Historical Notes on Tom Nairn and the British State

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] to achieve a rapid seizure of power in the name of the ‘National Will’, in senior ranks of the armed forces and sections of the security and intelligence services, on the Right of the Conservative Party, in business and financial circles and among sections of the media. The object seems to have been the […]

Newton on Keynes

Lobster Issue

[…] wealthy since the late 1950s.33 In the British case it was given a helping hand by elements embedded within the state, notably the military and security and intelligence agencies, reluctant to embrace the end of Empire.34 Using allies in the press, politics and higher education, these forces have fought a war for the accumulation […]

Britain’s Secret Wars: How and Why the United Kingdom sponsors conflict around the world by T. J. Coles

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] this book Coles uses the same techniques to explore…. well, not really secret wars so much as barely reported foreign policy events: military training missions, weapons sales, intelligence operations and attempts to manipulate other (relatively minor) countries in the interests of either – take your pick – multinationals or the global free trade agenda. […]

GLADIO: NATO’s dagger at the Heart of Europe; the Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis by Richard Cottrell

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] 1974 Cottrell has added the Cecil King-Lord Mountbatten meeting of 1968. (pp. 236/7) He has Sir Maurice Oldfield, a career-long SIS officer, as ‘MI5’s director of counter- intelligence and deputy controller’. He tells us (p. 240) that Peter Wright’s book ‘gave credence to Wilson’s persistent claims that he was the target of a conspiracy […]

The British state’s failed attempt to kill off the Freedom of Information Act

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] problem with US FOIA.’16 The CIA Operational Files exemption to which Mr Jones is referring was created in 1984 (appropriately, some might think) and allows the Central Intelligence Agency to withhold anything it claims is ‘operational’ without even requiring the material in question to be reviewed. ‘ the CIA has stretched the definition of […]

The Story of British Propaganda Film by Scott Anthony

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] or a seascape, engaged in propaganda? He also goes on to describe Orwell as ‘an anti-Stalinist socialist whose work has been appropriated by . . . British intelligence operatives’. The first part of this is undoubtedly true. Orwell, however, was not ‘appropriated’ by British intelligence services. He willingly cooperated with them, particularly in passing […]

Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form by Robert Guffey

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] or false is a handicap. He tells us that H. G. Wells was a member of the Round Table and spent WW2 as the head of British intelligence. Neither claim is true; and the fact that on this he cites the late Jim Keith, one of the less reliable people in this area, for […]

Apocryphylia

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] with spying on their own government at the request of the US and privately told Wilson – hence his actions and concern at the possibility of the intelligence services machinating to remove him from office. Basically, Harold was right, and (presumably with Heath) he remains the only UK prime minister spied on by his […]

Holding pattern

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] million blank ballot papers.2 This led almost inevitably to a rash of public 1 This may be a new name for the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit. About which see . The text of a request to the Met to explain the relationship between the two organisations is at 2 scepticism (given […]

The Plots Against the President, by Sally Denton

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] gone along with it in the first place. Nor is it any good to pin the blame solely on General MacArthur, for egging Hoover on with false intelligence about communist infiltration of the protests. Hoover had other and better sources of information available, but chose instead to rely on someone who drew out his […]

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