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
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
