The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt Richard Webster Oxford: The Orwell Press, 2005, £25 This is an account of the various child abuse and satanic abuse cases that developed across the UK from the mid ’80s onwards. At the phenomenon’s peak, around 1995, many police forces were carrying … Read more
Many thanks, as always, to Terry Hanstock for contributions. Comments and contributions welcome. My email is ‘War on Terrorism’: Repercussions of 11 Sept. 2001 The Sept 11 2001 attacks on the US and subsequent ‘war against terrorism’ have provided law enforcement/intelligence agencies with an opportunity to push for sweeping new powers, plus fast-tracking of … Read more
PART 1 See also Part 2 in Lobster 6 Most Western political scientists, following in the traditions of Marx or Weber, scorn the study of secret and occult societies as irrelevant to understanding the politics of the age. In their view, politics can best be understood as the working out, in public arenas, of bureaucratic, … Read more
[…] politics by never having any serious rivals on the right. Contrast the Liberal and Labour parties and at times, the SDP and Nationalists, who split the centre-left vote between them. But there was always a risk of some ‘flaking away’ of support on the right of the party, especially on the issues of immigration […]
See note(1) Very few notions generate as much intellectual resistance, hostility, and derision within academic circles as a belief in the historical importance or efficacy of political conspiracies. Even when this belief is expressed in a very cautious manner, limited to specific and restricted contexts, supported by reliable evidence, and hedged about with all sort … Read more
[…] War that the CCF was advocating at that time. Meanwhile, the Communist Party was never more than a marginal player, gaining no more than 10% of the vote at its peak and going rapidly into decline after 1950. While there was some Dutch concern over the dominance of American interests in European culture and […]
[…] it that small town, suburban and rural Muslims can be integrated into the community through sensitive policing whereas the radicalisation of urban Muslims is undercutting the Labour vote in the big cities and ‘something must be done’? I am beyond my competency in second-guessing either the politicians or the security services but there has […]
[…] (He was also keen on astrology, which is frowned on in evangelical circles in the normal run of things). Nevertheless Reagan appreciated the value of the evangelical vote and recognised that Falwell’s organisation Moral Majority could deliver. At a meeting of the Religious Roundtable in October 1979, Reagan famously declared to an audience of […]
[…] formed the Social Democratic Party in the 1970s. Cavendish notes in his letter that the Democratic Prty was set up ‘to attract Labour voters who would never vote Tory’, and folded when Donnelly died. Among the other founders Cavendish lists Maurice Buckmaster (a big-wig in SOE) and Air Marshal Johnny Johnson. (b) An indexing […]
Mandy’s place in things On 12 June 1999 The News, Portugal’s weekly English-language paper, ran this comment on the Bilderberg meeting which had then just taken place in Portugal. The 47th Bilderberg Conference has come to an end. Members and one-off participants have departed as discreetly as they arrived. Lines of black limousines, unmarked except […]
