Brian Crozier Foreword by Sir James Goldsmith The Claridge Press, London, 1995, £12.95 One of the odd things about the James Goldsmith Referendum Party gambit in the recent election is the way the mass media collectively chose not to refer back to the last great Goldsmith campaign – his hunt for the Red Menace … Read more
Brice is right? An ‘immoral’ government has undermined human rights in Northern Ireland and is threatening to do the same across the rest of the United Kingdom, argued Professor Brice Dickson, the then Chief Commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission,([1]) in an interview with ePolitix.com to mark Human Rights Day last December.([2])He claimed … Read more
Parish Notices Thanks to Robin Whittaker (in particular), Terry Hanstock, Simon Matthews, Grattan Healey, David Turner, Jane Affleck, Harlan Girard, Anthony Frewin and Tom Easton for cuttings and other material since the last issue. Two years into New Labour and the loudest sound is the sound of surprise being expressed by people who ought to … Read more
As a number of people have pointed out, in the first 5 Lobsters – something like 100,000 words – there has been hardly a mention of the Soviet and Soviet satellite intelligence activities. There are reasons. No-one has offered us anything on this subject, and neither of us (ie Ramsay/Dorril) know much about it. What … Read more
Straw Wars: Full Spectrum Sycophancy Jack Straw’s briefing with a response by Ken Coates Socialist Renewal, new series, number 8, £3.00 ‘Jack Straw’s briefing’ is a document, written by a Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) official, justifying UK support for the US ‘star wars’ missile defence system. Coates’ title comes from current US military ‘doctrine’, … 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
Bernard Donoughue London: Jonathan Cape, £25, h/b Political diaries are among my favourite reading. In that genre this is an absolute belter; but not for the minutiae of policy formation, with which Donoughue was primarily preoccupied, or the account of the government’s handling of various incidents, interesting though they are; but for the picture … Read more
The idea that the Security Service, MI5, colluded with British fascism in the inter-war years is not to be found in the existing literature on the subject. On the contrary the fascists are depicted as the victims, rather than the beneficiaries of MI5’s attentions. MI5, it is generally argued, viewed fascism as a potential danger … Read more
BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory 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 made Labour … Read more
David Miller, Pluto Press, London, 1994, £14.95 (paper) 40.00 (cloth) In his introduction Miller thanks his ‘colleagues at the Glasgow University Media Group’, from whence came the pioneering studies of the way the British media handle politically sensitive events, such as Bad News, More Bad News and Really Bad News. That, with the book’s title, … Read more
