[…] the figures were: 1978 -72 1987 -164 This doubling over the period of the Thatcher years is very interesting. For while the South and Midlands has voted Tory, Scotland has been moving leftwards throughout the Thatcher period – the Tories now have only slightly more than 10% of the Parliamentary seats in Scotland. And […]
[…] in part in the analysis in Lobster 11 and Smear!, Larkin correctly identifies the anti-communist, anti-subversion alliance formed by elements within Whitehall and a section of the Tory Party but oversimplifies it and makes many errors of detail. For example, on p.182 he writes of the ‘right wing of the British establishment (Airey Neave, […]
[…] Routledge. ‘This is not the same thing.’ Of course I asked the wrong question. What I should have asked was: does Gordon Brown understand British economic his tory? Or: does he understand economic politics? In any case, I would have been asking a question to which I knew the answer. Brown knows little of […]
[…] of the UCA smear published in Lobster 14. We sent out 50 copies to various people in the media known to have been interested in the s tory and the handful of politicians who had been active in the Wright/MI5 story earlier in the year. The Independent got 4 copies. We didn’t tackle the […]
[…] said. This section is missing from the book. It’s not that Taylor actually tries to avoid this area: it just doesn’t get its due. The biggest s tory, the most important development, in our knowledge of the Loyalist paramilitaries in the past ten – maybe twenty – years gets three and a bit pages […]
Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World Mark Curtis London: Vintage, 2003; p/b, £7.99 This latest analysis of British foreign policy by Mark Curtis could not be better timed. With more than a million Britons on the streets of London protesting against the Iraq war earlier this year there is a potentially large … Read more
BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regula tory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had […]
[…] at his side, toured the City’s dining rooms announcing Labour’s conversion to economic orthodoxy – the most complete and protracted act of political surrender in British his tory this century. Further, while John Smith was spurning the skills of Mr Mandelson and wooing the money-lenders he was a member of the Steering Committee of […]
[…] decades of corruption and bribery at the very heart of Italian politics. Tony Blair came to power promising to be ‘whiter than white’ after the decade of Tory sleaze and corruption culminating in the Scott Report into the arms for Iraq scandal. The idea of being a cleansing force in politics was central to […]
[…] helped organise a party at the British embassy in Washington to honour the BAP – the Project newsletter reporting the event called the New Labour election vic tory the ‘Big Swing to the BAP’ – Wolfowitz was one of the guest speakers. Naughtie’s opposite number on the US advisory board is now deputy to […]
