Labour Party PLC David Osler Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, £15.99, 2002 Colin Challen MP Having written a history of Conservative Party funding, (1) I had been wondering when somebody would get round to doing a similar job on Labour. However, Labour Party plc is more than a simple history of party financing, it seeks to show … Read more
[…] sophisticated as Horowitz should produce a confession that is so over the top. Just because the New Left now appears naive seems a fairly thin reason to vote for Reagan, who was a dummy when Ramparts was on the go, and is now a dummy with pretty advanced senile dementia. The new lesson according […]
[…] would rather we observed (in Davies’ analogy) gliding along like an elegant swan. Deference to the supposed superiority of Conservative statecraft may explain why many people still vote Tory. The Conservative claim to the state – to be the state – rests as much, if not more, on the interconnected nature of their party […]
[…] task is to co-ordinate foreign police training although day-to-day operations are carried out under the auspices of the British Council. Unlike military aid there is no separate vote for police training in the Overseas section of the budget so it is impossible to ascertain how much money is devoted to this activity other than […]
Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain … Read more
During the current farcical trial of Ali Agca a most interesting snippet appeared in the press which looks like finally seeing off the alleged ‘Bulgarian connection.’ Signor Giovanni Pandico, a jailed former member of the upper echelons of the Naples-based Camorra, claimed that it had played a part in convincing Agca to accept the role … Read more
Is the picture on the right that of the old Spycatcher himself, Peter Wright? It has been used as if it is three times, in the Sunday Times on 12 July 1987 and 16 October 1988; and more recently, the version shown, heavily cropped to illustrate Wright’s obituary in the Independent, 28 April 1995. It … Read more
Part 1 The world of ultra-right conspiracy theory is of interest to researchers into clandestinism for 3 reasons. First, because critics of research into clandestinism frequently attempt to bracket it together with ultra-right believers in The Protocols of Zion and similar fantasies.(1); secondly because the ultra-rightists, in the last decade, have been showing an interest … Read more
Ivor Crewe and Anthony King Oxford University Press, 1995, £25 Few who lived through the launch of the Social Democratic Party are likely to forget the impact of the creation of the Gang of Four in 1981. The avowed intention of the four former Cabinet ministers was to offer Britain a fresh alternative – a … Read more
Steven P. McGiffen London: Pluto, 2002, £11.99 (pb), £35 (hb) Discussion about the European Union, just like that on its forebears – the European Economic Community and the European Community – has often been short on fact and long on opinion. Dialogues of the deaf have frequently resulted, with caricature images of ‘Little Englanders’ … Read more
