The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 1 The police were a vital arm of the British state in the Eighties as bloody battles were fought against criminals, football hooligans and trade unionists. Mrs Thatcher needed the police to take on the miners. She was, and is, an icon to Tories like myself. It pains me to write this, but we […]

Misleading Parliament – a case to answer

Lobster Issue 86 (2023) FREE

See also: Misleading Parliament – Appendices

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[PDF file]: […] victims of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and their families show that in 1989 the then Secretary of State for Defence, Tom King, and the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, misled Parliament by not only suppressing the conclusions of an internal MoD inquiry, but also by replacing that inquiry with a new one which had much […]

The miners and the secret state

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Mineworkers, but it was directed by a triumvirate who had declared that they were using the strike to try to bring down the elected government of Margaret Thatcher and it was actively supported by the Communist party. What was it legitimate for us to do about that? We quickly decided that the 2 How […]

The Two Goulds

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] some domestic capital wanted to destroy unions, not work with them. Consequently, for both parties what became known as corporatism or the producers’ alliance proved difficult.1 Mrs Thatcher briskly resolved these difficulties by declaring trade unions ‘the enemy within’, abandoning the domestic economy, and giving the financial/overseas sector what it wanted in the 1980 […]

The View from the Bridge (updated 20 Sep 2022)

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] this warmed-over Thatcherism will work? My guess is that they do; that they have spent too long in a free marketeer intellectual ghetto to understand even the Thatcher years. They have failed to grasp that Thatcherism didn’t work on its own terms: it did not ‘cure’ inflation3 and did not produce more economic growth […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] of our problems arise from the rubbish in the minds of politicians. How were the ‘knowledge economy’ or financial services ever going to replace the industrial base destroyed by the Thatcher years? A quick squint at the Wiki entry on the Alliance for Progress which JFK instituted gives a flavour of this: . 70 30

The British Right – scratching the surface

Lobster Issue 12 (1986) £££
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[PDF file]: […] for the first time, why British firms continued giving the organisation tens of thousands of pounds a year. But surely, if we have learned anything from the Thatcher era it is that we should not underestimate the ‘blimps’ in this society; nor, perhaps, should we readily accept the idea of inevitable left-wards ‘progress’ built […]

Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power by David McKnight

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] give Murdoch a seat at the table of national politics in three English-speaking nations’. In Britain, the focus has always been on Murdoch’s close relationship first with Thatcher and then with Blair and Brown. What McKnight brings out is the extent to which it is the United States that is the real object of […]

Britain alone The Path from Suez to Brexit by Philip Stephens

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] political giants, and both are surely due a reappraisal. After joining in 1973, UK opposition to the Common Market/EU had become the default position by the time Thatcher made her Bruges speech in 1988. This was despite the lack of US support over the Falkland Islands in 1982. Blair broadly followed Thatcher’s line, agreeing […]

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