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 […]
[…] Red Brigades (b) organised the current Mafia/P2 episodes to discredit Andreotti. (New Statesman 25 Jan. 1985) Also in the New Statesman (11 Jan 1985) Duncan Campbell ( Thatcher goes for Nerve gas), using leaked documents, shows that this government is on the verge of ordering nerve gas for the British military. We have to […]
[…] much political headway after the riots of late 1985, or even significantly control the streets, illustrated the powerful physical and ideological reserves at the disposal of the Thatcher regime.(90) So, in a variety of ways, those anticipating a breakthrough by organised fascism were few and far between. The ‘coalition regime’ in the NF itself […]
Crosland lives! Managing the World Economy John Mills MacMillan, London, 2000, £42.50 (hb) John Mills argues in this book that the central problem facing any economy is that of creating and sustaining growth. This is true not only for the older developed economies of the United States and Europe, including Britain, but also for … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] secret state and its opponents and/or victims. Because there is so much information in this period, inevitably the most interesting and most detailed section is on the Thatcher years. There are no great revelations here, but there are some incidents I had forgotten about (and some I’d never heard of); and since I can’t […]
[…] 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 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 […]
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
