Labour Affairs Magazine

The start of the 21st century, by most people’s reckoning. Not what was hoped for, with the failure of New Labour. A wider look at where it went wrong, with Tony Blair identifying with the super-rich.
How the Kosovo War was clearly shown to be illegal, but most politicians did not care. “Moral (but Illegal) Bombing”.

PDF for LTUR 93 – April 2000.

• E-Commerce: what’s the big deal? “Wednesday: Tony has had the brilliant idea of using the Net to solve national poverty and unemployment within five years, by giving every child in the land free 24-hour free access to pornography.”
  That was Mrs Blair’s comment, according to her Observer diary, on her husband’s announcement on 7th March that he wanted all of us to have access to the internet by 2005. It was one of the more informed comments on the PM’s plan…
  Pornography is a commodity that is particularly suitable for e-commerce…
  But most other commodities cannot be delivered down a telephone line. E-commerce in these commodities is mail order (or telephone or fax order) via the internet. And mail order was a modern retailing concept a hundred years ago.
• You couldn’t make it up… …unless you’re running a New Labour smear campaign.  David Morrison listened to a lively discussion between Jeremy Paxman and the junior minister Barbara Roche as she enjoyed a moment’s pause in in the important work of spreading stories about Ken Livingstone.
• How Competition Cured Morality.  Gwydion M. Williams discussed what capitalism actually does to traditional values.
  Plus Britain’s home-grown antisemitism: “Had he lived longer, Chesterton might perhaps have felt ashamed at the way the Nazi party had acted according to the logic of what Chesterton, Belloc and many others had been saying for the past half-century. Perhaps. But perhaps not. For certain, there are times when lack of foresight is a criminal offence. There had been enough violent anti- Semitism in places like Tsarist Russia for a reasonable person to know that the matter was no joke.”
  [G. K. Chesterton is best known for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown.  The nasty side had been covered up.]
• Mr Freedland Changes Trains, by David Morrison Jonathan Freedland was one of three Guardian columnists who cheered on the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia a year ago.  However, one year on doubt has crept in.
• Kosovo and Virtual Morality, by Andrew Bryson.  “The Kosovo war is unlikely to go down in history as anything but a dishonourable bungle, which was instrumental in turning a small-scale, limited civil war into a humanitarian disaster.”
• Cuba, by Wilson John Haire.  “Back in 1989 Cuba was accused by the West of being part of the world-wide drug trade. These accusations were put down to anti-communist propaganda by the Cuban authorities. Soon afterwards General Arnaldo Ochoa of the Cuban armed forces was accused of drug running and corruption and was executed.”
• Danny The Confused, by Sean McGouran.  The errors of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the main leader of the 1968 student protests in France.
• Parliamentary Diary: British Nuclear Fuels’ falsification of safety records; Murders in Northern Ireland; MPs with extra jobs; Misbehaviour by Newcastle Football Club directors
• Notes on the News: Ken Livingstone, Londoner.  The British attitude is: have a top person who can rule, but who can also be kept in his place by popular feeling.
  BMW and Rover: Board members in British companies include no workers’ representatives. The idea was on offer in the 1970s, but leftists such as Arthur Scargill and Neil Kinnock vigorously opposed it in case it diminished the struggle against capitalism.
  Chinese Shadow-Boxing.  The eight decade long conflict between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists may be ending with collapse of Kuomintang power on its Taiwanese enclave.
  The USA is the only power that could authorise Taiwanese independence, and it does not want it. They recognise that Beijing is currently taking China in much the direction that the USA wants China to go…  The USA also perhaps see the danger of another hundred Yugoslavias, if the diverse intermingled peoples of China were not under some sort of strong central control.  [True enough in the year 2000.  It later changed.]
  Dying in the Wild East. When I was in Mongolia in 1997 for the total eclipse, it seemed like a country coming apart at the seams. China was in control of its own economy, but Mongolia had been globalised without having very much to offer.
  Eastern Europe is mostly collapsing into a comfortable dependence on Western Europe. Which is not about to apply free-market dogma against its own interests, any more than the USA will. The ideas are invoked in internal struggles, but no one treats them as truths when their own vital interests are at stake.
  Yugoslavia Break-Up.  The Yugoslav Communist Party, with its solid Stalinist traditions, was able to impose peace on a region that has barely known it before or since. The different elements flowed untidily into three of the world’s major civilizations: Latin Christianity, Orthodox Christianity and Islam.
  Discussing a magazine that got sued out of existence: “It was also stupid for Living Marxism to get caught up in a legal system that was set up by the gentry for the gentry.“

