[…] number of ‘conspiracy theorists’ have assumed that this man was signalling to the assassins, thus tying a seemingly trivial and inconsequential act into the alleged plot to kill Kennedy. It is precisely this totalistic, all-encompassing quality that distinguishes ‘conspiracy theories’ from the secret but often mundane political planning that is carried out on a […]
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of … Read more
Philip Augar London: The Bodley Head, h/b, 2009, £20Reviewed by A few days before he became Prime Minister, Gordon Brown was in celebratory mood as he arrived in the Square Mile to address the 2007 Mansion House dinner. Taking much of the credit after 10 years at the helm of the British economy, the Chancellor … Read more
Part 1, 1974-83 See also: Part 2: British Fascism 1974-92 (II) (Lobster 24) Part 3: British fascism 1983-6 (Lobster 25) Part 4: British Fascism 1983-6 (II) (Lobster 26) The 1986 National Front Split (Lobster 29) Introduction This essay does not set out to be a comprehensive history of fascism in this period but rather to … 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
PART 1 See also Part 2 in Lobster 6 Most Western political scientists, following in the traditions of Marx or Weber, scorn the study of secret and occult societies as irrelevant to understanding the politics of the age. In their view, politics can best be understood as the working out, in public arenas, of bureaucratic, … 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
[…] they did not suggest a bomb plot against the public but an extension of the Iraq insurgency. They were allegedly centred on a plot to capture and kill for Internet distribution one or more Muslim-British soldiers on British soil. Later, it was the spin on this particular case that was to trigger the ire […]
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
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie Giles Scott-Smith,(1) who wrote about the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Lobster 36 and 38, has written a very interesting study of Margaret Thatcher’s first visit to America in 1967.(2) Scott-Smith shows that Thatcher, then a junior shadow spokesperson in the Tory Party, was talent-spotted by the State Department’s man in the … Read more
