[…] The British Lion “Letters to the Editor”, from Maxwell Knight. ‘Opium, tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940-52’, by Jonathan Marshall, in Journal of Policy His tory, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1991. (Published at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.) Marshall is the former producer of the wonderful Parapolitics USA, and, […]
[…] And a new blockbuster is on the way from Anthony Summers, he of File on the Czar and Conspiracy fame. Friends in High Places: the Bechtel S tory by McCartney. (See Mother Jones, June 1984) for Bechtel’s relevance to the Reagan regime, and earlier periods in the Middle East … and Citizen Hughes: how […]
[…] which he refers, not organised labour. An eminently fair-minded man he may be, but has he produced an interesting book? Yes he has, both in the s tory that he is aware that he is telling and, perhaps more importantly, for the extraordinary sidelights that, consciously or not, he sheds on official and semi-official […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
