[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] this was the first conference raising issues of national security and freedom of expression and asked why no-one from the authorities was present. Many members of the Labour government had been very critical of, and voted against the OSA 1989 because it allowed the prosecution of whistleblowers, but a Labour Attorney General consented to […]
[…] he brought his brand of clever, witty and vigorous exposure to bear on the Blair government in 1998. For detailing the corruption at the heart of New Labour in his Lobbygate reports in The Observer (see Lobsters 36 and 38), Palast was branded a liar on the front page of the then Blair-backing Daily […]
[…] about his own writing, accepting editing suggestions on their merits. During a lunch break he said to me: ‘What’s a bright guy like you doing in the Labour Party?’ I replied: ‘What’s a bright guy like you doing in the SWP?’ We laughed. The second time we worked together was during our most minor […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Sometimes chronology implies causality and sometimes not. Consider the following sequence of events: in January 1994 Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary and career-long member of the Labour Friends of Israel, took a four day freebie trip to Israel, with his wife, at the expense of the Israeli government. Two months later Tony Blair […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
