New Labour prefers to stress that the intellectual architects of Attlee's reforms were John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, both members of the Liberal Party.
As India's global economic footprint grows, a marked rise in trade-related controversies in areas like labour standards, product safety and intellectual property seems all but inevitable.
It would be nice to believe that Labour's conversion to the cause of constitutional reform is a result of the intellectual force of the arguments advanced by Charter 88 and others.
The leaders of the growing labour movement were exactly the kind of self-educated men who prided themselves on a fierce intellectual independence from ready-made doctrine.