[…] to Beckett and Hencke, in the late 1980s Nigel Lawson could never understand why Tony Blair was a member of the Labour Party rather than of the Conservative Party. This question subsequently occurred to a growing number of Labour Party members and the answer they came up with saw tens of thousands of them […]
[…] International Red Cross campaign against landmines. What would normally have been a strictly humanitarian gesture was given a political dimension by the fact that John Major’s rapidly-deflating Conservative government had stalled repeatedly on banning landmines, whereas Labour was promising a foreign policy with ‘an ethical dimension’. Declassified US diplomatic cables record that ‘Government officials […]
[…] pay to guarantee assured outcomes to his backers: active members, after all, can rock the boat carrying the big donor cheques which keep New Labour afloat. The Conservative party is no better placed and it is difficult to see how they would want to change the direction of foreign policy anyway. Whatever Hutton concludes, […]
Oliver Kamm London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2005, h/b, £13.99 Kamms’ Anti-totalitarianism was published in the same week and possibly on the same day as the Henry Jackson Society announced itself to the world. So this is a kind of manifesto for that group. (1 ) It’s a nice try, in a way, this … Read more
[…] made public.’ You can’t buy an endorsement better than that, thanks very much. And if ‘the Establishment’ was cross with ‘West’ it didn’t stop him becoming a Conservative MP; and under Margaret Thatcher, who hated dishers of dirt and secrets. So, for me, ‘West’ has always been a puzzle: a conservative (and Conservative) historian […]
[…] The author’s account also shows a Labour Party dimly aware of all this, making the occasional half-hearted stab at reining in ASIO, which the agency and its conservative allies easily outflanked or overturned. Cain’s account has the familiar virtues and the faults of academic writing on these subjects. On the plus side it is […]
[…] saga certainly played its part in creating the impression that Labour could not be trusted to run the economy competently, a view frequently promoted thereafter by the Conservative Party and then, in the 1990s, by ‘new’ Labour. The criticisms from the right were reinforced from the left by arguments that Wilson, his Chancellor Jim […]
[…] of Labour MPs could effectively bring down the government. For some years past the arguments for a realignment had been taken seriously by a section of the Conservative Party who had been close to MacMillan. Since 1973, Reg Prentice had taken a lone path, one which would eventually take him out of the Labour […]
[…] MI6.’ Not mentioned by Crozier: G.K. Young, Airey Neave ….. In the 1970s and 80s Crozier claims to have run, inter alia: Peter Shipley (last seen at Conservative Party Central Office); Douglas Eden of the Social Democratic Alliance; Dr Julian Lewis (last seen at Conservative Party Central Office); Tony Kerpel (last seen listed as […]
The CIA In a recent ‘Witness Seminar’ on the 1975 British referendum on entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), the Conservative MP, Sir Richard Body, who in 1975 was co-chair of the anti-EEC National Referendum Campaign, had this to say: ‘At the very beginning of the campaign two CIA agents came to see […]
