Review of Prawn Cocktail Party by Robin Ramsay (Vision, £9.99), Tribune 12 June 1998
On page 144 of Robin Ramsay's book on the "hidden power behind New Labour" there is a footnote: "I have written book reviews for Tribune since 1986. The first review of mine which did not appear was of a book attacking Britain's military-industrial complex, Neil Cooper's The Business Of Death. A couple of months before I submitted my review the unions represented in the British arms industry had run a full-page advert in Tribune saying, basically, 'jobs are at stake'. These two events are, of course, not connected."
Which is, of course, a joke - or at least I think it is, Ramsay doesn't really believe that the Tribune reviews editor, on receiving his piece, took a look and thought: "Hmmm. We can't use this. The defence unions might pull their advertising." Or does he? Worse, perhaps Tribune does work like that these days. After all, when I ran into the advertising manager last week, he did say that I’d better not slag off Ramsay's book because the publisher was taking an advert. I think he was joking, though I'm not sure.
The difficulty with writing about hidden influences in any sphere of life is simple. You need evidence, and evidence of what is hidden is by definition hard to find. It is all too easy to stray into the realm of conspiracy theory. Ramsay knows this danger from long experience. He has been editor and publisher of Lobster magazine since 1983 and was co-author with Stephen Dorrill of Smear!, a sober and comprehensive account of MIS's "dirty tricks" campaign against Harold Wilson. Prawn Cocktail Party cannot be dismissed as conspiracy theory, but Ramsay does push his thesis on the role of multinational capital in shaping the policies of New Labour rather further than the evidence will take it.
Ramsay's big idea is that there "is a group of interrelated and mutually supporting financial institutions whose interests lie outside the domestic British economy" - what he calls "the overseas lobby" - that has for most of this century pursued a policy of undermining everyone who has backed measures to ensure that wealth created in Britain stays here. With New Labour, he argues, the triumph of this lobby is complete.
It is not an implausible story, and Ramsay tells it with a polemical verve unusual in contemporary political writing. The chapter on shadowy American-funded transatlantic networks for members of the political elite is excellent, as is the one on Labour's fear of the City.
The problem, however, is that Ramsay never tells us who, precisely, has been part of the "overseas lobby" or how members of the lobby operate - and the result is that he gives little idea of how its supposed influence could be countered beyond making a plea for Labour to resort to economic nationalism.
