Last week a new leader of the British Labour Party was chosen. Already the chimes can be heard from the belfries of thousands of Labour parishes, with coronation eulogies published in the journals of political dissent. The abdication of the Miliband dynasty would seem to herald the end of New Labour’s reign of terror begun when Thatcher acolyte, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair kissed hands in 1997.
Following on from last week's show I look at how the intelligence services who were causing mayhem in Northern Ireland were protected by a culture of institutional secrecy in the British government. Via a little-known government file that was declassified in 2009 I tell the story of government policy on avowing the existence of the security services.
There’s something truly disturbing about the fact that British prime minister David Cameron’s efforts to decide how the media refer to Islamic State are being taken seriously. So seriously, in fact, that 120 MPs have backed the idea that the BBC should not use the name Islamic State and refer to the group by the Arabic acronym “Daesh” instead. Cameron’s argument is that Islamic State is neither Islamic nor a state.
Consider the under-represented majorities in the United States, in the world for that matter, and pretty soon you’re going to come across the most ignored majority of them all. Sure, they’ve been getting a lot of broadcast media time these days, but that’s simply a way to placate their aspirations with shiny objects while the real power remains where it always has been. Having television shows named after them and hiring many as roaming extras is one thing, but what’s been missing is real power. Political power. It’s time to rectify this egregious deliberate oversight.
It’s very reassuring that more people are slowly learning how our monetary system really works: if you want to fix something, you need to know a bit about it. The indefatigable Ellen Brown has been hugely helpful in this regard with her regular well-informed and easy-to-read articles that relentlessly confront the myths of capitalist monetary theory.
Britain is now a zombie country – not so much a country of zombies, but a zombie itself. A zombie is a dead thing that doesn’t know it’s dead, but which is still capable of being controlled by evil wizards to wreak havoc. You can’t rescue zombies because you can’t bring dead things back to life; you can only render their controllers harmless, let the corpse finally rest in peace, and then begin again by creating new life, starting from scratch. And that’s exactly what we’ve got to do: start again, from scratch.
On the 21st January the UK’s Channel 4 news had a discussion about the fact that the long-awaited Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the illegal war in Iraq will not be released until after the general election in March. On the 29th January a sizeable group of demonstrators protested outside the Houses of Parliament against the continuing suppression of the Chilcot Report — now five years late. Whilst this story was covered on Russia Today, not a single mention of it was made on the BBC’s six o’ clock news.
teleSUR | November 22, 2014 Two British newspaper bosses claim that national security services prevented them from publishing allegations of a government pedophile ring in the 1980s on the grounds that it was intelligence that might damage national security. The executives were issued with the D-notices in 1984, when they were due to print damning details […]
Centuries ago, explorers, and economically charged navigators, firmly put to rout the idea of a “flat” world. Today, rather than equalizing development’s inborn global disparity, and rather than leveling the economic playing field, globalization has ushered into existence tremendous instances of developmental corrosion—especially among poorer states. Richer nations, and their ruling plutocracies, have grown incredibly wealthy as a direct result.
Last night a film critic friend invited me to see a new movie being released Friday, Pride. It's a dramatization of a true story set in Thatcherite England (1984), during an historic year long coal mining strike. The movie is spectacular and is a celebration of a bond between humans in the face of cold, ugly corporate power being enforced by right-wing government. The film is set as a piece the brings together politically conscious London gays and Welsh miners.
