[…] Bedford Borough Council has been hung for 14 years, with the local economy gasping while reserves of over £14m sit in the bank and councillors meet in secret to plan their next jaunt to Europe. Some 4,500 voters applied for postal votes in the run-up to the election, but only 2,000 postal ballots actually […]
[…] North in 1970. Orders For The Captain is Kelly’s detailed account of his personal role in the crisis period of August 1969 to May 1970, when, on secret orders, he liaised between Northern Defence Committees and the Dublin Government, and arranged for undercover importation of arms for distribution to the North should the situation […]
[…] draft Bill (www.cfoi.org.uk/draftbill240599pr.html): ‘Deeply disappointing’ and ‘in key areas the Bill is weaker than the Conservatives’ Openness Code’. Criticisms include: Safety info can be classified as top secret; it replaces the Code’s public interest test by a voluntary test; it replaces the WP’s ‘substantial harm’ test with a lower ‘prejudice’ test; it contains ‘catch-all’ […]
[…] met with hostility from the middle and senior ranks. ‘A few key officers took the decision…… to obstruct the progress of our investigation’. Stalker’s intrusion into their secret world set off all kinds of ‘panic bells’.(3) Stalker’s team came to believe that a ‘tout’ (informer), known as ‘the mole’, who had provided information which […]
[…] Seagrave published a number of documents I provided to him about four years ago under an agreement of confidentiality. Some of these I later published with The Secret Gold Treaty (8) and so not only did he breach a confidentiality agreement but also copyright. I privately insisted he cease publishing but he didn’t have […]
[…] and drabs of official information — all sanitised and ‘weeded’ — being doled out to the handfuls of people who are interested in this country’s history. Top Secret: An Interim Guide to Recent Releases of Intelligence Records at the Public Record Office, by Louise Atherton, is rather a large drib — practically a torrent […]
[…] research, notably: what overall political strategy the significant British fascist groups were pursuing, and how this intersected with more orthodox political forces — including elements of the secret state. By comparison with equivalents abroad, British fascists have been rather tame, but this should not cause us to forget that in the 1970s they blazed […]
[…] per se. The Kennedys had too many of their own secrets at risk. In 1963 the knowledge of John Kennedy’s sexual promiscuity was still largely an insider’s secret — as was the family’s various links to the mafia, from Joe Kennedy’s bootlegging days to the mob’s assistance in the election of 1960. A decent […]
[…] Lobster 39 went to the printer and didn’t pursue it. I should have. The following references are from Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State (London: Fourth Estate, 1991) Geoffrey Goodman was repeatedly burgled in 1976, one of many among Wilson’s inner circle who were being burgled in this period. […]
[…] And that wasn’t the reason the deal fell apart in the UK. It fell apart because of a dispute between HM Customs and the rest of the secret state; and, when the whole stupid mess ended up in court, the late Alan Clark MP was unwilling to see MI6 agent and Matrix Churchill executive […]
