context of the Opium Wars.  Predicting that it would not be a centre of Westernisation.  Though not the doomed protests that later happened.
• Prospects for local government under New Labour
• Ramsay Macdonald on Joseph Chamberlain
• Housing Benefit: a change for the worse…
• Newsnotes: The strange death of Tory England?; Britain is bumbling; Free market in fish quotas?;
• Molesworth: Tactics & Tory Opposition; 48 Hours Directive; Union Recognition

PDF from LTUR 66 – June 1997.

• Will Frank Field Reform the DHSS?
• French Election: Winning Without Selling Out
• Martin Jacques on Blair
• Ramsay MacDonald on Joseph Chamberlain (part 2)
• European TUC Opposed a March by the Unemployed
• John Laughland Fights World War 3
• Parliamentary Diary; Labour a Party Of All The People?
• Molesworth; Trade Unions At DTI, Labour as the Business Party

PDF from LTUR 67 – July-August 1997.

• Capital Globalism + Strict Immigration Control = Prosperity?  New Labour’s Economic World-view
• Obituary for Peter Winch, Philosopher
• The Future of Democracy in Hong Kong.  “China has an horrific potential for violence and tragedy if it should ever lose coherence. Tibetan, Muslim, Mongolian, Manchu and Han-Chinese populations are all mixed up in the thinly populated west. It could easily be another Bosnia. There are further possibilities for conflict within the majority Han- Chinese population.”
• Don’t Cry For Me Oklahoma,  Thoughts on the McVeigh verdict by G. M. Williams
• German Angst And ‘Crimes’ Of The Wehrmacht
• Parliamentary Diary: Mo Mowlam’s faux pas over the Portadown Orange Order march; Benn, Ken Livingstone and Europe;
• Notes on the News: Tobacco Barons Kill More than the Mafia; McDonalds and Libel; An Englishman’s Word is His Convenience; Tory Party Futures; Animal Welfare Red in Tooth and Claw.

PDF from LTUR 68 – September 1997.

• New Labour: Do They Even Know it’s Government?
• The German Welfare State: A Target of Anglo-American Greuelpropaganda? By Manfred McDowell
• Reply by Angela Clifford
• Devolution: the Catalonian experience,  With the forthcoming referendums in Scotland and Wales in mind Tim Williams examines Catalonia’s use of devolution to distance itself from Spain.
• Private Finance Initiative.  Angela Clifford reviews Dangers ,Realities, Alternatives published by UNISON.
• Fringe Benefits? Tim Williams considers the possibility that the Tories might turn the tables on Labour in the coming battle over Devolution.
• Parliamentary Diary; Why did We Vote Labour?; Labour supplying Indonesia with 16 Hawk jets, used against East Timor; New Deal?—Rough deal for (some) lone parents; Coal’s Collapse;
• Notes on the News; Hong Kong happenings; Beijing Spring?; Decriminalising crime? (drugs); Hindu heritage; Mir mired, Yeltsin fired?
• Trade Union Diary; The Future of Coal; United Parcel Service (UPS) in the USA; The Magnet Strike; Rail operating companies have introduced a bad penalty points system

PDF from LTUR 69 – October 1997

• New Labour: New Rat Race.  Whatever Happened to Margaret Beckett?
• Labour And The Private Finance Initiative
• New Labour: Old Battlefield.  Joe Keenan finds servility at the TUC Conference
• Sean McGouran reviews The Aachen Memorandum, a recent venture into fiction by Andrew Roberts, the historian and columnist.  The world as it might be in 2045.
• Andrew Roberts in the Sunday Times.
• A Bout of Mourning in the Global Night Club.  Strange reactions to the death of over Lady Diana.  “The Royals and their advisors seem not to have noticed how far the `alternative morality’ of the 1960s is now the standard morality.”
• Parliamentary Diary: Tears and Sympathy over Lady Diana; Air Transport Failures; Poverty By Another Name; Archbishop of Canterbury to tell New Labour that ‘taxing and spending’ is good.
• Trade Union Diary: The US Unions—Update; Unemployment And Europe; MSF And The Archbishop; Blair And The TUC.
• Newsnotes:  China Plays It Cool.  “China is not “going capitalist”. Rather, it is, returning to the orthodox Marxist policies of the 1950s, when it was fully intended to have a long period of mixed-economy”; Compassion Fatigue. “Of all the times she could have picked to die, Mother Teresa had to die the weekend they were burying Princess Diana.”; Tory Doldrums; A Very Short 20th Century “Did the 20th century start in 1979? Certainly, the radio pundits are claiming that socialism has lost the 20th century.”

Issue 70 not currently available.

PDF from LTUR 71 – December-January 1998.

• New Labour Mysteries The Backbenchers That Didn’t Bark.  “Oona King’s  maxim seemed to be that when there is a choice New Labou must choose the Thatcherite option. She explained that they had lost four elections because the electorate could not trust them to do this, and now that they had finally gained office they had to show that they were absolutely trustworthy”.
• Chris Winch reviews Trust by Francis Fukuyama
• Regulation Benefits French Workers.  Angela Clifford describes the resolution of the recent lorry drivers strike in the context of France’s role at the geographical heart of the European Union
• Stock-Market Brawls in the Global Night-Club.  How global power is shifting,
• ‘Libel’ As Censorship.  Independent Television News against an independent magazine, Living Marxism, that exposed distorted news about Bosnia.
• Parliamentary Diary: New Labour Evasive on Taxes; Motor Sports Allowed to Push Tobacco;
• Newsnotes: Why is it that lawyers get paid a  fortune, while childminders are paid just  a pittance?
• The New Labour Miracle!  “There has been no peace  dividend. There has only been an  expansion of the world market into the  regions where Bolshevism collapsed, an  intensification of competition, an erosion  of social culture, and a lengthening of  the working day.
• “New Labour is a blind adaptation to  this resurgence of capitalism. Old Labour  can offer no resistance because Old  Labour is New Labour. At least they are  the same bodies.”