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 […]
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 […]
‘Britain, 2005. Saddam Hussein, still the ruler of Iraq and possessor of a long-range nuclear missile, seeks revenge on the west. Warned by intelligence reports of Saddam’s plan, the United States deploys a space-based missile shield, which will catch the Iraqi rocket before it gets to Washington. The key installation is based in Yorkshire — … Read more
[…] the week before had revealed that 23 countries had experienced serious civil unrest in the previous year as a result of implementing IMF policies. In retrospect, the Thatcher economic programme of 1980-83, riots and all, was the standard IMF ‘structural adjustments’. 18 Will Hutton, ‘Log cabin to White House? Not any more’ in The […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland in the killing of Catholics. The programme — which I don’t remember — apparently claimed that the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement between the Thatcher Government and that of the Irish Republic convinced significant sections of the Ulster Protestant community that they were going to be sold down the river. This […]
W. D. Rubinstein (Second edition, revised and updated) London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006, pp., £20 Did you know that, on his death in 2001, former Beatle, George Harrison, left the second largest fortune in the UK (£98,916,000)? If you like facts like this, you will enjoy this book, and you will be in good … Read more
[…] with, she tells us, through her ‘employment law work’. This is a complete travesty. The strike was deliberately provoked by Murdoch, with the full support of the Thatcher government, in order to deny the workers their redundancy payments. She must have known this at the time through, as she puts it, her ‘employment law […]
[…] a private security firm (who, I kid you not, codenamed Gable ‘Horse’!) and a Tory MP. The outcome was a police report which ‘was given to Mrs Thatcher at a meeting in Downing Street and to Lord Bridge, then Chairman of the Security Commission’. Murray leaves this extraordinary episode thus: What happened from that […]
One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. … Read more
