Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] eddies of policies and events.’ (p. 39) ‘Instead of blessed ordinariness, therefore, from 1979 onwards HM’s subjects have been consoled with the iron sacraments of neo-liberalism, Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War, fake Americanisation, and then more recently New Labour’s successor to British Socialism, the Third Way – and a subsequent “resignation” of half the […]

Britain’s Secret Propaganda War

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Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

[…] Personnel from various intelligence agencies, including IRD, were in or around the so-called Wilson plots and the other psy-ops operations leading up to the election of Mrs Thatcher in 1979. If Common Cause and IRIS are also eventually shown to have also been state operations, historians of post-war British politics will have to rewrite […]

The meaning of the 2009 Budget

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] per cent of the UK GDP. It fell back from this level over the subsequent twenty years, but its share still remained over 30 per cent. The Thatcher years saw a much more rapid decline, as large parts of British industry closed down while the financial and service sectors expanded. This process slowed down, […]

Fifth Column: A brief sojourn East of Suez: a last gasp for British great power status

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

The debate about whether the British should have a military presence East of Suez seemed to have been settled under the Wilson-Callaghan Government in the 1960s and 1970s. The process of withdrawal started with the independence of India and Pakistan (widely celebrated in the UK media recently on its sixtieth anniversary), was confirmed by the […]

How many divisions does the Pope have?

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] of Nations for many years. It would not be until the advent of the current Pope, John Paul II, and the coming to power of Reagan and Thatcher, that the concerted roll-back of communism was pursued in much the way that the Intermarium exiles, Peron, Skorzeny, Durcansky, Pavelic, Horthy etc. would have wished. Goni […]

The Labour Finance and Industry Group: a memoir

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] to roost. Blair’s revolution was a genuinely new departure because it faced the electorate with the brutal reality that power is all – a fact intimated by Thatcher but never taken to the same extent of offensive war overseas, restriction of ancient liberties and refusal to brook alternative foci of power. On the other […]

Churchill and Secret Service

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Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

[…] by appeasement, to confiscate the Second World War and make it their own. This process has continued down to the present day with the likes of Margaret Thatcher, who, having singularly failed to contribute to the war effort at the time, nevertheless subsequently adopted an ersatz Churchillian guise for political advantage. Martin Gilbert’s massive […]

The Westminster Whistleblowers

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

The Westminster Whistleblowers: Shirley Porter, homes for votes and twenty years of scandal in Britain’s rottenest borough Paul Dimoldenberg London: Politicos, 2006, £12.99, p/b   The author was a Labour councillor in Westminster during Porter’s ‘reign of terror’ and was instrumental in eventually bringing her down. With an insider’s view he has written an immensely […]

The Enemy Within (Whitehall)

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] first was the reports in March and April that the Treasury was beginning to question the workings of Britain’s financial system – after the non-regulation of the Thatcher period. The second was the report by Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian (9 February, 1994) that the government was actually reviewing the activities – i.e. the […]

It’s all Jacques to me

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] end of ideology (ideology): Fukuyama-Huntington-Friedman, one could also add Charles Murray, greatly marketed by the new right. The New Labour set seemed attracted by how the ‘ Thatcher think tanks’ had done so well, but I wonder how much they knew here, the extent of the influence of the Heritage Foundation, how this tied […]

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