[…] 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 […]
NB This issue of Lobster went to the printer in late May. At that stage no Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had been found by the ‘coalition’ forces. Before the furore over the British government’s ‘dodgy dossier’ in February, in truth I hadn’t been really paying much too attention to the then impending assault on […]
[…] and Bermuda Triangles. In particular the concluding chapters in Part Seven, which I had the good sense to read first, are quite brilliant. Dorril rightly indicts New Labour for its craven cowardice and refusal, not only not to rein MI5/6 in, but actively to encourage them! In particular Robin Cook has ratted not only […]
[…] 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. […]
[…] 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, […]
Ideas and Think Tanks in Contemporary Britain: Volume 1 edited by Michael David Kandiah and Anthony Seldon Frank Cass, London/Portland, Oregon, 1996 £29.50 As the title suggests this really contains two separate though not unrelated areas. The first is a series of shortish essays about so-called think tanks in the UK which follow on from […]
Many thanks to Terry Hanstock for contributions. Comments and contributions to Shayler case and human rights David Shayler went on trial at the Old Bailey in October/ November 2002 for disclosing information and documents relating to security and intelligence, under s1(1) and 4(1) of the Official Secrets Act 1989. During the trial he was […]
[…] this period. Yet despite the massive detail there are obvious things missing from Lucas’s account. Most striking is the tiny space devoted to the role of US labour unions and transnational labour bodies created and run by the US. This is surprising, for their activities in the immediate post WW2 period strongly support his […]
[…] Hook mentions Rousset’s suggestion in Out of Step, op. cit. p. 432. The God that Failed (Hamish Hamilton/London, 1950) was a collection of six essays edited by Labour MP Richard Crossman, three by ‘the initiates’ (Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and Richard Wright) and three by ‘worshippers from afar’ (Andre Gide, Louis Fischer, and Stephen […]
[…] us that “today, in Wallace’s mind, ‘Clockwork Orange’ has become a more sinister Mark Two which … went beyond destabilising the IRA; it was aimed at mainland Labour politicians – which just happens to dovetail with similar allegations, raised in Parliament from an entirely independent source, namely Peter Wright.” This really is extraordinary. In […]
