Stuart Holland
Encyclopedia
Stuart Kingsley Holland (born 25 March 1940) is a British Labour
politician and academic.
He represented the Vauxhall
constituency in Lambeth
, London
from 1979 until 1989, when he applied for the Chiltern Hundreds
to take up a post at the European University Institute
, Florence
. He held the post of the Chiltern Hundreds for 5 years and 247 days the longest period the post has been held for since its creation in 1850. He currently teaches at the Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal.
by only one street, Stuart Holland was educated at State primary schools, Christ’s Hospital and Balliol College, Oxford
. At both the latter, one of his contemporaries was Alan Ryan
, later a professor of politics at Princeton
and then Warden of New College Oxford. With Ryan, and many others, he gained immensely from the sixth form or ‘Grecian’ teaching of the historian Michael Cherniavsky who introduced both of them to Hume
and to Wittgenstein
, as well as to political theory.
He was tutored at Balliol by two of the most prominent historians of the time, Christopher Hill
and Richard Cobb
. Hill opted to give him tutorials in political theory on a one-to-one basis and recommended him to teach political theory at several Oxford colleges on Holland's graduation. He was fortunate also in being encouraged by another Balliol tutor, Paul Streeten, to pursue his critique on philosophical grounds of the ‘trap’ of conventional economics in the mind set of the early Wittgenstein. Having attended and presented papers at seminars chaired by John Hicks
, later a Nobel laureate, Hicks deemed that he could proceed straight to a doctorate which, after a stint in Whitehall and no.10 he did.
, then Shadow Chancellor, who invited him on graduation to be his assistant, but Holland declined in order to ‘do economics’ properly in order to be able better to critique it. His graduate thesis was in regional theory and policy and he was asked to draft papers for the Department of Economic Affairs
which became the analytic basis of regional planning in the 1965 National Plan. He later was to draft the case for the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland Development Agencies on the committee for the 1975 Industry Bill, and the English regional development agencies, with John Prescott
, who later introduced them while Deputy Prime Minister.
In December 1965 he was invited to become an economic assistant in the Cabinet Office by Thomas Balogh
, economic adviser to Wilson, and accepted. Holland saw the case for joining the EEC as accepting De Gaulle’s
veto on qualified majority voting and proposed also a European Technology Community as the basis for doing so.
Balogh was initially delighted by Holland's knowledge of what was happening in Europe to the issue whether or not the UK should join the then European Economic Community
(EEC), but fell out with him when he made the case to join it. Holland assisted Wilson in getting through to De Gaulle via Pierre Joxe
. Joxe saw De Gaulle on Holland’s behalf, and then gave Holland the answer the next morning, in Paris, that the reply was ‘Yes’ to the 2nd application to join the EEC.
When De Gaulle accepted this, Wilson wanted Holland to become the first economic adviser to the Foreign Office, but was blocked by Sir Paul Gore Booth
and Sir Con O’Neil, permanent and deputy secretaries at the FCO.
Wilson then invited Holland into the political office in 10 Downing Street handling relations with the Labour Party outside parliament, trades unions and those members of the public who declared to be or have been Labour Party supporters. He decided to resign from No. 10 for policy related reasons including on Europe
, where he believed Wilson could have succeeded with the 2nd application to join the EEC, and done so in a manner which, with a new Technology Community, and a block on qualified majority voting, could have transformed it. Also on the failure to re-launch the 1965 National Plan through planning agreements with leading firms, which the French were adopting with success since 1966. He had passed a paper on this to Wilson, which he in turn passed to Peter Shore
, who had succeeded George Brown as Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. But Wilson did not follow through. There was no National Plan re-launch. Holland then accepted a fellowship at the Centre for Contemporary European Studies at the University of Sussex
and continued as an economic advisor to the Labour Party.
The case for state holding companies had been based on a study (The State as Entrepreneur, 1972) of the Italian Industrial Reconstruction Institute
(IRI), and arguing the case in its opening chapter that both the private sector and Keynesian macroeconomic policies needed to be supplemented by State holdings in leading firms to ensure long-term innovative investment, extend a national innovation frontier and offset negative externalities such as regional imbalance. He combined this with the case that such holding companies could countervail multinational companies threatening to locate in lower labour cost countries by offsetting such lower labour cots through technical progress and innovation and, by direct operations in sectors, gain information on the degree to which they were transfer pricing and evading profits through tax havens (Holland et al., Fabian Society, 1971). Much later, this became a major agenda item for the first summit of the G20 heads of state and government in Washington in 2008
.
