The View from the Bridge Robin Ramsay Thanks to Garrick Alder and Nick Must for editorial and proof-reading help. Going round in circles In the section below subheaded ‘What goes around’, I referred to David Teacher’s massive study of Le Cercle. Teacher informs me that his fifth, final and slightly revised version is now on-line.1 […]
[PDF file]: […] this is the man who not only initiated Britain’s nuclear weapons programme but also kept it secret from both Parliament and his own Cabinet, something that even Blair would have thought twice about! What of the ‘secret state’? By the time Attlee took office, the bad old days of the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ had been […]
[PDF file]: […] New York as a result flowed via corporate tax and asset and bond purchases to governments (so helping to finance the expansion of the welfare state under Blair and Brown) and, via banks, building societies and finance companies, both to businesses and to millions of private citizens. Lending expanded, personal and corporate borrowing mushroomed. […]
[PDF file]: […] the overturning of the murder convictions of the Birmingham Six in 1991. More recently, there have been the revelations that a Metropolitan police officer most probably killed Blair Peach at Southall in 1979, and South Yorkshire Police conspired to blame Liverpool fans for their deaths at Hillsborough in 1989 in order to deflect attention […]
[PDF file]: Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics Peter Geoghegan London: Head of Zeus, 2020, £8.99 Colin Challen Ever since the birth of ‘democracy’ it has been for sale. Influence pedlars, bribery, blackmail, fraud, honours touting – these are all as common as the ballot box. A whole library has been written about these less […]
[PDF file]: […] to ‘democracy’. It seems that in the early 2000s the British intelligence community raised serious doubts that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, which were disregarded by Bush and Blair because they didn’t fit in with their presumptions. America’s problem after 2001 was not that it had no loyal intelligence allies, but that they were, as […]
[PDF file]: […] the war in Afghanistan was not of any great concern to the British government, as long as fealty to the American Empire was faithfully demonstrated. As Tony Blair once remarked, it was sometimes necessary to cement the ‘special relationship’ in blood – other people’s blood. But why has the war gone so disastrously wrong? […]
[PDF file]: […] or else they swallowed whole the current orthodoxy since they had no capacity to take an independent view. Gordon Brown fell into this latter category – Tony Blair the former. John Smith had only a rudimentary knowledge of economics, but was a little more confident on the nuts and bolts of tax and accounting. […]
[PDF file]: […] investigation in 2004, but, in a clear case of political interference in the judicial process, it was closed in 2006, after intervention from then Prime Minister Tony Blair, on grounds of public interest, amid concerns that relations with Saudi Arabia were being harmed. In August 2013 the issue surfaced again when the SFO admitted […]
[PDF file]: […] with extremist elements. But he has lately thrown in his lot with Victor Gollancz who as you probably know has severed all connection with the Communist Party. Blair undoubtedly (has) strong Left Wing views but he is a long way from orthodox Communism’. As Ogilvie noted, it was evident from Orwell’s recent writings (this […]
