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
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
SIS is dead – you read it first in Lobster – but the funeral has not been announced. Established in 1909, it will not make its centenary. SIS once offered a global brand operating in a market that had been previously divided along the lines of accepted cartels (market fixing). Its market-share, however, has been … Read more
Most, if not all police forces already have, or are in the process of acquiring, information handling computers of some kind. The background to the present situation is best described in the pamphlet The Police Use Of Computers, parts of which were reproduced in State Research No 29, and were used by the National Computer … Read more
The articles on Blairism and contamination in Lobster 33 are tremendously useful in understanding the recent political changes in the UK, and also in understanding ‘fusion paranoia’ as a cross-contamination argument. Maybe it’s not a conspiracy, but it’s surely not a coincidence that the fusion idea was first put forth by New Yorker, a champion … Read more
Two major American parapolitics journals closed at the beginning of this year. Both were primarily dedicated to the JFK assassination, though Probe also covered the King family’s landmark case and its successful outcome — establishing that Dr Martin Luther King was killed, not by a lone assassin, but by a conspiracy. This story was largely … Read more
Following the initial investigation by the West Mercia Police, there have been over a dozen reviews of this extraordinary case. Reviewers include Robert Green, (1) Tam Dalyell MP, (2) Graham Smith,(3) World in Action,(4) BBC Crimewatch,(5) John Osborne,(6) Amanda Mitchison, (7) Bob Parker (8); and more recently, David Cole and Peter Acland, (9) Nick Davies,(10) … Read more
Greg Bishop London/New York: Paraview, 2005, $14 (US), p/b In Lobster 40 I presented a summary of this story. This book-length version adds much detail but nothing substantially different from that summary. Bennewitz was an electronics manufacturer in New Mexico, who lived a few yards from the boundary fence of the Kirtland Airforce Base, … Read more
17. Vatican Connections Curious report in IHT (14th April 1983) that an Italian radical mag., Peace and War, had received photocopies of telegrams indicating that the US Ambassador to Italy had worked out a plan to link the Bulgarians to the shooting of the Pope. The US embassy says they’re fakes. It certainly sounds implausible … Read more