The first person in the Labour Party to show interest in the case for state holding companies was Bill Rodgers
, then chair of the Expenditure Committee of the House of Commons, who appointed Holland an adviser on the use of public money in the private sector. At the invitation of Rodgers, Holland wrote a paper on the case for state holding companies and planning agreements for a conference organised by the Centre-Right Socialist Commentary journal. He then was invited to present the same case to the National Executive of the Labour Party, and wrote two papers for it.
After he had presented the first, the then chairman of the Labour Party, and president of the boilermakers union John Chalmers, thanked him and was ready to move to next business, But Ian Mikardo, an influential member of the national Executive intervened. He declared that he did not know whether the case was right or wrong. But that, if it was right, the whole basis of what the Labour government had claimed in a National Plan based incentives to business to invest and sector working parties as talkshops was wrong and that the Executive should establish at east two committees to examine this, one on public ownership and the other on planning. This then ensued, with both chaired by Judith Hart, and the outcome became Labour Party policy in its 1972 and 1973 programmes.
Initially, this gained consensus without any of the internal dispute within the Labour Party that thereafter ensued. The case for the State as entrepreneur and gaining value for public money in the private sector through planning agreements had resonance in what already was a multinational economy, and why the Keynesian macro-micro synthesis, including the 1967 devaluation, had failed in the 1960s either to accelerate investment and innovation, or gain export-led growth. From the spring of 1972 through to the summer of 1973, at varying levels of commitment, both the Right and Left of the Labour Party had agreed the same agenda. There was a serious prospect of consensus not for an ‘Old Labour’ commitment to nationalisation, as the media and the Right later parodied the case, but for new public ownership and selective planning through the leading firms which were coming to dominate both the national and global economy.
Concerned to gain as broad based an approach as possible for the case, Holland accepted to write a paper on the same lines as for the Labour National Executive for Roy Jenkins
whose chapter on ‘The Needs of the Regions’ in his What Matters Now (Fontana, 1972) reflected this in claiming that the State should have a shareholding in at least one leading firm in all the main twenty plus sectors of manufacturing, and in banking, mortgage finance and insurance.
When Labour came into government on a minority basis in the election of February 1974, Judith Hart appointed Holland as her special adviser on overseas development cooperation (see further Background Experience – Global). In the interim Tony Benn
co-opted him into the drafting committee for the government’s new Industry Act on a committee chaired by Eric Heffer
and including Michael Meacher
and Tony Benn’s economic adviser Francis Cripps.
In 1975, Holland resigned as an economic adviser when it became plain that the Industry Act would make public shareholdings and planning agreements ‘voluntary’. The Labour Governments from 1974 nonetheless introduced two major state holding companies. The first, modelled on the Italian Industrial Reconstruction Institute (IRI) was a National Enterprise Board
. The other was the British National Oil Corporation, modelled on the Italian State Hydrocarbons Corporation (ENI). By 1979, before being abolished by the Thatcher
government, the NEB was employing a million people in British manufacturing. The BNOC’s own operations also made it possible to identify transfer pricing and tax avoidance by private sector oil majors in the North Sea.
In The Socialist Challenge (Quartet, 1975) Holland argued that new dimensions to a mixed economy
including selective shareholdings in some leading firms and planning agreements with them and others would enable national governments to countervail the already emerging trend to unaccountable multinational companies, offset transfer pricing between their subsidiaries through tax havens and avoid a fiscal crisis for welfare expenditures. He also warned that a conservative neo-liberal alternative to this would be de-industrialisation, as echoed also in much of his writing in the press, and also in his contribution to a 1978 conference by the National Institute of Economic and Social research (Blackaby, De-Industrialisation, NIESR, 1979).
What followed then has been chronicled by Mark-Wickam Jones in his Economic Strategy in the Labour Party 1970-83 (Macmillan, 1996). Holland was elected a member of parliament when the Conservatives
regained office in 1979. During the early Thatcher period, he argued the case with others, including Jacques Delors
whom he had met in 1975, for a European dimension to an alternative economic strategy to that of neoliberalism
and worked also with Willy Brandt
, Bruno Kreisky
and others to extend this at a global level through the Socialist International
.
