The New Year opened with two former Ministers, Geoffrey Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, calling for the Parliamentary Labour Party to hold a leadership election. This was widely regarded as an attempted coup against Gordon Brown\'s leadership. In view of the fact that Labour was making some headway against Cameron\'s Tories in the opinion poll, the move was regarded as senseless. It was apparent that Labour MPs did not welcome the initiative and ...

Like the neo-con Republican right in the United States, David Cameron has an aversion to big government and large state institutions. Thatcher began the work of dismantling the electricity, gas and rail industries, breaking them up and transferring them to the private sector. And who among us can say, hand on heart, that they have been a shining success? Blair and Brown took this a stage further, developing and extending the Private Finance ...

Michael Foot saved the Labour Party in the potentially disastrous leadership conflict following the resignation of James Callaghan. He did not save it by his policies, by his administrative drive, or by the force of his personality. He saved it just by being there and agreeing to be Leader when the policy choice lay between Denis Healey and Anthony Wedgewood Benn. The fact that he lost the General Election of 1983 with a Manifesto which was “the ...

It is a continuous Western demand that today\'s Chinese People\'s Republic should drop its distinctiveness and copy the Western political system. Those making such demands prefer to ignore what happened the last time it was tried.
Last month I described how the Manchu Dynasty in China made a mess of reform, while a somewhat similar system in Japan succeeded brilliantly.[A]
This month I\'ll look at what happened next. China became the ...

For many years, large sections of the Left, including the clique around Neil Kinnock, who went on to form New Labour, were fond of forecasting a potentially calamitous crisis of capitalism. In those far-off days, they were looked on with the same respect as the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ When the wolf, in the form of the credit crunch, unexpectedly arrived, the Left had effectively given up on anti-capitalism for some time, having succumbed to the ...

Both in the US and the UK the banking crisis continues to worsen. Meanwhile the non-banking economy continues to decline with no sign of respite. The Brown government is seemingly paralysed, its only plan seeming to be the day to day rescue of banks while at the same time avoiding their nationalisation. It seem that, like the US government they will do anything to avoid nationalising the banks, dreading being called ‘socialist’ or worse as a ...

BBC Today Programme, John Humphreys interviewed Rodney Bickerstaffe, an official in NUPE at the time, and later its General Secretary, and Will Hutton, chief executive of the Work Foundation.

JH The Winder of Discontent began 30 years ago today with the first public sector day of action. At the time Alan Fisher, then General Secretary of the public sector workers union NUPE, was asked whether the strike would bring down the Labour ...

One of the difficulties in making sense of the extraordinary economic events that unfold on a daily basis is the fact that we live in a situation where reliable information is hard to come by. Nowhere is this more true than of the banking system, at the heart of the current crisis. However a picture is gradually beginning to emerge of a banking system in the US and the UK which is more or less bankrupt. A major problem however is that nobody ...

The ‘happiness agenda’ was taken up a few years ago by some Blairites and by Cameron, but the fashionable concern with GNW (Gross National Well-being) is likely to bring up political consequences that are most unwelcome to both Cameroons and Brown and this point needs to be pressed home vigorously. A few years ago, one of Cameron’s advisors ventured into controversial territory, arguing that the Churchillian idea of a welfare safety net is no ...

Strictly speaking, capitalism ended in the 1930s and 1940s. It ended because it had damaged the advanced economies that had created it. The alternatives of Fascism and Leninist Communism had achieved fast economic growth and full employment when the West was mired in the Great Depression.

Roosevelt\\\'s New Deal is commonly supposed to have been an escape, but strong ideological opposition to Roosevelt\\\'s socialist solution looked likely ...