Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Troubles legacy bill threatens collusion inquiries

    The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill received its second reading in the House of Lords last week.  In a generally high-quality debate, perhaps the most illuminating intervention came from the former Policing Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Baroness Nuala O’Loan, who gave a stark assessment of the bill’s implications. The Bill does four very important…

  • Intelligence or operations: A key question for evaluating the CIA

    The New Yorker has a valuable long read this week, asking Has the C.I.A. Done More Harm Than Good? "Almost from its creation" author Amy Davidson Sorkin notes, "there was a sense that something about the C.I.A. was off. The split between covert action and intelligence gathering and analysis was part of it." This division…

  • IRD, MI6 and the eurocommunists

    The stream of revelations from the files of Britain’s cold war propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD), continues in the Observer today. The paper reports on how the IRD worked with MI6 in the 1970s to undermine the Italian Communist Party, in spite of the Eurocommunist trend which saw the party taking a more…

  • Labour’s Scottish gamble

    Politico has an intriguing nugget on Scotland: And while a serious revival in Scotland appears unlikely — one party official admitted only 15 seats north of the border are competitive for Labour, and that “we won’t win them all” — aides are bullish that Tory warnings about Starmer needing a backroom deal with the SNP to secure…

  • How a Labour government would deal with Northern Ireland

    With a Labour government looking increasingly likely after last week’s ‘fiscal event’, the policy announcements at this week’s party conference have taken on a new significance. Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Kyle didn’t disappoint in that respect, stating that he would set out the criteria for a referendum on Irish Unity if Labour were to…

  • MI5 and the far-right: then and now

    ITV is running a new thriller next month based on the life of Matthew Collins, a former far-right activist who now works for the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate. Today's Guardian interview with Collins reveals that he ran four spies inside the BNP's Belfast office, three of them English. There's also this nugget: His work…

  • Northern Ireland census shows Catholics out-number Protestants for the first time

    The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency has today released the results of the 2021 census. As widely anticipated, it shows for the first time that Northern Ireland has more Catholics (45.7%) than Protestants (43.48%) (See update below). This is inevitably a historic moment given that Northern Ireland was founded on the basis of a…

  • Greeks turn to MI5 after bugging scandal

    The Greek government has enlisted a former senior MI5 officer to reform its intelligence services, the daily Kathemirini reported earlier this month. The government has reportedly opted for a British model to restructure Greece’s National Intelligence Service (EYP) in an optimal and effective way.  The changes are being initiated in the wake of the tapping…

  • Intelligence and the Arms to Africa Affair

    The National Archives move towards a 20-year-rule mean that many records from the early New Labour years are now available.  That includes episodes like the 1998 Arms to Africa Affair when a British mercenary outfit, Tim Spicer's Sandline International, sent arms to Sierra Leone in defiance of a UN arms embargo.

  • New Foreign Office Advisor called for trade border between Ireland and the EU

    When Liz Truss’s press secretary was asked for a list of the new Prime Minister’s advisors earlier this month, journalists were told that ‘you can refer to the Guido Fawkes website.’ So we must take take Guido as authoritative when it reports tonight that ‘Victoria Hewson is leaving the IEA to join the Foreign Office…

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