[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] British state and Thatcherism in 1984/5 and lost. (Beckett suggests that the CPGB leadership did not want this show-down.) After 1974 and the Saltley depot event, the Conservative Party and the British state prepared not to be defeated ever again: the miners and the British Left in general did nothing. Like other generals before […]
‘I know nothing about it. I don’t want to say I didn’t at the time, but today I have no knowledge of it.’ Former US Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara on the attack on USS Liberty. ‘As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy four years earlier, the official version [of the attack on … Read more
[…] received. All aspects of running a railway have become far more expensive…’ Why should this be? First, of course, privatisation itself was a costly exercise. At a conservative estimate, the total cost of the process, including the amounts paid out by bidders, was reported to be at least £1bn. For the taxpayer, the direct […]
