[…] 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, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Red Brigades (b) organised the current Mafia/P2 episodes to discredit Andreotti. (New Statesman 25 Jan. 1985) Also in the New Statesman (11 Jan 1985) Duncan Campbell ( Thatcher goes for Nerve gas), using leaked documents, shows that this government is on the verge of ordering nerve gas for the British military. We have to […]
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 […]
[…] much political headway after the riots of late 1985, or even significantly control the streets, illustrated the powerful physical and ideological reserves at the disposal of the Thatcher regime.(90) So, in a variety of ways, those anticipating a breakthrough by organised fascism were few and far between. The ‘coalition regime’ in the NF itself […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Crosland lives! Managing the World Economy John Mills MacMillan, London, 2000, £42.50 (hb) John Mills argues in this book that the central problem facing any economy is that of creating and sustaining growth. This is true not only for the older developed economies of the United States and Europe, including Britain, but also for … Read more
