The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004 p/back, £12.99 On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each other, … Read more
[…] from public to private. (And because they were the Labour Party, they could do this without the opposition from the unions and the public sector that the Conservative Party would have faced. Many of the trade union supporters and members of New Labour have been in a state of total denial about the reality […]
[…] has grown like Jack’s beanstalk as partisans and disinteresteds alike slug it out. (11) However, history is written by the victors. Former Clinton ally (i.e. converted neo- conservative) Dick Morris gave the world the benefit of his insight shortly after election day. Who does Mr Morris think is to blame for the discrepancies in […]
[…] from the government line on Iraq, and he is now at the Brunel Centre. Between them they have much academic and practical knowledge. The authors are essentially conservative defenders of the British security and intelligence system. It isn’t that they aren’t critical; it’s just that they don’t want to, or are unable to, deal […]
Revolutions Per Minute number 9 BCM Box 3328, London WC1N 3XX 70pp., £4 Online at http://www.red-star-research.org.uk/rap/rapframe.html There is a very good Website, www.red-star-research.org.uk, which is the best single source of information on the Blair government, its financial supporters and networks. This pamphlet is a kind of spin-off from that site – the previous Revolutions … Read more
[…] reading one sheet of A4. One final point: this reminded me again that among the leading architects of the creation of the current muddled but fundamentally neo- conservative NuLab were a group of ex-CPGB members and one ex-Trot (Mulgan), who in their left incarnations despised the Labour Party, and finally got to help kill […]
[…] more mundane figure than the PR machine would have us believe. Early Blair The PM had no great connection with the Labour Party (his father was a Conservative barrister, widely tipped as likely to get a seat in Parliament before a disabling stroke) and has, arguably, no great connection either with the English or […]
[…] his knowledge of one of the anti-Harold Wilson plots of the 1960s, reported on p. 174 of the Dorril/Ramsay book Smear! Clive Derby-Lewis, briefly a South African Conservative MP, elected Honourary President of the renamed Western Goals Institute in February 1992, was arrested in April for his alleged part in a conspiracy to assassinate […]
Greg Grandin New York: Metropolitan books, 2006, $25.00 Reviewing a biography of Harold Laski in 1953,([1]) the historian A. J. P. Taylor remarked on ‘the dilemma of our times’: that ‘no-one who believes in liberty can ever work sincerely with communists, or trust them, yet no-one who has socialism in his bones can ever … Read more
[…] primacy. Taking the post-modern route away from the analysis of the real spared the sensitive cultural analyst from those career-threatening conflicts with the line coming from the Conservative governments of the day. If the left was out, post-moderism provided an alternative to embracing the new right, a sideways step. After the authors’ long introductory […]
