[…] against trade unions and having his substantial profits in offshore accounts, Branson has continued to find favour at the highest level, culminating in his knighthood from the Blair government, something that he was not seriously considered for even under the Tories. Bower also has a good account of the bungled attempt by the magnificently […]
Travesty: The trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the corruption of international justice John Laughland London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press; 2007, £14.99 (UK) $24.95 (US), p/b Laughland is an interesting figure, whose writing appears in media across the ideological spectrum, from the conservative right to The Guardian and here, Pluto Press. It is thus […]
[…] the absence of evidence of the Iraqi regime’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, to the distress of the professional diplomats and most of their intelligence services, the Bush- Blair ‘allies’ used dodgy information from defectors, selectively edited what other information they had, or simply made it up as part of the ‘perception management’ of their […]
[…] measures taken to combat terrorism comply with all their obligations under international law.’ But then immediately the war on terror ideologues scream ‘special circumstances’; for example Tony Blair on 5 August 2005: ‘Let no-one be in any doubt. The rules of the game are changing.’ In practice this means an erosion of our civil […]
[…] Ahmed was not under surveillance, a departure from their normal policy of neither confirm nor deny with regard to such claims. (24) In a written answer Tony Blair stated that government policy remains that there be no tapping of telephones of members of the Houses of Commons and Lords, and with this exception it […]
[…] and father-in-law of Roger Liddell, the SDP founder member and lifelong pal of Peter Mandelson, who became adviser on Europe and defence at No 10 when Tony Blair became Prime Minister. Liddell, like his wife’s father, gravitated to a Brussels job when Mandelson became an EU commissioner. Lord Thomson, who shared his son-in-law’s strong […]
[…] the Zinoviev letter. When the Zinoviev report appeared the major media forgot – or chose to ignore – that it wasn’t the first time since Prime Minister Blair took office that the Zinoviev story had appeared. In August 1997, just after Labour won the General Election, MI6 leaked material about Zinoviev to a couple […]
[…] in central Asia. We are dependent on information given to us by the United States’ CIA and NSA.’ The British overseas lobby in Whitehall – like Tony Blair – still dreams of being a ‘world player’. But it doesn’t have the tax resources to match the UK’s (private) overseas investments. Which is essentially why […]
[…] 70 page, perfect (glue) bound pamphlet, part commentary on and part supplement to George Monbiot’s book The Captive State. It covers all the main agenda items: the Blair administration’s obsession with big business; PFI spreading throughout the public sector; the government’s Task Forces dominated by business personnel and the role of groups such as […]
[…] was shown by the Daily Telegraph’s report on 7 April: headlined ‘Africa becomes vital front in war on terror’, the story by the Telegraph’s diplomatic correspondent David Blair told us that ‘Meanwhile, a belt of countries in the Horn of Africa and on the southern fringe of the Sahara could, say US officials, become […]
