Neil Cooper I. B. Tauris, London, 1997, £39.50 This is an analysis of the arms business in the UK, chiefly about the MOD’s procurement system. Not a subject I knew much about, I approached the book expecting little. Discovering it had begun as a PhD reduced my expectations even further. In fact it is a … Read more
[…] Frank Portnoy, Fiasco: blood in the water on Wall Street (London: Profile Books, 1997) On the wider British issues, the connections between the current situation and the Thatcher years’ obsession with the market and the City, see Peter Wilby, ‘All of us live by the logic of finance’ at . Dan Hind’s ‘Jump You […]
[…] and not by military and industrial power (neither of which Britain has any more). Newsinger’s thesis about the psycho-political uses to which the SAS was put under Thatcher, is undoubtedly correct, it’s just that he has underplayed the extent to which it was built on an older theme in our society. That quibble aside, […]
[…] Since 1997 house prices have tripled and private debt topped a trillion pounds in July. (5) Thatcherism continued Brown-Balls have simply continued the economic policies of the Thatcher government. Like them they have no exchange rate policy: get inflation under control, they believe, and everything else will follow. Indeed, Brown has warned of the […]
[…] electoral reform, none of which came to fruition. etc. At the other end of the spectrum Blair was anxious to be seen to take advice from Margaret Thatcher in the early years of his premiership. No such involvement was offered to previous senior Labour Party figures. The point is tellingly made that Blair is […]
[…] Larkin thinks that the ‘collusion’ can be traced back to the ‘quiet coup’ run in the UK in the 1970s which led to the election of Mrs Thatcher. This chapter, the one which he has written from other published sources, without the kind of detailed research he conducted in Northern Ireland, is the weakest […]
[…] based on the Wills family tobacco fortune.(3) Grant-seekers must apply to a panel of high-powered Conservatives. Trustees listed for 1994 include Lord Carrington, Foreign Secretary under Mrs Thatcher and currently Chair of the Bilderberg organisation; Lord Gowrie, former arts minister and chair of the Arts Council; and John Kemp-Wallace, former chair of the Stock […]
[…] under an NF regime would ‘find themselves in police cells so quickly they won’t know what hit them’ — closing off space to the Left just as Thatcher had drawn off support from the Right. (27) In this period there were allegations of collusion with the repressive apparatus of the state, centred around Martin […]
[…] may turn out to be more interesting than it first appears. And let’s hope that McCoy, now living in Australia, is working on that material . RR Thatcher and Friends: The Anatomy of the Tory Party Ian Ross (London 1983) This might have been a very good book, but inclusion in Pluto’s ‘Arguments for […]
Mr Tony was a spook? Issue 7 of Larry O’Hara’s Note from the Borderland () includes a section from the Anne Machon and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early […]
