[…] of the Atlantic the professional diplomats and the rational core of the intelligence community are slowly throwing off some of the vile nonsense perpetrated in the Reagan-Bush- Thatcher years? The release of various official US documents which could easily have been withheld on national security grounds – eg on the CIA’s role in Guatemala […]
[…] and the War on Terror was, however, provided in Central America in the 1980s and early 1990s. There the United States (with the full support of the Thatcher government) engaged in two of the most brutal counter-insurgency campaigns of modern times in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as waging an illegal covert war […]
[…] and journalists. Those who read them could keep in mind a throwaway comment (1997) by Sir Percy Cradock, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee under Prime Ministers Thatcher and Major: ‘The bulk of the records of its outposts, principally JIC (Germany), JIC (Middle East) and JIC (Far East) have disappeared.’ (24) That they have […]
[…] weeks it has become clear that these difficulties are not isolated hiccups, but part of a carefully co-ordinated campaign of disruption designed to neutralise the NF while Thatcher and co. deal with Ulster and the police try to keep the lid on the simmering pot of racial tension in the inner cities.'(19) He accused […]
[…] per cent of the UK GDP. It fell back from this level over the subsequent twenty years, but its share still remained over 30 per cent. The Thatcher years saw a much more rapid decline, as large parts of British industry closed down while the financial and service sectors expanded. This process slowed down, […]
[…] Personnel from various intelligence agencies, including IRD, were in or around the so-called Wilson plots and the other psy-ops operations leading up to the election of Mrs Thatcher in 1979. If Common Cause and IRIS are also eventually shown to have also been state operations, historians of post-war British politics will have to rewrite […]
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 […]
[…] Committee for A Free Nicaragua (UK) – CFN(UK) These are two recent additions to the long list of right-wing groups which have circled their wagons round the Thatcher administration in support of the greater lunacies of the American right. CFN(UK) is screened from view by PO box number, no phone, and no personnel listed […]
[…] eddies of policies and events.’ (p. 39) ‘Instead of blessed ordinariness, therefore, from 1979 onwards HM’s subjects have been consoled with the iron sacraments of neo-liberalism, Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War, fake Americanisation, and then more recently New Labour’s successor to British Socialism, the Third Way – and a subsequent “resignation” of half the […]
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 […]
