Independent Publishing of Independent Views
Latest Titles
SIRS Consultancy
National Security Risks: Immediate Challenges before Summer 2012
- published on 24th November
This handbook presents policy-makers and practitioners with a final opportunity to make critical changes to optimise national security, months before the Opening Ceremony of the biggest peacetime event to take place in the UK. Comprehensive in scope, this is the first document to encompass all five official inquiries into the 7 July 2005 London Bombings. It also offers its own analysis of the Anders Breivik ‘lone wolf’ attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011 and the August 2011 England Riots. It covers all key threats, and makes many important recommendations that must be urgently addressed before Summer 2012.
Written by SIRS Consultancy. SIRS Consultancy Ltd is devoted to providing research and policy recommendations on national and international security, carrying out projects across the public and private sectors in the UK and throughout the world.
Foreword by Anthony Glees, Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at Buckingham, who is consulted widely by the media as a 'terrorism expert' to comment on the intelligence matters.
“I have found this SIRS Consultancy handbook on the National Security Risks leading up to the London 2012 Olympic Games to be extraordinarily useful. For the first time the different strands of the threats that are facing this country have been pulled together into one concise document. Having read this I now feel better prepared, better informed and much more ready to understand how threats will develop and how we might deal with them. This is an invaluable piece of work.”
Patrick Mercer, OBE, MP, Shadow Minister for Homeland Security (2003 – 2007)
"A must-read for anyone who does not want to spend hours of their lives trawling through reports and news pages to get accurate, up-to-date information on the threats the UK faces today. This concise document will help you to understand the issues and develop your plans for the future."
Chris Phillips
Head of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office (2005 – 2011)
Available now; please click on Add to Cart
ISBN 978-1-908684-02-8
This handbook presents policy-makers and practitioners with a final opportunity to make critical changes to optimise national security, months before the Opening Ceremony of the biggest peacetime event to take place in the UK. Comprehensive in scope, this is the first document to encompass all five official inquiries into the 7 July 2005 London Bombings. It also offers its own analysis of the Anders Breivik ‘lone wolf’ attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011 and the August 2011 England Riots. It covers all key threats, and makes many important recommendations that must be urgently addressed before Summer 2012.
Written by SIRS Consultancy. SIRS Consultancy Ltd is devoted to providing research and policy recommendations on national and international security, carrying out projects across the public and private sectors in the UK and throughout the world.
Foreword by Anthony Glees, Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at Buckingham, who is consulted widely by the media as a 'terrorism expert' to comment on the intelligence matters.
“I have found this SIRS Consultancy handbook on the National Security Risks leading up to the London 2012 Olympic Games to be extraordinarily useful. For the first time the different strands of the threats that are facing this country have been pulled together into one concise document. Having read this I now feel better prepared, better informed and much more ready to understand how threats will develop and how we might deal with them. This is an invaluable piece of work.”
Patrick Mercer, OBE, MP, Shadow Minister for Homeland Security (2003 – 2007)
"A must-read for anyone who does not want to spend hours of their lives trawling through reports and news pages to get accurate, up-to-date information on the threats the UK faces today. This concise document will help you to understand the issues and develop your plans for the future."
Chris Phillips
Head of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office (2005 – 2011)
Available now; please click on Add to Cart
ISBN 978-1-908684-02-8
Recently Published
Tragedy of Riches by Stephen Barber spoke on 23rd January at the University of Buckingham and signed copies of his book after his lecture.
The book describes how our single minded pursuit of prosperity has constrained politics from being a force for good. Our comfortable bubble of economic prosperity separates us from the poverty of the recent past as well as from the poorest parts of the world today. We have never been richer or more deeply immersed in materialism and consumption. And as the great response to the global financial crisis demonstrates, with its banking bail out and massive fiscal stimulus, the economic power of the Western world is profound.
Why is it then, in the rich second decade of the twenty-first century, that we do not live in some sort of advanced paradise?
ISBN 9780956395238
Recently Published
Thought Prison by Bruce G Charlton
"Beautifully written and very wise." James Delingpole
Most of us think of political correctness in terms of its scope for irony. It provides opportunity to protect us from a vaguely troubling acceptance of an enforced orthodoxy. We are familiar with the no-go areas defined by PC taboos – race, sex (or to be pc, gender), ethnicity, sexual preference, disability, class – and indeed of it being an engineered term to suit political and scientific argument. What we may be less able to accept is that PC is something in which we are all complicit.
This book examines the way we are now, and how the Western world has come to be that way. It reveals an Orwellian dystopia that instead of being characterised by a crude authoritarian elite, is supported and driven by an irrational yet equally totalitarian and all-pervasive status quo of our own making, dominating politics, economics, public administration, law, education, the military, health services – our very selves.
The book explores the ramifications of PC on language, and thus thought; its casual denial of logic and insidious reach into the realms of science and learning; its total saturation of its twin supports, the mass media and ruling elites. Once the collectively self-imposed blinkers, of good causes and good intentions, are stripped away we can see the nanny state and moral universe beyond for what it is – a catastrophic delusion that is destroying the world we know.
