Fifth Column: A brief sojourn East of Suez: a last gasp for British great power status

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

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 […]

It’s all Jacques to me

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] end of ideology (ideology): Fukuyama-Huntington-Friedman, one could also add Charles Murray, greatly marketed by the new right. The New Labour set seemed attracted by how the ‘ Thatcher think tanks’ had done so well, but I wonder how much they knew here, the extent of the influence of the Heritage Foundation, how this tied […]

The Westminster Whistleblowers

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

The Westminster Whistleblowers: Shirley Porter, homes for votes and twenty years of scandal in Britain’s rottenest borough Paul Dimoldenberg London: Politicos, 2006, £12.99, p/b   The author was a Labour councillor in Westminster during Porter’s ‘reign of terror’ and was instrumental in eventually bringing her down. With an insider’s view he has written an immensely […]

Churchill and Secret Service

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Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] by appeasement, to confiscate the Second World War and make it their own. This process has continued down to the present day with the likes of Margaret Thatcher, who, having singularly failed to contribute to the war effort at the time, nevertheless subsequently adopted an ersatz Churchillian guise for political advantage. Martin Gilbert’s massive […]

How many divisions does the Pope have?

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] of Nations for many years. It would not be until the advent of the current Pope, John Paul II, and the coming to power of Reagan and Thatcher, that the concerted roll-back of communism was pursued in much the way that the Intermarium exiles, Peron, Skorzeny, Durcansky, Pavelic, Horthy etc. would have wished. Goni […]

The Labour Finance and Industry Group: a memoir

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

[…] to roost. Blair’s revolution was a genuinely new departure because it faced the electorate with the brutal reality that power is all – a fact intimated by Thatcher but never taken to the same extent of offensive war overseas, restriction of ancient liberties and refusal to brook alternative foci of power. On the other […]

At Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain’s Intelligence Agency, MI6

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] 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 of spookery with ambiguous relations […]

The Enemy Within (Whitehall)

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] first was the reports in March and April that the Treasury was beginning to question the workings of Britain’s financial system – after the non-regulation of the Thatcher period. The second was the report by Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian (9 February, 1994) that the government was actually reviewing the activities – i.e. the […]

The Blairs and their Court

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Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] understand the shift to the right in British politics we have to look to the shift in the balance of class forces in British society accomplished by Thatcher and consolidated by Blair. The rich and powerful have more influence in British society and over British politics today than at any time since the end […]

Groupings on the British Right

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

Media Monitoring Unit This looks like another case of the British Right imitating its American counter-parts, in this case AIM (Accuracy in Media – analysed in great detail in Covert Action Information Bulletin No 21, available from PO Box 50272 Washington DC 20004 $3.00). The main people behind MMU appear to be Julian Lewis and […]

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