[…] a private security firm (who, I kid you not, codenamed Gable ‘Horse’!) and a Tory MP. The outcome was a police report which ‘was given to Mrs Thatcher at a meeting in Downing Street and to Lord Bridge, then Chairman of the Security Commission’. Murray leaves this extraordinary episode thus: What happened from that […]
[…] the less well off simply disappeared from the electoral register to avoid payment. No-one’s quite sure how many voters disappeared in this way, but Baroness Thatcher herself has been quoted as saying that the Poll Tax helped win the ropey-looking 1992 election for the Conservative party. She put the number of disappearing […]
[…] secret state and its opponents and/or victims. Because there is so much information in this period, inevitably the most interesting and most detailed section is on the Thatcher years. There are no great revelations here, but there are some incidents I had forgotten about (and some I’d never heard of); and since I can’t […]
[…] an endorsement better than that, thanks very much. And if ‘the Establishment’ was cross with ‘West’ it didn’t stop him becoming a Conservative MP; and under Margaret Thatcher, who hated dishers of dirt and secrets. So, for me, ‘West’ has always been a puzzle: a conservative (and Conservative) historian of spookery with ambiguous relations […]
[…] Red Brigades (b) organised the current Mafia/P2 episodes to discredit Andreotti. (New Statesman 25 Jan. 1985) Also in the New Statesman (11 Jan 1985) Duncan Campbell ( Thatcher goes for Nerve gas), using leaked documents, shows that this government is on the verge of ordering nerve gas for the British military. We have to […]
Crosland lives! Managing the World Economy John Mills MacMillan, London, 2000, £42.50 (hb) John Mills argues in this book that the central problem facing any economy is that of creating and sustaining growth. This is true not only for the older developed economies of the United States and Europe, including Britain, but also for … Read more
W. D. Rubinstein (Second edition, revised and updated) London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006, pp., £20 Did you know that, on his death in 2001, former Beatle, George Harrison, left the second largest fortune in the UK (£98,916,000)? If you like facts like this, you will enjoy this book, and you will be in good … Read more
[…] the right into power in much of Europe, America and Australasia. It is arguable that without the oil price hike in 1974 we would not have had Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their subsequent effects on the world. An e-mail to the Observer journalist who conducted the interview with Yamani went unanswered but I had […]
[…] much political headway after the riots of late 1985, or even significantly control the streets, illustrated the powerful physical and ideological reserves at the disposal of the Thatcher regime.(90) So, in a variety of ways, those anticipating a breakthrough by organised fascism were few and far between. The ‘coalition regime’ in the NF itself […]
[…] in explaining Soviet policy and thinking just at the point when the Soviet Union was cracking up, thus smoothing to way for the Gorbachev relationship first with Thatcher and then with the Americans. ‘Decisive’ – maybe not; but not insignificant. The cry that intelligence services are useless is a variation on the more specific […]
