Maggie’s guilty secret

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] project, with both the Home Office (MI5) and the FCO (MI6) ordered to support the illegal exports. Michael Heseltine, Geoffrey Howe, Willie Whitelaw, Francis Pym and PM Thatcher all gave the secret project government blessing. During the 1992 Matrix Churchill trial ex-Minister Alan Clark let the cat out of the bag revealing that ‘the […]

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 […]

The View from the Bridge (updated 20 Sep 2022)

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] 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? A quick squint at the Wiki entry on the Alliance for Progress which JFK instituted gives a flavour of this: . 70 30

TO CATCH A SPY: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold by Tim Tate

Lobster Issue 89 (2024) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] about Soviet moles in MI5. At this point the British state, in the shape of Cabinet Secretary and chief liaison with the secret services for Prime Minister Thatcher, Sir Robert Armstrong, looked for a way to take the sting out of this murky tale. They turned to Chapman Pincher, the Daily Express journalist who […]

Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power by David McKnight

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE

[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 […]

Britain alone The Path from Suez to Brexit by Philip Stephens

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE

[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 […]

Treasury orthodoxy and sound money delusions (Book reviews)

Lobster Issue 86 (2023) FREE
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[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 […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 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

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