[…] 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, […]
[…] Fred Holroyd and Colin Wallace. A few months later I wrote the first attempt to explain Wallace’s claims in Lobster 11, ‘Wilson, MI5 and the rise of Thatcher’. This was 50 A4 pages, with an introduction by my MP, the late Kevin McNamara. He was a Catholic of Irish extraction, had knowledge of events […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] from Amstrad PCW format to MS Word 4.0 Example of Amstrad PCW Formated file: Notes# +/ 1. The “New Right’ and those around Keith Joseph and Thatcher worked hard to portray the Lobster issues 26 onwards were produced in Macintosh Claris Works, and required converting to PC-formated files: Macintosh 3½-inch diskettes are read […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
