THE MANLEY EXPERIMENT WAS TRIED IN EASTERN EUROPE, ASIA AND AFRICA...:

The scion of a famous political dynasty, Michael Manley could have easily become just the kind of establishment figure that could be trusted to take charge of a vital former colony without rocking the boat. Educated at exclusive British colonial schools, Manley served as a fighter pilot in the Second World War. But after the war, Manley took up his university studies at the London School of Economics (LSE), where the teachings of Marxist professors like Harold Laski and Ralph Miliband made an impression on him. He moved from theory to practice when he returned to Jamaica to inherit the leadership of the People's National Party from his father, Norman Manley, becoming prime minister 50 years ago, in 1972.

What would the world today have looked like if the freshly decolonised nations had been able to 'take back control' from multinational corporations?

Upon taking office, he began implementing one of the most ambitious programmes of social reform that has ever been tried in a former British colony. But it was on the international stage that Manley would cause the biggest stir. For him, the arena of international law offered the perfect avenue to organise all of the recently decolonised countries to use their growing power to call for what he and his allies would christen a 'New International Economic Order' (NIEO).

Manley mobilised the numerical advantage that the former colonies enjoyed in the UN to pass a resolution in May 1974 that still reads as radically today: the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order. This UN declaration contained a commitment to ending all waste of food products, a recognition of the right for countries to enjoy full, permanent sovereignty over their own natural resources and, perhaps most strikingly, a provision which reinforced the power of national governments to control "the activities of transnational corporations". What would the world today have looked like if this declaration had been actualised, if the freshly decolonised nations had been able to 'take back control' from multinational corporations? Could this moment have altered the balance of power between the interests of capital and the democratic demands of people across the world? We will never know. Because as all the attention was focused on the battle at the UN, changes to the political landscape back in the old centre of the world - Westminster, London - would soon have major consequences for the dreams of Manley and his allies.

After the failure of free marketeers like Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph to seize control of Conservative Party, in 1975 Margaret Thatcher succeeded where they had failed and, after the 1979 election, became Britain's first woman prime minister. Thatcher's position was reinforced by the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as the new US president. The Anglosphere had taken a decisive ideological turn just in time for tensions to come to a head. In 1981, 22 heads of state from across five continents met for the world's first and only 'North-South' conference. The world leaders gathered at the Cancun Sheraton, looking out over the coast of Mexico towards the crisp Caribbean Sea, an idyllic setting to contrast with the tension that underpinned the power struggles taking place.

Michael Manley had paved the road to Cancun. Prior to this summit meeting, Manley had even hosted a preliminary mini-summit in Jamaica, which, while snubbed by the UK and the USA, was able to bring the leaders of West Germany, Australia, Canada and Norway together with the leaders of post-colonial countries to discuss a set of new rules to govern the global economy more fairly. However, the year before the Cancun conference took place, just five days before Reagan won the vote in the USA, Manley lost one of the most bitter and conflict-ridden elections to have taken place in the Western hemisphere. After a bloody contest that was marked by a shocking level of politically sponsored violence, Jamaica had elected a new president - the 'business-friendly' Edward Seaga, a politician known to opponents as 'Edward CIAga' due to his perceived closeness to Reagan and the USA.

So after years of trying to bring the global powers to the table, when the NIEO was finally put before the world's global powers at the Cancun conference, it was without the man who had done so much to bring it together. With the wind of change now firmly blowing back in their direction, Thatcher and Reagan had little reason to compromise and casually dismissed the NIEO's calls to allow for more democratic control over capitalism. Instead, Thatcher took this historic 'North-South' conference as an opportunity to tell the 'Third World' that the solution to its problems was simply to privatise and financialise further. In an early significant appearance on the international stage, Thatcher rejected the idea of protecting every nation's sovereignty over its resources and shot down the idea of a UN bank, from which countries could access cheap credit to see them through financial storms, declaring that 'there was no way that I was going to put British deposits into a bank which was totally run by those on overdrafts'.

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