[…] on to occupy important positions in the Civil Service and in academic life, nevertheless made no attempt to use their positions of influence seriously to undermine parliamentary liberal democracy.” Glees op cit p 297Knightley made himself a small fortune from the Philby articles but earned no academic kudos. As Allen Douglas noted (Kim Philby: […]
Conference Report by Jane Affleck On November 10 2000 the Freedom Forum’s European Centre in London, in association with Article 19, Index on Censorship and Liberty, hosted a debate on National Security. (1) Three panels spoke on The Nature of National Security, British State Security in Northern Ireland, and The Internet – Circumventing Censorship? The […]
I’m still interested in the origins of the invasion of Iraq, the why and the when. At one level this is banal. We know, originally from CBS reporter David Martin, that within hours of the 9/11 attacks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeldt was ‘telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there … Read more
It is a difficult time for Britain’s security and intelligence agencies. Not only have the old certainties collapsed with the Berlin Wall, Britain’s economy is in increasingly dire shape, and current levels of government funding for the agencies can no longer be taken for granted. (1) As a result, both the major agencies, MI5 and … Read more
[…] military materiel that any unwilling or intransigent Israeli government could sit tight knowing it was relatively secure until the term of office of any well meaning or liberal US President expires. It would retain the option during such a difficult period of agitating – via the Israel lobby – within US domestic politics, to […]
[…] Mosleyism and British politics. In the light of ‘anti-alienism’, Mosley was not just a flash-in-the pan, an aberration that serves to affirm the essential stability of the liberal state and its political system. The state was, itself, already deeply incriminated in anti-Jewish discrimination and political parties had already experimented with a national chauvinism defined […]
[…] the briefest acquaintance with the FOI schemes of other countries would show that they are always used by the media; and in even a minimalist version of liberal democracy the media plays a role as the primary informer of the citizen. The ongoing Di show The report of Operation Paget, the Metropolitan Police’s investigation […]
The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein, (Penguin 2007) X Films: true confessions of a radical filmmaker Alex Cox, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008 Managing Britannia: Culture and Management in Modern Britain Robert Protherough and John Pick, imprint-academic.com, ISBN 978-097645539 Guns for Hire Tony Geraghty, Piatkus, 2008 A Peoples History of American Empire: a […]
Clippings The Lie Detector Story In the wake of the Prime case, US intelligence has made polygraph (lie detector) introduction into GCHQ at Cheltenham a condition of future GCHQ-NSA cooperation. “At a meeting in July with Civil Service union leaders, Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, made it clear that Senior Whitehall officials were reluctant … Read more
[…] or preferably confine to history, socialist or social democratic values of solidarity and collective action. They were intent upon the permanent establishment of a new market-driven, neo- liberal economic order based upon Thatcherite beliefs in individualism and the unquestioned merits of private and corporate capital enterprise. An important section of Milne’s work tackles the […]
