[…] made Shadow Chancellor by the late John Smith, he did not believe it but thought he had to go along with the so-called ‘Washington consensus’ to get Labour into office; but for at least a decade he appears to me to have been a true believer. And you can see the appeal of this […]
[…] (FARI). John Bruce Lockhart (Obituary, Independent 13 May 1995). SIS officer. Niall MacDermot (Obituary by David Leigh in the Guardian, 26 February 1996). War-time MI5 officer, later Labour MP and Minister in the first Wilson government, whose career was halted by MI5 ostensibly because of his wife’s links with Soviet officials, but probably because […]
[…] developed in the fifties and sixties, how IRD came to circulate (and the rest of Whitehall let it circulate) material about the ‘Soviet threat’ within the British labour movement; and how this nonsense came to be inserted into the conflict in Northern Ireland (‘Britain’s Cuba’ as IRD christened it ). For that – what […]
[…] all that a few, a very few malcontents in MI5, a lot of them right wing, malicious…..were spreading damaging and malicious stories about some members of that Labour Government’. This may very well not be the whole story. How many were ‘a few, a very few’, especially when ‘a lot’ of these had extreme […]
[…] to Holroyd either, while writing his book The Dirty War from which Urban took the quotation. Hedging his bets as expertly as the MOD answering an inquisitive Labour MP, Urban concludes that his ‘own research has not produced any evidence to support the claim that the security forces colluded with loyalist death squads in […]
[…] new magazine about … how to put this accurately?..Northern Irish politics and the British state from a Republican perspective? In other words, not too dissimilar to, say, Labour and Ireland but with a much greater emphasis on news. It appears 6 times a year and though the subscription is given as f30 (French francs?) […]
[…] the pension she was due and resist SIS attempts to get her to spy for them in Parliament. She formed an unlikely long-distance alliance with the left-wing Labour MP the late Bob Cryer who, like her, was interested in the corruption of the parliamentary lobbying system. They never met. Just before their first arranged […]
Searchlight At the beginning of the essay on the Blairites above, I discuss the concept of political contamination, the denigration of people on the left by association – real or fictitious – with ideas or people on the right. The most enthusiastic users of the contamination device in Britain today are found in Searchlight magazine. … Read more
[PDF file]: […] about what would be the next story to be leaked, scandal to be revealed, personality to be defamed, that was going to be another blow to the Labour Government. Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay have sought to unravel the events which took place at that time. They suggest that it was all part of […]
[PDF file]: […] that underpin the Coalition? We might normally expect Her Majesty’s Opposition to have something – substantial – to say. But, apart from occasional moments of denial, the Labour Party position appears to be that it accepts the general assumptions made by the new government and would pursue broadly similar policies – but would either […]
