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 […]

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

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 […]

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

[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

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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 89 (2024) FREE

[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 […]

A tale of two Islingtons: How Blair opened the door for Corbyn

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Executive Committee (NEC) had agreed proposals for the selection and re-selection of Parliamentary candidates, as suggested by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. Even after 1979, with Thatcher markedly unpopular, it was assumed (pre-Falklands War) that Labour would win any general election called in 1982-1983.7 Had Labour won a general election in 1978, then, […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] with Lobster. *new* Broken-down Blighty In my local library book sale I picked up a copy of Dominic Sandbrook’s 2019 account of the early years of Mrs Thatcher, Who Dares Wins. Yes, the title is meant to evoke the SAS and the Iranian Embassy siege but it also represents Sandbrook’s view that Mrs T […]

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