John Perkins San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004, $25.95, h/b ( £14.50 from Amazon.co.uk in January 2005) This is an interesting book, though it is not quite as interesting as it sounded in the interviews with the author which are on the Net. The key material is Perkins’ account of working as an economist for an […]
[…] expecting any reader to demur. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Glass records his return to London with an observation that needs to be repeated: ‘The Labour apparatchiks swallowed whole the late Tory view that the public does not exist……. everyone is a customer; all services and professions are businesses.’ The public did […]
[…] within the Conservative Party, the security and intelligence services, the City of London and the Bank of England and large-scale industry. Together with a handful of renegade Labour M.Ps like Richard Stokes, they might have formed a National Government committed to a non-aggression pact with Germany and the pursuit of a managed capitalism at […]
[…] 1 per cent of the GDP. The special circumstances of the oil crisis in 1973 led to a –4 per cent figure in 1974, but the ‘old Labour’ Wilson and Callaghan governments trans-formed this into a 0.5 per cent surplus by 1978. Thereafter the position became far more volatile, and by the end of […]
[…] the book is not terribly interesting. Part of it is Mayhew’s memories of his struggle with the CP front groups – the friendship societies – in the 1950s, and the rest is fragmented memories of his increasing dissatisfaction with the Labour Party and his eventual defection to the Liberal Party and thence into the SDP.
[…] the Democrats willing to take before they conclude that attack may be the only form of defence? Notes I haven’t read the party’s history before 1960 and don’t know. A great deal of this critique of the Democrats – fear of the spooks and the media, for example – applied to the pre-Blair Labour Party.
[…] global corporate culture and its corrosive effects upon the body politic of America. British corporate culture and its increasing ‘synergy’ with the structures of the state under Labour would benefit from similar scrutiny. Indeed such a study would be particularly timely given Tony Blair’s concerted attempt to dissolve the current democratic safeguards which prevent […]
[…] supporters would keep marching straight on. But then all of us down at the bunker were the awkward squad anyway – Committee of 100 fellow-travellers rather than Labour Party stooges as we then saw CND. Spies for Peace gave a lot of us a taste for counter-government surveillance and I spent more weekends than […]
[…] computer-based information handling, only with the computer’s assistance can this kind of intensive information gathering be usefully handled. On Humberside, after a flurry of anxiety within the Labour Party, the Humberside Police Committee awoke briefly from its slumbers, and asked the Chief Constable to produce the Operational Requirements of the system. He refused, instead […]
[…] passed to PIRA and own bank account David O’Connell/Marie Maguire affair Jeremy Thorpe: misuse of party funds Funds from East Germany to finance Wilson’s campaign McGrath/Paisley/McKeague Are Labour deliberately damaging the economy to assist USSR plot against West? Psychoanalysis: Wilson, Benn, O’Connell, Paisley Treasury study shows economy on verge of collapse Jo Richardson, Joan […]
