Stephen Haseler

According to Tom Easton:

Haseler was not only a member of the SDP, but a founding member of the Social Democratic Alliance which preceded it. An academic who, as a London councillor, had become a vociferous critic of changes within the Labour Party in the Seventies, Haseler had spent some time at the third big Washington think-tank, the Heritage Foundation. With its money he had helped set up in London the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, a forceful and well-resourced foe of both the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Labour Party in the Eighties. Haseler gains just one mention from Crewe and King as 'a little-known outsider, a self-styled "rank and file" candidate' for the SDP presidency in 1981.'

Now it may be true that Haseler is not the important figure in starting the SDP ball rolling CIA asset Brian Crozier claims in his 1993 book Free Agent , but there can be little doubt that he had a considerable transatlantic role before and during the life of the SDP. [1]

Haseler worked for the 'left-face' of the US National Strategy Information Centre (NSIC)one of the funders of Brian Crozier's Forum World Features, a CIA front. He co-authored Eurocommunism with the NSIC's Roy Godson, who 'helped Oliver North channel contributions from private donors to the contras by using the Heritage Foundation to launder the funds'. ([2]) Haseler has written for Demos.

Publications

Stephen Haseler The Super Rich: The Unjust New World of Global Capitalism, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmmillan, 2000.

Notes

Tom Easton 'Who were they travelling with?'Review of SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, Oxford University Press, 1995, £25 Lobster 31, 1996.