New Labour Notes

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

Ah, the wonderful private sector In ‘Blair anti-corruption plan weakened by British firms’ in The Independent 2 September 2002, Geoffrey Lean reported: ‘Britain has the world’s most corrupt companies, and some of the weakest legislation among industrialised countries for dealing with them….Half of the 70 companies identified by the World Bank as so corrupt that … Read more

Spychips: How major corporations and government plan to track your every move with RFID

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre Nashville (US):Nelson, 2005, Distributed in the UK by New Holland Publishers, London, at £14.99, h/b   RFIDs are acoming. RFIDs are radio frequency identification or identifiers, little chips which can be fixed to, implanted in, built into almost anything from paper money to human beings; and which can then be … Read more

One Boggis-Rolfe or two?: Philby: The Hidden Years

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

One Boggis-Rolfe or two? Philby: The Hidden Years Morris Riley Janus Publishing, London, 1999, £9.95 pb There are almost as many Philbys as there are readers. His current reputation is as thin as the biographies are fat. Is there room on the shelf for yet another Philby book? Perhaps for a slim one. Amidst legal … Read more

Sources: Roundtable. U.N. Lockerbie, etc

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

Roundtable I get regular e-mail bulletins from an organisation called the roundtable – not the Round Table but somebody? some people? – trying to document the US ruling elite by the study of its organisations. Really they should be called Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – because it is the CFR they mostly write about; … Read more

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

The view from the bridge Bilderberg and the EU The Diaries of former Liberal-Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, (volume one 1988-1997, London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2000) is a pretty uninteresting read with a couple of striking sections. Pages 42-46 contain his account of attending a Bilderberg meeting – by far the longest and most detailed account … Read more

The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

Hugh Wilford London: Frank Cass, 2003; £22.99, h/b   This book is a striking example of how far we have come. A senior British academic writing a book with this title was inconceivable 20, even 10 years ago. But there is now a group of British academics, historians mostly, who are working on the history … Read more

Forty Years of Legal Thuggery

Lobster Issue 9 (1985) £££

Part One A to B See also: Part 2: British Spooks “Who’s Who” (Lobster 10) Intelligence Personnel Named in ‘Inside Intelligence’ (Lobster 15) Philby naming names (Lobster 16) First supplement to A Who’s Who of the British Secret State (Lobster 19) Spooks (Lobster 22) Georg Simmel said ‘The purpose of secrecy is above all protection. … Read more

Golitsyn

Lobster Issue 5 (1984) £££

One of the recurring sub-themes of the literature on intelligence systems in the West in the past decade has been the status of the claims made by KGB defector Golitsyn. Until recently all the book-reading public knew about Golitsyn was (a) that he has exposed some (relatively minor) Soviet operations; (b) made a series of … Read more

Maria Novotny: From Prague With Love

Lobster Issue 2 (1983) £££

In February this year, unnoticed by the press, a funeral took place in a quiet Sussex village. In attendance were some famous names from London society of the fifties and sixties, and two men in regulation dark suits from an undisclosed department of the Security Services. They had been contacts for the deceased, Maria Novotny, … Read more

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