[…] in the essential services, and were linked to rumours that elements in the military and intelligence establishment were contemplating some kind of coup to overthrow the minority Labour government which had taken up office in March 1974. This view was expressed at the time by Tony Benn (2) and supported by the later publications […]
[…] possible future prime minister. Scott-Smith has more information on the Net. His ‘Searching for the Successor Generation: Public Diplomacy, the US Embassy’s International Visitor Program and the Labour Party in the 1980s’(1) shows how the US cultivated the leaders of NuLab. ‘This article looks at the influence of US public diplomacy in the UK, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money. This is a detailed account of some of the intellectual processes behind ‘New Labour’, focusing on IPPR and Demos in particular. The author has read the documents, articles and pamphlets produced by the little group of intellectuals who paved the […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] identified as part of the capitalist segment of the conspiracy leading to an ‘authoritarian world government’. (5) Far from contemplating a role in the overthrow of the Labour government, in 1974 the NF had only just been rebuffed by the Monday Club and seen the break-down of ‘the bridge’ between the racists in the […]
In the mainland UK press the bugging of a house used by Seamus Mallon, deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, was presented as (merely) another mysterious and rather inept example of ‘dirty tricks’ in Irish politics. (See eg Guardian 20th February 1984) A brief story appeared and then vanished again. But […]