Bruce Charlton is Professor of Theoretical Medicine, University of Buckingham, UK and Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry, Newcastle University, UK. Prof Charlton researches widely in evolutionary psychology and psychiatry, and on the role of scientific consensus and social mechanisms in biomedical research. From 2003 to 2010 he was editor of Medical Hypotheses. He is also an editor of The Journal of Hypotheses in the Life Sciences.
ISBN 9780956395245
"I recommend the book....my general agreement and great admiration for his work." John C Wright
"I’ve just finished reading Bruce Charlton’s new book Thought Prison, the most radical attack on political correctness that I’ve yet encountered." Blogger Bonald
"Beautifully written and very wise." James Delingpole
Most of us think of political correctness in terms of its scope for irony. It provides opportunity to protect us from a vaguely troubling acceptance of an enforced orthodoxy. We are familiar with the no-go areas defined by PC taboos – race, sex (or to be pc, gender), ethnicity, sexual preference, disability, class – and indeed of it being an engineered term to suit political and scientific argument. What we may be less able to accept is that PC is something in which we are all complicit.
This book examines the way we are now, and how the Western world has come to be that way. It reveals an Orwellian dystopia that instead of being characterised by a crude authoritarian elite, is supported and driven by an irrational yet equally totalitarian and all-pervasive status quo of our own making, dominating politics, economics, public administration, law, education, the military, health services – our very selves.
The book explores the ramifications of PC on language, and thus thought; its casual denial of logic and insidious reach into the realms of science and learning; its total saturation of its twin supports, the mass media and ruling elites. Once the collectively self-imposed blinkers, of good causes and good intentions, are stripped away we can see the nanny state and moral universe beyond for what it is – a catastrophic delusion that is destroying the world we know.
Bruce Charlton is Professor of Theoretical Medicine, University of Buckingham, UK and Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry, Newcastle University, UK. Prof Charlton researches widely in evolutionary psychology and psychiatry, and on the role of scientific consensus and social mechanisms in biomedical research. From 2003 to 2010 he was editor of Medical Hypotheses. He is also an editor of The Journal of Hypotheses in the Life Sciences.
ISBN 9780956395245
"I recommend the book....my general agreement and great admiration for his work." John C Wright
"I’ve just finished reading Bruce Charlton’s new book Thought Prison, the most radical attack on political correctness that I’ve yet encountered." Blogger Bonald
Just Published
Arguments for Liberty by Jan Lester
In Arguments for Liberty, Lester emerges as the contemporary follow-up to Frederic Bastiat. As Bastiat so quotably said, “The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.” Lester picks up that ball and runs with it, to wonderful effect. What he has to say about a lot of currently hot topics—abortion, discrimination, AIDS, heroin, and several more—is bracing, always interesting, and generally, to my mind, convincing. What it convinces one of is what the liberal view implies about these things. There are plenty of illiberal people about—all supporters of government are more or less illiberal, after all—and whether it will convince them is another matter. But it is great to have the liberal view so pungently expounded on so many important topics. Professor Jan Narveson
Libertarianism has been rapidly growing since the 1970s. But it is still not commonly understood or even given a proper hearing. However, you will increasingly come across it. Often it will be state enthusiasts disingenuously claiming to be ‘libertarians’. At other times it will be state enthusiasts attacking libertarianism as an ‘extremist’ ideology. And very occasionally it will be real libertarians explaining and defending their views.
J C Lester is a philosopher and a libertarian who has been writing on the superiority of liberty over politics for thirty years. This book contains many of his shorter writings. Ranging from the popular to the philosophical, together they provide an introduction to libertarianism. The variety of topics and approaches will give the reader a good grasp of the subject.
In Arguments for Liberty, Lester emerges as the contemporary follow-up to Frederic Bastiat. As Bastiat so quotably said, “The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.” Lester picks up that ball and runs with it, to wonderful effect. What he has to say about a lot of currently hot topics—abortion, discrimination, AIDS, heroin, and several more—is bracing, always interesting, and generally, to my mind, convincing. What it convinces one of is what the liberal view implies about these things. There are plenty of illiberal people about—all supporters of government are more or less illiberal, after all—and whether it will convince them is another matter. But it is great to have the liberal view so pungently expounded on so many important topics. Professor Jan Narveson
Libertarianism has been rapidly growing since the 1970s. But it is still not commonly understood or even given a proper hearing. However, you will increasingly come across it. Often it will be state enthusiasts disingenuously claiming to be ‘libertarians’. At other times it will be state enthusiasts attacking libertarianism as an ‘extremist’ ideology. And very occasionally it will be real libertarians explaining and defending their views.
J C Lester is a philosopher and a libertarian who has been writing on the superiority of liberty over politics for thirty years. This book contains many of his shorter writings. Ranging from the popular to the philosophical, together they provide an introduction to libertarianism. The variety of topics and approaches will give the reader a good grasp of the subject.
