(Incidentally, Lobster's first online only edition comes out next month and has an extensive article by me on the construction industry blacklisting scandal.)
The Labour Party, whether in government or opposition, seems
to have a pathological inability to deal with the intelligence services.
Either this is through fear about being bitten or a sense
that the chaps really do know best and Labour should stick to stuff like the
NHS.
Politics and Paranoia is a collection of talks that Robin
Ramsay, editor of the parapolitical magazine Lobster, has given around the
country for the last 20 years.
Ramsay abides by the First Law of American politics after
Watergate: “No matter how paranoid you are, what the government is really doing
is worse than you could possibly imagine.”
In an engaging and lucid style these talks cover topics such
as the rise of New Labour, the complex network of plots that targeted Wilson
and Heath, the British American Project for the Successor Generation, mind
control research, the War on Terror and several furious dissections of Labour’s
subservience to the City.
You do get a fair amount of repetition as he cuts and pastes
key sections and quotes for reuse. Ramsay is frank about what he does and does
not know (by implication, we know even less) and he’s not edited the talks
where he’s got things wrong, but acknowledged it in a footnote.
Of course any talk about conspiracy theories immediately
gets ‘ordinary’ people rolling their eyes. Green inkers who think Roswell aliens on the
grassy knoll assassinated Kennedy’s body double to protect the Queen’s cocaine
empire.
Yet as Ramsay points out: “…even ignoring all the evidence
of large scale political conspiracies, and organisations such as intelligence
services which are conspiracies pure and simple, it is blindingly obvious, is
it not, that political parties, for example, are intrinsically conspiratorial.
Routine internal party politics is a network of interlocking cabals plotting to
get their hands on this group, committee, caucus meeting, council, party,
pressure group.”
Reading over some of these talks, where Spycatcher was still
fresh and Colin Wallace had only just been released from prison, you realise
there is an immense institutional will to forget.
A man who has evidence of dirty tricks by the intelligence
services against Labour and Liberal politicians gets framed for manslaughter. And
nothing happens.
Ramsay believes that on too many occasions the Labour Party
did not show leadership that would have kept up the media pressure.
Thatcher taunts Kinnock after one of his staff spoke to
Peter Wright’s lawyers and Kinnock dives for cover rather than ask the obvious
question about how she knew. Once in power MI5 and MI6 continue to act with
impunity.
Can you imagine a Labour MP making a maiden speech like Ken
Livingstone’s where he aired the allegations of Wallace and Fred Holroyd and
accused the sainted Airey Neave of being involved in dirty tricks?
In several of Ramsay’s talks he discusses the destabilising
of New Zealand in the 1980s
as it pursued policies not sanctioned by the US.
If Labour thinks that acquiescence to the secret state
during its time in power will protect it in the future then this book shows
that to be a naive at best.