[…] Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland in the killing of Catholics. The programme — which I don’t remember — apparently claimed that the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement between the Thatcher Government and that of the Irish Republic convinced significant sections of the Ulster Protestant community that they were going to be sold down the river. This […]
[…] the week before had revealed that 23 countries had experienced serious civil unrest in the previous year as a result of implementing IMF policies. In retrospect, the Thatcher economic programme of 1980-83, riots and all, was the standard IMF ‘structural adjustments’. 18 Will Hutton, ‘Log cabin to White House? Not any more’ in The […]
[…] and the War on Terror was, however, provided in Central America in the 1980s and early 1990s. There the United States (with the full support of the Thatcher government) engaged in two of the most brutal counter-insurgency campaigns of modern times in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as waging an illegal covert war […]
[…] a private security firm (who, I kid you not, codenamed Gable ‘Horse’!) and a Tory MP. The outcome was a police report which ‘was given to Mrs Thatcher at a meeting in Downing Street and to Lord Bridge, then Chairman of the Security Commission’. Murray leaves this extraordinary episode thus: What happened from that […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] UK amounted to a good deal more than it does now. But has the revival of the City of London, fueled by North Sea oil and the Thatcher period of high real interest rates, really seen a revival of British imperialism? I think this is over-stating it somewhat. While it is true that, with […]
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 […]
[…] the less well off simply disappeared from the electoral register to avoid payment. No-one’s quite sure how many voters disappeared in this way, but Baroness Thatcher herself has been quoted as saying that the Poll Tax helped win the ropey-looking 1992 election for the Conservative party. She put the number of disappearing […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] spelling of General Galtieri. Sinking the Belgrano was popular with the majority of the Brits who were deep into a nostalgic imperial relapse at the time; Mrs Thatcher won the 1983 election at a canter; and the British government did not invite Galtieri to send in his troops. World in Review is also dotted […]