PDF for LTUR 94 – May 2000.

• The Case For Mugabe.  “The state which is now called Zimbabwe was set up as a white settler colony after the Boer War less than a century ago. Britain made war on the Boer Republic in order to gain control of the gold and diamonds that had been found in them, and in order to open the way for the expansion of the British Empire towards Central Africa. The chief British propagandist in the Boer War was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He explained that it was intolerable that those unprogressive Boer Republics should be allowed, on the plea of sovereign right, to block the flow of Empire and progress into the regions beyond them…
  “Soviet Cold War pressure on the Empire caused Harold Macmillan to announce in the late fifties that a “wind of change” was blowing in Africa. Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) were granted independence in 1964, the electoral franchise having been reformed in favour of the African majority. But franchise reform was delayed in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and the granting of independence was delayed accordingly.”
  [Mugabe led the guerilla war that ended white rule.  And added to the pressures on Apartheid South Africa, which eventually made a deal giving power to the black majority.]
• Meeting Advert: Adam Smith – Wealth Without Nations by Gwydion M. Williams.   Contrary to both the Marxist and New-Right view, the British Industrial Revolution was as much state-sponsored as capitalist. Adam Smith paved the way for a cosmopolitical world, a world where wealth flourishes but nations decay.
• Anti-Capitalist For What? By Gwydion M. Williams.   Britain is not, and never has been, a capitalist society. It is a society in which capitalist decision-making plays a large, and growing, role, but still only a partial role, and a role which was much smaller back in the 1970s. In the 1970s, there was a widespread willingness to reduce the role of capital still further, to move to much more social control. This included an incomes policy that would have decided wages and salaries according to criteria of social justice rather than bargaining power in the labour market.
  Left propaganda laid society open to Thatcherism by not distinguishing between a capitalist society and a society in which capitalist decision-making plays a large role. In terms of standard Left theory, the alternative to 100% socialism was 100% capitalism, and today’s Blairites are busy damaging Britain’s social structure in pursuit of the latter ideal.
• The drift under Thatcher was to turn Britain into a second-rate copy of the USA. It is much easier to copy American vices than American virtues; we are heading towards US level of drug-taking, urban decay, violent crime and social emptiness. We have wholly failed to acquire their efficient management of manufacturing industries, with good British ideas still tending to go to France, Germany or the USA to be turned into marketable products.
• Go No More A-Rover? David Morrison points out that the future of Rover cars depends on overcoming the problem of selling them. [Never in fact solved: MG Rover Group was broken up and is largely gone.]
• London Underground’s Funding Gap by David Morrison
• Parliamentary Diary:  What Price Loyalty? A recent survey showed that the average yearly income of a Premiership footballer over the age of 20 was £409,000, or £8,000 a week; and this does not include money from endorsements and sponsorship: Ken’s Blarney (London mayor election); Caring Clare?  Clare pretends that the values of Blair and Co. are the same as those of Bevan and Co., or certainly those of previous Labour governments.
• Notes on the News:  Fairy Tales of Saint George. Once upon a time the ethnic English assumed that Englishness, Britishness, United Kingdom identity and the global English-speaking culture were all centered on them.
  Not any more.
  The recent upsurge in interest in St. George was not much celebrated on April 23rd until this year. It was regarded as part of ‘popery’ and was played down by the Church of England.
  Race Cards:  There is a difference between allowing new people in and accepting those legally here, mostly now born here and distinctly British in outlook. But I can’t see that the protests made are really drawing much of a difference. The Tories deny ‘playing the race card’ . And yet a cynical Tory strategist might wish to copy US republican strategy. Attract a racist vote, while retaining a much larger number who would never vote for an overtly racist party.  [Surprisingly, the Tories did promote a lot of non-white people to top jobs.  The hostility is for new arrivals, plus some West Indians who came as children but were never officially British.  The US Republicans had more racists votes to draw on, and never allowed similar people to get very far.]
  Voting With Their Bodies In the USA, unofficial segregation continues, with different ethnic groups mostly scared of each other and living apart. Not in Britain, despite quite widespread racist attitudes, especially among young people. What is remarkable is the number of couples who get together without regard for any ethnic barriers. People are `voting with their bodies’, with the same mix of erotic and romantic factors as any other pairing.
  Mainstream, My Mainstream.  I was interested to hear William Hague speaking of the social `mainstream’ . I’ve been using the phrase for several years now, along with `Overclass’ , the disconnected rich people he seems to identify with…
  If this goes on, we’ll have to redefine `Conservative’ as someone who tries to demolish everything for which they see no immediate need. And then blames the poor for the resultant chaos.
  Privatised Death: When William Hague calls for softening of the proof for self-defence, he is wanting to privatise the death penalty, as well as unofficially reintroducing it for property offenses. In the USA, it seems that most courts do stretch ‘self-defence’ to total meaninglessness. Attacking those who pose no threat or who are fleeing is still `self-defence’.
  Internet Libel:  Dr Laurence Godfrey got £250,000 from Demon Internet because they refused to remove a false accusation posted on an Internet bulletin board. It’s all very well to call for ‘free speech’. But supposing it was you? Something totally false, but with enough factual detail to make it plausible? As I see it, the problem is the slow, punitive and unreliable libel law in Britain: a system which makes it much safer to tell lies about someone who can’t sue you than to tell the truth about someone who can.

