Category Archives: Safety First

Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann (Granta, £9.99)

Written from a ‘critical libertarian left perspective’, Safety First will not, I suspect, get Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann invited to many Downing Street cocktail parties. Theirs is a voice from outside the conventional Labour spectrum and, in this stimulating and informative account of the so-called Blair Revolution and the first one hundred days of the ‘New Labour’ government, they treat the official version of the party’s recent history with healthy scepticism. Combining sharp analysis with a robust narrative of political events, they show that serious, heterodox thinking – the legacy of independently minded radicals such as George Orwell and Raymond Williams – has survived the broad left’s disintegration into ‘new’ revisionists, ‘old’ reactionaries and the persistently extremist fringe. Continue reading →

Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann (Granta, £9.99)

Ten full weeks before the May 1997 general election, Tony Blair’s aides told the media that the new Prime Minister would enter No.10 shortly after 1pm on 2 May to facilitate live reports for lunchtime news bulletins. Such details are typical of this highly informative book by two journalists from a New Statesman/Tribune background. It also encapsulates the authors’ dilemma, torn as they are between undis­guised admiration and profound cynicism about New Labour. Continue reading →

Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann (Granta, £9.99)
The End of Parliamentary Socialism by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (Verso, £15)

Why has Tony Blair been able to shift the Labour Party so far to the right, and why was the left wing inside the party so impotent in the face of the breathtaking speed of Blair’s changes? Both these questions are tackled in those two new books. Safety First is an accessible account written by Paul Anderson, former editor of the left wing Labour paper Tribune, and Nyta Mann, who still writes for the paper. The book puts the New Labour project in the context of the last 50 years and is a useful resource for socialists. Continue reading →

Blair’s Hundred Days by Derek Draper (Faber, £7.99) 
Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann (Granta, £9.99)
Fifty Years On: A Prejudiced History of Britain Since the War by Roy Hattersley (Little, Brown, £20)
A Class Act: The Myth of Britain’s Classless Society by Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard (Hamish Hamilton, £17.99)

Tony Blair’s new centrist Labour Party won power in Britain a year after Felipe Gonzalez’s old centrist Socialist Party lost it in Spain. We look at the most interesting books on the whys and wherefores, first in Britain, then in Spain

The guests at the launch party for Derek Draper’s Blair’s Hundred Days were in no doubt that they were at the right party, at the right time. “I suppose we’re the new establishment,” gushed one young woman to another, as Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s fixer (and Mr Draper’s employer until the writer switched jobs) drifted by. Continue reading →

Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann (Granta, £9.99) 
The End of Parliamentary Socialism by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (Verso, £15)

It makes me sick when publishers debase language so brazenly. A caption or a sub-sub-title on the cover of Safety First says “The Definitive [sic] Guide to the Policies and Personalities of the British Government”. The blurb on the back cover is more cheekily and accurately headed “Anything but the authorised version of new Labour” (their italics, fully warranted).

Paul Anderson is a former editor of Tribune and a former deputy editor of the NS in some historically remote regime (that seems like yesterday). Nyta Mann is a former NS assistant editor. The tone and the standpoint are Tribune at its best: rude, factual, lively and down-to-earth plain English, always provocative, always selective, but crammed full of useful information — if one has a pinch of salt to add to their pepper. Continue reading →

Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann (Granta, £9.99)

This is not at all the book I expected. Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann are keen to point out that they are not Old Labour; but they are certainly not Blairites. They describe themselves as redistributivist libertarian socialists, whose beliefs are drawn from an eclectic range of sources.

Indeed so catholic are their political tastes that at the pre-launch party Ms Mann introduced me, somewhat sheepishly it must be said, to the finance director of Militant. As someone who dived head first into the warfare of an English metropolitan Labour party in the mid-Eighties, this was, for me, on an emotional par with being introduced to the boss of the West Belfast Brigade of the IRA at a cocktail party in St John’s Wood. Continue reading →

Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann (Granta, £9.99
Blair’s Hundred Days by Derek Draper (Faber, £7.99) 
Were You Still Up for Portillo? by Brian Cathcart (Penguin, £5.99)

In the spring of 1996, a Labour whip was found sinking pints in a Westminster bar like a man trying to drown his conscience. His task that night was to force Labour MPs to support a Conservative measure which would allow police officers to search any member of the public they wanted without explanation. ‘Well, you don’t think I could whip this vote sober, do you?’ he spluttered. A few months later, the same whip had to persuade his admittedly flexible friends why New Labour loved Michael Howard’s plan to give police officers unconstrained power to bug the conversations, burgle the homes, inspect the files, steal the property and read the correspondence of anyone they did not like, without going through the tedious formality of getting a warrant from an independent judge. Continue reading →

Anyone who attended the 1984 Conservative Party conference in Brighton approaches that town with caution. One understands why they take such precautions with security. Even so, as I was quizzed about the Swiss army knife I use for sharpening pencils (‘you will keep this about your person at all times, won’t you, sir?’), I couldn’t help thinking that this was unnecessary on two counts. For one, the Government is now talking to the IRA, and second, the terrible 1984 bomb was planted well before conference-goers arrived. Continue reading →

In the years since the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader there has been a succession of frothy hagiographies and vacuous volumes that have promised to reveal all on the machinations of New Labour, yet managed the opposite.

So, it was a relief to learn that Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann were planning to stir the pot with a book that promised to be “anything but the authorised version of New Labour”. And what is promised is largely delivered. Yet their starting point comes not from Blair’s election night but the accession of Neil Kinnock as party leader. Continue reading →

Blair’s Hundred Days by Derek Draper (Faber, £7.99) 
Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann (Granta, £9.99)

To publish in September a book which deals with August’s events is an achievement in itself. But in the case of Derek Draper’s Blair’s Hundred Days, it is more a tribute to the technical efficiency of the printers than to the author’s ability to write about contemporary events in a way which is distinguishable from overnight journalism. Continue reading →