London Calling

The militant entryist policy was supposedly broken in the Labour movement - unions, constituency Labour party, affiliated organisations, and the youth movement - during Kinnock's years as Leader of the Labour party. Nothing of the kind happened of course, and many that were members of the International Marxist Group and its descendent splinter groups are now high up in the Labour regime's power elites, particularly those associated with Socialist Action, whose modus operandi is to target a particular political figure and support that figure into power and maintain him there.
Of these ultra-loyalist grouplet members, some of the most successful examples are John Ross and Redmond O'Neill, Ken Livingstone's incredibly highly-paid loyalists in the London Mayor's office.
Beneath each of these loyalists grouplets is a network of organised connection into universities, Labour party sections, and various socio-cultural movements and pressure groups such as anti -abortion, anti Iraq-war, multicultural foundations, the teaching unions, and the public service unions; as well as financial structures and privatised public service providers
And if this sounds conspiratorial - it is and they are.

But they are not really the problem any longer. The problem is what has been done and the clientele spawned, as access to resources and power has enabled emphasis on the 'Action' part of this conspiracy.

The clientele, too, and much more extensively, extends into the Labour party power elites, less tightly disciplined, indeed often unaware that it is reflecting the 'vision' of of the bourgeois democratic revolution but, in its self-seeking and power-seeking, embodying and effecting its aims. Aims which are very much part of the Third Sector economic model. The conspiratorial closeness has opened into a received correctness subscribed to much more widely.

The transfer of £60 billion to the North East via the Third Sector, with Northern Rock as a principal financial, economic and socio-cultural actor, has been acknowledged, albeit under duress of external economic and financial normality asserting itself, by the Labour Executive. The share of all UK business in the north east of England was 3%, but the share in Third Sector business was 4% in 2004;in comparison for the West Midlands the shares are all UK business 9% Third Sector 6%; for the East Midlands 7% and 3%. (These figures are numbers of enterprises, not capital, employment or output; but the relative weight of the Third Sector by Northern Rock standards, could be much higher than these ratios suggest.) It might be thought that the North East, then, was such a basket case it was especially vulnerable to Third Sector imposition and experimentation; after all, the rest of the UK was always going to have to transfer wealth to help the people there after the collapse of heavy industry and mining in the UK. Although it could have been done more effectively, and without the power transfers to within Labour regime nomenklaturas, and hidden agendas for regionalisation.

That London has even higher, much higher ratios of Third Sector business to all business 22% Third Sector to 14% all business, is quite a shock. And these are 2004 returns; since then the Office of the Third Sector has moved into the Cabinet Office and has been centrally concerned with increasing Third Sector size.

The antics of The Mayor of London's Office and some of his advisers have been widely described in the press; local tax-raised wealth has been allocated, not indiscriminately, for there has been considerable discrimination, but irresponsibly, to typically Third Sector recipients.

While what has happened in the North East with Northern Rock and the Third Sector has damaged immensely the United Kingdom's reputation for financial sense and reliability, what could happen in London, with the advance of the Third Sector resulting from a shared ideology between the London Mayor's Executive and that in Downing Street, is a wholesale downgrading of London as a world financial centre. And all that that enjoins for the wealth and well being of the UK economy.