[…] the agreement. There is considerable opposition to the MAI, especially from environmental and development organisations, amid fears that its provisions could damage environmental quality, social welfare and labour standards, and its progress has been slowed. Currently (May 1998) the MAI has not been signed, and seems likely to be further delayed, largely due to […]
Jim Phillips Pluto Press, London, 1995, £12.99 To study the relationship between the Labour government and the trade unions in the ’45-’51 government, Phillips provides the first detailed examination of which I am aware of the various dock strikes during the period. Phillips concludes that the various charges of ‘communist conspiracy’ made by members […]
Contributors to this issue Don Bateman has a PhD in history, and has written widely on labour and trade union issues. Alex Cox is a film-maker and can be seen on BBC2 introducing the series Moviedrome. Phil Edwards a former chair of the Socialist Society, lives in Manchester and works as a systems analyst. […]
Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson Verso, London, 1998, £17.00, hb I haven’t had this book very long, have only had time to read it (quickly) once, so this is by way of an interim report. But a second reading won’t change my mind that this is a very good book. I enjoyed this more than […]
[…] 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 […]
Tony Geraghty Harper Collins, London 1998, £19.99 Before dawn one Thursday in December 1998 a team of six Ministry of Defence police raided the home of the writer and journalist, Tony Geraghty. After seven hours, they left taking his computer, modem, disks and work in progress, having charged him under Section V of the Official […]
[…] section (pp. 336-7) on his attendance at the 1995 Bilderberg conference. Of this he writes: ‘I am sent by the Blair office as none of the front-line Labour spokesmen can go’. Oddly – or not – Bilderberg is not in the index. Generalissimo Somehow it was terribly cheering to learn from a posting by […]
[…] 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? […]
A Wapping mystery I noticed with some interest that Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, was described in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that […]
[…] is of a disturbed child, completely out of control. His rebellion at preparatory school and later at Harrow public school. In 1950 he painted the slogan VOTE LABOUR on a number of college walls (this did not indicate any youthful leftism, just that he thought this would cause more offense than anything else he […]
