[…] to those tracking them over the years: ‘modernism’ must be reclaimed from the reactionary forces of the anti-technology left that was emerging from the period of the Thatcher Junta. On the streets of Britain the left was reforming. From the Battle of the Beanfield in 1983 to Twyford Down, the heroic fight against the […]
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
[…] Conflict of Loyalties. GCHQ 1984 – 1991 Hugh Lanning and Richard Norton-Taylor This is the first full account of one of the most controversial disputes of the Thatcher era — the removal of trade union rights at the GCHQ intelligence base in Cheltenham and the campaign for their restoration.. The authors, one a trade […]
[…] US to sign anti-terror co-operation deal’, Madrid, 20 September. 8 ‘Spain “secretly backed coup by sending warships”‘, The Times, 27 August, 2004 9 ‘US was told of Thatcher “coup plot”‘, The Sunday Times 29 August 2004, where there is reference to a proposed ‘carbon copy’ of the arrest of General Pinochet. However, this report […]
[…] and the US, far from being ‘Finlandized’ or GDR-ized, far from drifting slowly into the Soviet orbit, saw the beginning of the right-wing moves which now see Thatcher, Kohl and Reagan in power. To this mere book-reading outsider one of the odder features of the great ‘mole hunt’ has been the contrast between the […]
[…] during the Wilson premierships and that it was officially cleared of plotting in Parliamentary statements made by two Prime Ministers – James Callaghan in 1977 and Margaret Thatcher in 1987. But in fact the accusations, first made by Wilson himself and published in The Pencourt File, (1) nearly ten years before the appearance of […]
One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. … Read more
[…] with, she tells us, through her ‘employment law work’. This is a complete travesty. The strike was deliberately provoked by Murdoch, with the full support of the Thatcher government, in order to deny the workers their redundancy payments. She must have known this at the time through, as she puts it, her ‘employment law […]
[…] research in marketing), The Mayfair Set (about a section of the British right in London in the 1970s considered as a microcosm of and forerunner to the Thatcher era) and, most recently, The Trap. I didn’t think much of The Trap’s thesis and thought its version of the concept of freedom contrived and philosophically […]
[…] of ‘knighted’ is wrong: it should have been ‘enobled’.) McIntyre asks, ‘What precisely was the nature of the ‘Orwellian disinformation’ to which we were exposed during the Thatcher administrations?’ Our answer follows in the final paragraph of the book, immediately after our use of the phrase ‘Orwellian disinformation’: viz ‘promising to ‘put Britain back […]
