Whether or not it was motivated by a desire to please a wealthy benefactor, the decision to exempt Formula One from the tobacco sponsorship ban was wrong in principle, and revealed a distressing bias towards private profit over public health.
The most recent issue of the Lancet, the leading medical journal, reports that tobacco sponsorship of motor racing plays a measurable and major role in luring young people into smoking. According to the Guardian, every day the tobacco industry has to recruit 300 new clients to replace the 300 its product kills. Smoking related diseases cost the NHS £1.4-1.7 billion every year
None of the arguments in defence of the F1 exemption hold water. The claim that it would lead to 50,000 job losses has been exposed as a fraud; indeed, more jobs are immediately under threat because of the Government’s refusal to intervene in the coal industry (whose workers over the years have given many more millions to the Labour Party than Bernie Ecclestone). The “globalisation” argument (that tobacco sponsored events held abroad will be televised in Britain) could apply to any number of sports (a point made by aggrieved snooker and cricket bosses).
Against the overwhelming arguments of public interest, Blair (who made the decision without consulting his own Cabinet) yielded to the importuning of Ecclestone. Yet even within the fast-and-loose milieu of commercial sport, Formula One is considered a corrupt, discredited, ramshackle industry. Tribune reports that Ecclestone hopes to float F1 on the stock market next year, transforming it into a limited corporation with a hugely profitable European-wide monopoly. If this is so, Ecclestone will require yet more co-operation from the Government.
No one should have been shocked at the notion that New Labour policies are up for sale to the highest bidder. In 1995, Blair and his entourage met Rupert Murdoch, and weeks later Labour abandoned its long-standing opposition to cross-media ownership. The rapprochement with Murdoch, which led to the Sun backing Blair against Major, was widely hailed as a shrewd move, but it is open to the same objections as the Ecclestone tie-up.
Blair doesn’t need to be “bribed” to intervene on behalf of big business. Anyone who has seriously studied New Labour in theory and practice has noted the growing convergence of ideologies and interests between Blair and the Murdochs, Ecclestones, and Sainsburys. Gordon Brown’s statement on EMU confirmed that New Labour identifies the priorities of big business as “the national interest”. The Government seeks to serve big business, and expects the appropriate financial support in return.
Blair is constructing a new US-style interface between government and big business. It is in this light that Party members should scrutinise not only the F1 U-turn but the Government’s approach to defence spending, the Private Finance Initiative, contracting-out under Best Value (see Best Value — for big business?), Welfare to Work, and the Millennium Dome.
Labour MP Robert Marshall-Andrews has tabled a Commons question regarding secret contracts worth some £450 million — awarded by the New Millennium Experience Company, a company with one issued share and no direct lines of information or accountability — to Parliament. The second biggest corporate investor in the Dome is BA, which is also awaiting a Government go-ahead for a proposed fifth terminal at Heathrow. The development is strongly opposed by local residents, who were dismayed to learn that BA had recently conducted a raffle for Labour MPs. First prize — Concorde tickets worth £11,000 — went to the Labour MP for Hove, Ivor Caplin; Janet Anderson, a Government whip, won a flight to Paris. Shortly after the election, BA boss Bob Ayling was asked by Blair to head up his personal office; Ayling declined, preferring to concentrate on BA’s battle with the TGWU.
The new Register of Members’ Interests reveals that Barclays Bank has been providing staff to help run Blair’s constituency office. Martin Taylor, Barclays’ Chief Executive, heads Blair’s task force on tax and benefits. He is also enmeshed in a bitter dispute with unions over an effective pay cut he is trying to impose on 25,000 employees. Last year, the Bank’s profits were £2.35 billion.
Alec Reed, union-busting chairman of Reed Executive, contributed £100,000 to the “blind trust” which funded Blair’s office in opposition. Reed has now been asked by Blair to come up with a solution to the crisis in teacher recruitment. One of his subsidiaries, Reed Personnel Services, has been awarded the contract to run a pilot project for the Welfare to Work scheme. The chair of the Government’s task force for this scheme is Peter Davis, another veteran union buster, now running Prudential, which has admitted to massive mis-selling of pensions. Should New Labour’s compulsory “second pension” proposals go ahead, the Prudential stands to make a killing.
