Labour Party Plc: The Truth Behind New Labour As A Party Of Business [Hardcover]

In this thoroughly researched book, David Osler portrays Labour's swamp of lobbyists, inside dealers, fixers and spinners. He includes a 20-page list of donors, and notes that, purely coincidentally, Blair has created peers faster than any previous Prime Minister, and that he has given more than 2000 quango posts to businessmen. Not surprising then that 80% of us think that Blair gives special help to business donors!
For example, the Texas-based utilities company Enron gave the Labour Party £38,000: Ralph Hodge, CBE, its head in Britain, said bluntly, "in the current climate, sponsorship and donations are the most efficient ways of getting access." The company gave George W. Bush's election campaign $825,000. Enron had gained hugely from energy utilities privatisation and from energy price deregulation. It encouraged its workers to plough their savings and pensions into company shares. Just before the firm filed for bankruptcy with $55 billion debts, its top executives cashed in 17.3 million shares, while the workers were prohibited from cashing their shares! Chief Executive Officer Ken Lay, `Kenny Boy' to his good ol' pal George W., got $101 million! Now 25,000 former Enron workers are without jobs, without pensions and without savings, but with lots of worthless shares.
Osler shows that Britain's economy is not working. As he writes, "British manufacturing has never been in worse shape, and Labour's macroeconomic policies must bear much of the blame." Manufacturing industry is being wrecked, not by the pound, but by its overvaluation. Much-vaunted, high-quality private sector management has ruined Marconi and bankrupted Railtrack. Inadequate investment, private and public, is damaging our future.
Osler is scathing about Labour's Private Finance Initiatives, which were driven by Economic and Monetary Union's demand to cut public spending. PFI is like paying off your mortgage over 30 years, and then the building society repossesses your house! Companies enter the public services not to put money in, but to get money out! They are obliged by law to prioritise shareholders' interests, not public needs. Inevitably, disasters result, like Railtrack, privatised under EU Directive 91/440, and the Private Public Partnership scheme for London Underground, recently endorsed by the EU.
Accountants Arthur Andersen produced a report saying that PFI worked, after it had advised the government on selling off air traffic control, Railtrack and the London Underground, but PFI did not work even for Andersen, which has had to be wound up. Even Labour's sad little thinktanks are sponsored, Demos, for instance, by British Gas, Cable & Wireless, NatWest, Shell and Tesco: so it is not likely to find, for instance, that democracy involves expropriating the expropriators!
In sum, Labour has embraced PFI, the World Trade Organisation, the euro and George W. Bush, advertising privatisation as public service, globalisation and Europeanisation as internationalism, and war as peace.
This appalling record explains why Labour lost three million votes between the 1997 and 2001 elections, and in 2001, it won the votes of only 25% of those entitled to vote. Why should trade unions contribute to a party that fights tooth and nail against all that our members want? Let's use the money to campaign for our interests, as the GMB is doing with its adverts against PFI.
Osler rightly argues that Labour is institutionally corrupt. It cannot be reformed, and it is not `New'. The Labour Party always embraced capital, now it loves capital.