[…] in general and the secret state in particular in the 1980s in Britain, but the author is simply wrong to attribute this to the arrival of the Tory Party in 1979. On the British non-Trotskyist Left its origins lie in the 1975-78 period, and the ‘national security’ scares that were run against the Labour […]
The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt Richard Webster Oxford: The Orwell Press, 2005, £25 This is an account of the various child abuse and satanic abuse cases that developed across the UK from the mid ’80s onwards. At the phenomenon’s peak, around 1995, many police forces were carrying … Read more
[…] expensive, unnecessary grudge match which the miners were going to lose. And they were going to lose. This was the Iron Lady (with a general election vic tory, the defeat of Argentina and the powers of the state) that they were up against. The NUM had not prepared much for the strike: the authors […]
[…] his various books? Confirmation – if any were still needed – of the grotesque time-wasting that goes on under the name of ‘counter intelligence’ given in s tory of self-confessed ‘anarchist’, Peter Edge, and his dealings with British and East German intelligence. (Observer 7 October 1984). Edge apparently came forward with his story because […]
[…] the result of lobbying by a firm called Good Relations whose members include David Hill, some time Labour chief press officer, Penny Chobham, the partner of former Tory cabinet minister David Mellor, who chairs the British Casino Association, and the son of Lord Bernard Donoghue, Steve. (‘Labour’s big gamble on casino deals’, The Guardian […]
[…] an enormous variety of groups on the neo-fascist British Right. Who could achieve this kind of penetration? Only MI5 could, I thought. Then I re-read the s tory of the ‘Gable memo’ in the New Statesman — and that was the case closed as far as I was concerned. Thus it was that I […]
[…] for the Successor Generation is — only time will tell. But it is certainly proving rather indigestible to the British media. By any standards a major s tory, Tom Easton’s piece on BAP (in Lobster 33) found its way only into three snippets in the Guardian diary in August, and a gossip piece in […]
[…] lost his second general election, this time to John Major, and the Labour Party leadership began the long and tortuous process of full-scale conversion to being another Tory Party. And we got Blair and Brown after John Smith’s heart attack. And we got an end to the party’s members, via annual conference, having any […]
[…] handle properly in the time he had or Routledge doesn’t quite take it seriously. The important part of Neave’s career began with his organising Mrs Thatcher’s vic tory over Edward Heath in the 1975 contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party; the bit before that is neither here nor there. Yet that pre-1975 […]
An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation David Edgerton Macmillan, London, 1991, £14.99. Short (130 pages), elegant assault on the thesis of ‘the declinist’ tendency in British history, now associated chiefly with Corelli Barnet and Martin Weiner, who have argued that science and technology failed to penetrate British (but essentially English) culture. By looking … Read more
