[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]: […] the value of the guilder. This made Dutch exports more expensive and imports cheaper. Writing for The Times in the same 3 Quoted in Peter Riddell, The Thatcher Government (London: Martin Robertson, 1983) p. 34. The general tenor of the oil debate can be seen in The Times Index for 1977, especially p. 375, […]
[…] 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]: […] 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]: […] for the first time, why British firms continued giving the organisation tens of thousands of pounds a year. But surely, if we have learned anything from the Thatcher era it is that we should not underestimate the ‘blimps’ in this society; nor, perhaps, should we readily accept the idea of inevitable left-wards ‘progress’ built […]
[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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[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
[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 […]
