“The anomaly of going to war in your own country was not lost on Harry.” (Harry’s Game, Gerald Seymour, Fontana, London 1975) Airey Neave was killed in March 1979 by a bomb planted beneath his car just outside the Houses of Parliament. The then little known Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) soon claimed responsibility. The … Read more
See note (1) Robin Ramsay The topic was suggested to me by Kevin O’Brien . It wasn’t clear to me if it was simply that I was being played out a very long piece of rope with which to hang myself. At any rate, given such a wide title – and a title to which […]
[…] into his well-paid ex-premiership status. The ten-year long weekend from reality will be over. Jonathan Bloch: The day after Blair was elected in 1997 I joined the Liberal Democrat Party. His election led me to take this step for two reasons: firstly, I feared for the state of civil liberties in the country and […]
[…] in ‘the idiocy of rural life’ and that their activities are inferior to and less important than those of technologists and media folk? Or is there a liberal unease with the political stance of Tory farmer/land-owners and the reactionary supporters of the Countryside Alliance? These speculations on Marr’s reasons for ignoring a major feature […]
[…] obviously evaporated. So after 1979 there was indeed ‘no alternative’ to a reassertion of laissez faire, pursued with zeal by Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher sought to recreate the liberal synthesis of free markets, liberty and greatness which (she believed) had characterised Britain in 1851. Yet this could not be done. Economic liberalisation, if anything, accelerated […]
[…] police were a hindrance to anti-fascists, acting always on the side of the fascists. Finally, there is the conventional view, that the police acted as ‘neutrals’, protecting liberal society from two parallel sets of extremists. The first view was argued by the politicians of the 1930s, who claimed that the key event in the […]
[…] the culmination of a campaign against the tour run by Anti-Apartheid. We gave a night’s accommodation to students sent to us by Peter Hain (then a Young Liberal) and all elements of ‘the left’ combined in a massive demonstration. Peter Jordan was allowed to leave the rugby ground after spreading the tin-tacks and was […]
[…] wrecked. The only action Britain could take in these circumstances would be to implement Operation Brutus, with its controls, which would mean opting out of the post-war liberal international trade and payments system and returning to a 1940s-style siege economy. It was this prospect which led the Bank to favour a sterling float, in […]
[…] no reference to the President’s remarks, but clearly shares the same concern for an improvement in US-UK relations when, in the early Eighties, both the Labour and Liberal parties opposed the major arms spending increases – nuclear and non-nuclear – central to Reagan and the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. In the BAP version […]
[…] a vastly expanded CIA station at Miami, JM/WAVE, under Theodore Shackley, is glossed over far too rapidly. (3) The President is depicted as a milk and water liberal even though both he and his brother Bobby were known for staunch anti-communism. At the same time Garrison is seen as a determined enemy of Mob […]