PDF for LTUR 95 – June 2000.

• The British State’s Revived Ambitions.   The British state has been feeling its way back into balance-of-power politics since the ending of the Cold War ten years ago. Realisation that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of China into its own affairs had suddenly left Britain with the second most powerful usable army in the world dawned gradually in the political circles that were still capable of thinking on this scale. Resignation to the status of fourth or fifth power was dispelled, and ambition to regain former glory escalated.
• Have Internet Retailing Companies A Future? By David Morrison.  “Traditional retailers, such as Tesco  and WH Smith, have introduced internet  ordering as an additional string to their  bow…  But pure internet retailers—  companies set up from scratch to trade  exclusively via the internet—such as  Boo.com and Lastminute.com make no  sense at all.”
• Has Rover Really  Been Saved?  On 9th May [2000], the Phoenix group  took over Rover. There was widespread  rejoicing that the Longbridge plant had  been ‘saved’, and with it an estimated  24,000 jobs in the West Midlands. The  rejoicing is premature.  [Sadly correct – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MG_Rover_Group#Phoenix_Consortium_ownership.]
• Uncle Sam’s Web “Just you, your trusted friends and a whole gaggle of police spies. That’s how ‘libertarian’ the new technology of the Internet actually is.”.  [China later made their independent, but the libertarians never got what they’d hoped for.]
• Scandalmongering by avid Morrison.  “For the first time in three years it is possible to believe that New Labour may not win the next election.”
• Tony Benn’s Debate On Socialism.   As our New Labour rulers show an increasing tendency to by-pass Parliament in favour of populism and spin, there are still some Honourable Members who see the House as something other than a machine for generating tame majorities. Mr Benn’s debate on Socialism took place on 16th May.
• Parliamentary Diary:  Tyson KOs New Labour.  Women Labour MPs were said to be  furious with Jack Straw’s decision to  allow Mike Tyson, the former  heavyweight champion of the world,  into Britain to fight fellow-American  Lou Saverese in Glasgow later this  month.
  Green Labour; Will Ken [Livingstone]return to the fold?
• Notes on the News: From Russia With Lyrics I watched the Eurovision Song Contest just for the voting, always the best part… More than half in the songs were English, only a minority in anyone’s national language… The winner was a song in English from Denmark, closely followed by a song in English from Russia.
  French culture was centred on Paris, Paris and Paris, which is why it could not keep its brief hegemony. English success is mostly culture following military success, yet it also allows a great range of different forms. You could also get a nice argument going about where, if anywhere, you would find the centre of English culture.
  Million Moms Fail To Rule On Guns.  Meanwhile the USA continues to show how we and they are going in different directions. The USA with ordinary people allowed guns for ‘self defence’ is vastly more dangerous than the UK where only professional criminals have them
  I think they should repeal the  entire Bill of Rights and sign up to one of  the modern Human Rights conventions instead.

