David Pitt-Watson

Tim Pendry writes:

I once knew Pitt-Watson (henceforth in this posting DP-W) well but not in recent years. We both held high office in the Labour Finance & Industry Group and, coincidentally, worked together on the Russian Mass Privatisation Programme in 1992 (an experience that has prejudiced me ever since in favour of Vladimir Putin's war on the thieving oligarchs)... He is very much an 'insider'. He was Assistant General Secretary in the mid-1990s, taking a fair hit to his salary, and, earlier, he made an unsuccessful attempt to become New Labour candidate in Corby, apparently, like many a technocrat, not really understanding how to work a constituency system that, even today, depends a great deal on glad-handing opinionated and self-important local worthies.

He wrote often on party reform, broadly along New Labour rather than democratic lines, and was part of a circle of younger (then) radicals who wanted engagement with capitalism by using the state as regulator. In essence, he was and probably still is a modernising social liberal rather than anything that the past or the future would call a socialist.