[…] was not the case. Not only did Parliament and The Focus give him a platform, in Parliament he could eventually count on the support of some forty Conservative MPs, the Liberals under Archibald Sinclair, and, after Munich, almost all of the Labour Party. Origins of The Focus The Focus was partly a dining club […]
[…] up a large fund to enable ordinary citizens to sue newspapers; or introduced a Right of Reply Act. Etc etc. In the event they did nothing. The conservative nature of the British media became the cover story for their own conservative beliefs. A member of the Labour Party for tribal rather than political reasons, […]
[…] view was put in words to them.’ Why did Kennedy decline to reveal his political persuasions? Did he have something to conceal? In 1964 Norris was the Conservative candidate at Orpington. With Ross and Kennedy he was probably a Conservative in 1958. However there is evidence which suggests that they also belonged to another […]
[…] found its intellectual advocates. Importantly this was not seen by its proponents as a shift towards conservatism. Bell stated: ‘The perspective I adopt is anti-ideological, but not conservative. repudiation of ideology, to be meaningful, must mean not only a criticism of the utopian order but of existing society as well.'(52) Not simply a CIA […]
[…] that the conspiracy theories of the subversive-hunters of the British right – Brian Crozier et al – had ‘captured’ a significant section of the leadership of the Conservative Party which had actually tried to use them to damage the elected government of the day. None of this is included in the Routledge biography of […]
[…] had looked for alternative government for most of the 20th century. Given the ambition of their undertaking and the SDP’s significance in dividing early opposition to a Conservative party now in power for 17 years, it is curious then that we have to wait until now for a detailed account. It is also disappointing […]
[…] Orwell’s Politics op cit, pp. 124-130. Ibid, pp. 72-77. Orwell’s third way must not, of course, be confused with New Labour’s third way as advocated by Orwell’s conservative namesake, Tony Blair. New Labour’s third way is committed not to the socialist but to the capitalist transformation of British society. For Orwell as Tribune Socialist […]
Votescam (again) Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we – readers of magazines like Lobster – are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the … Read more
[…] son, Nicholas, this always rankled: he ‘had seen little active combat, and this played on his mind’. His subsequent entry into the House of Commons as a Conservative MP owed considerably less to his war record than it did to his affairs with the wives of prominent Tories and the connections and contacts this […]
[…] throughout the world, attention has been diverted from what the other side are up to over here. In fact, just four years and five months after the Conservative Government expelled 105 Soviet KGB and GRU (military intelligence) officers from Britain, the Russian spy network is back at full strength. There are nearly 200 Soviet-controlled […]
