Echelon The piece below arrived, through the magic of e-mail forwarding, via the following: Jane Affleck, Terry Hanstock, and Julian Assange. The report referred to is a companion to Nicky Hager’s book Secret Power (review in Lobster 32 at p. 47). See also ‘The Technology of Political Control’, Robin Ballantyne, in Covert Action Quarterly, Spring … 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
Edited by Anthony Gorst, Lewis Johnman and W. Scott Lucas. Pinter/Institute of Contemporary British History London, 1991, £35 Goodness only knows what “politics and the limits of policy’ in the subtitle is supposed to mean. This is just a collection of essays on recent British history and was initially of interest because of the essay … Read more
A. J. Davies Little Brown and Co London, 1995, £20 Davies provides in equal measure a perceptive and comprehensive account of the modern Conservative Party which, hopefully, will lead to further reappraisals of Conservative history. In contrast to, for example, Lord Blake’s standard history of the Party over much the same period, We, The Nation … Read more
The parapolitical activities of Jean Violet go back to the 1930s, when Violet was supposedly involved with a violent quasi-Masonic movement going under the title of the Comite Secret pour l’Action Revolutionnaire, or CSAR. CSAR was part of a larger far-right phenomenon in pre-WW2 France, the conspiratorial members of which were referred to as Cagoulards, … Read more
The assassinations of the 1960s A recently discovered sound recording of the assassination of Robert Kennedy shows that there was indeed a second shooter in the room. At least 13 shots were fired according to the analysis by Philip Van Praag, an expert in the ‘forensic analysis of magnetic media recordings’. Sirhan Sirhan’s gun could … Read more
Donovan Pedelty Prometheus Press, Builth Wells, Powys, £13.50 This is a fascinating book. As the Labour Party approaches its 100th birthday, Donovan Pedelty critically assesses the extent to which it has realised its aim. In a detailed and well-argued account, he shows that whereas Labour always espoused equality, nevertheless the gulf between rich and poor … Read more
In 1998, I left the New Labour Party, more out of exhaustion than anything else. For two or three years, I had been at the forefront of the drive to modernise the Party through promoting internal party democracy, first as Deputy Chair and Founding Member of Labour Reform, and then as Coordinator of the Grassroots … Read more
Mark Urban Faber and Faber London 1996 £16.99 The first sentence of Urban’s conclusion to this very interesting and rather important book is: ‘More than anything else, British intelligence is a system for repackaging information gathered by the USA.’ He might have added, ‘information gathered in large part at US bases in Britain’. Urban has … Read more
Melanie Phillips London: Gibson Square, 2007, £8.99, p/b This is rather interesting, though not entirely for the reasons the author intended. In the first half of the book Phillips describes how, after the British state lost control of and/or gave up control of its borders, a large (but unknown) number of Jihadist Muslim refugees … Read more
