[PDF file]: […] Halifax, Foreign Secretary; Reginald Dorman-Smith, Minister of Agriculture; David Margesson, Secretary of State for War; Lord Simon, Lord Chancellor; Sir Kingsley Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Ernest Brown, Minister of Labour; William Morrison, Postmaster-General; and Lord Caldecote, Lord Chancellor.3 Among those not explicitly branded as guilty, but still retained, was Lord Reith, known for […]
[…] $2.07 at its peak in 2007). A strong pound is bad for the British manufacturing economy, making exports expensive and competing imports cheap. But Blair (and Chancellor Brown) didn’t care about manufacturing – or simply didn’t understand the impact the value of sterling had on it – or both. After all, we had the […]
[…] took office in 1974. That narrative says that Labour politicians don’t understand the economy and can’t be trusted with it. This narrative had such power over Gordon Brown and Tony Blair that they spent the period in opposition from 199497 endlessly endorsing it and promising not to challenge its perceived prescriptions. When he was […]
[PDF file]: […] the world does not include political approval or disapproval. NuLab didn’t understand this. Their initial posture towards the City was fear mixed with buttkissing. As chancellor, Gordon Brown may have famously not worn the expected dinner suit for his address at the annual meeting of the City bigwigs, but as his central policy that […]
[PDF file]: […] saying a sharp shooter in a hotel overlooking the White House could pick JFK off in the garden, and he even names a possible assassin, a Jack Brown (who he?). Had Milteer described some unique way of killing JFK and had that transpired, then his statement would have carried some weight, but it doesn’t. […]
[PDF file]: […] their peers’. (pp. 1-2) And so on. This is just so The book under review here is the latest in a series of volumes that started with Brown at 10 (2010) and continued with Cameron at 10 (2015), May at 10 (2019) and now Johnson at 10. Will the next volume have to combine […]
[PDF file]: Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics Peter Geoghegan London: Head of Zeus, 2020, £8.99 Colin Challen Ever since the birth of ‘democracy’ it has been for sale. Influence pedlars, bribery, blackmail, fraud, honours touting – these are all as common as the ballot box. A whole library has been written about these less […]
[PDF file]: […] topics such as foreign or social policy – or else they swallowed whole the current orthodoxy since they had no capacity to take an independent view. Gordon Brown fell into this latter category – Tony Blair the former. John Smith had only a rudimentary knowledge of economics, but was a little more confident on […]
[PDF file]: […] territory. I’m telling you now, if you don’t get those squaddies off the roof, none of you will be coming to the Thursday night disco in your brown boots and mufti.19 The firing duly ceased. At the City Hotel, with some tuition by Stanley Bonnett, the international press had perfected a confidential system of […]
