Ronald Gray, founder and owner of The Hammersmith Bookshop (1948-1963) and Hammersmith Books (1963-2000) died on 30 May at the age of 87. He was a most remarkable person, with a passionate interest in everything relating to politics and to recent history. He developed the vast stock of out-of-print books in Hammersmith Books to reflect … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] UK amounted to a good deal more than it does now. But has the revival of the City of London, fueled by North Sea oil and the Thatcher period of high real interest rates, really seen a revival of British imperialism? I think this is over-stating it somewhat. While it is true that, with […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] spelling of General Galtieri. Sinking the Belgrano was popular with the majority of the Brits who were deep into a nostalgic imperial relapse at the time; Mrs Thatcher won the 1983 election at a canter; and the British government did not invite Galtieri to send in his troops. World in Review is also dotted […]
[…] it is unclear whether or not the author has interpreted what is going on around him correctly. And yet the parade of the military-political characters from the Thatcher years, an almost palpable smell of the growing British arms industry in the period, not to mention a picture of a world I know a little […]
[…] 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 […]
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
[…] kind of minor explosion of interest in parapolitics in the United States. And not before time. The interest in conspiracies is simply reality breaking through. The Reagan- Thatcher years saw unprecedented expansions of unregulated intelligence and military agencies, and breathtaking multi-billion rip-offs (most obviously, in the U.S., the S and L scam; in the […]
