Stephen Haseler
According to Tome 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.