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Lobster Issue

[…] political parties will publicly admit this yet but they all must know it. They must also know that it began in 1979 with the arrival of the Thatcher government and the delusion that a modern western European society can function with low taxation. Florence SutcliffeBraithwaite reworks some of this in ‘It’s a shitshow’, her […]

Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away with War Crimes by Phil Miller

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] down much better informed and, at the same time, seriously concerned that so much of what Miller reveals was new to him. It was during the Reagan- Thatcher years that the British so-called ‘private military companies’ first came into their own. Mercenaries had operated before then but, during that period, a permanent network of […]

View from the Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] British conservative movement. In some ways Thatcher’s children really are Rand’s offspring. It was Rand who first said ‘There is no such thing as society’,20 echoed by Thatcher in 1987.21 Whether or not Thatcher had read Rand is, as far as I know, still unclear. Nevertheless Mrs Thatcher wanted to take Britain back to […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] took hold, particularly in the Conservative Party, where what became the Thatcherites adopted it and wrecked the British manufacturing economy with it between 1980 and 1984. Margaret Thatcher was a politician who knew no economics. John Hoskyns, a businessman recruited to join the Thatcher team as Head of the Policy Unit, records in his […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] union obstruction’ – and some 75 Bradlee’s ‘other’ biography has recently been pulled together by the excellent John Simkin at 76 77 Just In Time: inside the Thatcher revolution (London: Aurum Press, 2000) were economically illiterate. Just after the election in May 1979 which saw the first Thatcher government elected, he writes: ‘I had […]

The two Goulds

Lobster Issue

[…] some domestic capital wanted to destroy unions, not work with them. Consequently, for both parties what became known as corporatism or the producers’ alliance proved difficult.1 Mrs Thatcher briskly resolved these difficulties by declaring trade unions ‘the enemy within’, abandoning the domestic economy, and giving the financial/overseas sector what it wanted in the 1980 […]

Appendices

Lobster Issue 11 (April 1986)

[PDF file]: […] MI6), William Colby (ex DCIA), Edwin Feulner of The Heritage Foundation, and General D. Stilwell (DIA). Pinay projects are said to have included the promotion of Mrs Thatcher in the UK and Strauss in West Germany. ISC records from as early as 1972 mention efforts by the Pinay Circle to generate moral and financial […]

Misleading Parliament – a case to answer

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

See also: Misleading Parliament – Appendices

[PDF file]: […] victims of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and their families show that in 1989 the then Secretary of State for Defence, Tom King, and the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, misled Parliament by not only suppressing the conclusions of an internal MoD inquiry, but also by replacing that inquiry with a new one which had much […]

The Brexit impasse

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] capital and unable to divert Heath from his mission. From the 1980s onwards, however, opinions changed under the impact of the neoliberal revolution driven through by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations. There was what was euphemistically called a ‘shake-out’ of the economy as many firms either closed or rationalised. The power of organised industrial […]

The Reinvention of Britain 1960-2016: a political and economic history by Scott Newton

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] foolish refusal to devalue sterling right at the start? Bang! Its Seventies successor buried social democracy after the 1976 sterling crisis and paved the way for Mrs Thatcher? Pow! Say what you like about Maggie, but she gave Britain its own economic miracle? A melon is shredded as Fox’s exploding bullet finds its mark. […]

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