Blair’s apologists will insist that this magic circle of access and influence, public policy and private profit is entirely innocent. They miss the point. The whole arrangement is corrupting, whatever role individual donations or gifts may or may not have played. As in the US, the boundaries between private and public are being blurred, and with them the Labour Party’s accountability to the people who elected it.
Blair’s BBC interview with John Humphreys revealed that despite (because of?) his years at the Bar and in the Commons, he does not understand that a conflict of interest is by definition a potential conflict of interest. His indignant insistence that he was not influenced by Ecclestone’s donation is irrelevant. What emerges from the whole fiasco is the massive insensitivity of the Prime Minister and his clique to the ethos of public service. They simply have no idea where the line should be drawn.
Those of us who have observed the resistible rise of the Blairites inside the Labour Party are not in the least surprised by the F1 revelations. We expected nothing else from people who routinely broke the rules of their own party, lied about their own actions, smeared fellow Party members, abused Party funds to pursue factional advantage, rigged votes, repeatedly revised policy without consulting any of the Party’s democratic organs, and ensured a steady flow of jobs and patronage to those loyal and useful to the leadership. Their attitude to the rules that apply to ordinary people is like Leona Helmsley’s towards taxes: they’re “for little people”.
Stand by for more New Labour sleaze. If you’re a Party member, and you don’t want people scorning you the way they now scorn the Tories, you had better get cracking.
Sometime prior to the general election (we still don’t know when), Bernie Ecclestone secretly contributed £1 million either to the Labour Party or to the ‘blind trust’ which funded Blair’s office. (We still don’t know which.)
1st May: Labour wins election with pledge to ban tobacco advertising.
17th May: Frank Dobson and Tessa Jowell, at their first Department of Health press conference, announce plans to ban tobacco sponsorship of all sports.
19th May: Dobson repeats message to Royal College of Nursing; the Government will ban tobacco sponsorship.
20th May: David Mills, Jowell’s husband, resigns as director of Benetton Formula One, though he remains involved with the company through his law firm.
July-August: Dobson and Jowell enter EU negotiations on tobacco ban. At the same time, party officials are seeking an additional gift of £500,000 from Ecclestone.
23rd September: Jowell talks to F1 secretary Max Mosley.
16th October: Blair meets privately with Ecclestone and Mosley. No one from Department of Health is present. Notes taken by Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who as fund-raiser had helped negotiate the £1 million gift.
17th October: PM’s office writes to Dobson instructing him to exempt F1. Soon after, Dobson in letter to Cabinet colleagues makes first mention of concessions to F1.
4th November: letter to European ministers indicating change in British policy on F1.
5th November: Jowell announces U-turn. Rumours of Ecclestone donation begin to spread. Denied by PM’s office and by Labour Party.
7th November, morning: newspapers run stories about Jowell’s husband’s links to F1 (as well as his deep entanglement with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian TV magnate who was briefly the country’s PM, thanks to neo-fascist support.)
7th November, 7pm: Letter is faxed to Sir Patrick Neill, composed by Blair, signed by Tom Saywer, asking if it was OK for Labour to accept a second gift of £500,000 from Ecclestone. Letter does not ask about propriety of first gift or reveal its size.
8th November: Labour spin doctors insist information on donors cannot be divulged either “internally or externally”; implication (false) is that Blair knows nothing about Ecclestone donation. Millbank tries to scare off journalists by claiming Ecclestone would sue.
10th November: After advice from Sir Patrick Neill, Labour finally admits to receiving gift from Ecclestone, which it says is an amount over £5000. Dismisses reports of £1 million as “wild and seriously inaccurate”.
11th November: following statements by Ecclestone himself, Downing Street admits gift was £1 million.
12th November: Blair claims in Commons that he had consulted Sir Patrick as soon as a potential conflict of interest arose — which he dates from 6th November, one day before fax was sent, several days after journalists began asking questions, weeks after his meeting with Ecclestone and months after receiving the gift.
16th November: Blair on BBC TV says he told Ecclestone on 5th November that he could accept no further donations from him (flatly contradicted by contents of Sawyer’s letter on 7th November).
19rd November: Jowell announces that F1 exemption will be “permanent”.
23rd November: Labour secures £1 million to repay Ecclestone from boss of Planet Hollywood restaurants (official residence: Orlando, Florida).