[…] on Northern Ireland. To get it on the air you have to get it past Ware. Comment? I wouldn’t dare. Enemies of Democracy? ‘The debate within the Labour right on how to handle the “left-wing problem” was often heated, indeed acrimonious… Many discussions took place “across the floor”. They normally came to nothing, Yet, […]
[…] prospective candidates were insufficiently robust on this issue. The Goldsmith effect By 1995 it seemed clear to many observers of UK politics that Tony Blair and the Labour Party, now packaged as the ‘New Labour project’, were likely to do very well at the forthcoming general election. For a range of reasons, notably the […]
[…] Standards in Public Life about the influence of the Israeli lobby in the UK, is on-line.(5) Most usefully, it includes details of the Conservative as well as Labour Friends of Israel. The authors comment: ‘In the meantime your Committee is aware how the lobby group, Friends of Israel, has embedded itself in the British […]
[…] I began reading about the relationship between the intelligence and security services and the British political system in the early 1980s, it was widely believed on the Labour left that the intelligence and security services were all-powerful and unaccountable. They are still unaccountable in any real sense: their accountability to Parliament is notional. But […]
Down Under David Lange may have come and gone and the New Zealand Labour Party may have blazed a rightwards trail for Tony Blair et al to follow, but the New Zealand anti-military, anti-spook campaigns continue. The latest journal to document the activities of the spooks and military in that part of the Pacific […]
[…] to the gigantic, going on in every industrialised society. Political parties always contain conspiracies at every level. As I was writing this it was announced that the Labour Party is going to examine the influence of an entryist Trotskyist group called Socialist Action, previously Socialist Organiser (known to some Trot watchers as the ‘Soggy […]
[…] Peter Watson, David Lee, John Burnes and Harry Irwin for information, material and advice. Correction In footnote 1 on page 28 of Lobster 35 I referred to Labour MP Tony Lloyd as a ‘moderniser’. My apologies to Mr Lloyd: I confused him with Tony Wright. Donations Thanks to Carol Smith for a donation of […]
[…] provides the best opportunity to investigate the origins of what Ambush calls ‘the shoot to kill legend’ and SAS involvement in ‘dirty tricks’ operations. As soon as Labour won the February 1974 election, MI5 began destabilising Harold Wilson and his policies in Northern Ireland. In May 1974, the Power-sharing Executive was brought down by […]
[…] of what we might call the politics of intelligence in the 1990s, from the creation of the Intelligence and Security Committee through to the collapse of the Labour Party: from feisty words and talk of action in opposition to the forelock-tugging we now see. The authors point out that, while Shayler was sitting in […]
[…] His marriage to Lord Curzon’s daughter, Cimmie, consolidated his position within the country’s governing elite. Impatience for preferment led to his defection from the Conservatives to the Labour Party where he was welcomed with open arms. Both he and his wife became Labour MPs and in 1929 he became a junior minister in the […]
