[…] 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, […]
[…] an initial trawl. Future historians of the Conservative Party may discover that upon its heart in the 1960s “Rhodesia” was indelibly graven.(1) With the arrival of Mrs Thatcher in 1975 came “the New Right”, with about as much claim to be called “new” as had the “New Left’ a decade earlier. Although the Tory […]
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 […]
[…] or, ideally, a combination of both. (It is interesting to note that before transforming Saddam into a ‘bad guy’, the same media had favourably compared him to Thatcher during the 1980s when he was privatising Iraq’s economy. ) At the same time the collapse of Communism had the Western elites searching around for a […]
[…] at all costs any possibility of hitting a police officer with the predictable and very costly consequences for the Libyan regime and economy? And why did the Thatcher government allow the 22 employees of the embassy to leave the country without hindrance? Hints from Ministers The then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, was so unhappy […]
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 […]
[…] for fourth and fifth men working for Moscow, and away from those now working, in effect, for Washington. By 1979, Andrew Boyles The Climate of Treason presented Thatcher with a gift by blowing Anthony Blunts cover, and heaping further obloquy on Keynes former alma mater. When the Empire was finally wound up in the […]
[…] as being a ‘link with the foreign office’, he was trusted by the Foreign Office mandarins even more than security overlord Sir Maurice Oldfield, appointed by Mrs Thatcher in 1979. The appointment in 1980 of Sir Brooks Richard, an ex-diplomat, as Security Co-ordinator in Northern Ireland, was seen as giving the Foreign Office ‘game […]
[…] ’75 he was living in Switzerland and listed his occupation as ‘tax exile’. His current address is Tonbridge, Kent (he stopped being a ‘tax exile’ during the Thatcher years) and is ‘active in personal development and social change’. Currently a Senior Partner of Performance Consultants Ltd., he has written a number of books including […]
[…] 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 […]