This was strongly supported by Neil Kinnock
when he became Leader of the Labour Party in 1983, who appointed him shadow minister for International Cooperation. Kinnock supported a far more positive approach to European cooperation, and also extending the case for planning agreements with leading firms not only as an ‘alternative economic strategy’ to monetarism, but also for Europe, which also was supported also by Delors.
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...
politician and academic.
He represented the Vauxhall
Vauxhall (UK Parliament constituency)
-Elections in the 1980s:-Elections in the 1970s:-Elections in the 1960s:-Notes and references:...
constituency in Lambeth
Lambeth
Lambeth is a district of south London, England, and part of the London Borough of Lambeth. It is situated southeast of Charing Cross.-Toponymy:...
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
from 1979 until 1989, when he applied for the Chiltern Hundreds
Chiltern Hundreds
Appointment to the office of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham is a sinecure appointment which is used as a device allowing a Member of the United Kingdom Parliament to resign his or her seat...
to take up a post at the European University Institute
European University Institute
The European University Institute ' in Florence is an international postgraduate and post-doctoral teaching and research institute established by European Union member states to contribute to cultural and scientific development in the social sciences, in a European perspective...
, Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
. He held the post of the Chiltern Hundreds for 5 years and 247 days the longest period the post has been held for since its creation in 1850. He currently teaches at the Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal.
Background and education
Born in 1940, and escaping the most accurate V1 aimed at its ‘bull’s eye’ Oxford CircusOxford Circus
Oxford Circus is the area of London at the busy intersection of Regent Street and Oxford Street, in the West End. It is served by Oxford Circus tube station, which is directly beneath the junction itself.- History :...
by only one street, Stuart Holland was educated at State primary schools, Christ’s Hospital and Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....
. At both the latter, one of his contemporaries was Alan Ryan
Alan Ryan
Alan James Ryan, FBA was Warden of New College, Oxford, and Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and currently a lecturer at Princeton University....
, later a professor of politics at Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
and then Warden of New College Oxford. With Ryan, and many others, he gained immensely from the sixth form or ‘Grecian’ teaching of the historian Michael Cherniavsky who introduced both of them to Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
and to Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
, as well as to political theory.
He was tutored at Balliol by two of the most prominent historians of the time, Christopher Hill
Christopher Hill
Christopher Hill may refer to:*Christopher Hill , English bishop*Christopher J. Hill, International Relations scholar, Professor and Director of the Cambridge Centre of International Studies*Christopher R. Hill, U.S. Ambassador in Iraq...
and Richard Cobb
Richard Cobb
Richard Charles Cobb was a British historian. He became Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, after an initially unconventional academic career in which he spent a dozen years working as an independent scholar in French archives. His work was recognised in France by the award of...
. Hill opted to give him tutorials in political theory on a one-to-one basis and recommended him to teach political theory at several Oxford colleges on Holland's graduation. He was fortunate also in being encouraged by another Balliol tutor, Paul Streeten, to pursue his critique on philosophical grounds of the ‘trap’ of conventional economics in the mind set of the early Wittgenstein. Having attended and presented papers at seminars chaired by John Hicks
John Hicks
Sir John Richard Hicks was a British economist and one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS/LM model , which...
, later a Nobel laureate, Hicks deemed that he could proceed straight to a doctorate which, after a stint in Whitehall and no.10 he did.
Political Experience in the UK
In 1963 he came to the attention of Harold WilsonHarold Wilson
James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC was a British Labour Member of Parliament, Leader of the Labour Party. He was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s, winning four general elections, including a minority government after the...
, then Shadow Chancellor, who invited him on graduation to be his assistant, but Holland declined in order to ‘do economics’ properly in order to be able better to critique it. His graduate thesis was in regional theory and policy and he was asked to draft papers for the Department of Economic Affairs
Department of Economic Affairs
The Department of Economic Affairs could refer to:*Department of Economic Affairs - A government body in the UK in the 1960s.*Federal Department of Economic Affairs - A government body in Switzerland....
which became the analytic basis of regional planning in the 1965 National Plan. He later was to draft the case for the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland Development Agencies on the committee for the 1975 Industry Bill, and the English regional development agencies, with John Prescott
John Prescott
John Leslie Prescott, Baron Prescott is a British politician who was Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. Born in Prestatyn, Wales, he represented Hull East as the Labour Member of Parliament from 1970 to 2010...
