On 3 July Mark Jones wrote:
Noam Chomsky has been saying that BAe has been taken over by the Americans
and that there is now a split between Euro defence industry and
Anglo-American defence industry, to mirror the big strategic divide. I
haven't been able to find much for or against Chomsky; BAe did take over
French firm Thompson, I think, and also is involved with the EU's fighter
plane project. Chomsky wants to say that Britain s now a wholly-owned US
subsidiary. I disagree, for reasons already stated: the British
establishment wants to get in bed with the EU, and anyway the British have
always clung to fig leaves like their own bomb, so it has never been a case
of comoplete British subjection, even when Churchill gave away the
Intelligence crown jewels plus British radar, jet engine and nascent nuke
technology in 1940.
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I just stumbled on the website for a group known as the Ditchley
Foundations. They have three branches: in the US, UK and Canada. Their
purpose is to foster and nurture "Anglo-American links". Established in
1958, this outfit operates on private donations and, rather like the
Trilateral Commission, appoints the great and the good as office bearers. It
is chaired by John Major, and other prominent members include Tory
euro-enthusiasts and former Labour MP and philosophy academic Bryan Magee.
Its US branch features some overlap with the Trilateralists (e.g. Cyrus
Vance). A full listing of its personnel reveals the connections between New
Labour, the Tory "left", the Liberal Democrats and some prominent business
and military people. See
http://www.ditchley.co.uk/listings/index.htm
For example, on its board of governors sit Andrew Adonis (former FT hack and
member of Blair's Downing Street Policy Unit), Robert Ayling (discredited
ex-boss of British Airways and Blair pal), Leon Brittan (ex-VP, European
Commission and former Thatcher toady), Jim Callaghan, Robin Cook, Ralf
Dahrendorf, Nik Gowing (BBC journalist, formerly at ITN, home of MI6 agent
Sandy Gall), Douglas Hurd (former Foreign Secretary), Peter Jay (oh no, not
him again), Gavin Laird ("trade unionist"), Peter Mandelson (oh no, not him
again), George Robertson (Lord NATO), Christopher Tugendhat (former VP,
European Commission), and John Monks (General Secretary of the TUC). And the
list goes on.
Some of the speakers at its get-togethers (15 annually) are also
interesting.
The www intro to Ditchley concludes:
Rarely can precise results be
measured or attributed to
particular Ditchley discussions.
Rather, Ditchley's impact
manifests in contacts made,
understanding deepened, fresh
insights gained, and new ideas
or lines of thought established in
the minds of those who engage
in the candid dialogues
conducted in an atmosphere of
informality, confidentiality and
trust that characterize this extraordinary enterprise.
In September last year, Ditchley organised a conference on THE DEFENCE
INDUSTRIAL BASE: EUROPEAN RATIONALISATION AND TRANSATLANTIC COOPERATION.
You can find a report on it here:
http://www.ditchley.co.uk/news/defence00-8.htm
This conference was chaired by former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind. As
I mentioned in the third part of the Wilson Plot review, Rifkind, while
Defence Secretary, had appointed the Thatcherite David Hart as an adviser.
Hart had organised the working miners' committee during the miners' strike
in 1984/5. He was retained by Michael Portillo as an adviser when he
replaced Rifkind at Defence in 1995. Hart was a participant at this
conference last year, where he is listed as a "Consultant to BAE Systems and
The Boeing Company."
At another conference last October on THE EUROPEAN UNION'S COMMON FOREIGN,
SECURITY AND DEFENCE POLICY: ASPIRATION OR REALITY? among the participants
were Nik Gowing (see above) and Michael Maclay. See
http://www.ditchley.co.uk/news/european00-10.htm
The US end of this operation features some familiar names: Caspar
Weinberger, Brent Scowcroft, and Senator John Warner. Meanwhile there is an
impressive list of academics in the field of political science, no doubt
following Michael Maclay's advice that I posted earlier (see
http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001III/msg00429.html). Among these include
Michael Sandel of Harvard Uni (famous for authoring a communitarian critique
of the contemporary US, "Democracy's Discontent), Gary Sick of Columbia Uni,
and Professor Elspeth D Rostow (any relation?) of the LBJ School of Public
Affairs, UT at Austin.
What a big small world.
Michael K.
