[…] 1 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 […]
[PDF file]: […] failure to set up a sovereign wealth fund to invest the income from North Sea Oil and remind us (p. 189) of the casual spite of the Thatcher years by quoting Nigel Lawson’s 1984 Mansion House speech in which he admitted that most jobs created in the future in the UK would be ‘no […]
[PDF file]: […] Mineworkers, but it was directed by a triumvirate who had declared that they were using the strike to try to bring down the elected government of Margaret Thatcher and it was actively supported by the Communist party. What was it legitimate for us to do about that? We quickly decided that the 2 How […]
[PDF file]: […] being that this had luckily coincided with an invitation from the Republican National Committee). See: or . 2 Peter Blaker was a ‘former diplomat’ who served in Thatcher cabinets and would later, due to ‘knowledge of defence, foreign policy and the world of intelligence’ be ‘the only Lords member of the Intelligence and Security […]
[PDF file]: […] of his memoir Hitch-22 (Atlantic Books, 2011) which he wrote while he was terminally ill. In this there is a section in which he describes meeting Mrs Thatcher for the first time while she was leader of the Opposition. At the end of this very odd encounter, Thatcher whacks him on his arse with […]
[PDF file]: […] give Murdoch a seat at the table of national politics in three English-speaking nations’. In Britain, the focus has always been on Murdoch’s close relationship first with Thatcher and then with Blair and Brown. What McKnight brings out is the extent to which it is the United States that is the real object of […]
[PDF file]: […] happens again by exerting a vice-like grip on public spending. Chapter 2, ’Creative destruction and the road to nowhere’, explains how the Treasury was weaponised by the Thatcher government from 1979 onwards to control government spending and to set in motion the ‘long journey towards state withdrawal, not only from direct forms of government […]
[PDF file]: […] political giants, and both are surely due a reappraisal. After joining in 1973, UK opposition to the Common Market/EU had become the default position by the time Thatcher made her Bruges speech in 1988. This was despite the lack of US support over the Falkland Islands in 1982. Blair broadly followed Thatcher’s line, agreeing […]
[…] Stoke town centre when I was there in December. In the end, after all the other factors are taken into consideration, lots of our problems arise from the rubbish in the minds of politicians. How were the ’knowledge economy’ or financial services ever going to replace the industrial base destroyed by the Thatcher years? 72
[PDF file]: […] this warmed-over Thatcherism will work? My guess is that they do; that they have spent too long in a free marketeer intellectual ghetto to understand even the Thatcher years. They have failed to grasp that Thatcherism didn’t work on its own terms: it did not ‘cure’ inflation3 and did not produce more economic growth […]
