[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] is quite interesting and impressive; but with a strange spin. There is a lot of (to me) new detail on the impact of the event on the Labour Party and trade unions, on money given to the NUM from other unions and on attempts to resolve the conflict. The authors show us the senior […]
[…] Freedom of Information Act, and are not likely to get one from any of the British political parties. Imagine a conversation in the office of the new Labour Prime Minister in a year or three: ‘FOI? Too much trouble, too much aggro with Whitehall. As if we need any more, what with the economy, […]
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 […]
[…] ways Justice Delayed is more shocking than his Eichmann biography because with that book we know what to expect. What Justice Delayed revealed was that the 1945-1951 Labour government did its best to keep Jewish Holocaust survivors out of Britain, but had no problem with allowing in Baltic veterans of the SS. While there […]