, who later introduced them while Deputy Prime Minister.
In December 1965 he was invited to become an economic assistant in the Cabinet Office by Thomas Balogh
Thomas Balogh
Thomas Balogh, Baron Balogh was a Hungarian economist and member of the British House of Lords....
, economic adviser to Wilson, and accepted. Holland saw the case for joining the EEC as accepting De Gaulle’s
Charles de Gaulle
Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II. He later founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and served as its first President from 1959 to 1969....
veto on qualified majority voting and proposed also a European Technology Community as the basis for doing so.
Balogh was initially delighted by Holland's knowledge of what was happening in Europe to the issue whether or not the UK should join the then European Economic Community
European Economic Community
The European Economic Community The European Economic Community (EEC) The European Economic Community (EEC) (also known as the Common Market in the English-speaking world, renamed the European Community (EC) in 1993The information in this article primarily covers the EEC's time as an independent...
(EEC), but fell out with him when he made the case to join it. Holland assisted Wilson in getting through to De Gaulle via Pierre Joxe
Pierre Joxe
Pierre Joxe is a former French Socialist politician and has been a member of the Constitutional Council of France since 2001....
. Joxe saw De Gaulle on Holland’s behalf, and then gave Holland the answer the next morning, in Paris, that the reply was ‘Yes’ to the 2nd application to join the EEC.
When De Gaulle accepted this, Wilson wanted Holland to become the first economic adviser to the Foreign Office, but was blocked by Sir Paul Gore Booth
Paul Gore-Booth, Baron Gore-Booth
Paul Henry Gore-Booth, Baron Gore-Booth, GCMG, KCVO, was a British diplomat. He served in HM Diplomatic Service and in retirement held the following appointments: Director: Grindlays Bank, 1969–79; United Kingdom Provident Institution, 1969–79; Registrar, Order of St Michael and St George,...
and Sir Con O’Neil, permanent and deputy secretaries at the FCO.
Wilson then invited Holland into the political office in 10 Downing Street handling relations with the Labour Party outside parliament, trades unions and those members of the public who declared to be or have been Labour Party supporters. He decided to resign from No. 10 for policy related reasons including on Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, where he believed Wilson could have succeeded with the 2nd application to join the EEC, and done so in a manner which, with a new Technology Community, and a block on qualified majority voting, could have transformed it. Also on the failure to re-launch the 1965 National Plan through planning agreements with leading firms, which the French were adopting with success since 1966. He had passed a paper on this to Wilson, which he in turn passed to Peter Shore
Peter Shore
Peter David Shore, Baron Shore of Stepney PC was a British Labour politician and former Cabinet Minister, noted in part for his opposition to the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community. His idiosyncratic left-wing nationalism led to comparison with the French politician...
, who had succeeded George Brown as Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. But Wilson did not follow through. There was no National Plan re-launch. Holland then accepted a fellowship at the Centre for Contemporary European Studies at the University of Sussex
University of Sussex
The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....
and continued as an economic advisor to the Labour Party.
The case for state holding companies had been based on a study (The State as Entrepreneur, 1972) of the Italian Industrial Reconstruction Institute
Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale
The Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale was an Italian public company set up by the fascist government in 1933 to combat the effects of the global depression on the Italian economy...
(IRI), and arguing the case in its opening chapter that both the private sector and Keynesian macroeconomic policies needed to be supplemented by State holdings in leading firms to ensure long-term innovative investment, extend a national innovation frontier and offset negative externalities such as regional imbalance. He combined this with the case that such holding companies could countervail multinational companies threatening to locate in lower labour cost countries by offsetting such lower labour cots through technical progress and innovation and, by direct operations in sectors, gain information on the degree to which they were transfer pricing and evading profits through tax havens (Holland et al., Fabian Society, 1971). Much later, this became a major agenda item for the first summit of the G20 heads of state and government in Washington in 2008
2008 G-20 Washington summit
The 2008 G-20 Washington Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy took place on November 14–15, 2008, in Washington, D.C., United States. It achieved general agreement amongst the G-20 on how to cooperate in key areas so as to strengthen economic growth, deal with the financial...
