[…] this resulted in a temporary halt in the US signals intelligence flow to the UK. Heath was defeated two years later in a leadership contest by Margaret Thatcher, whom the Americans had been cultivating and promoting since 1967 as a potential leader of the Conservative Party. This may have been pay-back for Heath daring […]
Jane Kelsey, Pluto Press, London 1996, £14.99 Kelsey describes how a handful of bureaucrats in the New Zealand state, backed by some of the big New Zealand companies, seized control of economic policy in New Zealand and imposed on it a bizarre amalgam of the IMF restructuring programme traditionally imposed on the Third World, traditional […]
From Thatcher to the Third Way: think-tanks, intellectuals and the Blair project Robert Carl Blank Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-89821-277-7 This illustrates the hazards of Amazon’s ‘search inside the book’ feature: I read an interesting couple of pages of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money. This is […]
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 […]
[…] community which was threatened by immigration. GKY’s aims But who was he trying to impress? The ‘correspondents’ themselves, the party leaders or both? Or the ‘anti- Thatcher’ element in the party? He claimed that pro-Heath elements wanted to stage a comeback through the constituencies. GKY did not want people to join the National […]
[…] at a press conference in the House of Commons in 1986 were not interested and, while we thought we had a story which might bring down the Thatcher government if taken seriously, not a word appeared in print in the following months. Figuring that my part in the story was over, that the major […]
[…] Madrid he was appointed permanent secretary to the European Community in 1978 during Roy Jenkins’ presidency and then ran the Foreign Office news operation during the middle Thatcher years. John Major made him press secretary at No 10 and then Blair sent him to Washington in 1997. Diplomat and upmarket spin merchant Meyer, who […]
[…] Mother, after all. Before he died, Andrew Boyle, whose book finally exposing Blunt came soon after her election in 1979, expressed to me his opinion that Margaret Thatcher had withdrawn Blunt’s immunity from publicity rather than let him successfully sue Boyle for libel, only to have the truth emerge when Blunt died of old […]
[…] shamefully corrupt and racist and openly sided with capital against the working class in major industrial disputes. As Reiner tells us, the Police Federation overtly campaigned for Thatcher before the 1979 election. Then came the riots in 1981 followed by Scarman, and a forced policy of reform and change that was initially resisted by […]
[…] first sign of recession the MPC behaved just like any demand management ‘Keynesian’ politician of the type that was supposed to have been made extinct in the Thatcher years with one huge difference: before Mrs Thatcher the government would have used public, state spending to create demand in the domestic economy; the MPC […]
