[…] piece for the Guardian to launch the publication of a report by the Foreign Office’s historian on the notorious Zinoviev letter.(15) Cook had been asked by the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker – the current Parliament’s leading member of ‘the awkward squad’ – to open the MI6 files relating to the Zinoviev letter. Cook […]
[…] class. In the week that the IRA announced its decommissioning amidst a Nuremberg-style rally in Dublin, I got into an interesting argument with one of my more liberal colleagues at Queens University. The woman in question was horrified that I saw decommissioning as a sham because IRA criminality meant they could buy new guns […]
[…] the Spanish Civil War but she could not recall on whose side. He was a very powerful public speaker and orator and had once stood as a Liberal candidate in a general election. The name Clay Shaw meant nothing to her. Hughes was very active in the English Speaking Union and frequently went on […]
[…] evidence has not been conclusively found. It was hardly to be expected that it would be. Industrial espionage aided by government is not meant to exist in liberal democracies; or, more to the point, amongst friends. According to Bamford, the industrial information that is picked up by the National Security Agency (NSA) is only […]
Nigel West London: Greenhill Books, 2006, £25, h/b The books of ‘West’ that I have read all have the same problem: he tells you that some of the material comes from past or present intelligence officers and hints that in those sections you are getting ‘the real inside story’. Somewhere along the way, for … Read more
The assassinations of the sixties JFK Farewell America On the site of The Coalition On Political Assassinations(1) is a very interesting essay by William Turner, ‘RFK, Charles de Gaulle and the Farewell America plot’, about the events leading up to the publication of the book Farewell America about the Kennedy assassination.(2) This may be marginalia … Read more
See note (1) David Phillips, the former CIA officer considered by the Select Committee on Assassinations as a possible candidate for the true identity behind the cover name ‘”Maurice Bishop” -(2)- reacted strongly when this book was published in the summer of 1980. He contacted top executives in newspapers and television, making himself available to … Read more
Raj Chari and Sylvia Kritzinger London: Pluto Press, 2006, £16.99, p/b See note 4. The authors begin by noting how policies emanating from the European Union are of increasing importance to the citizens of the member states. They divide these policies into those which they describe as ‘1st order’, which include single market measures, competition … Read more
Why do they do this? In the previous issue I referred to the fictitious comments attributed by Tony Blair to a doctor in Africa. They’ve done it again. In February Blair’s spin doctor in chief, Alastair Campbell, claimed to have saved a man from being beaten by muggers, The Mail on Sunday (23 February) traced […]
I sent the following by e-mail to a number of people: ‘Thus Martin Jacques in the New Statesman: ‘For the next 30 years, neoliberalism – the belief in the market rather then the state, the individual rather than the social – exercised a hegemonic influence over British politics, with the creation of New Labour signalling … Read more
