Colin Challen MP First, buy your senator It wasn’t long after their election in 2000 that the business backgrounds of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney became mired in controversy. Cheney’s business career was not as long as Bush’s, but it personifies the role of crony capitalism endemic to U.S. politics. Cheney’s role as Halliburton’s … Read more
Searchlight At the beginning of the essay on the Blairites above, I discuss the concept of political contamination, the denigration of people on the left by association – real or fictitious – with ideas or people on the right. The most enthusiastic users of the contamination device in Britain today are found in Searchlight magazine. … Read more
Earlier articles in Lobster (issues 39, 41, 43, 45, 49) have followed Malcolm Kennedy’s case. The human rights organisation, Liberty, took his complaint about interference with his communications and other forms of surveillance and harassment, to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the body set up under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) to … Read more
Shorts Yorkshire Post (14 March ’92) reported the admission by the Ministry of Defence that in an operation called HORNBEAM, trawlers had been used during the first Cold War to spy on Soviet shipping. But the MOD spokesperson refused to confirm that some trawlers had carried intelligence officers. Statewatch Bulletin (Jan/Feb 1992) includes an important … Read more
Secret Nazi Technology which could have changed the course of WWII Gary Hyland and Anton Gill, Headline Books, 1998, £18.99 Thirty years ago schoolboys built model aeroplanes. The most common and popular were, for the Airfix generation, the main combat types of the last great war – Spitfires, Me109s, Mustangs, Zeros, Lancasters, Flying Fortresses etc … Read more
Since issue 45, last June, there has been so much information produced on the events preceding the assault on Iraq it is impossible to keep track of it all. Here is my selection. For the powers-that-be, the war has been traumatic, not least because their various cover stories and deceptions have been exposed so rapidly, … Read more
Gone but not forgotten: a further update on Di Terry Hanstock This update follows on from my earlier articles in Lobster 38 and Lobster 39 Never was the old adage ‘She’s dead but she won’t lie down’ more apt than when applied to the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Although she died almost nine years … Read more
The story in The Guardian of 12 November, ‘Diplomat’s “slave” can stay in UK’, was the tip of an iceberg. The story concerned the allegations made that a Sudanese diplomat had kept a ‘slave’ in London. Allegations of slavery in the Sudan have been made – and denied – for years. (A summary of the … Read more
Hollis again What with the opening of the KGB archives and the testimony of Oleg Gordievsky, you might be forgiven for thinking that the question, Was MI5 Director-General Roger Hollis a Soviet spy? had been answered conclusively and resoundingly ‘No’. You would be wrong – or so says the doyen of British espionage writers, Chapman … Read more
Book Reviews Gerry Healey: A Revolutionary Life Corinna Lotz and Paul Feldman Lupus Books, PO Box 942, London, SW1V 2AR, £15.00 Ken Livingstone MP was given a large chunk of a page of the Guardian (tabloid section p. 13, September 6, 1994) to write a review of this book. The bit that caught my eye … Read more
