Down Under David Lange may have come and gone and the New Zealand Labour Party may have blazed a rightwards trail for Tony Blair et al to follow, but the New Zealand anti-military, anti-spook campaigns continue. The latest journal to document the activities of the spooks and military in that part of the Pacific […]
[…] I began reading about the relationship between the intelligence and security services and the British political system in the early 1980s, it was widely believed on the Labour left that the intelligence and security services were all-powerful and unaccountable. They are still unaccountable in any real sense: their accountability to Parliament is notional. But […]
[…] prospective candidates were insufficiently robust on this issue. The Goldsmith effect By 1995 it seemed clear to many observers of UK politics that Tony Blair and the Labour Party, now packaged as the ‘New Labour project’, were likely to do very well at the forthcoming general election. For a range of reasons, notably the […]
[…] provides the best opportunity to investigate the origins of what Ambush calls ‘the shoot to kill legend’ and SAS involvement in ‘dirty tricks’ operations. As soon as Labour won the February 1974 election, MI5 began destabilising Harold Wilson and his policies in Northern Ireland. In May 1974, the Power-sharing Executive was brought down by […]
[…] Standards in Public Life about the influence of the Israeli lobby in the UK, is on-line.(5) Most usefully, it includes details of the Conservative as well as Labour Friends of Israel. The authors comment: ‘In the meantime your Committee is aware how the lobby group, Friends of Israel, has embedded itself in the British […]
Policing (a) and the miners 3 page overview in Labour Research (September) Officers being sent straight from training school (Guardian 20 November) Police installing alarms in homes of (some) working miners. (Guardian 27 November) Police officers being charged a ‘fee’ of a bottle of whisky to get on lucrative picket duty. (Daily Telegraph 25 […]
[…] of what we might call the politics of intelligence in the 1990s, from the creation of the Intelligence and Security Committee through to the collapse of the Labour Party: from feisty words and talk of action in opposition to the forelock-tugging we now see. The authors point out that, while Shayler was sitting in […]
[…] His marriage to Lord Curzon’s daughter, Cimmie, consolidated his position within the country’s governing elite. Impatience for preferment led to his defection from the Conservatives to the Labour Party where he was welcomed with open arms. Both he and his wife became Labour MPs and in 1929 he became a junior minister in the […]
[…] and 1 former Conservative Cabinet Minister’ as KGB agents. (Daily Telegraph 24 and 27 September 1984) What, only 7? According to Frederick Forsyth’s ‘sources’ in the British labour movement there are 20. (See Times 31 August 1984). And doesn’t Chapman Pincher talk of 60 plus in his various books? Confirmation – if any were […]
[…] simply is not sourced; and sometimes the source can be inferred from the context. For example, there is this paragraph on p. 76. ‘Clement Attlee, Britain’s new Labour prime minister, and particularly his more socialist colleagues, influenced by their wartime encounters with MI5 officers, suspected the service’s activities were uncontrolled. MI5, they complained, was […]
