Rogue State: A guide to the world’s only superpower William Blum Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $16.95 Globalize This! The battle against the World Trade Organization and corporate rule eds. Kevin Danaher and Roger Burbach Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $15.95 I have lumped these together partly because they are both published … Read more
BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour … Read more
Robert Parry Arlington (VA): The Media Consortium, 2004; $22.95 (US); p/b Order from <www.secrecyandprivilege.com> This is the book I have enjoyed most since the last Lobster and it is one of the best books I have read on American politics and parapolitics. Robert Parry really is very good indeed: he has the serious investigative … Read more
Organisation, History and Politics In the early years of the Thatcher decade, the radical or ‘new’ right was generally treated as though it was a united palace guard for libertarian Conservatism. More recently it has become clearer that the radical right in Britain was, at best, an ‘anti wet’ alliance between authoritarian/ nationalist and libertarian/radical … Read more
The debate about whether the British should have a military presence East of Suez seemed to have been settled under the Wilson-Callaghan Government in the 1960s and 1970s. The process of withdrawal started with the independence of India and Pakistan (widely celebrated in the UK media recently on its sixtieth anniversary), was confirmed by the … Read more
Brice is right? An ‘immoral’ government has undermined human rights in Northern Ireland and is threatening to do the same across the rest of the United Kingdom, argued Professor Brice Dickson, the then Chief Commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission,([1]) in an interview with ePolitix.com to mark Human Rights Day last December.([2])He claimed … Read more
Raj Chari and Sylvia Kritzinger London: Pluto Press, 2006, £16.99, p/b See note 4. The authors begin by noting how policies emanating from the European Union are of increasing importance to the citizens of the member states. They divide these policies into those which they describe as ‘1st order’, which include single market measures, competition … Read more
How often does the conspiracy buff/ parapolitics connoisseur stumble upon a new, all-colour, glossy parapolitics magazine at W. H. Smith’s at Euston Station? Not that often. When I called Private Eye to mail order a copy of Paul Foot’s fascinating report on the Lockerbie trial, I was assured that I could buy a copy at … Read more
See note(1) By some standards, the loss of 269 souls aboard Korean Air Lines flight 007 on August 31, 1983, was a modest disaster. The Titanic, for example, claimed 1503 lives; the Lusitania 1198. But historians may come to believe that the political implications of the downing of the civilian 747 airliner by a Soviet … Read more
Nicola Calipari’s death If the tragic death of ‘Nicola Calipari’, the international oper-ations chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, in March 2005, was, as has been alleged, a deliberate act rather than misadventure, it is one of the most recent examples of extreme PR ‘message management’ I can think of. ([1]) ‘Public relations’ is about … Read more
