After Iraq: some FCO/SIS issues

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

When falsehoods are bared, we have to be alert to those that will take their place as well as the ones that remain concealed.(1) At the time of writing (October 2004), the deluge of media coverage on the false justifications for the Iraq war – now understandably giving way to greater anxieties about the well-being … Read more

Phoenix: Policing the Shadows, and, Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland

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Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997) £££

[…] Special Branch, SAS and MI5. By the 1990s the British government was seeking an accommodation with Sinn Fein and counter-terror was passing out of favour. Whereas under Thatcher, the SAS (‘her boys’) had what amounted to a license to kill PIRA volunteers, under John Major the license was revoked. After 1990 the Chief Constable […]

Clippings Digest. June/July 1984

Lobster Issue 6 (1984) £££

[…] of trying to suppress chapter in OECD report on the economy which states that unemployment causes poverty. We kid you not! Guardian 16 June Material on Mrs Thatcher and her links with the Oman business and Trafalgar House removed from World in Action programme by IBA. This is the result of recent changes in […]

Ten Thirty Three: The Inside Story of Britain’s Secret Killing Machine in Northern Ireland

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Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] of Sinn Fein/IRA politicians, gunmen, bombers, supporters and sympathisers by the UDA, aided and abetted by British Military Intelligence, was known about by MI5, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and a few senior government ministers and civil servants (p. 160). There is no ‘smoking gun’ in the form of a document authorising British co-operation with […]

Our American problem

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Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

[…] anti-democratic, and keen on ‘leadership’. (Some Straussians have problems with women leaders. Norton points out how unusual Carnes Lord is among American conservatives in not admiring Margaret Thatcher. ‘On the contrary, is castigated for being too harsh, too demanding; for humiliating men.’) Again, some of this sounds almost fascist. (Almost?) For European liberals, aware […]

Changing the guard: Notes on the Round Table network and its offspring

Lobster Issue 6 (1984) £££

[…] Sir Keith Joseph’s talk of instituting a ‘patriotic’ history curriculum in secondary schools, and, arguably, the reappearance of The Round Table. All have taken place since the Thatcher Government removed exchange controls and allowed the current flood of UK capital abroad to take place. (About £60 billion has gone since 1979.) As the core […]

Listen, Marxist

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] to those tracking them over the years: ‘modernism’ must be reclaimed from the reactionary forces of the anti-technology left that was emerging from the period of the Thatcher Junta. On the streets of Britain the left was reforming. From the Battle of the Beanfield in 1983 to Twyford Down, the heroic fight against the […]

Fantasy Island

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

[…] change) and the fetish for free trade. We are, more or less, back in the late 1970s again, before the City used the economic ignorance of Mrs Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe (and North Sea oil revenues to pay the dole and police overtime) to reinstall itself in the driver’s seat. We may have no […]

Shorts

Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££

[…] Conflict of Loyalties. GCHQ 1984 – 1991 Hugh Lanning and Richard Norton-Taylor This is the first full account of one of the most controversial disputes of the Thatcher era — the removal of trade union rights at the GCHQ intelligence base in Cheltenham and the campaign for their restoration.. The authors, one a trade […]

The New European Order – judges, modernising conservatives and Tony Blair

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

[…] US to sign anti-terror co-operation deal’, Madrid, 20 September. 8 ‘Spain “secretly backed coup by sending warships”‘, The Times, 27 August, 2004 9 ‘US was told of Thatcher “coup plot”‘, The Sunday Times 29 August 2004, where there is reference to a proposed ‘carbon copy’ of the arrest of General Pinochet. However, this report […]

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