Stephen Dorril London: Viking, 2006, £30 In his 1975 biography of Oswald Mosley, Robert (now Lord) Skidelsky very much celebrated the old fascist on his own terms, contributing, wittingly or not, to his attempted rehabilitation. Mosley, we were told in all seriousness, was always driven by his concern for ordinary people and a desire … Read more
Patriots not sneaks After a year of New Labour I feel beholden to write something on this subject, but what is there worth saying that isn’t blindingly and depressingly obvious and predictable? Jack Straw, who took over as Home Secretary, and thus formally as the boss of MI5, is determined to sedate any sleeping dogs … 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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
[…] present orientation of a group which used to be devoted to the propagation of (first) the Empire and then the Commonwealth. “In the longer sweep of his tory we have to understand that the basic supposition of our national policy towards the European mainland has been transformed since 1945. For four centuries we secured […]
[…] 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
[…] 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 […]
