[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Ronald Gray, founder and owner of The Hammersmith Bookshop (1948-1963) and Hammersmith Books (1963-2000) died on 30 May at the age of 87. He was a most remarkable person, with a passionate interest in everything relating to politics and to recent history. He developed the vast stock of out-of-print books in Hammersmith Books to reflect … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] of ‘knighted’ is wrong: it should have been ‘enobled’.) McIntyre asks, ‘What precisely was the nature of the ‘Orwellian disinformation’ to which we were exposed during the Thatcher administrations?’ Our answer follows in the final paragraph of the book, immediately after our use of the phrase ‘Orwellian disinformation’: viz ‘promising to ‘put Britain back […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] beyond him as an individual and will indicate the circles within which he moves, circles which overlap with, and are integrated into, the British State. Introduction When Thatcher was first elected to office in 1979, unemployment was already rising fast and the Labour Party leadership (Callaghan and Healey in particular) had, in practical terms, […]
