[…] In Lobster 43 I reported on the case of the then breaking electoral fraud case in Birmingham, which has now come to fruition with the sacking of Labour councillors who rigged the city’s elections. Although warned repeatedly in advance (by very reputable civic figures) that an election was being corrupted, Birmingham Police were so […]
Unfree press A recent release of previously undisclosed documents reveals that J. Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to carry out the illegal surveillance of newspaper labour activists during the 1940s. Also revealed is the fact that informants included journalists who wanted Communists removing from the leadership of the Newspaper Guild.(1) Only following orders Psychologist […]
[…] of consultation papers and statements covering encryption and electronic commerce in recent years, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) taking the lead role.(9) Both Conservative and Labour governments, in their 1997 and 1998 papers, proposed some form of key escrow system, in which a user’s private encryption key is held by a third […]
[…] of the Peoples of Russia was drafted which could, if stripped of its contingent allegiance to the German war effort, pass as a neo-conservative or even New Labour manifesto sixty years later. (4) It was naive in its time and it slipped through the Nazi system of ideological control in the chaos of those […]
[…] Smith picked up the Fabian version of the white man’s burden concept and went to Nigeria in the early 1950s for the Colonial Office. Working in the Labour Ministry, he drafted some of Nigeria’s labour and factory legislation. His memoir is a fascinating insight into the underbelly of British colonial administration. Smith not only […]
[…] 14th February 1988, front page story in the Sunday Express based on leak from MI5 – complete with surveillance photograph – on alleged contact between the then Labour MP John Diamond and two Yugoslav women. The article contained the women’s passport numbers and the flights they came into Vienna on. The point of this […]
[…] up to the spook problem and turns away again. Of Harold Wilson’s second term he writes: ‘There was, too, a trace of paranoia, not this time about Labour rivals but about something far more sinister. It’s impossible for outsiders – and, indeed, for most insiders – to reach an informed judgement about the alleged […]
[…] institutional palsy, rigor mortis disguised as resolution, and fixed-grin happiness with a resplendent past.’ (p. 31) ‘It was in the late part of this era that the Labour Party graduated into that original “Establishment”; by the fifties it had completely absorbed most of its world view. Such assumptions are extraordinarily tenacious – as “Blairism” […]
[…] economic imperialism in order to achieve trade surpluses. The post-1919 system had generated deflation, had wrecked efforts to sustain international cooperation such as those of the 1929-31 Labour Government in Britain and had prevented the full exploitation of the wealth-creating potential afforded by technological progress. This was why Keynes argued that it was ‘ideas, […]
[…] fount of information on the B-sides of pop singles of the 1960s. Well, pop-pickers, our civil liberties are safe in his hands then. Or not. As New Labour prepares to cut back on the already pretty limited freedom of information legislation in this country, Falconer came out with a classic in the New Labour’s […]
