Paul Lashmar and James Oliver Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been […]
[…] let alone an instinctive authoritarian like Jack Straw, would bring in a Freedom of Information Bill that meant anything; or that the enthusiastic fans of America round Blair would do anything but genuflect across the Atlantic. It is, alas, all going precisely as Lobster 33 said it would. Young Mr Blair really is the […]
[…] the Leader’s immediate circle. Geoff Mulgan was then (1992) a research assistant to Gordon Brown and LFIG was close to the John Smith/Gordon Brown Scots network, though Blair was very much in the frame even at that time as a rising moderniser allied to the same power base. Mulgan and Martin Jacques, the almost […]
Thanks to Terry Hanstock for contributions. Contributions comments are always welcome. E-mail me on 101521.3515 @compuserve.com Electronic Privacy and Encryption Privacy and Human Rights http://www.gilc.org/privacy/survey/ New GILC/EPIC/PI report details the state of privacy in 50 countries. Includes Threats to Privacy; The Right to Privacy; Technologies of Privacy Invasion. The report was written by Privacy International; […]
[…] salary. Twigg’s old friend at the FPC, Lord Levy, has announced his commitment to raising money for the Labour Party will end with the retirement of Tony Blair from No 10. This will come as small surprise to Lobster readers who will recall that Levy met Blair in 1994 through the good offices of […]
[…] hasn’t bought the globalisation-is-wonderful line, and thus the Blairites have to keep him as far away from domestic politics as possible: hence Foreign Secretary. This means that Blair will be most reluctant to see him removed in disgrace as a result of the Sierra Leone affair – or anything else. As a back-bencher Cook […]
[…] link with the Americans. Here is the late Hugo Young’s notes on a conversation with the late Robin Cook, when Cook was foreign secretary in the first Blair administration. (2) Young asked Cook why the British government supports the US so slavishly. ‘Because of the Ministry of Defence’s fanatical determination to keep close to […]
David Craig and Richard Brooks London: Constable, 2006, £9.99, p/b When the Blair faction took office in 1997 as ‘New Labour’ we knew that they were going to be pro-American, pro-NATO, pro-business, anti-union and media conscious. What we did not know then was just how completely they had internalised the Thatcher ethos, how […]
From Thatcher to the Third Way: think-tanks, intellectuals and the Blair project Robert Carl Blank Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-89821-277-7 This illustrates the hazards of Amazon’s ‘search inside the book’ feature: I read an interesting couple of pages of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money. This is […]
Rogue State: A guide to the world’s only superpower William Blum Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $16.95 Globalize This! The battle against the World Trade Organization and corporate rule eds. Kevin Danaher and Roger Burbach Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $15.95 I have lumped these together partly because they are both published […]
