Magazine Issue 4 - Summer 1997
New Labour, Token Favours?

The ancient festival of ballot paper making has been and gone again. The government is dead! Long live the government! The sense of relief is palpable, but is the great white replacement quite as fluffy as it seems? Will the European Convention on Human Rights make up for the Criminal Justice Bill and the Police Bill which New Labour helped to enact? Will greater powers for the DoE outweigh the travesty of the Atlantic Frontier?

Unlikely when you look at the company New Labour keeps. Sir David Simon, for example - chair of Atlantic Frontier leader BP, vice chair of the European Round Table of industrialists (see CW3) : next thing we know he's made a peer and Minister for Trade and Competitiveness in Enrope, and not so much as a ballot paper in sight. A 1995 report commissioned by the Colombian government accuses BP of parsing information on campaigners to the military. Hundreds of trade unionists and protestors have now been murdered or disappeared. BP is still making payments to the military. Cash for deaths? Makes cash for questions look like a positively trivial misdemeamour.

"A new partnership with business will be at the heart of this government’s plans," says New Tony. Does he know the devil with which be deals?

This is the govemment that will introduce a mimmum wage yet still employ people for £118 per week on its new environmental task force (actually a public works company which competes by forcing benefit claimants to accept their low-waged work). The level of the minimum wage will be set by the Low Pay Commission, which will be headed by Peter Jarvis, chief exec of Whitbread.

This is the government that won't sell arms to countries that would use them for internal repression or external aggression but is "not yet ready to make decisions on individual countries", according to Robin Cook. Strange that a foreign secretary doesn't know which countries are aggressive.

This is the govemment that had promised more spending without raising income taxes. It’s keen support for the Tories' Private Finance initiative will help - they can buy now: future governments can pay later. Oh, and here we find another friend from the boardroom - Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson, a former chief exec of Jaguar Cars, who made his millions at the helm of engineering group TransTec, now wilh the job of overseeing privatisation and the PFI, amd motivating economic growth.

'This is the government that claims to care but "will promote open markets around the world".

On the other hand, they’ll incorporate the Social Chapter and try to conserve fish. There will be plenty of good news; we can perhaps expect Peter Mandelson to be Minister for News in a couple of years' time. One recalls another Mr. Blair, Eric, whose pseudonym was George Orwell.

New Labour is pro-EU, pro-NATO, pro-Trident. Probably pro-Tory for all we know.. Still, there's a broader smile at No.10 and no Michael Howard in the cabinet. Things must be on the up.