[PDF file]: […] that far from exaggerating, if anything McBride understated Murdoch’s influence, the extent to which modern Britain has been shaped in his image, and the way politicians, both Labour and Conservative, were willing to be of service. Most of the reviews of Hack Attack have focussed on the dramatic story of how Davies and the […]
[PDF file]: The State of Secrecy Spies and the Media in Britain Richard Norton-Taylor London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2020, £20 h/b Scott Anthony Logic would tell you that the relationship between journalists and secret agents should be antagonistic. Journalists are after all charged with exposing power, while intelligence work is supposedly done in the […]
[PDF file]: […] on this occasion I could see how it might have been possible for some ignorant KGB officer to have confused DS Harley’s name with that of the Labour politician, although I thought it unlikely. In any event, the context was completely wrong, although I do admit that in Moscow I often sounded off about […]
[PDF file]: […] days earlier he had seen Edward Rice, a brother-in-law of Lady Cynthia Mosley, deep in conversation in the House of Commons tea room with James Maxton, Independent Labour Party (ILP) MP for Glasgow, Bridgeton and assumes they are up to something. He confirmed this (24 June 1940) with the comment: ‘Edward Rice came to […]
[PDF file]: […] on the Hollis matter in March 1981 was a lie. In those days lying to the Commons might have been a resigning issue. But since the leading Labour politicians of the time were afraid to go near any security issues, the Thatcher-Armstrong strategy wasn’t necessary. There is a wonderful German word, verschlimmbesserung, which means […]
[…] country in the world.7 In reality, depending on how this is measured, we are about 17th. I caught the tail end of an interview with a female Labour MP on Times Radio in early September. Alas I didn’t catch her name but she repeated this canard. It does seem to be people on the […]
[PDF file]: […] (London: Random House, 2007). The historian Donald Cameron Watt described Mason-MacFarlane as a ‘courageous eccentric’. See his How War Came, (London: Heinemann, 1989) p. 183. Mason-MacFarlane was Labour MP for Paddington North between 1945 and 1946. 15 and into the North African Desert as part of Churchill’s Eighth Army. ‘Mason-Mac’ managed to keep Maisky […]
[PDF file]: […] who is keen on the dialling down? Who has said that this or that cannot be achieved? Perhaps a recent article in openDemocracy, ‘Lovebombed by lobbyists: How Labour became the party of Big Business’, will provide a few clues.1 What dialling-down Centrism implies is precisely the reason people search for alternatives. Centrism is an […]
[PDF file]: […] the necessary pantomimes to rubberstamp decisions taken in Whitehall. On the other hand, this was 1984: the Thatcher regime was still being challenged by the left; the Labour Party had not then embraced the ‘Washington consensus’; the American banks had not completed their take-over of British economic thinking; the Cold War had been revived […]
[PDF file]: […] cyber technology. The big question remains: how much, if any, of this technology has a back door? Has the insatiable thirst for intel – on friend and foe alike – been catered for? Colin Challen is a former Labour MP and blogs at www.colinchallen.org. ‘Peer Group Pressure’, in Lobster 78 at or . 9 8