PDF for LTUR 96 – July 2000.

• Britain’s Geopolitical Dilemma. President Clinton declared last year that globalism is not a policy but a fact. This means that in this era when the ideology of ‘choice’ justifies everything, choice is decreed not to be functional at the most basic level of all. Peoples must have the freedom to choose whatever the core economies of the global market present to them, and those economies must be free to present their ‘choices’ everywhere. What peoples may not choose is to preserve ways of life which they had developed for themselves during the long era of a different kind of freedom that preceded the arrival of modern Imperialism.
  (This began with Britain’s war in the 1840s to compel the Chinese state to allow free trade in opium, and the despatch of American warships to Tokyo Bay in the 1850s to rouse Japan out of its peaceful slumbers and present it with the stark choice of being predator or prey.)
• Letter on Kosovo
• Pensions, by David Morrison.  “The 75p a week increase in the basic pension introduced last April was, and is, a Government spin doctor’ s nightmare. You simply can’t sell it as an act of outstanding generosity to pensioners.”
• Is The Tide Turning? By David Morrison.  “On 7th June Tony Blair achieved the rare, perhaps unique, distinction of being heckled and slow hand clapped by members of the Women’s Institute.”
• Tony Blair’s Anti-Socialist Speech.  “The way we do it is to combine the old and the new, traditional British values of responsibility and respect for others; with a new agenda of opportunity for all in a changing world. “
• Spooks and Chinooks by Dan Ackroid.  “The magazine Computer Weekly has recently been mentioned widely because of its continuing insistence that the Chinook helicopter crash in 1994 was not due to pilot error. This was a crash in which a whole slew of government experts on Northern Ireland security unexpectedly died: most of the top people, it seems.
  “It is remarkable how Northern Ireland security position has improved since the crash.
  “The crash gave IRA room for manoeuvre, the confidence to risk a peace process. And note, the Irish are substantially part of the new Globalism.” 
  [Dan Ackroid is a pen-name for Gwydion M. Williams, who knows no more than he said in the year-2000 article.]
• Democracy doesn’t deserve total devotion, by Samuel Gregg.  “To love democracy, it is necessary to love it moderately. This is the principal lesson of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the 19th century’s greatest philosophers.
  “Tocqueville understood that democracy’s tragedy is that is defects are generated by its very principles. One contemporary Australian example is the problem of proliferating ‘rights-talk’. Our political and legal language has been impoverished by an explosion in the use of the word ‘rights’.
• Tony Blair’s Anti-Socialist Speech.  “The way we do it is to combine the old and the new, traditional British values of responsibility and respect for others; with a new agenda of opportunity for all in a changing world. “
• Scott Ritter And The Sanctions Against Iraq, by  David Morrison.
