[…] off-message On 25 January 2004 The Glasgow Herald reported what were claimed to be the views of senior British intelligence figures in a ‘pre-emptive strike against Tony Blair ahead of the publication of the Hutton report’ (2) The Herald said this of MI6: ‘The key points it wants on the record are: Many had […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] lives. Their world was one of good schools, private medicine, domestic help and the best holidays money could buy.’ And the influential New Labour MPs around Tony Blair and Brown ranged from those like Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and Ruth Kelly whose City knowledge was largely journalistic, to Peter Mandelson, with close friends in […]
[…] this time to John Major, and the Labour Party leadership began the long and tortuous process of full-scale conversion to being another Tory Party. And we got Blair and Brown after John Smith’s heart attack. And we got an end to the party’s members, via annual conference, having any say at all in policy […]
[…] that it is the press who threaten democracy in confusing the public and the private, becomes ironic when one considers that the sole consistency of the current Blair administration lies in the attempt to abolish this distinction. Notes Claghorn v. Edsaco Ltd., Northern District, 98-3039 Regina v The Secretary of State for the Home […]
[…] chapters are more interesting and, as befits a former Conservative MP, he has a serious go at the latest ‘C’, John Scarlett, for his relationship with the Blair government and the fiasco over Iraqi WMDs. He also drops some hints about blemishes on Scarlett’s career which can only have come from SIS personnel. The […]
[…] brought out that ‘special edition’ of Marxism Today, which distanced (well tried to involve, really) his little group from all those gushing interviews he did with Tony Blair. He always seemed very token left to me, but very early with it in terms of the New Labour shtick, with appearances at places like the […]
[…] for him to have a sideways move, working for one of the Met’s suppliers. Interestingly, just like the policeman who fatally smashed the skull of London teacher Blair Peach at a demonstration, Harold Chalenor had previously belonged to the military’s blood-and-guts brigade, earning the sobriquet of ‘Tankie’ Chalenor. Donovan Pedelty also fails to deal […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] the island’s productive resources be abandoned. I think Labour’s leaders have got it completely wrong and however they think of themselves, history will judge that the Brown- Blair faction was merely the ultimate triumph of the ideology of the City over the rest of us; and, let us hope, the last dribble of Thatcherism […]
