Prawn cocktails or pink Thatcherites?

John Stewart reviews Prawn Cocktail Party: The Hidden Power behind New Labour by Robin Ramsey, £9.99 from Vision Paperbacks

LLB readers familiar with Ramsey's excellent work over the years on the para-political journal Lobster and his earlier 1991 book Smear, with Stephen Doril, an account of security service plotting against Harold Wilson's Government, will have looked forward to Prawn Cocktail Party with keen anticipation. True to form he serves up more detailed accounts of the machinations and conspiracies of those in power against elected politicians and the labour movement. Ramsey details the struggle of what he calls the "overseas lobby" -- the Treasury-Bank of England-City of London nexus to exert influence on Government policy at the expense of the domestic economy.

From "Operation Robot" in 1952, when Treasury and Bank of England officials tried and failed to persuade the then Conservative Government to move to full convertibility of sterling and float the pound, Ramsey argues there has been a continual struggle to liberate the movement of capital at the expense of the domestic economy -- basically manufacturing industry. This culminated in victory for the overseas lobby with the election of the Thatcher Government in 1979 and the removal of export controls and other deregulation measures.

In the process he gives us some interesting details of the tensions between Thatcher and the bankers' representatives in her cabinet around Lawson and Howe. There is more on the security service and CIA penetration of the Labour Party and trade union movement. One example given is the influence of the British American Project for a Successor Generation -- a CIA front set up to promote US interests in Britain -- its supporters include ministers George Robertson, Mo Mowlam and Chris Smith.

Ramsey sees the European Union as a kind of transnational plot to promote freedom of movement for capital at the expense of manufacturing industry. He favours the arguments against EMU put forward by Peter Shore, Austin Mitchell or Bryan Gould rather than those advanced by the left. He talks, in terms most LLB supporters would agree with, about Tony Blair and New Labour being frontmen for finance capital, but not about the potential of working class people to liberate themselves from the hardship imposed on them. Rather, Ramsey would prefer an alliance between the Labour Party leadership and domestic British businessmen in manufacturing industry against finance capital. That of course is where we came in one hundred years ago.

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