• Notes on the News: Ministry For Offensiveness.  We used to have a Ministry for War. George Orwell foresaw it might be changed to a ‘Ministry of Peace’, they actually settled on ‘Ministry of Defence’ . In the period of the Cold War, there was a certain reality to the name. NATO’ s role was mainly defensive and British Imperial power was in retreat. But then with the Cold War ended, there was a deliberate decision not to beef up the UN, but leave it weak and dependant on the will of NATO countries— which is hardly defence.
  How about the Ministry for Offensive Self-Righteousness?
  Death Penalties The recent controversies in the USA suggests reasons why their high rate of execution does no good. It would appear to be mostly carried out on minor criminals convicted of crimes they had nothing to do with. A real murderer would usually have good legal defence and get off.
  Middle Mired America.  “`America’ s Forgotten Majority’ are white working-class people without college degrees. They pursue a far wider range of occupations than their manual worker parents; they are also much less Archie Bunkerish in their attitudes. But they share a common sense of economic frustration. In 1979-97 their real incomes fell by 12% if they had only a high school diploma and by 26% if they had not even managed that. By contrast, people with college degrees saw their incomes rise by 6% and those with advanced degrees by 13%.” And several million millionaires are flourishing in any economy that grows no better overall than it did while the New Deal / Keynesian system still held. And yet George Bush Junior is leading in the polls with a promise of tax cuts that would shift still more wealth to those who need it the least.
  Conservative & Nihilist Party Britain has basically turned in a European direction. Tony Blair has turned out to be ‘Yesterday’s Modernism’. But William ‘the Unsilent’ Hague seems intent on fighting for further Americanisation, including an attempt to tap into the same sort of right-wing religious feeling that allows the Republics to win with a ‘United Front Of Saints And Sinners’—except that classic Puritanism of the sort that mostly votes Republican in the USA has simply vanished over here.
  Prince William. The marriage of Charles and Diana was supposed to set an example of traditional values upheld. Except that the males in the Royal family never did uphold such values out of the public eye, and nowadays both the press and the women are less tolerant and respectful.
  Medicinal Tangles. Cuba 39th, USA 37th. That’s one of the lest noticed statistics from the WHO survey of world standards in medical care.
  We come in at 18th. Our NHS, cheap and bad by European standards, is still way ahead of the US. An extremely rich country with a much higher proportionate level of medical spending fails because it is all market-driven. It sells excess care to the rich and denies basic care to many who need it. You can find the full report at https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/924156198X.
  The Human-cell Genomes Scientists have now got a full picture of the human genome, but contrary to reports, this is not the instruction-book for humans, merely the instruction-book for the individual cell. And even as instructions for cell-making, we know what it says but not why nor how it works.

