The ties that bind The treatment of Andrew Gilligan blamed by the internal BBC inquiry while all his superiors escaped censure throws a little more light on the tightness of the New Labour network. Conducting the investigation was Caroline Thomson, the BBC director of policy, who is married to Roger Liddle, Tony Blair’s … Read more
Flat Earth News: An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media Nick Davies London: Chatto & Windus, 2008, £17.99, For many taking a dissenting view of our national life, The Guardian and The Observer have long been part of our diet – the morning fix that sustains us in our daily … Read more
Poverty Tony Blair promised to eradicate child poverty in the UK. A couple of articles, ‘Redefining poverty will lead to ridicule, ministers told’ (The Independent 27 August 2002) and ‘Poor definition confuses poverty’ (The Daily Telegraph 27 August 2002) suggest that the government is thinking of ‘eradicating’ poverty by redefining it. Hospital waiting lists Reported … Read more
A number of the obvious questions about an enterprise like this can now be answered. Can we do an issue every 2 months or so? Yes: the problem is the reverse. We actually have more material than we really know what to do with at the moment. Will other people begin writing for it? Yes. … Read more
Conference Report by Jane Affleck On November 10 2000 the Freedom Forum’s European Centre in London, in association with Article 19, Index on Censorship and Liberty, hosted a debate on National Security. (1) Three panels spoke on The Nature of National Security, British State Security in Northern Ireland, and The Internet – Circumventing Censorship? The … Read more
The real story of the Budget is not to be found in the striking figures concerning the government’s borrowing requirement. These figures are symptomatic of a much deeper crisis which is rooted in Britain’s economic history over a 30 year period. The fundamental problem facing the UK is the shrinkage of the manufacturing sector. This … Read more
When I began studying the Kennedy assassination, back in 1983, my naivety was considerable. It would be a few years before I fully hooked into the diffuse network of assassination researchers, and my hit-and-miss efforts to locate that fraternity produced some bizarre results during the 1985-87 period. Consulting periodical directories and other sources, I collected … Read more
Last year, in the search for independent corroboration of some of Colin Wallace’s story, I talked to a number of ‘Irish hands’, journalists who had been in Northern Ireland while Wallace was working there. One was Kevin Dowling, the Sunday Mirror correspondent there from 1970-74. Dowling was reluctant to talk much about that period of … Read more
Gore Vidal London: Abacus, 2002, £10.99, p/b Once upon a time collections of essays by Gore Vidal would appear every few years or so in this country in those neat little Panther paperbacks: On Our Own Now (1976), Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1978), Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1982) for example. The … Read more
We know that torture is going on in secret and not so secret prisons. We know thanks to the excellent research done by <www.cageprisoners.com> that elements of the British government, be they MI5, MI6 or diplomats from the FCO, have been involved. Yet we seem unable to stop it. Civic society raises its voices in … Read more
