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Lobster Issue

[…] all the major economies because we went all in on financialisation, a process that did not start with Brown. It started under the governments led by Margaret Thatcher. Brown then accelerated it and the over-extended and over-leveraged banks became far too big relative to the rest of the economy. To give a proper sense […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] all the major economies because we went all in on financialisation, a process that did not start with Brown. It started under the governments led by Margaret Thatcher. Brown then accelerated it and the over-extended and over-leveraged banks became far too big relative to the rest of the economy. To give a proper sense […]

The Rise of New Labour: Into Office

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] government to direct the economy; and no reacquisition of the privatised state assets, the roughly £100 billion of taxationcreated assets flogged-off for around £50 billion during the Thatcher years. All talk of justice, fairness and redistribution had been stripped from the vocabulary. They had learned the central mantra of neo-liberalism: private good, public bad. […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] beginning of the decade about the KGB shooting the Pope. After I wrote that paragraph I was looking at volume 1 of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher and noticed that he has it that the shooting of the Pope was probably the work of the KGB. Probably? Moore’s caution is striking. Hadn’t the […]

Show Me The Bodies by Peter Apps

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] spend sufficient money maintaining it.’ (p. 215) Grenfell Tower was completed in 1974 and built to the mandatory ParkerMorris standards for space, heating and amenity which Margaret Thatcher effectively ended in 1980. The wealthy part of reportedly the most unequal borough in the country – home at one time to Cameron’s ‘Notting Hill set’ […]

Holding pattern

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] actual evidence of its existence. The DVD did not originate in Shrimpton’s mind. As far as I can tell, it originated in the mind of self-styled former Thatcher advisor, the late Christopher Story, who also (along with one time Joint Intelligence Committee chairman Percy Cradock) believed that the fall of Communism was a hoax […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] phrase ‘the change of government’: ‘The thing is there were some senior people in the forces at the time who were very right-wing and they thought that Thatcher coming in gave them carte blanche to get up to all sorts of things. We heard whispers that some of these people were trying to destabilise […]

Sailing Close To The Wind: Reminiscences by Dennis Skinner and Kevin Maguire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] immense hardship, the daily abuse of the press and a degree of police repression not seen since the 1930s. As he points out, the union argued that Thatcher ‘had 70 pits on a secret hit list’ and planned the effective destruction of the coal industry, something that was vehemently and categorically denied at the […]

Bullingdon Club Britain: The Ransacking of a Nation by Sam Bright

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] academic learning and wealth creation’, so much so that ‘the country appears to be betraying its commitment – however distant – to meritocracy’. He actually argues that Thatcher, Major and Blair tried to squeeze the ‘rejuvenated aristocracy’ out of politics – which rather misses the point about their governments. Each of them which presided […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] . The police were a vital arm of the British state in the Eighties as bloody battles were fought against criminals, football hooligans and trade unionists. Mrs Thatcher needed the police to take on the miners. She was, and is, an icon to Tories like myself. It pains me to write this, but we […]

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