[…] of Sinn Fein/IRA politicians, gunmen, bombers, supporters and sympathisers by the UDA, aided and abetted by British Military Intelligence, was known about by MI5, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and a few senior government ministers and civil servants (p. 160). There is no ‘smoking gun’ in the form of a document authorising British co-operation with […]
[…] anti-democratic, and keen on ‘leadership’. (Some Straussians have problems with women leaders. Norton points out how unusual Carnes Lord is among American conservatives in not admiring Margaret Thatcher. ‘On the contrary, is castigated for being too harsh, too demanding; for humiliating men.’) Again, some of this sounds almost fascist. (Almost?) For European liberals, aware […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] it clear that the giant firms he has been put in control of must be made to “balance their books”. The implication, forcefully promoted by the ‘monetarist’ Thatcher, is that the nationalised industries don’t work and privatisation is necessary. But, as we have seen, a massive rationalisation movement has been going throughout the capitalist […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
