[…] Peter Watson, David Lee, John Burnes and Harry Irwin for information, material and advice. Correction In footnote 1 on page 28 of Lobster 35 I referred to Labour MP Tony Lloyd as a ‘moderniser’. My apologies to Mr Lloyd: I confused him with Tony Wright. Donations Thanks to Carol Smith for a donation of […]
[…] 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 […]
Gregory Palast is the journalist who broke the ‘cash for access’ story in The Observer. Here is the text of a letter he wrote on August 18 1999 to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Neill Committee, by way of a preface and request to give oral evidence to that committee. My recommendations […]
[…] 1 Issue 24 of the Covert Action Information Bulletin (Summer 1985) is chiefly devoted to recent activities of U.S. government agents and agents provocateurs inside radical and labour organisations: the ‘sanctuary movement’, the Native American movement and one industrial dispute, are analysed as case studies. They are preceded by a long essay, “The New […]
[…] Whistleblowers: Shirley Porter, homes for votes and twenty years of scandal in Britain’s rottenest borough Paul Dimoldenberg London: Politicos, 2006, £12.99, p/b The author was a Labour councillor in Westminster during Porter’s ‘reign of terror’ and was instrumental in eventually bringing her down. With an insider’s view he has written an immensely detailed […]
[…] become regarded as both a spokesman for youth and a great British entrepreneur Branson was duly courted by various UK politicians. The Tories liked him; later New Labour liked him, too. His astutely managed PR battles with British Airways made some think that Branson could (and would) provide cut price air travel. This never […]
[…] to the gigantic, going on in every industrialised society. Political parties always contain conspiracies at every level. As I was writing this it was announced that the Labour Party is going to examine the influence of an entryist Trotskyist group called Socialist Action, previously Socialist Organiser (known to some Trot watchers as the ‘Soggy […]
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 have no way of knowing how many of these existed before Blunkett became Home Secretary; nor, indeed, how many of these preceded the arrival of the Labour government in 1997. But if he didn’t create them, Blunkett hasn’t scrapped them and it is hard to disagree with Jenkins’ comment: ‘This is bureaucracy gone […]
