The Captive Party: How Labour Was Taken Over by Capital (Socialist Renewal, New Series, 2) - Softcover

The Mandelson resignation revealed some of the close personal connections of the man himself and other Ministers with wealthy businessmen and women. In this little book Michael Barratt Brown reveals, with much detailed evidence, that this is but a tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface there is a massive bonding between New Labour and Big Business, British and American. The core of his argument is that capital in Britian and in the USA, and to a less extent in other advanced industrial countries, is moving rapidly out of much of manufacturing industry and into the service industries. This not only affects those involved in new information technology but also the health and education and social services that were previously the responsibility of governments. This is where the richer societies spend their money and where it is believed that future profits are to be made. New Labour has joined in the game along with Big Business.
The Captive Party (with due acknowledgements to George Monbiot) shows that what New Labour has created to this end is a new social formation of Task Forces, Panels, Working Parties, Foresight groups and other specialist units which have brought business into the very heart of government decision making. The instrument for the intervention of private capital in what were once public services is the Private Finance Initiative. There are great dangers for the British people in this invasion of Big Business into government, in the steady reduction of British manufacturing industry and in the replacement of public by private finance in new fields of education, health, pensions and other services as in the basic utilities of electricity, gas, water, railways and communications. The whole process must be stopped before it is too late.