Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World Mark Curtis London: Vintage, 2003; p/b, £7.99 This latest analysis of British foreign policy by Mark Curtis could not be better timed. With more than a million Britons on the streets of London protesting against the Iraq war earlier this year there is a potentially large […]
IRD, home and away The creation of the Information Policy unit in HQ Northern Ireland in 1971 may have been the last occasion on which the classic IRD psy-war operation was created. Evidence of previous examples is hard to find, but skimming through Charles Foley’s Legacy of Strife: Cyprus from rebellion to civil war (Penguin, […]
[…] twenty years ago Ken Livingstone took a sustained interest until the researcher who was generating the questions he was asking in the House of Commons joined the BBC. Now we have Norman Baker, the Liberal-Democrat MP, who has kind of inherited the ‘awkward squad’ mantle from Tam Dalyell. He has had a short Commons […]
A small section of this appeared in Lobster 12. Although this is incomplete and under researched, we thought it worth putting out now. The origins of IRD 1947 saw the creation of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD). It is generally accepted that IRD was the brain-child of the then Labour M.P. Christopher Mayhew, […]
[…] and will only act when national courts are unable or unwilling to investigate or prosecute. Ireland Panorama – A Licence to Murder Two-part documentary broadcast by the BBC June 19 and 23 2002 ‘reveals the extent to which some members of the British Intelligence services colluded with – and even tried to direct – […]
Ken Livingstone MP, has been putting dozens and dozens of questions to our state about the cases and allegations of Fred Holroyd and Colin Wallace, those bits of the secret state you are allowed to ask questions about, Northern Ireland, psy ops and so on. Putting down such questions is a fairly dispiriting business. Some […]
[…] BBC2 in October/ November devoted to Special Branch accounts of their work against British ‘subversives’ in the 1970s and 80s. There was a rich irony about the BBC broadcasting the first two episodes while David Shayler was on trial. A group of Special Branch officers – assisted by the BBC – broke the Official […]
Are raw prawns pink? Fun and games Down Under where a great brouhaha developed over allegations that Australia’s most famous – and left-wing historian, the late Manning Clark, was a Soviet agent. It started when the Australian poet Sid Murray reported that 26 years before he had seen Clark at a dinner wearing the Order […]
[…] In Britain antipathy to Israel is not confined to radical Muslims and the ‘far left’. Rubinstein says: ‘One of the most egregious and dangerous examples is the BBC’, and he identifies two its reporters, Orla Guerin – ‘little better than an anti-Israeli propagandist’ – and Barbara Plett for particular criticism. John Pilger and former […]
[…] 1991 he had secured on tape, a confession by Ken Barrett that he killed Finucane. (7) That Barrett killed Finucane has been common knowledge only since a BBC Panorama programme in 2001. In contrast to Adair however, Jonty Brown claims that his efforts to secure a conviction against Barrett were blocked and that he […]
