Bah1964

The Young Upstarts In August 1990, the current Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, Yvette Cooper, graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She was a bright young lady with lots of potential and had graduated with a first-class honours degree. The following year, Cooper won a Kennedy Scholarship to study at Harvard University putting her on course to be involved with the US election campaign of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats. However, after Yvette Cooper graduated from Oxford, she initially began working as an Economic Policy Researcher for the Labour Party Shadow Chancellor John Smith. The left in the United Kingdom were looking for inspiration. Thatcherism had decimated the old Fabian socialists of the past, and a new Fabianism had started to bubble away in the melting pot of youthful exuberance, and the potential future Labour leaders were all busy indulging in the Kool Aid. With a lack of new ideas coming from a stagnating Labour Party, this new generation of potential Labour leaders started to look towards the United States for inspiration. By the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, the future New Labour elite were busy studying their trade across the Atlantic. The impetus for Labour’s American invasion was actually the then Delaware Senator, and future president of the United States, Joe Biden. In 1987, Biden was accused of plagiarising a speech during his first presidential campaign, which was stolen from Labour leader Neil Kinnock. The Democrats were clearly watching what the UK Labour Party was doing, and Kinnock had also been interested in the leftist American political scene, too. In fact, Labour’s next generation were all studying the American system. Labour’s Douglas Alexander had volunteered for the 1988 Michael Dukakis campaign, Gordon Brown had already attended the International Visitor Program in 1984, Tony Blair took part in 1986, David Miliband was studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while Ed Balls, as the historian Richard Carr put it: “…could regularly be found chomping on a burger in Charlie’s Kitchen in Boston, reflecting on his latest chat with Robert Reich or Larry Summers at Harvard.” Ed Balls, who eventually married Yvette Cooper, had also studied at Oxford University, where he was not only a member of the Labour Club, but was also signed up to the Liberal Club and the Oxford University Conservative Association. In an Independent article, entitled: “How Ed Balls was a Tory under Thatcher”, Guy Adams quotes friends of Balls as saying: “Ed hasn’t exactly advertised the fact, but he’s never sought to hide it either. It even featured in the jokes at his wedding. He joined the Tories at Oxford because they used to book top-flight political speakers, and only members were allowed to attend their lectures. Ed was, however, also a member of the Labour Club. He was more active in that, and was always, at heart, a man of the left.” After leaving Oxford, Ed Balls took up a post as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University between 1988 and 1990. He had originally gained a place in the UK Civil Service via a fast-stream scheme but had deferred the position for two years when offered the Kennedy Scholarship. In the last part of his time at Harvard, Balls was studying economics with Larry Summers, a former Harvard economics professor who went on to become the US deputy Treasury Secretary. Balls had made many significant connections while at Harvard, including in 1989 where he took a class taught by Robert Reich. Reich was a Democratic economist and thinker who later became Secretary of Labour under Bill Clinton. As I covered in articles such as Dr Klaus Schwab: Or How the CFR Taught Me to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Harvard had become a central base for American-led Globalism during the 1960s and 1970s, and this has continued to be the case ever since. By 1992, Yvette Cooper was based in America, as the aforementioned historian Richard Carr points out in his article for the official Fabian website, entitled, “Sweet Moderation”, which states: “In November 1992, Bill Clinton, backed by New Labour’s Yvette Cooper (who survived on a diet of baked potatoes, sweetcorn and bananas when researching health and crime policies for the Democrats) and Philip Gould, advising on media strategy, finally proved that progressives could win again. Within weeks, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in New York and Washington, probing New Democrats like Al From and Sidney Blumenthal on the latest DLC and PPI think tank pamphlets. Though impressed by Brown’s detailed grasp of American politics, Blair appeared to Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg “like a Bill Clinton without all the complexity”. Their leader John Smith was less impressed, telling Peter Mandelson that “we don’t need any of this fucking Clinton stuff over here”. But he was too late: Blair and Brown had fully bought in.” Carr also quotes Balls as accepting that the centre-left of politics had “to really accept globalisation, not uncritically, but with a mindset that broadly said it was a good thing that we needed to mitigate the risks of, rather than seek to avoid”. While at Harvard, Ed Balls reportedly told one of his professors that he was already “preparing to govern”. The latter quote comes from a multipart series for the Economist entitled: The American Connection, which also states: “The transatlantic ties were strengthened further when several of Mr Balls’s Harvard gurus joined the Clinton administration. Larry Summers went to the Treasury; Lawrence Katz, a prominent Harvard labour economist was, for a while, chief economist at the Labour Department under Robert Reich, another Harvard man. The academics-turned-policymakers were now able to test their ideas in government. Messrs Brown and Balls, who visited Washington regularly, listened closely.” Larry Summers had become a great influence on Harvard’s left-wing British contingent throughout this period. However, it may have been Yvette Cooper’s work on the initial Clinton presidential campaign in 1992 which cemented the future close cooperation between the trans-Atlantic political left. An Independent article from March 1999, entitled, “Ed Balls, Treasury Adviser – Chancellor’s golden boy”, states: “However, he [Ed Balls] married a woman who is, in the ways important for a successful long-term relationship, very similar to him, a match for his intellect and his beliefs. Cooper, too, spent some time at Harvard and worked with the Democrats in the 1992 US campaign.” (Below: Yvette cooper and Ed Balls Married in Eastbourne in 1998) 🧵6/11