David Craig and Richard Brooks London: Constable, 2006, £9.99, p/b When the Blair faction took office in 1997 as ‘New Labour’ we knew that they were going to be pro-American, pro-NATO, pro-business, anti-union and media conscious. What we did not know then was just how completely they had internalised the Thatcher ethos, how […]
[…] a ‘parliamentary fellow’). There is also a section (pp. 336-7) on his attendance at the 1995 Bilderberg conference. Of this he writes: ‘I am sent by the Blair office as none of the front-line Labour spokesmen can go’. Oddly – or not – Bilderberg is not in the index. Generalissimo Somehow it was terribly […]
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 […]
[…] link with the Americans. Here is the late Hugo Young’s notes on a conversation with the late Robin Cook, when Cook was foreign secretary in the first Blair administration. (2) Young asked Cook why the British government supports the US so slavishly. ‘Because of the Ministry of Defence’s fanatical determination to keep close to […]
Down Under David Lange may have come and gone and the New Zealand Labour Party may have blazed a rightwards trail for Tony Blair et al to follow, but the New Zealand anti-military, anti-spook campaigns continue. The latest journal to document the activities of the spooks and military in that part of the Pacific […]
Votescam (again) Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we – readers of magazines like Lobster – are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the […]
From Thatcher to the Third Way: think-tanks, intellectuals and the Blair project Robert Carl Blank Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-89821-277-7 This illustrates the hazards of Amazon’s ‘search inside the book’ feature: I read an interesting couple of pages of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money. This is […]
The Kent and Sussex Courier is the archetypal regional conservative daily. It reflects an area that returns Conservative candidates for Parliament and Council like Alabamans would return ‘yellow dog’ Democrats. One recent police raid in ‘the war on terror’ was on an Islamic school, Jameah Islamiya, in Crowborough, East Sussex.()It is possible that the authorities’ […]
[…] be mobilised by the media, the way it was in 1924 and 1979, and Labour’s had 80 years to work out how to stop them doing it. Blair, of course, prefers joining them to beating them. From Phil Edwards I expected my review of Russ Kick’s collection You are being lied to in Lobster […]
[…] the British economy to make it fit for EEC entry. In Heath’s day the major co-conspirator in the project was the Cabinet Secretary Sir William Armstrong. With Blair it was his chief media wallah, Alistair Campbell. Thus the world has changed. Casualties So, after two reports by noble Lords and thousands of critical column […]
