Notes from the underground part 3: British fascism 1983-6

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

[…] this fuss about the police woman who was shot outside the Libyan embassy? We should not shed any tears over the death of an agent of the Thatcher regime.’ (50) His views weren’t universally shared, and by October 1985 an Organisers’ Bulletin was urging members to ‘make an effort to be pleasant to PCs […]

Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since The Industrial Revolution

Book cover
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

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

I married a war criminal

Book cover
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] 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 […]

Clippings Digest: August – November 1984

Lobster Issue 7 (1985)

[…] to protect the security of the state as the political comfort of ministers.’ (Times 27 August) Story, already printed, due for Times (of 23 August) claiming Mrs Thatcher present at Naval HQ when Belgrano was sunk, was withdrawn at last minute by editor, apparently after conversation with Rupert Murdoch. (Guardian 4 October) Book about […]

Clinton and Quigley: a strange tale from the U.S. elite

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

[…] America attacked the Round Table’s various front organisations in the late 1940s, thinking they were attacking the ‘international communist conspiracy’. (22) More recently both Nixon and Mrs Thatcher have explicitly set themselves up as the enemies of the foreign policy ‘establishment’ without ever showing the slightest signs of understanding who it is they are […]

Lobbying

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

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

Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s

Book cover
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] that Garnett’s book, another rattling good read, traces the story from the mid-1970s to now, while Mr Turner begins in 1970 and calls a halt when Mrs Thatcher takes office in May 1979. Mr Garnett is unafraid to interpose his opinions into his own narrative, as when he declares that private medicine and education […]

Parapolitical bits and pieces

Lobster Issue 7 (1985)

[…] withdrawal from Ireland and pointed out that the possibility of a united Ireland joining NATO was the option most frequently discussed at the meeting between Haughey & Thatcher, in December 1980. The author of the article was Kenneth Whitaker, former governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, and Secretary of the Irish Department of […]

A political journey

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] over the next decade. The Tory Party would have to reject not the free market side (which Gordon Brown has absorbed) but the a-social side of the Thatcher Revolution to become electable – and its activists will not allow this to happen. From this point of view, Europe is a sideshow. Clearly, Tory free-thinkers […]

Mind control, mobiles and the military

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] 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 […]

Accessibility Toolbar