Difference between revisions of "Peter Mandelson"
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==Communist influence== | ==Communist influence== | ||
Revision as of 13:40, 5 July 2020
Template:TOCnestleft Peter Mandelson
Communist influence
The influence of the Communist Party of Great Britain on New Labour has been neglected. One day it will be an important subject for a dissertation or PhD by a university graduate. It is not merely the case that a significant number of figures in the Government machine - John Reid, David Triesman, Peter Mandelson, Charlie Whelan to name a few - belonged to the Communist Party of Great Britain in all its King Street grandeur.
Many others - Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn among them - were connected in one way or another with the obscure sub-Marxist organisations that abounded in the 1970s, doing their best to tear down capitalism. Even those, like Jack Straw, who had no Marxist sympathies at all, were obliged to come to terms with communist methods and adversaries in the shadowy internecine struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. It is these methods - as opposed to the now despised Marxist dogma about ownership of the means of production - that have endured to influence the Blair Government. Millbank admittedly borrowed its technology - rebuttal units, the Excalibur computer etc - from the United States. But the obsessive secrecy, centralisation and intolerance of dissent which were such overwhelming characteristics of the Millbank operation reek of the CPGB.
David Triesman was a significant figure of the Euro-communist movement of the 1970s, an attempt to give communism a 'human face'. Thirty years on and he is attempting a comparable exercise with New Labour.