RE: [A-List] UK state: Michael Portillo

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Mark asks:

 Michael wrote:

> David Owen might want to start another party of his own

Are you being serious?

-----

I was half-joking. However I firmly believe that "Dr" Owen has been
putting himself to the good use of certain US interests for decades,
fully cognisant of their intentions to undermine and smash the UK labour
movement, and now derail EU integration. Owen's career is a tactical
zig-zag in which two features are constant: (1) he acts against the
organised left, even dishing it from the left, as with his "Face the
Future" manifesto from 1981; (2) he acts to aggrandise himself, as with
his pathological inability to get along with just about everyone (e.g.
Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Steel, Paddy Ashdown) with whom he
otherwise shares common interests. His main function has been to act as
a spoiler (not unlike Peter Hain's role within the Labour Party at
present). Thus he preaches multilateral disarmament during the 1980s
when Labour's official policy is unilateral disarmament (thereby
appealing to "reason" to those unhappy with Thatcherite militarism but
uneasy about the Soviets); he toys with the idea of aligning his rump
SDP with Major's Conservatives before the former implodes simply to
prevent any Labour ascendancy; and now, with his "New Europe" outfit,
he's splitting the pro-Europe camp by campaigning against euro
membership whilst being in favour of EU membership. In so doing he
recruits a bunch of tired old 1970s Godleyites like Brian Burkitt, Bob
Rowthorn and Jonathan Michie, all of whom are convinced that by getting
out from under Maastricht Treaty criteria they can somehow re-enact the
Alternative Economic Strategy put forward over twenty years ago by the
Labour Party's National Executive Committee. Meanwhile Owen, who has
never, ever, once supported any such policies (except as an
opportunistic means to dish Labour from the left) is quite happy to
employ them in the service of US interests eager to ensure that Britain
remains what De Gaulle had suspected it would be -- a hindrance to
European integration, the very thing that these same US interests had
tried to promote until the end of the Cold War, when doubts about the
emergence of a strategic rival began to emerge. Owen is in the service
of these interests, and going about his splittist business with some
major funding, if the New Europe website is anything to go by. Just how
does he earn a salary anyway?

Re a new party, it is conceivable that, if New Labour and the Liberal
Democrats become the two main parties, as seems to be on the cards,
especially if the Conservatives perform as disastrously at the next
election, a new vehicle for those anti-EU interests will have to be
created, and one which concedes sufficient ground to the consensus view
that EU membership is a given (something the punk Thatcherites cannot
countenance), but what remains up for grabs is the extent of UK
involvement in EU integration. In this respect Owen could emerge as a
"statesman" taking on the mantle of national saviour (something that
would very much appeal to his ego) and might carry influential opinion
with him (the "left" pro-EU but eurozone-sceptic wing of the
Conservative Party, including Major, who is a personal friend). I think
that the current situation is so unstable that a well-plotted,
well-timed intervention by certain interests such as those Owen
represents could conceivably alter the political climate, however
temporarily. The SDP was hardly a failure, after all, when one considers
just what it accomplished. For someone like Portillo, such a vehicle
would offer him an opportunity to start afresh, although that would
depend upon Owen's willingness to adopt an elder statesman role as
opposed to front line commander.

Perhaps this is all a bit fantasist. But the Conservative Party is
increasingly redundant as a vehicle of opposition, whilst the Liberal
Democrats are in many ways occupying ground vacated by New Labour in the
latter's shift to the right. That creates a bit of a vacuum, and not
just on the left, and while New Labour is the "state party" now and for
the foreseeable future, the chances of an unexpected, far-reaching
development tilting the balance headlong somewhere else may indeed call
for the emergence of a "strong man", and if none exists within New
Labour to the liking of the power bloc of interests in control of the
state, then "he" will have to be found somewhere else. Portillo may have
been moved sideways into a boardroom, but BAe is no ordinary one and, as
the experience of the 1970s shows, several British companies were rather
more busy discussing how to dispose of the Labour government than how to
reverse their own declines (see John Stonehouse's testimony to that
effect in his references to Kleinwort Benson, where George Kennedy Young
was putting together his Unison Committee for Action).

Michael