[…] out no operation, investigation, surveillance or action against any individual otherwise than for the purposes laid down in its directive.’ The words ‘lying’ and ‘bastard’ come to mind, as they say. Gill takes a deep breath and contents himself with observing that ‘such an inquiry, to be carried out properly, would have taken many […]
‘Everything is going to change’ JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters James W. Douglass Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2008, h/b, $30.00 I am writing this immediately after Barack Obama’s victory in the US Presidential election, almost half a century after John Kennedy became the first, and thus far … Read more
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
[…] believe he ingeniously plays fast and loose with facts but because my memory of such exchanges that we had suggested to me that you had a closed mind on this issue. Baa Baa White Sheep! Simon Matthews Local government — and local politicians — generally get a bad press, some of it deserved, some […]
[…] as the Nixon people knew that the CIA knew, they (the White House) must have known that it was all going to come out. With this in mind we should perhaps not so readily accept Hougan’s assertion that the Agency couldn’t have foreseen the outcome. Indeed, we need not assume – as Hougan does […]
[…] that the root cause of all the trouble in the UK was Watergate, the CIA and a few spook-spotters and critics of the police in London. Never mind the British labour movement, the Heath government’s attack on the independence of trade unions and the roaring inflation caused by Heath’s ‘dash for growth’, it was […]
[…] were trying to raise lots of relatively small sums of money at great effort from traditional Labour networks which had no money. You have to cast your mind back to a time when Thatcherism was culturally triumphant. The wealthy middle classes, let alone the rich, were little interested in the ‘men in brown suits’ […]
[…] 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, […]
Dodgy dossiers Steven Kettell, author of Dirty politics? New Labour, British democracy and the invasion of Iraq (London: Zed Books, 2006), argues that New Labour wanted regime change in Iraq before Bush and before 9/11 and that the production of the WMD Dossier was one of the key components of a broader political strategy designed … Read more
The Robert Henderson/Tony Blair story. Having failed to persuade any section of the British political class then in power to do anything about a wrong he had suffered at the hands of the media, Robert Henderson wrote letters to the then Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair – 13 letters in all. This is Henderson’s […]
