[…] study: Murphy’s Law……. Notes Robert Verkaik, ‘The Freedom of Information Act misused’, The Independent, 22 March 2007. The complete text can be read at . For a BBC version of the original ‘Israeli art students’ story from 2002 see . Or, rather, don’t see that URL for it evoked a 404 when I tried […]
Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World Mark Curtis London: Vintage, 2003; p/b, £7.99 This latest analysis of British foreign policy by Mark Curtis could not be better timed. With more than a million Britons on the streets of London protesting against the Iraq war earlier this year there is a potentially large […]
IRD, home and away The creation of the Information Policy unit in HQ Northern Ireland in 1971 may have been the last occasion on which the classic IRD psy-war operation was created. Evidence of previous examples is hard to find, but skimming through Charles Foley’s Legacy of Strife: Cyprus from rebellion to civil war (Penguin, […]
[…] twenty years ago Ken Livingstone took a sustained interest until the researcher who was generating the questions he was asking in the House of Commons joined the BBC. Now we have Norman Baker, the Liberal-Democrat MP, who has kind of inherited the ‘awkward squad’ mantle from Tam Dalyell. He has had a short Commons […]
A small section of this appeared in Lobster 12. Although this is incomplete and under researched, we thought it worth putting out now. The origins of IRD 1947 saw the creation of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD). It is generally accepted that IRD was the brain-child of the then Labour M.P. Christopher Mayhew, […]
[…] general council for much of that period; Sir John Boyd, general secretary of the AUEW from 1975-82, also on the TUC general council, a governor of the BBC and a director of British Steel; Terry Casey, general secretary of the teachers’ union NAS/UWT and vice-president of the pro-NATO teachers’ union international; Lord Collinson, general […]
[…] April.(2) No newspaper reported his dramatic revelations about the way the Blair government had changed policy to permit the use of intelligence material gained by torture. The BBC provided the only report I could see. The Quick and the dead Thanks to Craig Murray,(3) I twigged why Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick might have been […]
[…] Atlanticist freemasonry in 1987. BAP was not just a rite of passage for Baroness Scotland. She continues to serve on the UK advisory board with her old BBC pal James Naughtie and Mike Maclay, the man from Hakluyt. The small irony she may have pondered as she flew west on behalf of the wealthy […]
Paul Todd, Jonathan Bloch, and Patrick Fitzgerald London: Zedbooks, 2009, £14.99, p/b, £39.95 h/b This book is published as the debate rages in America about whether or not the activities of the Bush regime, specifically the torture of various combat detainees and suspects rendered from various parts of the world, should be subject to […]
[…] 1st November 2002 on the occasion of her resignation: ‘I feel strongly that minimum standards of accountability and probity have not been upheld by some leading officers and members of the executive.’ According to the Tribune article, Ms Davis was referring to ‘allegations of financial malpractice’. 4 Any Questions, BBC Radio 4, 25 October 2002