PDF for LTUR 97 – August-September 2000.

• Liberals and Left-Liberals “There’s nothing surer—the rich get rich and the poor get poorer”. There was a time when Clare Short was of the opinion that the poverty of the poor was in some way connected with the riches of the rich. That time was either a moment ago or an eternity ago depending on how you feel about it.
  She settled in very quickly to her job as Secretary of State for goodness all over the world. She adapted instantly to the basic requirement of that job—which is a sincere belief that the poor have brought their poverty upon themselves by their fecklessness, their improvidence, their tardiness in forming themselves into perfectly open markets for Western capital investment.
• The Leader’s Will.  [Tony Blair]  The Prime Minister’s lack of gravitas, his.   Walter Mitty-like nature, has been thrown into stark relief— in contrast with the increasingly credible Gordon Brown.
• The Last Refuge.   Joe Keenan reviews the recent Hollywood offering, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson. What it shows about atrocities by the British Empire is accurate.
• Till human voices wake us… Selections from Robert Blatchford
  (Robert Blatchford the writer and Keir Hardie the parliamentarian were the principal socialist figures in England in the 1890s. Blatchford edited the journal The Clarion, and collected some of the material into a book Merrie England. He encouraged the Labour movement to become independent of the Liberal Party, though he never took much part in the ILP. Blatchford and Keir Hardie did not get on.)
• Mr Follett doesn’t regret…  Millionaire novelist Ken Follett accuses the Prime Minister of allowing officials to criticise some ministers by spinning stories and giving secret briefings to journalists.
• Parliamentary Diary: Empty Choice (not restoring Council Housing).  How Safe is Safe?  (Biotechnology companies and GM crops.)  Tax “Blair claims to be on the side of the poor and excluded, yet he surrounds himself with people who evade income tax and have the lifestyle of the superrich”. 
• Notes on the News: The Phantom-Menace Missile Defence System.  Any state capable of launching an atomic missile at the USA could also organise a much more effective and untraceable terrorist strike: a few tons of anthrax spores tipped in a reservoir, or a nuclear weapon concealed in a ship.
  The significance of the missile defence is not terrorism, but deterrence. Being ready for a coherent unexpected attack is never likely to be possible. Dealing with a hasty retaliation after the US had struck first would be another matter, and quite possibly feasible. And just knowing it would be possible would change the ‘balance of terror’ in the USA’s favour.
   The US has sanctified ‘cowboy diplomacy’, i.e., ignoring International Law and existing norms, doing whatever looks good to the voters back in the USA, even if it’s stupid. The only limit is when the costs of the war might become excessive.
   The Serbs had no weapons of mass destruction, so they could be reduced by US air-terrorism. Contrary to what was claimed at the time, the Serb army suffered no serious damage. It was air terrorism against railway bridges and television stations and similar civilian targets that won the campaign.
  Unmeasured Intelligence.  IQ is only one small part of real human intelligence. They should rename it ‘PA’ , puzzle aptitude. People with a high ‘IQ’ do well in the educational system, but rather less in achieving a high income and a position of power— and still less with living a satisfactory human life.
  [I did not expect Chatbots.  But this explains why they master another aspect of puzzle solving, and still lack vital human qualities.]
  William Hague and the Last Crusade.  I suppose the Northern Ireland connection makes it impossible for the Tories to rename themselves the Republican Party, but it is the US Republicans who are the source of such ideas as they have. In the USA sleaze, racism, inequality and religious enthusiasm all feed off each other and are very much related. It’s a useless system of ‘organised virtue’ which manages to propagate itself very well, much as bindweed and nettles will overrun a garden if you stop weeding .
  The Blague Ideology.   Just as Clinton/Gore and Bush have the same economic policies, so Blair and Hague are converging on a lot of issues. On law and order there is an assumption that tough action means effective action. This is not really so. America’s drop in crime is demographic—if there are less young men in the population there will be less crime, and that’s the main explanation.
  The USA has established an Open Oligarchy, an elite that anyone can, in theory, join, while individuals and families can quite quickly fall out of it if they are not efficient. But it is also destroying its own culture, making society steadily more violent, polarised and unhappy.
  [I should expand this sometime.  The Open Oligarchy, and Why it Deserves Its Enemies.]
  Chicken Run Mission Impossible 2 The Patriot Gladiator.  The top four films in a recent UK top 10 could be run together as in the above title, which says something about our current interests.
  Modern film-makers are ready to be very heroic in the face of an old dead lion. What they will not do is expose the myths and falsehoods of the currently powerful (the USA), rather, they seek to pander to and promote America’s prejudices.
  It’s rather hard to find a modern British writer who would defend the British Imperial tradition in the way Edgar Wallace or Dennis Wheatley would have done. Kipling, seen as a critic in his own day, now seems more like a justifier and defender

PDF for LTUR 99 – November-December 2000.

