Jane Kelsey, Pluto Press, London 1996, £14.99 Kelsey describes how a handful of bureaucrats in the New Zealand state, backed by some of the big New Zealand companies, seized control of economic policy in New Zealand and imposed on it a bizarre amalgam of the IMF restructuring programme traditionally imposed on the Third World, traditional […]
Mr Tony was a spook? Issue 7 of Larry O’Hara’s Note from the Borderland () includes a section from the Anne Machon and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early […]
With the decline of the revolutionary socialist Left the Right has turned to the anarchists for a law-and-order bogeyman – and a stick to beat the Left with. One journalist involved is Jamie Dettmer. Having worked for Tribune for a while, Dettmer migrated to the Sunday Telegraph (for whom his first article was an ‘expose’ […]
The unspeakable Martin Kettle of The Guardian is a political journalist who has been pretty close to, and supportive of, New Labour since the 1990s. His article ‘The special relationship that squandered a noble cause’ (27 May 2006) opened with this: ‘The long arc of Tony Blair’s rise and decline has been punctuated by journeys […]
[…] shamefully corrupt and racist and openly sided with capital against the working class in major industrial disputes. As Reiner tells us, the Police Federation overtly campaigned for Thatcher before the 1979 election. Then came the riots in 1981 followed by Scarman, and a forced policy of reform and change that was initially resisted by […]
Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust Ed. David Bankier New York: Enigma Books, 2006. p/b, $23 US Intelligence and the Nazis Richard Breitman et al New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p/b, £16.99 On 11 January 1943, the British intercepted ‘one of the most extraordinary messages’ of the war at Bletchley Park: it referred ‘to […]
[…] only from 1978 to 87, and for officers only, not civilians and officers, the figures were: 1978 -72 1987 -164 This doubling over the period of the Thatcher years is very interesting. For while the South and Midlands has voted Tory, Scotland has been moving leftwards throughout the Thatcher period – the Tories now […]
[…] heads Opinion Leader Research (OLR), part of the Chime Communications empire of Tim (since 1990, Lord) Bell, who served in a somewhat similar advisory capacity to Margaret Thatcher. I have yet to see any report of how much of Gould and Mattinson’s wealth has come from Labour party sources in those 20 years, or […]
[…] is to plan and command a massive revenge attack by the PLO on Israel and her allies.” May 8th 1988, Sunday Express, Massie tells us that “Mrs Thatcher has given the security services two months to crack down on IRA killer squads on the Continent … Mrs Thatcher, through her Security Coordinator, Sir Colin […]
[…] leader Neil Kinnock’s book Making Our Way, the Labour Party as an institution had grasped that the interests of the City of London were the core of Thatcher economics – Labour MPs’ constituents were unemployed because of it. You might have thought that since everybody hates the bankers, and they were getting fat in […]
