One neglected aspect of the plotting against Harold Wilson and the Labour Governments of the 1970s was the fact that it took place while the social democrat governments of Australia, New Zealand and West Germany — and possibly Canada — were also being subjected to destabilisation campaigns, with the some of the same characters playing … Read more
Giles Scott-Smith London: Routledge/PSA 2002, £55 This is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA-funded operation that ran for two decades after World War II of which Encounter magazine was the best-known British component. Giles Scott-Smith has added to the historical record well illuminated by Christopher […]
[…] weighty voices in his corner and does show that the trial and the creation of the ‘court’ were mounted on little more than the kind of vague, liberal guff (‘the international community’) which is running round in Tony Blair’s brain posing as thought. Laughland thinks this is a dangerous step. Even without the arguments […]
Kees van der Pijl Routledge, 1998, £15.95 From the late 1970s a group of Dutch academic Marxists – including Henk Overbeek, Meindert Fennema, Frans Stokman, Robert J. Mokken and Kees van der Pijl – began studying networks of capitalist power, setting up their own international scholarly network in the process (involving, among others, Beth … Read more
[…] about whom little has appeared in the British press – is at Stevenson is the figure on the left of the picture that tops William Clark’s posting. Murray’s evidence can be viewed at Murray posts a lively blog at For the apology and Godson’s 2007 ‘Newsnight’ performance, see Sunny Hundal’s ‘ Liberal Conspiracy’ story at
[…] class. In the week that the IRA announced its decommissioning amidst a Nuremberg-style rally in Dublin, I got into an interesting argument with one of my more liberal colleagues at Queens University. The woman in question was horrified that I saw decommissioning as a sham because IRA criminality meant they could buy new guns […]
[…] of it back from them. He sees the current situation as the outcome of struggle between factions of the American ruling class, between what he calls neo- liberal multilateralism and neo-conservative unilateralism. The multilateralists were exemplified by the Trilateral Commission who, in the 1970s, during Jimmy Carter’s term, had a go at creating a […]
[…] decided to shut him up by ruining his reputation. Evidence? Hume Boggis-Rolfe was at school (Westminster) and university (Trinity) with Philby, and held ‘extreme’ left opinions (mildly liberal, in common parlance, at least for the Lord Chancellor’s Department). Lever, a main player in the scheme, was a friend of Aarvold, a member of the […]
[…] control of economic policy in New Zealand and imposed on it a bizarre amalgam of the IMF restructuring programme traditionally imposed on the Third World, traditional neo- liberal notions of free markets, and Mrs Thatcher’s lasting memorial, selling off public assets are bargain prices. The oddity of what they did can’t be exaggerated. IMF […]
Nigel West London: Greenhill Books, 2006, £25, h/b The books of ‘West’ that I have read all have the same problem: he tells you that some of the material comes from past or present intelligence officers and hints that in those sections you are getting ‘the real inside story’. Somewhere along the way, for … Read more
