[…] to Stephen Marshall’s important but flawed book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, she’s just another ‘fallen liberal’ who either provides ineffective and impotent criticism of the present neo- conservative order or actually feeds it. It’s because of the essential truth in much of what Marshall says about former Left renegades in his book, that I […]
[…] by the late Sir Fitzroy Maclean…… managing director, Christopher James…..Baroness Smith joins Sir Brian Cubbon, a former top civil servant, Lord Laing of Dunphail, Treasurer of the Conservative Party towards the end of the Thatcher period…Earl Jellicoe….Sir Peter Cazalet, director of the P and O Group, former BP Chairman…and Sir Peter Holmes, one-time managing […]
Ivan Molloy London: Pluto Press, 2001, £18.99/£55 In the 1980s the resurgent US military and neo-conservatives were in a bind: faced with a variety of challenges to the American economic empire, the enormous military power they possessed was constrained by PR considerations; American parents who didn’t want their children dying abroad (the so-called ‘Vietnam … Read more
[…] USA. EXTRA! Extra! is the magazine of FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, one of the handful of left-wing magazines in the US trying to stem the conservative tide. It is exclusively concerned with US events and rarely means much to UK readers who have not seen the media to which it refers. However […]
The debate about whether the British should have a military presence East of Suez seemed to have been settled under the Wilson-Callaghan Government in the 1960s and 1970s. The process of withdrawal started with the independence of India and Pakistan (widely celebrated in the UK media recently on its sixtieth anniversary), was confirmed by the […]
[…] minister, and particularly his more socialist colleagues, influenced by their wartime encounters with MI5 officers, suspected the service’s activities were uncontrolled. MI5, they complained, was a secret conservative group with a historic mission to destabilise the Left.(1) Their fear of surveillance by the secret police required that MI5’s new director should not be hostile […]
[…] Ann Arbor: Pluto Press; 2007, £14.99 (UK) $24.95 (US), p/b Laughland is an interesting figure, whose writing appears in media across the ideological spectrum, from the conservative right to The Guardian and here, Pluto Press. It is thus a little hard to identify his politics. Three years ago David Aaronovitch wrote about him. […]
[…] classical Marxist) explanation of the growth of interest on the British Left in things spooky and conspiratorial. He suggests ‘the timing of this is not fortuitous: ….the Conservative Victories in 1979 and 1983, the defeat of the miners in 1985 (in which the security services played an intelligence gathering role)….. the collapse of cherished […]
[…] appeared in 1991. This is easily the most interesting and informative book on the Thatcher years to have appeared so far. Ranelagh was a member of the Conservative Research Department (CRD) between 1975-79 — a member of the internal opposition to Mrs Thatcher while ‘Thatcherism’ was being cobbled together by group around her. The […]
[…] by Assistant Secretary Will Clayton, a liberal in the Hullian tradition. Morgenthau left the Treasury and the post of Secretary was taken by Fred Vinson, a fiscally conservative mid-Western machine politician. White’s influence began to diminish (after the end of the war he came under suspicion of being a Soviet agent).(35) Power shift The […]
