[…] usual the UK was just part of the US PR operation, the ‘we are not alone’ factor. As has been frequently pointed out in these pages, New Labour was coopted by the US long before it took office. As for the events leading up to war, there isn’t much left to say. In the […]
[…] like neo-nazi occasionally back-fires. In January the Sunday Express ran a piece headlined ‘Traitors: the ultra-right Tories who plotted against Major’ – a piece recycled in the Labour Party-supporting Tribune (18 February, 1994 under the predictable heading of ‘Major’s Militants’). It didn’t amount to much: a branch of the Tory Party had passed a […]
[…] they began launching raids on Yugoslavia. ASIO was almost a parody of the right-wing security/intelligence outfit in bed with the right. The author’s account also shows a Labour Party dimly aware of all this, making the occasional half-hearted stab at reining in ASIO, which the agency and its conservative allies easily outflanked or overturned. […]
[…] MPs David Owen, Stan Orme, Tony Benn, Paul Rose and Merlyn Rees; the one purporting to be Dennis Healey’s opinion of the Common Market; or the purported Labour Party election pamphlet. All of these were produced to a standard far beyond the technical or professional abilities of the Army Information Services in Northern Ireland. […]
[…] inexplicable British history became intelligible. Wallace’s revelations illuminated the hysteria on the British right in the 1970s about the threat from the left and the belief of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson that there was a disinformation campaign against him and his government. He was right: the hysteria and the campaign were largely the […]
[…] eyebrows and the ears seem similar. Though Wright became a fairly run-of-the-mill, right-wing, communist-obsessed conspiracy theorist, when younger he taught in the Workers Educational Association and voted Labour in 1945. (Spycatcher pp.30 and 31) He came from the middle class, and he suffered – he thought – at the hands of incompetent prats from […]
Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones London: Yale University Press, 2002, £22.50 Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World Percy Craddock London: John Murray, 2002, £25 Jeffreys-Jones is Professor of American History at Edinburgh University and writes on the American intelligence services. His book’s subtitle … Read more
[…] liaisons with extreme right-wing organisations outside of Asia, including American groups that formed part of the KMT’s ‘China lobby’, (144) the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN),(145) National Labour Union, or NTS, (146) and an umbrella group for Latin American ultras called the Confederacion Interamericana de Defensa del Continente (CIADC).(147) The growing cooperation which ensued […]
[…] blowing up a draft office or a bank seemed sexy and exciting at the time – the group did not connect with the working class or organised labour, let alone with straight America, grazing in the malls. The author tries at the end to show that, despite their complete failure, the WU were important […]
[…] on standby by the Allies at the end of WW2 in case a war with the Soviet Union broke out; and were thus a disposal problem. A labour shortage in the UK in the immediate post-war years enabled MI6 to bring them into the UK as ‘workers’. I enjoyed this book but I knew […]
