View from 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) FREE

[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 […]

The Oyston Files by Andrew Rosthorn

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022) FREE

[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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[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 […]

The Brexit impasse

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[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 […]

View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[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. […]

Misleading Parliament – a case to answer

Lobster Issue 86 (2023) FREE

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 […]

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the signing of the Peace of Paris, which ended the east-west struggle and ushered in what Philip Bobbitt has called ‘the market state’.2 Indeed, Major’s predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, was in the French capital for this event when she heard she had failed convincingly to see off the 1 ‘The Nostalgia Game’, article first published […]

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