The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers by Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] Furnival Jones, MI5’s Director, no previous Prime Minister had ever shown ‘such enthusiasm for regular up-to-the-minute reports during an industrial dispute’. Wilson was particularly pleased that the Communist Party headquarters was ‘comprehensively bugged’. And he actively encouraged rightwing union leaders to collaborate with MI5. One of the leading figures in the GMWU, Sir Harry […]

Newton on Keynes

Lobster Issue

[…] over the requirements of material sustenance and the drudgery of mindless wage work’.10 It was a vision which bore some striking similarities to Marx’s vision of a Communist society, where ‘society regulates the general production’ and scarcity would cease to exist, ending all need for the division of labour: ‘nobody has one exclusive sphere […]

The Spy Who Was Left Out in the Cold by Tim Tate

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] disappointed. Up to the mid-1950s the US intelligence services had gathered very little reliable information on the activities of their Soviet bloc intelligence opponents. Then an anti- communist intelligence officer, Michal Goleniewski, working with Polish intelligence, began leaking them information. Code-named ‘Sniper’ by the CIA, he was by far the most important source the […]

More on Hess

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] the allegations that he knew Hess. What now appears to be the case is that Harry Pollitt, the defendant in the action (and secretary to the British Communist Party) had picked the wrong family member. When accusing the Duke of knowing Rudolf Hess before the war, he should have chosen perhaps the Duchess of […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay Harold Smith RIP Harold Smith has died. In Lobster 24 I summarised Smith’s account of witnessing the outgoing British state rigging the pre-independence elections in Nigeria which, he argued, lead to the Biafran war and millions of dead. Smith’s story can be found by Googling ‘Harold Smith + […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] case that JFK wanted to withdraw all U.S. military personnel as soon as was feasible, but that JFK had no intention of abandoning South Vietnam to a Communist takeover on his watch. And, yes, JFK was prepared to continue economic and military aid for many years. This will not be the last word on […]

Team mercenary GB: Part 1 – the early years

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] ‘gentlemen’ professional soldiers, who came to be exemplified by Mike Hoare. Demobbed at the end of WWII with the rank of Major, and an admittedly virulent anti- Communist, he led the mercenary force which fought in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from July ‘64 to December ‘65. In those intense 18 months he […]

Historical Notes on Tom Nairn and the British State

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] Marx’s second blind spot was failure to appreciate the power and significance of nationalism. His and Engels’ call for workers of the world to unite in The Communist Manifesto was based on the conviction that, even by the late 1840s, the international expansion of capitalism including the working class without which it could not […]

From an Office Building with a High-powered Rifle by Don Adams

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] Freedom. He was also cosy with the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and, to round off his catholic enthusiasms, was convinced there was a big Jewish/ Communist conspiracy. On 9 November 1963 Willie Somersett (a name straight out of James Ellroy), a professional police informant and childhood friend of Milteer, met with him […]

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