[…] 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 […]
[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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[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]: […] 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]: […] 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]: […] 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 […]
[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 […]
