The American Tendency & New Labour. posted by Richard Seymour

The post-war settlement was a more precarious affair than retrospection would appear to grant. European capitalism was in ruins, left-wing sympathies ran high, and there was a serious threat that a number of European countries would either align with Stalin or form independent socialist majorities - particularly in France, Greece and Italy . Sustained interventions in all three countries resulted, with election fixing in Italy, the employment of gangs to break strikes and split the labour movement in France, and an attempt by the British to impose a corrupt regime on Greece followed by a civil war in which the US helped crush pro-communist dissidents. Marshall Aid reconstituted European capitalism, confluently providing substantial markets for American goods, and Operation Gladio was set in place, involving clandestine 'stay-behind' forces which ended up becoming involved in right-wing terrorism across Europe as part of a 'strategy of tension' which allowed states to crack down on the radical left.

Another front in this offensive on the socialist left was the Congress for Cultural Freedom , a CIA-funded organisation that was set up to win liberals and left-wingers to the American side in the Cold War. (See Frances Stonor Saunders' excellent book Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, 1999, for an excellent account of the way leading intellectuals and artists were duped into working for this organisation). The CCF published various magazines for left-wing audiences, most notoriously Encounter, which involved figures of some standing like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode & Conor Cruise O'Brien, as well as those of lesser standing, like Isaiah Berlin. The Congress was involved in sponsoring the social-democratic wing of the Labour Party from the 1950s onward, while US Embassies each produced a 'Labour Attaché' which would monitor and try to influence labour movements across the world .

Since 1985, we have had the British American Project among whose luminaries were many of New Labour's milieu, from front-benchers like Mo Mowlam and George Robertson to sympathisers like Jeremy Paxman. It has been funded by multinationals as various as Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Unilever, BP, Cadbury - all the bad guys, in fact. Frances Stonor Saunders sees it as an inheritor of the cultural Cold War: "All that's changed is that BAP are much more sophisticated." John Pilger calls it "casual freemasonry". Personally, I call it a bunch of simpering liberals and hard-right Tories locked in a cluster-fuck with American capital.

Well, that's just a summary of some of the background. The role of what Robin Ramsay calls 'The American Tendency' in the rise of New Labour is a more parochial affair, even if it involves the same political alignments. As Ramsay explains in his invaluable booklet The Rise of New Labour (2002), the CCF and its publications were a familiar locus for right-wing figures in the Labour Party, including Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, Roy Jenkins (who would join the SDP), Peter Jay (who would convert to monetarism and become a BBC economics editor) and Tony Crosland. The US Labour Attaché exerted considerable influence on British foreign policy, according to Denis Healy, while also helping Gaitskell design policies and mount campaigns against the left.

It was this tendency in the Labour Party which led the campaign for British entry into the European Economic Community or ('Common Market'), a project the US looked favourably on with the CIA funding and organising the European Movement. Roy Jenkins co-founded the Labour Common Market Committee in 1962 with another future SDP supporter Jack Diamond , which then became the Labour Committee for Europe in the mid-1960s. The campaign kicked off in 1971, of course, when 69 Labour MPs voted with the Conservative government for entry into the EEC. One of its main supporters and organisers was Bill Rodgers, previously known for waging pitch battles against the CND through his Campaign for Democratic Socialism. From then on, says Ramsay, the group acted as "a party within a party". Roy Jenkins was approached several times by members of the American Tendency who wanted him to leave Labour and form a new party with them: each time he declined.

Following Roy Jenkins' defeat in his 1976 bid for the Labour leadership, he was offered a job as President of the EEC, which he took. His supporters in the Labour Party formed a group called the Campaign for a Labour Victory, and later a campaign was formed by a number of academics called the Social Democratic Alliance (SDA) to fight the Labour left. It attracted support from the trade union right, as well as Brian Crozier, a CIA and MI6 asset. In 1981, two years after Labour's loss to a hard right Tory party, Roy Jenkins and a number of activists from the SDA and the Campaign for a Labour Victory moved to ensure that a Labour Victory would be the last thing they'd see any time soon. They formed the Social Democrat Party (SDP), and were joined by a number of MPs who had voted for Michael Foot and against Denis Healey in the Labour leadership election - presumably to consolidate and ensure the right-wing break from Labour, which would have been more difficult under Healey.

I'm just tracing some institutional movements that lie behind various ideological contours, but focusing on what Ramsay's Lobster magazine would call 'parapolitics' has its drawbacks. Namely, it shifts attention away from ordinary politics - why did the SDP gain such support so quickly? Members, media plaudits and supporters can't be arranged by any CIA front, no matter how sophisticated and well-funded. Paul Foot gave the best answer to the question at the time: Labourism was dead in the water. Having pursued an unavailing reformist road to socialism, it had shifted to a managerialist approach to capitalism, and had finally presided over wage cuts, strike-breaking, cuts in public-spending and spiralling prices.

Anyway, one last question remains for me in this article (there's a lot more to be covered, but I'll leave that for another post, or another Tombster): why didn't Tony Blair join the SDP when he might have? One answer, again supplied by Paul Foot in a recorded speech made in 2003, is that Blair may well have been advised by his friend, the future Lord Irvine, that this would be unnecessary. The SDP's politics could prevail within the Labour Party, given enough batterings at the polls. Whether such advice was ever dispensed, the fact is that the SDP merged with the Liberals, and New Labour emerged to fight a 1997 election on a platform barely distinguishable from that of the Liberal Democrats, except that on some issues the Lib Dems seemed more to the left. The entire defense team under the first New Labour administration was drawn from the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Unity (TUCETU), which had been set up in 1976 by former Labour Attaché, Joseph Godson. As noted, New Labour's front-bench included a swathe of BAP veterans. Trevor Philips, a Labour rival to Ken Livingstone for the London mayoral bid back in the day, is also a BAP member, and describes how "Five years before I joined BAP, I thought wealth creation and progressive politics were completely incompatible ... BAP was one of the things that made me think that was absurd." New Labour's Philo-Americanism is one of its outstanding hallmarks, from the cozy relationship with Clinton to the frazzled one with Bush. New Labour came after the New Democrats, and Blair's Third Way rhetoric closely matched that of Clinton.

The American Tendency has come a long way in the Labour Party - from warning of the evils of the wrong kind of socialism, it now affirms that neoliberalism is, always was, the best way, the only way. What once portrayed itself as an anti-Stalinist movement, aimed at saving good reformist socialism, is now openly what it always was in private: a collection of fellow-travellers with the American Empire.