A Steamshovel Press Reader Edited by Kenn Thomas Illuminet Press 1995 Available in the UK from AK Distribution at £17.95(1) This is the first twelve issues of Steamshovel Press plus issue 13, which never appeared in magazine format. I like Steamshovel – I’ve written a couple of pieces for more recent issues – and I … Read more
I was born in a working class area of Leeds in September 1919. My parents were Quaker-ILPers and it was natural for me to gravitate to the labour movement. In 1934 I left school and joined the South Leeds Labour Party. The Labour League of Youth of the pre-war period had been heavily infiltrated by … Read more
Wensley Clarkson Blake Publishing, London 1998, £16.99 Remember Jonathan Moyle, the ex-RAF officer, editor of Defence Helicopter World, who was found dead, hanging in a wardrobe in his hotel room in Chile in 1990? This is about him – and about his death. It is done in the most irritating manner possible, written as a … Read more
Introduction In early January the American writer Martin Cannon, whose ‘Mind Control and the American Government’, was published in Lobster 23, and who has a very interesting letter in this issue, offered me a big piece of his on the so-called Gemstone File. Cannon had got access to some of the original documents on which … 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
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 Stirling: the authorised biography of the creator of the SAS Alan Hoe Little, Brown and Co, London 1992, £17.50 As the subtitle suggests, most of this book is taken up with the story of the foundation of the SAS. I didn’t read that section. I read the last third which contains lengthy accounts of … Read more
This is the text of a paper read by Jonathan Bloch at a meeting of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade in London in June 1985. The purpose of this paper is to examine selected aspects of British involvement in the training of foreign police personnel both here and abroad. Not much research has been … Read more
In 2002, in a class action, an American federal jury returned a verdict for the plaintiffs and against a company called Edsaco in a complex securities fraud case. (1) The case was interesting in two respects. Firstly, the plaintiffs’ plea through their lawyers that Edsaco was in fact ‘a front for organised crime’; secondly, the … Read more
Cock-up, conspiracy, or both? Israel and the Clash of Civilisations Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East Jonathan Cook London: Pluto Books, 2008, £14.99, p/b Was the invasion of Iraq a disastrous cock-up by the Americans and British, and by the Pentagon in particular? There certainly is a long line of people … Read more
