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 […]
It is a difficult time for Britain’s security and intelligence agencies. Not only have the old certainties collapsed with the Berlin Wall, Britain’s economy is in increasingly dire shape, and current levels of government funding for the agencies can no longer be taken for granted. (1) As a result, both the major agencies, MI5 and … Read more
Clippings The Lie Detector Story In the wake of the Prime case, US intelligence has made polygraph (lie detector) introduction into GCHQ at Cheltenham a condition of future GCHQ-NSA cooperation. “At a meeting in July with Civil Service union leaders, Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, made it clear that Senior Whitehall officials were reluctant … Read more
Oliver Kamm London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2005, h/b, £13.99 Kamms’ Anti-totalitarianism was published in the same week and possibly on the same day as the Henry Jackson Society announced itself to the world. So this is a kind of manifesto for that group. (1 ) It’s a nice try, in a way, this […]
[…] Mosleyism and British politics. In the light of ‘anti-alienism’, Mosley was not just a flash-in-the pan, an aberration that serves to affirm the essential stability of the liberal state and its political system. The state was, itself, already deeply incriminated in anti-Jewish discrimination and political parties had already experimented with a national chauvinism defined […]
The Cecil King coup plot as precursor to Gordon Brown’s ‘government of all the talents’ Students of parapolitics are divided as to the seriousness of the Cecil King coup plot of 1968 to establish what he called a ‘businessman’s government’, a permanent coalition government dominated by the right of the Labour Party but with unelected … Read more
Hitler’s spy chief: the Wilhelm Canaris mystery Richard Bassett London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005, £20 This is a full and very well researched biography of one of the great enigmatic figures of the spy world in the 30s and 40s. The author, former foreign correspondent of The Times in Berlin and Prague, provides … Read more
[…] has one, is completely investigated in its real and effective practice.’ ‘Such an approach,’ she continues, ‘allows us to step out of the constraints imposed by the liberal orthodoxy entrenched in existing literature about the role of secrecy in the British legal-rational state.’ This approach produces sections like this on pp. 8-9: ‘The interplay […]
[…] in the anti-Wilson – or, at least, anti-Heath – plots. One has to ask why Oldfield, a man who is generally regarded as being something of a liberal, was close friends with these two. Is everything we know about Oldfield wrong? Was the man a closet reactionary, or a man admired as a true […]
[…] secure the downfall of the Allende regime.(4) Of course Allende’s left-wing government, the first Marxist regime both to be democratically elected and to observe the principles of liberal democracy, had many enemies in the Chilean business and land-owning communities as well as in the Church and the military. The Right and the social forces […]
