The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners; GB84

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Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004, p/back, £12.99   On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each other, … Read more

Why are we with Uncle Sam?

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] defeated two years later in a leadership contest by Margaret Thatcher, whom the Americans had been cultivating and promoting since 1967 as a potential leader of the Conservative Party. This may have been pay-back for Heath daring to defy the Americans. An American colony? Is Britain then just an American colony? Not in any […]

Curried Knight: Maxwell Knight and the MI5 in-house history

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate Lloyd George. The Zinoviev Letter is mentioned, but not the fact that MI5 officers (notably Joseph Ball, who later became a Conservative Party official) were prime suspects for leaking it to the press in order to damage the Labour Party’s chances at the 1924 election. Curry implicates British […]

A vote in the can is worth two for George Bush

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] which has grown like Jack’s beanstalk as partisans and disinteresteds alike slug it out.(11) However, history is written by the victors. Former Clinton ally (i.e. converted neo- conservative) Dick Morris gave the world the benefit of his insight shortly after election day. Who does Mr Morris think is to blame for the discrepancies in […]

People

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] his knowledge of one of the anti-Harold Wilson plots of the 1960s, reported on p. 174 of the Dorril/Ramsay book Smear! Clive Derby-Lewis, briefly a South African Conservative MP, elected Honourary President of the renamed Western Goals Institute in February 1992, was arrested in April for his alleged part in a conspiracy to assassinate […]

Plundering the Public Sector

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

[…] from public to private. (And because they were the Labour Party, they could do this without the opposition from the unions and the public sector that the Conservative Party would have faced. Many of the trade union supporters and members of New Labour have been in a state of total denial about the reality […]

Publications and Book Reviews

Lobster Issue 6 (1984)

[…] series this hasn’t mattered too much, but with a subject like this the results are pretty catastrophic. The most striking example concerns Joseph Ball, who founded the Conservative Research Department back in the 1930s, which was then, and may still be, the Tories’ covert ops./black propaganda operation. Ball is an interesting figure in the […]

The death of Diana: an update

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] agreed with the Coroner and rejected the application.(5) Charles Wardle MP One of the more intriguing events occurred in March of this year when Charles Wardle, the Conservative MP for Bexhill and Battle who asked a number of pertinent questions about the crash in the House of Commons in June 1999, joined the board […]

Our leader

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Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] more mundane figure than the PR machine would have us believe. Early Blair The PM had no great connection with the Labour Party (his father was a Conservative barrister, widely tipped as likely to get a seat in Parliament before a disabling stroke) and has, arguably, no great connection either with the English or […]

Searchlight again

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] and former vice führer of the National Front, and, word has it, a range of other nazis, racists and extreme right-wingers from Western Goals to the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus. When I described him in my column as an errand boy for Patrick Harrington, the Press Complaints Commission held that this was fair comment. Not […]

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