Crime fighting? There must many candidates for the title ‘The most damaging thing I have read about this government’. My current candidate is a piece by Simon Jenkins, ‘A Keep Police off the Streets Strategy Unit’ (The Times 2 February 2002). After reminding the reader that in the UK the police are a local service, … Read more
[…] that they ‘could be flown into a trouble spot rapidly and discreetly, and operate in a remote area without publicity – a capability much valued by the Conservative Government of the day’ (pp. 150-151). There was considerable demand for their services throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. De la Billiere himself served in […]
[…] and 60s’, and Lashmar and Oliver’s chapter on IRD’s domestic operations takes that contention a good deal further forward. The authors tell us that in 1956 the Conservative MP Douglas Dodds-Parker, a former anti-communist ally of Labour Foreign Secretary Bevin, had been appointed to the Foreign Office as Under-Secretary – and apparently in formal […]
[…] the possibility of a ‘third party’ in the US. The media’s chosen standard bearer last time was the extraterrestrial Texas magnate Ross Perot (the media, liberal and conservative, regularly ignore the sizeable Libertarian Party and the efforts of Jesse Jackson while fixating on weird eccentrics). This time as a ‘third party’ possibility both Perot […]
Robert Fisk London: Fourth Estate, 2005, £25.00 This very fine book runs to more than 1,300 pages, is well footnoted, referenced and indexed, carries a helpful bibliography and is written by one of the most fluent, knowledgeable and thoughtful journalists of our time. That part of its dedication is to Fisk’s parents ‘who taught … Read more
[…] undertaken, associated with Rising, at both the Liss Forest home of Rosine de Bouniaville and the Suffolk farm owned by the father of Nick Griffin, accountant and Conservative Party activist, Edgar Griffin. Certain things nobody disputes took place at these seminars — ideological instruction, physical fitness programmes, self-defence training, and plotting how to get […]
[…] according to some sources part-funded by Rupert Murdoch – to continue to defame many of his old elected political targets, thus ‘raising a favourable wind’ for the Conservative prime minister in the miners’ strike and all that followed. An earlier BBC political editor When John Cole was narrowly beaten by Peter Preston in the […]
[…] Steve, and, in publishing it, we breached the Official Secrets Act in a big way. But apart from being denounced in the House of Commons by a Conservative MP – who was among those listed – nothing happened. Evidently the British state had learned the lesson that prosecution merely makes those prosecuted the subject […]
[…] election. It is possible to detect an interfering signal during any speeches or interviews or any images of the opposition parties . The signal ceases abruptly when Conservative Party images or words come on the screen’. This is technically feasible, I believe, though no convincing evidence is available yet. The Soviet Press Digest is […]
[…] the banks another £46 million: the public finances were running out of cash. (2) At this point alarm bells rang in London and Paris. In 1875 the Conservative administration of Benjamin Disraeli used the crisis to buy the Khedive’s shares in the newly built Suez Canal. In 1876 Egypt was forced to accept a […]
