[…] of the Atlantic the professional diplomats and the rational core of the intelligence community are slowly throwing off some of the vile nonsense perpetrated in the Reagan-Bush- Thatcher years? The release of various official US documents which could easily have been withheld on national security grounds – eg on the CIA’s role in Guatemala […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] and journalists. Those who read them could keep in mind a throwaway comment (1997) by Sir Percy Cradock, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee under Prime Ministers Thatcher and Major: ‘The bulk of the records of its outposts, principally JIC (Germany), JIC (Middle East) and JIC (Far East) have disappeared.’ (24) That they have […]
[…] Personnel from various intelligence agencies, including IRD, were in or around the so-called Wilson plots and the other psy-ops operations leading up to the election of Mrs Thatcher in 1979. If Common Cause and IRIS are also eventually shown to have also been state operations, historians of post-war British politics will have to rewrite […]
[…] former managing director of Goldman Sachs, as a special adviser at 10 Downing Street.(1) She has been brought in to advise Brown on welfare reform! If the Thatcher government had appointed someone like her to such a position, Labour MPs would have been outraged. Today, barely a murmur. There were some protests about the […]
[…] Committee for A Free Nicaragua (UK) – CFN(UK) These are two recent additions to the long list of right-wing groups which have circled their wagons round the Thatcher administration in support of the greater lunacies of the American right. CFN(UK) is screened from view by PO box number, no phone, and no personnel listed […]
[…] eddies of policies and events.’ (p. 39) ‘Instead of blessed ordinariness, therefore, from 1979 onwards HM’s subjects have been consoled with the iron sacraments of neo-liberalism, Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War, fake Americanisation, and then more recently New Labour’s successor to British Socialism, the Third Way – and a subsequent “resignation” of half the […]
[…] to roost. Blair’s revolution was a genuinely new departure because it faced the electorate with the brutal reality that power is all a fact intimated by Thatcher but never taken to the same extent of offensive war overseas, restriction of ancient liberties and refusal to brook alternative foci of power. On the other […]
[…] by appeasement, to confiscate the Second World War and make it their own. This process has continued down to the present day with the likes of Margaret Thatcher, who, having singularly failed to contribute to the war effort at the time, nevertheless subsequently adopted an ersatz Churchillian guise for political advantage. Martin Gilbert’s massive […]
[…] to jail after she leaked confidential documents to The Guardian. Many at the time – the height of the renewed Cold War under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – thought the editor of The Guardian would resign, a course of action over failure in civic duty his newspaper’s leading articles have frequently urged on […]
