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)

[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 […]

Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power by David McKnight

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[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)

[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 […]

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

Treasury orthodoxy and sound money delusions (Book reviews)

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[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 British Right – scratching the surface

Lobster Issue 12 (1986)

[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 […]

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