As the 20 July Labour leadership election approaches, more details are being revealed about in-fighting in the highest councils of the party.
Supporters of John Smith, it appears, hatched a plot to oust Neil Kinnock before the general election. Unfortunately their man wouldn't play ball.
At the same time, relations between John Smith and Kinnock broke down and the two hardly spoke to each other. Kinnock's press secretary Julie Hall wouldn't speak to his chief of staff Charles Clarke or Communications Director David Hill.
Cliques inside the top apparatus plotted against one another in a bewildering array of animosities. Other star players in the soap opera included Patricia Hewitt and Peter Mandelson.
There is no explanation for this pantomime in the sphere of political differences. All these people adhered to the same Kinnockite, new realist, advertising agency school of politics.
What really caused the conflicts was the realisation that Kinnock was a no-hoper and that there was a grave danger of Labour being defeated in the election.
The in-fighting has its comic side, but it is also tragic. Tragic because the hopes of milmore and personal Getting a whitf? Hopeiess Roy Hattersley Royal comings and goings... lions of working people became the playthings of conflicting advertising strategies and the personal rivalries of a bunch of yuppie twerps.
This idiocy speaks volumes about what has happened to the Labour Party. When the left fought against Hugh Gaitskell over the HBomb and Clause 4, in the late '50s and early '60s, they were fighting against a serious bourgeois politician. Gaitskell was an agent of the ruling class, but at least he had a coherent fuls. Now the fairy tale is over If the Prince now tums cut to be a frog wey nave oniy wemsenes to blame What worries them is not their privacy The salacious gossip about the Wales's owe He. hand on the heels of Fergie and Andy's rift, has - whatever the intentions - opened up a debate on whether the Queen should start The right of Charles to benefit from anyone dying intestate in the Duchy of Lancaster is queried. ine tuare of the monarchy has even been called into question. Good!
Socialists can only welcome this rise of Republican sentiment. it is a No. 24 social democratic philosophy. Kinnock and Smith by comparison are light-weights bereft of ideas. This is not because of personal capabilities, of lack of them. Rather it is because of the total collapse of right-wing social democracy before Thatcherite pro-market ideology. Ever since Kinnock was elected in 1983 Labour has run scared before the Tories. The Policy Review produced a watereddown Toryism, but nothing in the way of a serious alternative plan for governing In the leadership election nothing has changed. Gould's appeal for 'radical ideas has no substance whatever. Adjectives like 'radical' and bold' are just so much hot-air from the leadership hopeIn this situation the Labour left just has to tell the truth. The advertising people and spin-doctors are overpaid court jesters without two ideas to rub together. The 20 July coronation of John Smith will be a hollow and pathetic ceremony. And without a fight back by the left, the empt space where the party's brain ought to be wil be filled, before the next election, by evermore-rightwing garbage about coalitions with the Liberals and the philosophy of the market.
f that happens, the road to further decay o he party and heavy membership losses will be wide open. Only the left can put an end to the 'politics as advertising technique soap opera.
consistenty supported the reactionary institution of monarchy. The notion that a particular family amounts of weath because of an ac opposite of socialst ideas and ideals. "constitutional nature the monarchy still has enormous formal powers. in theory, at least, the monarch appoints the Prime Minister and asks him or her to form a government. MPs have to swear allegiance to the monarch. 300 years after the start of the Civil War against Charles 1st we have to ensure there is no throne for his патовано о сосоруJune 27, 1992