[…] have been a strictly humanitarian gesture was given a political dimension by the fact that John Major’s rapidly-deflating Conservative government had stalled repeatedly on banning landmines, whereas Labour was promising a foreign policy with ‘an ethical dimension’. Declassified US diplomatic cables record that ‘Government officials immediately scrambled to repair the public relations damage, and […]
[…] paragraph refutation, the entire briefing is baloney; a poorly argued rationale at best; forelock-tugging at worst. Indeed, the FCO briefing paper is so poor, just as today’s Labour Cabinet members make those of the Wilson-Callaghan generation seem like giants, I wonder if the quality of people going into the Foreign Office hasn’t also declined. […]
[…] are by the editor Parish Notices This is the final hard copy of Lobster.… but not the final issue of Lobster. I am merely giving up the labour of producing and distributing 1000 copies of a 50 page magazine. The next issue will appear – in precisely which form I haven’t decided: a blog? […]
[…] person, malicious letters and racial insult arising from letters Robert Henderson had written to the Right honourable Member complaining about various instances of publicly-reported racism involving the Labour Party; and that, after the Crown Prosecution Service rejected the complaints of the Right honourable Member and the Right honourable Member failed to take any civil […]
[…] interests of brevity and not to bore your readers I will take up only a few but telling points. ‘The Wallace-Holroyd claim of having discussed smears on Labour politicians with Mr. Neave’. The simple fact is, Holroyd never met nor had any form of contact with Airey Neave. ‘The Independent has examined the original […]
Blair and Gladstone Tony Blair’s Labour Party conference speech this year galvanised the delegates who were especially moved by his suggestions that Britain could play the role of an international troubleshooter, bringing liberal values, civilisation and the benefits of its skills in conflict resolution to troubled parts of the world. There were however some […]
[…] amusing but entirely false. Au contraire, Dorril is a Freudo-anarchist, with Situationist tendencies; and Ramsay is a premature anti-Militant member of the soft old left of the Labour Party. For Ziegler we had produced ‘ the same old stew of half-facts and wild surmises…precious little added in the way of new ingredients…a dull book, […]
[…] from Irish newspapers, and one in particular, the Sunday News. One of our Irish readers describes the Sunday News as ‘almost wholly Catholic..Nationalist … moderately Social Democratic Labour Party rather than moderately Republican.’ We have no way of checking the veracity of many (most) of these stories. We offer them because they are interesting; […]
[…] 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 […]
