[…] beyond normal 30 yrs. Remarks by Lord Donaldson, Ch’mn Advisory Council on Public Records in 24 th Annual Report of Public Records Office. (Guardian 1 July 1983.) Thatcher personally stops publication of two books: official histories of war-time MI5 and war-time counter intelligence operations. (Guardian 25 November and 8 December 1983) Anthony Lester QC […]
[…] former managing director of Goldman Sachs, as a special adviser at 10 Downing Street.(1) She has been brought in to advise Brown on welfare reform! If the Thatcher government had appointed someone like her to such a position, Labour MPs would have been outraged. Today, barely a murmur. There were some protests about the […]
[…] began in 1983 there seemed every point in collecting and publishing every available scrap of information on the British security and intelligence services: we had Reagan and Thatcher, a resurgent British imperialism on the coat-tails of America, and a repressive, authoritarian regime at home. Publicising what the British state most wanted kept in the […]
[…] the women’s movement as evidenced at Greenham Common, much more dangerously so. The Iran Contra documents make clear that the first Reagan administration was seriously afraid that Thatcher, and even Kohl, might not be re-elected. This was a prospect not to be contemplated if their successful opponents were not to conform to traditional NATO […]
[…] in Northern Ireland, what amounts to a revisionist history in miniature of WW2 intelligence operations on the British side, and a sardonic post-script on the Falklands: “Mrs Thatcher postured absurdly in the immediate aftermath …an illusion about an independent almost an imperial role comparable to that which regards nuclear weapons as deterrents to every […]
Dave Renton Pluto, London, 1999, £9.99 This book has been touted in some areas as a radical, new contribution to the study of fascism; and it is certainly well-packaged and cheap. To start with the good points which, although few, are important: if you want to know who the current academic theorists on modern … Read more
[…] was quickly moved to one side. Holroyd notes that Stalker’s downfall came after he and Colin Wallace had sent their file of allegations and evidence to Mrs Thatcher in 1984. After which ‘two events took place: the first was the Government’s robust attempt to stop Spycatcher; the second was the attack on the integrity […]
[…] to jail after she leaked confidential documents to The Guardian. Many at the time – the height of the renewed Cold War under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – thought the editor of The Guardian would resign, a course of action over failure in civic duty his newspaper’s leading articles have frequently urged on […]
Christopher Harvie Hamish Hamilton, London, 1994 This is nominally the book of the Channel 4 TV series on NSO. TV is an entertainment medium, almost wholly useless for conveying detail or arguments. (An hour’s documentary viewing covers what you might read in ten minutes – or less.) So the TV series was interesting in small … Read more
[…] America attacked the Round Table’s various front organisations in the late 1940s, thinking they were attacking the ‘international communist conspiracy’. (15) More recently both Nixon and Mrs Thatcher have explicitly set themselves up as the enemies of the foreign policy ‘establishment’ without ever showing the slightest signs of understanding who it is they are […]
