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 […]
[…] kind of minor explosion of interest in parapolitics in the United States. And not before time. The interest in conspiracies is simply reality breaking through. The Reagan- Thatcher years saw unprecedented expansions of unregulated intelligence and military agencies, and breathtaking multi-billion rip-offs (most obviously, in the U.S., the S and L scam; in the […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] big business, increasingly at odds with the left-wing of his party. He is pro MX, pro Israel, pro uranium mining and a promoter of economic policies which Thatcher would endorse. He is also immensely popular, but recently support has begun to slide and the election victory wasn’t as decisive as he wanted. “He has […]
[…] the right into power in much of Europe, America and Australasia. It is arguable that without the oil price hike in 1974 we would not have had Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their subsequent effects on the world. An e-mail to the Observer journalist who conducted the interview with Yamani went unanswered but I had […]
[…] this fuss about the police woman who was shot outside the Libyan embassy? We should not shed any tears over the death of an agent of the Thatcher regime.’ (50) His views weren’t universally shared, and by October 1985 an Organisers’ Bulletin was urging members to ‘make an effort to be pleasant to PCs […]
[…] to protect the security of the state as the political comfort of ministers.’ (Times 27 August) Story, already printed, due for Times (of 23 August) claiming Mrs Thatcher present at Naval HQ when Belgrano was sunk, was withdrawn at last minute by editor, apparently after conversation with Rupert Murdoch. (Guardian 4 October) Book about […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] America attacked the Round Table’s various front organisations in the late 1940s, thinking they were attacking the ‘international communist conspiracy’. (22) More recently both Nixon and Mrs Thatcher have explicitly set themselves up as the enemies of the foreign policy ‘establishment’ without ever showing the slightest signs of understanding who it is they are […]
[…] withdrawal from Ireland and pointed out that the possibility of a united Ireland joining NATO was the option most frequently discussed at the meeting between Haughey & Thatcher, in December 1980. The author of the article was Kenneth Whitaker, former governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, and Secretary of the Irish Department of […]
