Politics and Paranoia by Robin Ramsay
Picnic Publishing, £9.99
The Labour Party, whether in government or opposition, seems to have a pathological inability to deal with the intelligence services. Either this is a fear of 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 over the past 20 years. He 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 he covers topics such as the rise of “new” Labour, the complex network of plots that targeted Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, the British American Project for the Successor Generation, the war on terror and Labour’s subservience to the bankers in the City of London.
You get some repetition as he cuts and pastes key sections and quotes for reuse. But 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 acknowledges it in a footnote.
Talk about conspiracy theories immediately gets some 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 reasonably 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, when 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. Margaret Thatcher taunts Neil 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 Labour is in power MI5 and MI6 continue to act with impunity.
Can you imagine a Labour MP now 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 naïve, at best.
Phil Chamberlain
