Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
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Roy’s divisions
A look back at the work of Roy Jenkins in empowering the EU over its member states, before betraying Labour to found the first incarnation of the Lib Dems, tell us all we need to know about today’s pro EU ‘socialists,’ writes ROB GRIFFITHS
Roy Jenkins
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
ROY JENKINS had been an orthodox Labour chancellor of the Exchequer and a reforming home secretary before he took up the presidency of the European Commission in 1977.
Always on the right of the party, he had long been an enthusiast for the European Common Market and its subsequent incarnations.
By the time of his appointment in Brussels, he had lost much of the social democratic ethos that separated him from the Tories and the Liberals — and that had made him a staunch opponent of the left and socialism.
While he still believed that the welfare state played an important, civilising role in society, favoured a modest redistribution of wealth and thought mass unemployment should be avoided, he also felt that the trade unions were too powerful and that nationalisation belonged in the past.
Above all, he looked to the US — warts and all — Nato and nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantors of liberty in the world, while also wanting a united Europe to play a bigger role in that common endeavour.
His memoir A Life at the Centre (1991) is an elegant and reasonably frank, if sometimes pretentious and petty-minded, account of his political career, based as it is on his unpublished as well as published diaries.
It lifts the veil on episodes from his time at the European Commission which need to be understood by those on the left who clearly harbour illusions about the EU as a vehicle for social progress and even socialism.
For instance, he testifies to the extent to which the EU Commission uses its considerable powers and resources to drive the process of integration towards the objective of a United States of Europe that is “free market,” capitalist and aligned with the US and Nato.
The notion that the Berlaymont bureaucracy represents an equivalent apparatus to that of the Civil Service in Whitehall is preposterous (as anyone who has read Part Six of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union would already know).
For all the influence that Britain’s most senior civil servants wield behind the scenes, they do not indict governments and propose legislation as well as draft it.
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