[…] This point was again made by Holroyd himself, in evidence given to the Barron Inquiry in Dublin in 2003. At its simplest, and to paraphrase what Irish Labour Leader Pat Rabbitte recently said about Jonty Brown’s disclosures, in the Irish Dail in October 2005: when credible allegations as serious as this are made, they […]
[…] the Communist Party and the IRA. And here is the core of my complaint: it wasn’t just a plot against Wilson; it was a plot against the Labour and Liberal parties and the Heath wing of the Tories. And it wasn’t just MI5 doing it, either.(1) It did contain two significant new pieces of […]
[…] through a phone intercept at my end or his? (3) Searchlight smears O’Hara The Gable-Searchlight controversy resurfaced last year in the columns of the London left magazine Labour Briefing in the context of splits in the ranks of London anti-racists.(4) In October 1991 Larry O’Hara joined in the debate and reminded Labour Briefing readers […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] on intelligence and security personnel who become MPs. Some of the material was familiar but less well known were Raymond Fletcher, and Le Cercle. Fletcher was a Labour MP who was witch-hunted by MI5 as a KGB asset when really an MI6 agent. New information on Le Cercle (aka the Pinay Circle: see Lobster […]
One neglected aspect of the plotting against Harold Wilson and the Labour Governments of the 1970s was the fact that it took place while the social democrat governments of Australia, New Zealand and West Germany — and possibly Canada — were also being subjected to destabilisation campaigns, with the some of the same characters […]
[…] over in 1975, and Indonesia became America’s most reliable Asian ally. One of his leading advisers is Mike Donovan, regional representative of the ‘American Institute for Free Labour Development’, a branch of US trades union organisation which “works closely with the US government in seeking information on Bishop’s supporters in the trades unions and […]
[…] ) It’s a nice try, in a way, this pretence by Times columnist Kamm to be a left-winger. (For Kamm ‘left-winger’ means being a member of the Labour Party). It gives him a pitch – ‘left’ support for the Iraq War/’war on terror’ – that the media are supposed to find interesting. You can […]
[…] navy budget, later said that he ‘would have been astonished if those ships, from exercise Spring Train, had not been carrying nuclear weapons.’ (9) According to the Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, there was consternation in the Ministry of Defence when it was appreciated that a very large proportion of the Royal Navy’s entire stock […]
Parish Notices Thanks to Al Baron, Terry Hanstock, Daniel Brandt, Jane Affleck, Robin Whittaker (in particular), Tom Easton and Dr. David Turner for information since the last Lobster. An apology to David Guyatt not publishing his long and interesting reply to the criticism in ‘Feedback’ of his article on alleged US use of chemical weapons […]
