See also: Part 1 in Lobster 36 ‘Certainly I do not think that the answer to communism is a counter-faith, equally fervent, militant, etc; to begin with, nothing is less likely to create a faith, than perpetual reiteration of the fact that we are looking for one, must find one, are lost without one, etc … 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
It now looks pretty certain to me that Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a local Texas conspiracy on behalf of, and with the knowledge of, the then Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Most of the extant evidence for this can be seen on the web site ‘The Men on the Sixth Floor'(1) which advertises the … Read more
Errors, corrections, apologies My apologies to Mr A. Baron. At the top of p. 24 of Lobster 25 I stated that Mr Baron ‘has been circulating odd bits and pieces around the British far right for quite a while now’. It would have been more accurate to write that odd bits and pieces about Mr … Read more
Pieces without an author’s name are by the editor Parish Notices For information thanks to Jane Affleck and Robert Henderson, in particular. I wasn’t going to add my 5p’s worth to the ‘Good-bye Tony’ feature in this issue. But since Our Great Leader announced he was slipping his moorings and was pushing off into a … Read more
From April to late June 1992, I spent some three months in a Dutch refugee camp, OC Zeewolde. I had applied for political asylum. The Dutch authorities had agreed immediately, to fully process the application. I gave them no reason for my application. The Bosnian war was beginning and the Dutch reception centres for refugees … Read more
Pieces without an author are by the editor Parish Notices Thanks to Phil Chamberlain, Alex Cox, Richard Alexander, Robin Whittaker, Rom, Jane Affleck, Peter Watson, Chris Tame, Terry Hanstock and Phil Edwards for information, cuttings or sources. Somebody commented recently that Lobster had changed from its early days. Yes it has. This is inevitable. The … Read more
9:11 Revealed. Challenging the facts behind the War on Terror Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan London: Robinson, 2005; £8.99, p/b A declaration of a kind of interest: one of the authors of this book, Ian Henshall, is the Chair of INK, the Independent News Collective, to which Lobster belongs and whose leaflets Lobster has … Read more
James Rusbridger I. B. Tauris, London 1991, £8.95 James Rusbridger is Peter Wright’s cousin oddly enough, and occasionally assisted MI6 in the 1950s and 60s, an experience which has left him a cheerful cynic. He canters briskly and amusingly over the field of spook foul-ups in the post-war period to ‘show the pointlessness of so … Read more
The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945-2006 Mark Phythian London: Routledge, 2007, £19.99, p/b Reviewed by: Bernard Porter The title of this book is slightly misleading – at any rate, it misled me. I was expecting a broader treatment of Labour’s debates over issues of war and foreign relations, which would have included colonial … Read more