.
The first person in the Labour Party to show interest in the case for state holding companies was Bill Rodgers
Bill Rodgers
William or Bill Rodgers may refer to:*William Rodgers, Baron Rodgers of Quarry Bank , British politician*Bill Rodgers , American marathon runner*Bill Rodgers , American MLB player...
, then chair of the Expenditure Committee of the House of Commons, who appointed Holland an adviser on the use of public money in the private sector. At the invitation of Rodgers, Holland wrote a paper on the case for state holding companies and planning agreements for a conference organised by the Centre-Right Socialist Commentary journal. He then was invited to present the same case to the National Executive of the Labour Party, and wrote two papers for it.
After he had presented the first, the then chairman of the Labour Party, and president of the boilermakers union John Chalmers, thanked him and was ready to move to next business, But Ian Mikardo, an influential member of the national Executive intervened. He declared that he did not know whether the case was right or wrong. But that, if it was right, the whole basis of what the Labour government had claimed in a National Plan based incentives to business to invest and sector working parties as talkshops was wrong and that the Executive should establish at east two committees to examine this, one on public ownership and the other on planning. This then ensued, with both chaired by Judith Hart, and the outcome became Labour Party policy in its 1972 and 1973 programmes.
Initially, this gained consensus without any of the internal dispute within the Labour Party that thereafter ensued. The case for the State as entrepreneur and gaining value for public money in the private sector through planning agreements had resonance in what already was a multinational economy, and why the Keynesian macro-micro synthesis, including the 1967 devaluation, had failed in the 1960s either to accelerate investment and innovation, or gain export-led growth. From the spring of 1972 through to the summer of 1973, at varying levels of commitment, both the Right and Left of the Labour Party had agreed the same agenda. There was a serious prospect of consensus not for an ‘Old Labour’ commitment to nationalisation, as the media and the Right later parodied the case, but for new public ownership and selective planning through the leading firms which were coming to dominate both the national and global economy.
Concerned to gain as broad based an approach as possible for the case, Holland accepted to write a paper on the same lines as for the Labour National Executive for Roy Jenkins
Roy Jenkins
Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead OM, PC was a British politician.The son of a Welsh coal miner who later became a union official and Labour MP, Roy Jenkins served with distinction in World War II. Elected to Parliament as a Labour member in 1948, he served in several major posts in...
whose chapter on ‘The Needs of the Regions’ in his What Matters Now (Fontana, 1972) reflected this in claiming that the State should have a shareholding in at least one leading firm in all the main twenty plus sectors of manufacturing, and in banking, mortgage finance and insurance.
When Labour came into government on a minority basis in the election of February 1974, Judith Hart appointed Holland as her special adviser on overseas development cooperation (see further Background Experience – Global). In the interim Tony Benn
Tony Benn
Anthony Neil Wedgwood "Tony" Benn, PC is a British Labour Party politician and a former MP and Cabinet Minister.His successful campaign to renounce his hereditary peerage was instrumental in the creation of the Peerage Act 1963...
co-opted him into the drafting committee for the government’s new Industry Act on a committee chaired by Eric Heffer
Eric Heffer
Eric Samuel Heffer was a British socialist politician. He was Labour Member of Parliament for Liverpool Walton from 1964 until his death. His working-class background and consciousness fed in to his left-wing politics, but to an extent disguised the depth of his knowledge: with 12,000 books in...
and including Michael Meacher
Michael Meacher
Michael Hugh Meacher is a British Labour politician, who has been the Member of Parliament for Oldham West and Royton since 1997. Previously he had been the MP for Oldham West, first elected in 1970. On 22 February 2007 he declared that he would be standing for the Labour Leadership, challenging...
and Tony Benn’s economic adviser Francis Cripps.
In 1975, Holland resigned as an economic adviser when it became plain that the Industry Act would make public shareholdings and planning agreements ‘voluntary’. The Labour Governments from 1974 nonetheless introduced two major state holding companies. The first, modelled on the Italian Industrial Reconstruction Institute (IRI) was a National Enterprise Board
National Enterprise Board
-History:The National Enterprise Board was set up in the United Kingdom in 1975 to implement the Wilson Labour government's objective of extending public ownership of industry...
