[…] by the late Sir Fitzroy Maclean…… managing director, Christopher James…..Baroness Smith joins Sir Brian Cubbon, a former top civil servant, Lord Laing of Dunphail, Treasurer of the Conservative Party towards the end of the Thatcher period…Earl Jellicoe….Sir Peter Cazalet, director of the P and O Group, former BP Chairman…and Sir Peter Holmes, one-time managing […]
Ivan Molloy London: Pluto Press, 2001, £18.99/£55 In the 1980s the resurgent US military and neo-conservatives were in a bind: faced with a variety of challenges to the American economic empire, the enormous military power they possessed was constrained by PR considerations; American parents who didn’t want their children dying abroad (the so-called ‘Vietnam … Read more
[…] USA. EXTRA! Extra! is the magazine of FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, one of the handful of left-wing magazines in the US trying to stem the conservative tide. It is exclusively concerned with US events and rarely means much to UK readers who have not seen the media to which it refers. However […]
[…] the exposure of the lies and illusions within the carefully balanced society that has emerged over the last three hundred years as much as any traditionalist or conservative. And yet things are palpably beginning to fail. The US has a constitution that still permits lurches of adjustment to changed conditions – we think of […]
Since issue 45, last June, there has been so much information produced on the events preceding the assault on Iraq it is impossible to keep track of it all. Here is my selection. For the powers-that-be, the war has been traumatic, not least because their various cover stories and deceptions have been exposed so rapidly, … Read more
[…] minister, and particularly his more socialist colleagues, influenced by their wartime encounters with MI5 officers, suspected the service’s activities were uncontrolled. MI5, they complained, was a secret conservative group with a historic mission to destabilise the Left.(1) Their fear of surveillance by the secret police required that MI5’s new director should not be hostile […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] there will be a base left in the country for Labour and its two hundred thousand members when this era is over. Notes Similar problems at the Conservative Party show a general bankruptcy, possibly actual as well as figurative, if a grip is not acquired soon, of a system that, far from being new […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] to Stephen Marshall’s important but flawed book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, she’s just another ‘fallen liberal’ who either provides ineffective and impotent criticism of the present neo- conservative order or actually feeds it. It’s because of the essential truth in much of what Marshall says about former Left renegades in his book, that I […]
