BAP
The Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines a bap as a ‘large soft bread roll’. How soft or hard the British American Project for the Successor Generation is — only time will tell. But it is certainly proving rather indigestible to the British media. By any standards a major story, Tom Easton’s piece on BAP (in Lobster 33) found its way only into three snippets in the Guardian diary in August, and a gossip piece in the Independent on 6 October. The media also managed to ignore the June/July edition of the BAP Newsletter which had as its lead story, ‘UK Election News: Big Swing to BAP’. This began:
‘No less than four British-American Project Fellows and one Advisory Board Member have been appointed to ministerial posts in the new Labour government.’
New names on the BAP roster include Geoff (from Militant via Red Wedge to the PM’s Office) Mulgan, Julia (not now, daddy, I’m busy) Hobsbawm, and Wendy Alexander, now a Special Adviser to Donald Dewar. Bernard Gray, a 1993 BAPtist, is now Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Defense.
BAP’s UK Project Director, Ginny Felton is at 21 Byways, Burnham, Essex SL1 7EB, tel. 01628 602972, e-mail .
Spooks and Hacks
Looking for something else, I came across an article I had clipped from the Reader’s Digest no 817, May 1990. The article is a profile of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major. Titled ‘The Man Next Door to No. 10’, it carries the subtitle: ‘Tipped as a future Tory leader’. The piece is interesting for two reasons. One is precisely this ‘tip’ at a time when most of the British electorate had little idea who John Major was and Mrs. Thatcher showed no signs of quitting. The second is the author of this piece, David Moller. The CIA’s links to the American Reader’s Digest during the cold war are well known now; in the UK one of the main people involved in the early years of Common Cause, Peter Crane, was also a member of the board of the UK end of Reader’s Digest; and even a cursory glance at the British edition in the later 1970s shows a heavy input from the Atlanticist end of the British labour movement, Eric Hammond, Kate Losinska etc. (On this network see David Osler’s piece in Lobster 33.) Among the many attempts to increase the anti-socialist presence in the Labour movement in the 1970s was the 1974 creation of the Trade Union Education Centre for Democratic Socialism. A report written by one of its members on the organisation’s early activities tells us that it began with funding from Common Cause, and lists the people who had attended its early meetings, among whom was….. David Moller.
Now join up the dots.
Hanky-panky in the British UFO world
The former Searchlight agent provocateur, Tim Hepple, is now cruising the British UFO world under the guise of ‘Tim Matthews’ of the ‘Lancashire UFO Society’.
A major attempt to spread disinformation through the British UFO magazines is underway. Kevin McClure wrote about this in the second editon of his new newsletter Abduction Watch. Although the content of the stories varies from claims of secret British operations to cover-up the murder and mutilation of British citizens by aliens, to more mundane tales of secret bases and secret military units, the seven or eight stories in the past couple of years all have one thing in common: the source is anonymous and claims to be in some branch of the British military. In what is presumably part of the same operation, Armen Victorian received a phone-call this October from a man claiming to be a taxi-driver who had found a briefcase left in his cab with some official papers in it — an oldie but a goodie, that one! This ‘taxi-driver’ then tried to run part of this disinformation project, the story about alien contact with the British state, past him. What the purpose of this disinformation operation is — your guess is as good as mine (or McClure’s). (Abduction Watch — £5.00 buys 5 issues in the UK, 3 issues anywhere else in the world, from Kevin McClure 3 Claremont Grove, Leeds, LS3 1AX. McClure must be on the way to setting some kind of record for the creation and ditching of little mags. In fact, they are all the same generic Kevin McClure newsletter, with the contents shifting as his attention moves onto a new topic — and all are worth your attention.
Watch What Simon Says
The European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT), discussed below in the Sources section, has five UK members. One of them is Sir David Simon of BP. Simon is a member of the EU Competitiveness Advisory Group, appointed by the then European Commission President Jacques Santer in 1995. The idea of such a group came from the ERT in 1993 and, as the Europe Inc. (see Sources) report suggests (p. 27), this ‘institutionalises the access of the ERT to EU decision-making structures’. Sir David Simon is now installed in Whitehall as the Minister for Trade and Competitiveness in Europe. So when the Blair government begins telling us that wages are too high in Britain, you will know from whom it is coming.
Nexus backwards says Suxen!
Nexus claims to sell 20,000 plus copies in the UK. It is an irritating mixture of the fascinating and the idiotic. The issue for October-November 1997, for example, includes the second part of a rather interesting interview with the former remote viewer David Morehouse. But it also contains David John Oates’ ‘Reverse Speech: The Voice of the Inner Self’. Oates claims that recorded speech, played backwards, reveals words and phrases which are, in some sense, our suppressed thoughts. He gives one or two examples — and these, presumably, are some of the better examples.
JFK’s famous words (recently ripped-off and paraphrased by one T. Blair), ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,’ apparently contains the backwards message ‘Give Jack all your food.’ (Was it food Jack was after? Fish and finger pie, maybe.) Asked how he planned to celebrate winning an election, Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, replied, ‘Ah, several cups of tea.’ According to Oates, backwards this says, ‘Used to smoke the best marijuana.’ Awesome, right? Incidentally, written backwards ‘Ah, several cups of tea’ is ‘aet fo spuc lareves, ha’.
