[…] 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, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] secret state and its opponents and/or victims. Because there is so much information in this period, inevitably the most interesting and most detailed section is on the Thatcher years. There are no great revelations here, but there are some incidents I had forgotten about (and some I’d never heard of); and since I can’t […]
[…] big business, increasingly at odds with the left-wing of his party. He is pro MX, pro Israel, pro uranium mining and a promoter of economic policies which Thatcher would endorse. He is also immensely popular, but recently support has begun to slide and the election victory wasn’t as decisive as he wanted. “He has […]
[…] the right into power in much of Europe, America and Australasia. It is arguable that without the oil price hike in 1974 we would not have had Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their subsequent effects on the world. An e-mail to the Observer journalist who conducted the interview with Yamani went unanswered but I had […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
