Re: [A-List] Michael Hudson's Super-imperialism (euro)

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

Michael Hudson writes:

What I meant to say was that Wilson behaved AS IF he were an agent. The
Wilson watchers began to note his wildly pro-US views already in 1945 when
he was, I think, with the Board of Trade. Already at that time he acted as
an American toady.
Probably you're right - it was simply trying to side with the bully,
thinking that this was Britain's only hope of success, for better or worse.
This is how Britain behaved all during World War II, and even Keynes
couldn't get a better deal than he got and ultimately knuckled under. But
Wilson did so in a much more "C'mon gang!" way than did Keynes.

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UK secret state suspicion of Wilson began during his tenure as "President of
the Board of Trade". It was Wilson's frequent trips to the USSR that excited
interest in his possible entrapment by the KGB, an interest fanned to
preposterous proportions by defector Anatoly Golitsyn in the 1960s (leading
MI5 chief Martin Furnival-Jones to keep a file on "Henry Worthington" locked
in his office safe). The accusation of the rightwingers seeking to bring
Wilson down was always that, with regard to trading with the Soviets and
political détente, he would have been proclaiming "C'mon gang", much to the
disgust of the British uppercrust of the day. This disgust was amplified
when most of Wilson's business friends and backers were expatriate European
Jews (e.g. Joseph Kagan, a Lithuanian) who traded with the Soviet bloc.
Attlee's Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was a ferocious anti-communist and
anti-semite, which meant that for all his trade union background he had
plenty in common with the UK establishment. Wilson did not carry these
prejudices -- he was a pragmatist, and ultimately conservative with respect
to "Britain". His ministerial resignation in 1950, in protest at NHS charges
levied to pay for the cost of the Korean war, earned him a leftwing
"Bevanite" tag, but I think it would be unfair even to compare him with the
social chauvinist Aneurin Bevan. Instead he was concerned ultimately with
British economic decline and strove to reverse it via technological
modernisation and industrial restructuring, meanwhile trying to engineer the
Europe realignment that has bedevilled successive prime ministers from
Harold Macmillan to Edward Heath. Blair's ascension is a restoration of that
tradition, thanks to what I consider to be the ascendancy and ultimate
victory of the europhile fraction of British state and capital, which
thanked Thatcher very much for her smashing of the labour movement and
kicked her out when she threatened to damage Britain's European prospects.
John Major tried to redirect policy Europewards but could not carry his
party with him.

Wilson, like Heath and Macmillan, was a corporatist. His inevitable
compromises alienated the labour movement to his left whilst infuriating the
right, who saw him as a dangerous revolutionary (!) He was really a Tory --
someone whose conception of the national interest involved greater economic
redistribution to secure the social harmony necessary to support industrial
modernisation that would finance the even greater economic redistribution.
He was certainly no threat to the UK's political constitution. In that
respect there was much less difference between him and Heath (author of the
1930s Keynesian tract, "The Middle Way"), than there was between Heath and
Thatcher, whose "modernisation" of Britain was so effective because (a) she
recognised what needed to be done with respect to changing the status quo
(i.e., reconfigure the state while strengthening its repressive apparatus in
order to smash the labour movement via deindustrialisation), and (b) she had
the assistance of both the British establishment and the US.

I would be interested in further examples of Wilson's "C'mon gang"
behaviour.

Michael Keaney