Coming through the Windows?
The TV pictures in October of Microsoft’s Bill Gates in his grinning contest with Our Great Leader (T. Blair) reminded me of the persistent but to my knowledge unsubstantiated rumours that the Microsoft operating system, Windows 95, has a clandestine ‘back-door’ built into it. Tony Hollick puts it thus: if Windows 95 user [A] is logged on to site [B] via the Internet, interleaved data packets can be inserted into the datastream by site [C] and Windows 95 can be instructed to send [A]’s entire file directory structure back to [C], fully transparently, and all unbeknownst to [A]. [A]’s files can be scanned via Boolean key-word searches, and business plans, spreadsheets, data-bases, correspondence, financial records etc. can be ‘called up’ by site [C]. Also, latent viruses in Windows 95 can be activated for ‘Information Warfare’ purposes.
The rumour continues that this deal with the spooks explains why Microsoft, the most obvious monopoly supplier in the entire world, has never been the subject of serious anti-trust action by the U.S. government.
Searchlight news
On 15 July the legal action by Alexander Baron against Gerry Gable, editor of Searchlight, was resolved with Searchlight paying Baron £5000 and publishing the following in its September issue.
Mr Alexander Baron
‘In the November 1993 issue of Searchlight, it was claimed that Alexander Baron, together with others, was engaged in systematic law breaking by the publication of literature illegal under the Public Order Acts. Searchlight would like now to point out that since May 1993 Mr. Baron has been the subject of two intensive Police investigations, and on both occasions the Attorney General cleared Mr. Baron’s publication.’
At the beginning of October stickers appeared in Stamford Hill, Camden and Sydenham, purporting to be from the Hackney Anti-Paedophile League. They described Mark Taha as a child molester and gave his address as well as a photograph of him. The Hackney Anti-Paedophile League does not appear to exist. By a curious coincidence, Mark Taha, who is not a child molester as far as I know, is a colleague of Alexander Baron and one of two people with outstanding libel actions against Searchlight magazine.
Ex-CIA? Very New Labour
The Independent on Sunday (8 June) hinted that DeAnne Julius, one of Gordon Brown’s appointments to the Bank of England committee advising on interest rates, was a former CIA analyst, the Sunday Time (6 July) stated it as fact, but it was Nick Cohen in the Observer (19 October) who nailed it. Cohen’s ‘Why is CIA ex-agent setting our interest rates?’ is one of the best polemics written about New Labour. Ms. Julius doesn’t think we should bother trying to maintain our manufacturing base: we can all work in the service sector in the wonderful new global economy. Very New Labour…..
What makes Teddy run?
Who is Teddy Taylor MP? He is famous chiefly for his unremitting hostility to the European Union and his love of Bob Marley’s music. But nearly a decade ago he was the intermediary between Fred Holroyd and the MOD who came with an offer of money if Fred gave up on Colin Wallace. Then he was a deniable intermediary between Libya and the Foreign Office. More recently he offered Fred Holroyd £100,000 to break the British mercenary Peter Bleach out of an Indian jail. Taylor was taped discussing just such an operation with another British mercenary, John Miller, but denied any such intent. (See The Times 22 September. 1997.) Taylor’s a gofer, but who’s he going for?
Close, but no cigar
The Paul Anderson, Nyta Mann book on the rise of New Labour, Safety First (Granta Books, £9.99) is very good in many ways. Anderson and Mann have both been around the left media for a long time and they know bullshit when they step in it. This is chock full of information and criticism, and at 442 pages of text and notes is seriously good value for money. It describes itself as ‘the definitive guide to the politics and personalities of the British Government’, but it would be better described as The Definitive Guide to the Collapse of the Labour Party into Careerism, Thatcherism and Atlanticism. Correctly, the authors attribute most of the key changes to Blair’s predecessors; Neil Kinnock, who accepted the inevitability of membership of the EEC, and John Smith who accepted the futility of trying to run Keynesian economics in one country. This, latter belief, as the authors note, was considered proven by the apparent failure of the French government’s attempt to do so, which it ‘was forced to abandon in 1982-3, confronted by rising inflation and a balance of payments crisis.’ (p. 80) At this point there is a footnote in the text which reads thus:
‘There is, however, a complicating factor. France (unlike Britain) was a member of the ERM at this time and was committed to maintain the parity of its currency against the Deutschmark. Instead of abandoning its expansionism, the Mitterand government could have responded to its balance of payments problem by floating the franc out of the ERM and imposing import controls…. It is possible that such drastic measures would have worked — but more likely that they would have led to a collapse of the franc and hyper-inflation.’ (note 32 p. 401)
This will not do. The truth is we simply do not know what would have happened if the French government had abandoned its franc fort policy and not stayed tied to the Germans and the D-mark. The best comparison we have is with the consequences of Britain leaving the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 which led to falling unemployment, economic growth, and almost no increase in inflation. The authors’ conclusion about the French experience in 1983 is a cop-out — the only one I noticed in the book — but a big one. For despite the authors’ finely-tuned bullshit detectors in most policy areas, in the central one, economic policy, they more or less (grudgingly) accept the central Blairite line that there is no coherent alternative to the present economic policies, and that the nation state is powerless against multi-national forces — a view not remotely supported by the evidence presented here, or anywhere else, for that matter.