Tons of documents and tape recordings recovered from an old manor house in Lancashire reveal the true depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century. Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines […]
[…] MP or the prospective candidates were insufficiently robust on this issue. The Goldsmith effect By 1995 it seemed clear to many observers of UK politics that Tony Blair and the Labour Party, now packaged as the ‘New Labour project’, were likely to do very well at the forthcoming general election. For a range of […]
Global Intelligence: the World’s Secret Services Today Paul Todd and Jonathan Bloch, London and New York, Zed Books, 2003 h/back £32.95/ $55.00 p/back £9.99/ $17.50 ‘We lacked specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD program’ Vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Stuart Cohen, December 2003 With the spectacular failure of […]
[…] and his closeness to key people in New Labour to keep his readers in the dark over matters of peace and war and much else under the Blair premiership. Preston practises deception by omission as well as by lying. Network of influence It will take a longer piece than this to trace the network […]
[…] Box 3328, London WC1N 3XX 70pp., £4 Online at http://www.red-star-research.org.uk/rap/rapframe.html There is a very good Website, www.red-star-research.org.uk, which is the best single source of information on the Blair government, its financial supporters and networks. This pamphlet is a kind of spin-off from that site – the previous Revolutions Per Minute pamphlets can be read […]
[…] words are substitutes for deeds and orders are taken for their effects. Nor is this a new phenomenon. The political genius of the group that surrounded Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the 1990s was to see this system for what it was and then to develop rules for the acquisition of power that […]
Crime fighting? There must many candidates for the title ‘The most damaging thing I have read about this government’. My current candidate is a piece by Simon Jenkins, ‘A Keep Police off the Streets Strategy Unit’ (The Times 2 February 2002). After reminding the reader that in the UK the police are a local service, […]
Paul Lashmar and James Oliver Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been […]
[…] let alone an instinctive authoritarian like Jack Straw, would bring in a Freedom of Information Bill that meant anything; or that the enthusiastic fans of America round Blair would do anything but genuflect across the Atlantic. It is, alas, all going precisely as Lobster 33 said it would. Young Mr Blair really is the […]
[…] the Leader’s immediate circle. Geoff Mulgan was then (1992) a research assistant to Gordon Brown and LFIG was close to the John Smith/Gordon Brown Scots network, though Blair was very much in the frame even at that time as a rising moderniser allied to the same power base. Mulgan and Martin Jacques, the almost […]
