[…] at all costs any possibility of hitting a police officer with the predictable and very costly consequences for the Libyan regime and economy? And why did the Thatcher government allow the 22 employees of the embassy to leave the country without hindrance? Hints from Ministers The then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, was so unhappy […]
[…] it clear that the giant firms he has been put in control of must be made to “balance their books”. The implication, forcefully promoted by the ‘monetarist’ Thatcher, is that the nationalised industries don’t work and privatisation is necessary. But, as we have seen, a massive rationalisation movement has been going throughout the capitalist […]
[…] ten pages of it; and he later confirmed, to the Times Diary, that he had got the idea from MI5. Presumably it is this section that Mrs Thatcher finds so interesting. During the House of Commons debate on the Official Secrets Bill on 15 February 1989, Norman Buchan MP mocked the Prime Minister for […]
[…] former managing director of Goldman Sachs, as a special adviser at 10 Downing Street.(1) She has been brought in to advise Brown on welfare reform! If the Thatcher government had appointed someone like her to such a position, Labour MPs would have been outraged. Today, barely a murmur. There were some protests about the […]
[…] was a sign that Atlanticism in the UK was now bipartisan. After 1979 the two major political parties had gone separate ways on the special relationship: under Thatcher the Tories had drawn closer to the USA than they had been under Heath; while Labour under Foot and Kinnock had adopted a stance critical of […]
[…] and the US, far from being ‘Finlandized’ or GDR-ized, far from drifting slowly into the Soviet orbit, saw the beginning of the right-wing moves which now see Thatcher, Kohl and Reagan in power. To this mere book-reading outsider one of the odder features of the great ‘mole hunt’ has been the contrast between the […]
[…] began in 1983 there seemed every point in collecting and publishing every available scrap of information on the British security and intelligence services: we had Reagan and Thatcher, a resurgent British imperialism on the coat-tails of America, and a repressive, authoritarian regime at home. Publicising what the British state most wanted kept in the […]
[…] to jail after she leaked confidential documents to The Guardian. Many at the time – the height of the renewed Cold War under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – thought the editor of The Guardian would resign, a course of action over failure in civic duty his newspaper’s leading articles have frequently urged on […]
[…] the women’s movement as evidenced at Greenham Common, much more dangerously so. The Iran Contra documents make clear that the first Reagan administration was seriously afraid that Thatcher, and even Kohl, might not be re-elected. This was a prospect not to be contemplated if their successful opponents were not to conform to traditional NATO […]
[…] beyond him as an individual and will indicate the circles within which he moves, circles which overlap with, and are integrated into, the British State. Introduction When Thatcher was first elected to office in 1979, unemployment was already rising fast and the Labour Party leadership (Callaghan and Healey in particular) had, in practical terms, […]
