[…] 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 […]
W. D. Rubinstein (Second edition, revised and updated) London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006, pp., £20 Did you know that, on his death in 2001, former Beatle, George Harrison, left the second largest fortune in the UK (£98,916,000)? If you like facts like this, you will enjoy this book, and you will be in good … Read more
[…] with, she tells us, through her ‘employment law work’. This is a complete travesty. The strike was deliberately provoked by Murdoch, with the full support of the Thatcher government, in order to deny the workers their redundancy payments. She must have known this at the time through, as she puts it, her ‘employment law […]
One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] of Nations for many years. It would not be until the advent of the current Pope, John Paul II, and the coming to power of Reagan and Thatcher, that the concerted roll-back of communism was pursued in much the way that the Intermarium exiles, Peron, Skorzeny, Durcansky, Pavelic, Horthy etc. would have wished. Goni […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] first was the reports in March and April that the Treasury was beginning to question the workings of Britain’s financial system – after the non-regulation of the Thatcher period. The second was the report by Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian (9 February, 1994) that the government was actually reviewing the activities – i.e. the […]