. The other was the British National Oil Corporation, modelled on the Italian State Hydrocarbons Corporation (ENI). By 1979, before being abolished by the Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
government, the NEB was employing a million people in British manufacturing. The BNOC’s own operations also made it possible to identify transfer pricing and tax avoidance by private sector oil majors in the North Sea.
In The Socialist Challenge (Quartet, 1975) Holland argued that new dimensions to a mixed economy
Mixed economy
Mixed economy is an economic system in which both the state and private sector direct the economy, reflecting characteristics of both market economies and planned economies. Most mixed economies can be described as market economies with strong regulatory oversight, in addition to having a variety...
including selective shareholdings in some leading firms and planning agreements with them and others would enable national governments to countervail the already emerging trend to unaccountable multinational companies, offset transfer pricing between their subsidiaries through tax havens and avoid a fiscal crisis for welfare expenditures. He also warned that a conservative neo-liberal alternative to this would be de-industrialisation, as echoed also in much of his writing in the press, and also in his contribution to a 1978 conference by the National Institute of Economic and Social research (Blackaby, De-Industrialisation, NIESR, 1979).
What followed then has been chronicled by Mark-Wickam Jones in his Economic Strategy in the Labour Party 1970-83 (Macmillan, 1996). Holland was elected a member of parliament when the Conservatives
Conservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...
regained office in 1979. During the early Thatcher period, he argued the case with others, including Jacques Delors
Jacques Delors
Jacques Lucien Jean Delors is a French economist and politician, the eighth President of the European Commission and the first person to serve three terms in that office .-French Politics:...
whom he had met in 1975, for a European dimension to an alternative economic strategy to that of neoliberalism
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is a market-driven approach to economic and social policy based on neoclassical theories of economics that emphasizes the efficiency of private enterprise, liberalized trade and relatively open markets, and therefore seeks to maximize the role of the private sector in determining the...
and worked also with Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt, born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm , was a German politician, Mayor of West Berlin 1957–1966, Chancellor of West Germany 1969–1974, and leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany 1964–1987....
, Bruno Kreisky
Bruno Kreisky
Bruno Kreisky was an Austrian politician who served as Foreign Minister from 1959 to 1966 and as Chancellor from 1970 to 1983. Aged 72 at the end of his chancellorship, he was the oldest acting Chancellor after World War II....
and others to extend this at a global level through the Socialist International
Socialist International
The Socialist International is a worldwide organization of democratic socialist, social democratic and labour political parties. It was formed in 1951.- History :...
.
This was strongly supported by Neil Kinnock
Neil Kinnock
Neil Gordon Kinnock, Baron Kinnock is a Welsh politician belonging to the Labour Party. He served as a Member of Parliament from 1970 until 1995 and as Labour Leader and Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition from 1983 until 1992 - his leadership of the party during nearly nine years making him...
when he became Leader of the Labour Party in 1983, who appointed him shadow minister for International Cooperation. Kinnock supported a far more positive approach to European cooperation, and also extending the case for planning agreements with leading firms not only as an ‘alternative economic strategy’ to monetarism, but also for Europe, which also was supported also by Delors.
Works
- The State as Entrepreneur, New Dimensions for Public Enterprise: The IRI State Shareholding Formula (1972) editor
- Socialist Challenge (1975)
- Capital versus the Regions (1976)
- Beyond Capitalist Planning (1978) editor
- Uncommon Market : Capital, Class and Power in the European Community (1980)
- Out of Crisis. A Project for European Recovery (1983)
- Kissinger's Kingdom : a Counter Report on Central America (1984) with Donald AndersonDonald Anderson, Baron Anderson of SwanseaDonald Anderson, Baron Anderson of Swansea, PC, DL , is a British Labour Party politician, who was a Member of Parliament for Swansea East from 1966 to 1970 and from 1974 to 2005....
- Never Kneel Down: Drought, Development and Liberation in EritreaEritreaEritrea , officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea derives it's name from the Greek word Erethria, meaning 'red land'. The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast...
(1984) with James Firebrace - The Market Economy : From Micro to Mesoeconomics (1987)
- Central America: The Future of Economic Integration (1989) editor with George Irvin
- The European Imperative: Economic and Social Cohesion in the 1990s (1993)