[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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
[…] (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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] by Assistant Secretary Will Clayton, a liberal in the Hullian tradition. Morgenthau left the Treasury and the post of Secretary was taken by Fred Vinson, a fiscally conservative mid-Western machine politician. White’s influence began to diminish (after the end of the war he came under suspicion of being a Soviet agent).(35) Power shift 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 […]
The debate about whether the British should have a military presence East of Suez seemed to have been settled under the Wilson-Callaghan Government in the 1960s and 1970s. The process of withdrawal started with the independence of India and Pakistan (widely celebrated in the UK media recently on its sixtieth anniversary), was confirmed by the […]
