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
Electromagnetics & VDU News Subtitled ‘a News Report on Non-ionising Radiation’, this is now up to volume 6, and is now extremely impressive – and pretty alarming. Vol. 6 nos 1-2, for example, includes: Dramatic cuts in EMF exposure demanded by US draft report; biggest EMF lawsuit launched by top attorney – then dropped; breast … Read more
Introduction This, as some of Lobster‘s older readers will recognise, is a re-write of the essay I wrote on the JFK thing in Lobster 2, published on the 20th anniversary of the assassination in November 1983. This rewrite was written for the first issue of Casablanca, but it failed to appear. In JFK the Costner/Garrison … Read more
Official openings We don’t have a Freedom of Information Act, and are not likely to get one from any of the British political parties. Imagine a conversation in the office of the new Labour Prime Minister in a year or three: ‘FOI? Too much trouble, too much aggro with Whitehall. As if we need any … Read more
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Clairview, East Sussex: 2003, p/back, £11.95 It is, perhaps, unfair to review a current affairs book, a year or so after its initial publication. In this age of the Internet and the speed at which information is passed between people and continents, what chance does any book stand of still being … Read more
Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones London: Yale University Press, 2002, £22.50 Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World Percy Craddock London: John Murray, 2002, £25 Jeffreys-Jones is Professor of American History at Edinburgh University and writes on the American intelligence services. His book’s subtitle … Read more
“The anomaly of going to war in your own country was not lost on Harry.” (Harry’s Game, Gerald Seymour, Fontana, London 1975) Airey Neave was killed in March 1979 by a bomb planted beneath his car just outside the Houses of Parliament. The then little known Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) soon claimed responsibility. The … Read more
On 1 January 2005 several new laws and regulations governing access to information come into force: the Freedom of Information Act 2000, covering England, Wales and N. Ireland; the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002; new Environmental Information Regulations 2004/5; Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004; and an extension of the Data Protection Act 1998 to … Read more
Paul Routledge London: Fourth Estate, 2002, £16.99 In Lobster 39 (p. 23) I reported the snippet of information from a recent biography of James Callaghan that Mrs Thatcher, while leader of the Opposition, in 1977 had twice gone to to see Robert Armstrong, then Home Office liaison with MI5, to put the beliefs of her … Read more
Nigel West London: Greenhill Books, 2006, £25, h/b The books of ‘West’ that I have read all have the same problem: he tells you that some of the material comes from past or present intelligence officers and hints that in those sections you are getting ‘the real inside story’. Somewhere along the way, for … Read more
