[…] 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 […]
[…] never joined any of the groups Larry O’Hara deals with but has attended their meetings, reads their publications, once nearly joined, and describes himself as a Libertarian Conservative Nationalist, (sic!) I read his article with interested. I noticed a few errors. On page 15 he describes Lesley Wooler as a member of the 62 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 37, 1982, an article called ‘Victory for Strauss’. The Langemann papers 8th November 1979 Protected source contributions to state security. Personal for the state minister only”The militant conservative London publicist, Brian Crozier, Director of the famous Institute for the Study of Conflict up to September 1979, has been working with his diverse circle of […]
[…] a number of consultation papers and statements covering encryption and electronic commerce in recent years, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) taking the lead role.(9) Both Conservative and Labour governments, in their 1997 and 1998 papers, proposed some form of key escrow system, in which a user’s private encryption key is held by […]
[…] classical Marxist) explanation of the growth of interest on the British Left in things spooky and conspiratorial. He suggests ‘the timing of this is not fortuitous: ….the Conservative Victories in 1979 and 1983, the defeat of the miners in 1985 (in which the security services played an intelligence gathering role)….. the collapse of cherished […]
[…] appeared in 1991. This is easily the most interesting and informative book on the Thatcher years to have appeared so far. Ranelagh was a member of the Conservative Research Department (CRD) between 1975-79 — a member of the internal opposition to Mrs Thatcher while ‘Thatcherism’ was being cobbled together by group around her. The […]
[…] (3) Porter seems to be unaware of the literature concerning the role of what has been called the ‘core institutional nexus’. So he can argue that the Conservative Party’s right turn in the 1970s was a function of disappearing paternalism, a product in turn of decolonisation. This very sweeping post hoc ergo propter hoc […]
[…] diverse expressions of sexuality; styles of dress and appearance; life style attributes such as drug-taking or nomadic travelling; personally held philosophies and political positions; and even more conservative views such as an insistence on the use of cash rather than cheques or credit (10). All of these things militate against order in the strictest […]
