I: Wilson, Cromer and the City One anniversary which has come and gone this year without much comment is the attempted 1968 ‘coup’ orchestrated by Cecil King against the Labour government of Harold Wilson. The plot was provoked by collapse of confidence in Wilson in the media (led by King’s Daily Mirror), finance, industry and … Read more
Some recent JFK literature In front of me is a copy of Guth and Wrone’s The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography 1983-1979 (1980), nearly 450 pages, running to some 5,134 entries covering books, magazine articles, records, TV programmes, and news items from both the New York Times and the … Read more
The Brittle Society Alarmists, like Naomi Wolf, have been exaggerating the degree to which the US, and by implication the UK, have been slipping towards a police state. The evidence for true tyranny in either country is weak. However, since it came to power in 1997, it might be reasonably argued(1) that New Labour has … Read more
This arrived from David Guyatt, prefaced by the following message: ‘Robin: This is being published on a couple of Internet sites shortly. I’ve given up trying to sell it or get any responsible journo/editor to carry my work forward. They all have chickened out, mostly without an explanation or even a courtesy call/reply. Fuck ’em … Read more
Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the global nuclear weapons conspiracy Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark London: Atlantic Books, 2007, £25, h/b This is not an area I have any expertise in and I am hardly competent to review this. But I found this big (500 pages), massively-documented book an absolutely riveting read. The authors’ … Read more
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … 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
Intelligence Personnel Named in ‘Inside Intelligence’ See also: Part 1: Forty Years of Legal Thuggery (Lobster 9) Part 2: British Spooks “Who’s Who” (Lobster 10) Philby naming names (Lobster 16) First supplement to A Who’s Who of the British Secret State (Lobster 19) Spooks (Lobster 22) for Cohen, Brooman-White, De Haan, see Lobster 9 and … Read more
British ‘USP’ In September 2000 the tragic case of two infants from Malta dominated the headlines.(1) British judges were asked to decide whether it was ‘right’ for doctors to sacrifice one child, joined at the abdomen with her twin, for the sake of the other. As a result of global press coverage, the moral arguments … Read more
From: David Renton I am grateful to Lobster for printing Larry O’Hara’s review of my book. It is always a pleasure to see your ideas considered in detail. However, your reviewer devoted a great deal of energy to criticising an argument which he has not fully grasped, and I suspect that readers of this magazine … Read more
