[…] all ‘democratic’ polarisation, a con via ballot-box. A con so wicked that citizens of a little town of Beslen will be expected to be grateful for ‘the vote’. Never mind that in 2004, Beslen’s children, parents and teachers paid the price of barbaric, corrupt, ‘democratic’ (!) Russian policies in Chechnya. A con so contemptuous […]
[…] 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 […]
BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
[…] arm of the legislature. A similar move had been made when the Irish Republic was considering legislation against the IRA. An hour or so before the crucial vote in the Irish parliament a couple of car-bombs went off in Dublin. Although the evidence is nothing like conclusive, it seems probable that the bombs were […]
