Fifth Column: A brief sojourn East of Suez: a last gasp for British great power status

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] sort of stability to Anbar – but we are sure it is not quite what the mild-mannered liberal and evangelical advocates of peace and reconciliation had in mind when they surged around the government for pet project funding. The illusion of Northern Ireland is that constant dialogue and alternatively talking tough and offering concessions […]

Web update

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

[…] Expose Government Corruption and Corporate Crime http://www.well.com/user/pfrankli/ Provides info on high level corruption and crime; eg Danny Casolaro case (INSLAW, PROMIS etc); Iran-Contra affair; BCCI; Panam flight 103; Savings and Loan Industry failure; CIA; NSA; FBI: government corruption during cold war, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s etc. Extensive links, including material on conspiracies, mind control, media censorship.

Rebranding SIS

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] 30 July 2000 The Punch story, in issue 117, October 2000, about Sir John Browne of BP, Prime Minister Blair and the Russian oil money comes to mind – unless the retired SIS officer that sits on BP’s board forgot to check out the latest news from Russia with his former SIS colleagues. It […]

Directory of British Political Organisations, 1994

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] of our civil libertarian position on immigration, victimless crimes, sexual freedom and tolerance, free speech and censorship, and threats to civil liberties, is hardly what comes to mind when the term ‘right-wing’ is used. Neither does the author mention that we have as many ‘links’ with libertarian socialists, anarchists, sexual minorities, other civil libertarians, […]

Marching to the fault line: The 1984 miners’ strike and the death of industrial Britain

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] industrial trade union, led by CPGB members and ex-members, opposing government policy, was more than enough. The nonsense – the communist conspiracy theory – in Mrs Thatcher’s mind was of no relevance to MI5. But it surely is relevant to this story. Beckett and Hencke give us an expanded take on the received version […]

The Westminster Whistleblowers

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

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 … Read more

Defrauding America: a pattern of related scandals

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Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

Rodney Stich Diablo Western Press, USA, 1994 The first thing to be said is that this is a huge (650 pages), fascinating book; and I recommend it. It is really three stories interwoven. The first section describes the author’s experience of trying to alert the American civil aviation industry, then the politicians and then the […]

Enduring Freedom

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Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

Global Intelligence: the World’s Secret Services Today Paul Todd and Jonathan Bloch, London and New York, Zed Books, 2003 h/back £32.95/ $55.00 p/back £9.99/ $17.50   ‘We lacked specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD program’ – Vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Stuart Cohen, December 2003 With the spectacular failure of […]

Willy Brandt: the “Good German”

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] advice which, looking back, I should not have taken. I was right to shoulder the political responsibility …… I could not have soldiered on with an easy mind.’ He was a sensitive person who placed a great deal on personal integrity and loyalty. At the moment of crisis “government officials and even Ministers, hastened […]

It’s all Jacques to me

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

I sent the following by e-mail to a number of people: ‘Thus Martin Jacques in the New Statesman: ‘For the next 30 years, neoliberalism – the belief in the market rather then the state, the individual rather than the social – exercised a hegemonic influence over British politics, with the creation of New Labour signalling … Read more

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