Conference Report by Jane Affleck On November 10 2000 the Freedom Forum’s European Centre in London, in association with Article 19, Index on Censorship and Liberty, hosted a debate on National Security. (1) Three panels spoke on The Nature of National Security, British State Security in Northern Ireland, and The Internet – Circumventing Censorship? The … Read more
Larry O’Hara See also: Part 1: British Fascism 1974-92 (Lobster 23) Part 2: British Fascism 1974-92 (II) (Lobster 24) Part 3: British fascism 1983-6 (Lobster 25) The 1986 National Front Split (Lobster 29) A left turn for the NF? Having described some of the multiple policy initiatives undertaken by the National Front in part 3 … Read more
Election fraud Further to ‘How to fix an Election’ in Lobster 43, more news on the gentle art of perfuming a skunk. First Pick Your Voters Some strong contenders here. But first out of the hat is the Labour Party for performance during the all-postal voting experiments that were tried across the country in the … Read more
The Oyston Affair appears to have been the longest and most expensive privately-funded political dirty tricks campaign in recent British history. The astonishing 15-year campaign waged against Owen Oyston by Michael Murrin, the owner of a fish and chip shop in the village of Longridge, Lancs, was backed by help and cash payments raised by … Read more
See also: Part 1: British Fascism 1974-92 (Lobster 23) Part 2: British Fascism 1974-92 (II) (Lobster 24) Part 4: British Fascism 1983-6 (II) (Lobster 26) The 1986 National Front Split (Lobster 29) ‘Let a thousand initiatives bloom…’ While the piece in Lobster 24 was a (necessary) digression, treating of individual careers and various lurid allegations, … Read more
The story in The Guardian of 12 November, ‘Diplomat’s “slave” can stay in UK’, was the tip of an iceberg. The story concerned the allegations made that a Sudanese diplomat had kept a ‘slave’ in London. Allegations of slavery in the Sudan have been made – and denied – for years. (A summary of the … Read more
Gore Vidal London: Abacus, 2002, £10.99, p/b Once upon a time collections of essays by Gore Vidal would appear every few years or so in this country in those neat little Panther paperbacks: On Our Own Now (1976), Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1978), Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1982) for example. The … Read more
Iraqi documents Iraq on the Record (<http://democrats.reform.house.gov/IraqOnTheRecord>) is a searchable collection of over 200 specific misleading statements made by Bush administration officials about the threat allegedly posed by Iraq. The collection would be even larger if it also included statements that appear mistaken only in hindsight. However, if a statement was ‘…an accurate reflection of … Read more
On April 22, 1993 both BBC1 and BBC2 showed on their main evening news bulletins a rather lengthy piece concerning America’s latest development in weaponry — the non-lethal weapons concept. David Shukman, BBC Defence Correspondent, interviewed (Retired) U.S. Army Colonel John B. Alexander and Janet Morris, two of the main proponents of the concept. (1) … Read more
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
