[PDF file]: The Black Door Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac London: William Collins, £30 T his new book by two respected academics has a lot to tell us about how Britain is run. We are told, for example, that at a CBI dinner in December 1971, the Labour Party leader, […]
[PDF file]: British Counterinsurgency John Newsinger London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2015, p/b, £18.99 This is a new edition of British Counterinsurgency, first published in 2002. Here’s what I wrote about the first edition in Lobster 44. ‘To my knowledge this is the first account of Britain’s post-1945 colonial wars written from a radical left standpoint. By which I don’t […]
[…] maybe not even that – would have prevented the assault. Apparently unable just to say publicly that ‘We have to to support the Americans’, it was Tony Blair who needed to persuade himself that the cause was justified by the ‘intelligence’ on WMDs. The 18th also saw striking quotations in an article in the […]
[PDF file]: Robin Ramsay Thanks to Garrick Alder and Nick Must for editorial and proof-reading help. Going round in circles In the section below subheaded ‘What goes around’, I referred to David Teacher’s massive study of Le Cercle. Teacher informs me that his fifth, final and slightly revised version is now on-line.1 Also known as the Pinay […]
[PDF file]: […] Gordon Brown (2004) which I skimmed through recently. If you wonder why Labour Party members chose Corbyn, this account of Brown’s careerism, strange personality and feuds with Blair shows the kind of thing they were reacting against. 2 Centrally, NuLab and the New Democrats abandoned the urban working class because they presented problems which […]
[PDF file]: […] terrorist atrocity. These are serious questions raised by serious people, and the world is watching.’ But Mr Salmond, following the precedents of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, was adamant in his refusal: ‘They’re looking for an inquiry for the responsibility, ultimately, for Lockerbie. That touches on matters of […]
[PDF file]: […] involved in facilitating the Al Yamamah trade deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia which led to allegations of massive corruption. The investigation was closed down by the Blair government when the Saudis threatened to end their intelligence relationship with Britain if it was pursued.4 He gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Conservative […]
[PDF file]: Climate hysterics: useful idiots or just idiots Dr T P Wilkinson In 1973 a dystopian film, Soylent Green, was released, starring the sincerely gun-toting Charlton Heston.1 The scene was New York City, inhabited by 40 million (only twice as many as Beijing, today), with equatorial temperatures and humidity due to the ‘greenhouse effect’. The story […]
[PDF file]: […] by his son Alvaro in Granta in 1991. 12 See however Dominic Wring, The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 13 After the election, Blair sent Penn a signed photograph declaring: ‘Mark, you were brilliant. Thank you.’ In ‘The Price of Spin’, David Charter and Sam Coates, The Times, 25 April […]
[…] tagging along with the Americans has been disastrous in the last 20 years or so. The real authors of the Manchester Arena and 7/7 bombings are Tony Blair and the rest of the Cabinet who allowed Blair to play the role of George W. Bush’s loyal flunky and so generated this ‘blowback’. But see […]
