[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] reported academic research showing that the UK’s apparently low unemployment rate is achieved by having 2 million people on the long-term sick list. Welfare fraud figures ‘ Labour ministers have persistently exaggerated welfare fraud by a minority of claimants in an attempt to distract attention from difficult questions about improving economic security for the […]
[…] borrowing against the value of houses in a striking innovation in the annals of `Keynesian’ demand management. In 1976 Prime Minister James Callaghan became notorious on the Labour left for his speech to the Labour Party conference in which he stated that it was no longer possible to spend your way out of a […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] about the post-war Tory Party and its links with the secret state – in this case, almost exclusively MI5 – and various disinformation and smear campaigns against Labour Party politicians and union leaders. Some of this will be familiar to anyone who has read Smear!, say, but there is quite a bit of information […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Point: Clarity Press and Fernwood Books, 2006, $16.95 In a year in which Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza were accompanied by more stories of New Labour loans and the arrest (twice) of Tony Blair’s fundraiser and Middle East ‘envoy’ Lord Levy, it would have been good to have seen British publications examining […]