• Parliament’s Kosovo Whitewash.  The UN Charter is not merely “what might be termed” international law: it is what has been decisively and forcefully decreed to be international law, binding on all states whether they accept it or not. And Britain played a central part in establishing it as international law
  Stripped of this verbal quibble, the conclusion of the Select Committee is that NATO acted contrary to international law in bombing Kosovo.
• Will The Lockerbie Trial Collapse? By David Morrison.  The defence claim that the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command was responsible for putting the bomb on Pan Am Flight 103, and not the Libyans in the dock.
• Adam Smith And The Productive
• Labour Con Trick, by Christopher Winch.  Services from the state, such as a legal framework and defence are also classified as unproductive. Many of the essential non-commercial functions of a commercial economy contribute to economic life, but Smith does not provide a satisfactory account of them.
• The Open University: How Open? By Sean McGouran.  People enrolling for the academic year 2000 to 2001 will not find Blair quite as amenable as the Iron Lady (probably because he does not have the equivalent of Sir Keith Joseph, a man who sincerely believed in the usefulness of education as a means of socialisation, and even [self]-liberation. 
• Algernon Sidney and the Origins of Globalism, by Brendan Clifford.  “Marx was both fascinated and revolted by his insight into the dynamic of capitalism, which by its destruction of all human values established a kind of equality. When money becomes the supreme value—the value for which all others were exchangeable—each individual established his own value by the quantity of money he acquired. Inherited wealth was a wasting asset in a volatile market. It had to be renewed continuously by activity in the market. And anybody who dedicated his whole being to accumulating money had the opportunity of getting some. The ideology of thrift and abstinence was not entirely groundless.”
• Why The Danish Referendum Was Lost, by David Morrison.  “On 28th September the Danish electorate voted against joining the Euro by 53% to 47%. They did so despite the near unanimous support for joining from Danish political parties, press and business. And it was not as if the outcome was a fortuitous product of general apathy. Quite the reverse. There was an exceptionally large turnout of 88%. This was an issue which the Danish people took very seriously indeed.”
• Hugo Chavez: The Man who Raised Oil Prices, by David Morrison.  Oil is Venezuela’s main source of wealth. Chavez had the simple notion of financing his ambitious plans for economic development and making the poor a little less poor by means of a hike in the price of oil paid for by the West. And what’s wrong with that? It’s overseas aid without having to listen to Clare Short tell you what’s good for you.
• Yankee Global Went To Prague… by Gwydion M. Williams.  We have a global struggle over globalisation’, brought into focus by events like the protests in Seattle and Prague, but mostly fought out elsewhere. The dominant elite like to present it as a simple choice between ‘Free Trade/ Globalisation’ and a return to the kind of pre-industrial life presented by William Morris in the novel News From Nowhere. And some of their critics are happy with such a polarisation. I’d see these as just two out of
  dozens of viable options, any of which we could have if the world had the will for them. The United Nations system as set up in 1945 certainly could have provided a global framework with peace and local control. The Soviet Union and the United States were equally determined that it would not happen, with each of them trying to impose its own global pattern.
  With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States had the option to reshape the UN system into a global framework equally binding on all nations. They preferred an informal system in which they could use a variable blend of UN authority and their own armed forces to impose on other sovereign nations rules that the United States would not itself be bound by.
• Kosovo: What We Weren’t Told, by David Morrison.  It was never obvious how bombing Belgrade would inhibit the action of Yugoslav forces on the ground in Kosovo. It didn’t. A few days later with hundreds of thousands of Albanians streaming out of Kosovo it was obvious that far from averting a humanitarian catastrophe NATO had provoked one. NATO then changed its war aims, claiming that the purpose of the bombing was to return to their homes the Kosovo Albanian refugees, most of whom were in their homes when the bombing began.
• Parliamentary Diary:  The Costs of Motoring.   So the fuel protesters are to go ahead with their threat to disrupt supplies if the Government fails to meet their demand for a cut of up to 26p per litre in duty by 13th November.
  Hatfield Derailment. Railtrack were warned some time ago about the poor state of the track in a number of places, yet failed to act.
• There was no Notes on the News that month.

Several issues have not yet been scanned. February and March 2000, 91 and 92. And October 2000, 98.