Noam Friedlander London: Conspiracy Books/Collins and Brown, 2005, p/bk, £8.99 Apart from being an anagram of Oedipus, Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic organisation, which has grown from beginnings in Spain in the 1920s, led by José Maria Escriva, to being an evangelising force within the Catholic Church, aimed as much at the lay … Read more
Steamshovel 11 The arrival of a new Steamshovel is an event. No matter that I am going to want to be picky about something in it, every issue contains items both substantial and intriguing – and much that would find a home nowhere else, that I can think of. (Except maybe Lobster. I wish I … Read more
Russell Holden Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, hb, £47.50 The author is an enthusiastic supporter of the ‘reforms’ of the Labour Party and a Senior Lecturer in European Studies. His thesis is that the changes in Labour’s policy from anti- to pro-EU membership are the core of the ‘reforming’ of Labour in the 1980s and 90s … 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
Douglas Macleod Edinburgh: Birlinn; £9.99, p/b <www.birlinn.co.uk> Twenty years ago, before the current torrent of information about ‘the secret world of intelligence’, we were scratching about looking for clues to our secret history. One was given in the John Loftus book The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983) which contained a single reference to the Scottish … Read more
How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in … Read more
Efraim Karsh Yale University Press, 2006; 276 pp. For anyone who believes that ‘imperialism’ is an exclusively Western phenomenon, that Islam has only been the victim of it, and that 9/11 was simply a reaction to that (‘blowback’), this book will come as a bit of a shock. Karsh argues that aggressive imperialism was … Read more
Policing (a) and the miners 3 page overview in Labour Research (September) Officers being sent straight from training school (Guardian 20 November) Police installing alarms in homes of (some) working miners. (Guardian 27 November) Police officers being charged a ‘fee’ of a bottle of whisky to get on lucrative picket duty. (Daily Telegraph 25 October) … Read more
Espionage is two things – a career and a lifestyle. Both can be wildly exciting. Those who deny this have never been spies. Children born to SIS agents enjoy this lifestyle which can have many advantages. The home environment is usually stimulating, cosmopolitan and informed. There can also be one-off bonus such as acquisition of … Read more
William Engdahl London: Pluto, 2004, £15.99, p/b Google the author and you will find him listed as a senior member of the Lyndon LaRouche org in 1998, European Economic Editor of Executive Intelligence Review.([16]) Although I have been told by his publisher that he is no longer with LaRouche, the book’s first edition was … Read more
