lob84-view from the bridge (sept 84)

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

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 67 (Summer 2014)

[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

Signs of the times

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] protecting free markets while building national capabilities in telecoms, biotech and other key industries.’ The free market and national capabilities? Sounds awfully like what existed before Mrs Thatcher took office in 1979. Another sign of change was the publication a week earlier1 on the Telegraph website of a striking essay by Professor Lee Jones2 […]

ViewfromtheBridge

Lobster Issue

[…] on p. 403 without dating it. From the context it is the early 1950s. 22 5 CPGB, which ran the unions, which ran the Labour Party. Mrs Thatcher was one such patriot. When leader of the Opposition, she took the various allegations about Harold Wilson seriously enough to try to get the Cabinet Secretary […]

Lob86 View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] on p. 403 without dating it. From the context it is the early 1950s. 22 5 CPGB, which ran the unions, which ran the Labour Party. Mrs Thatcher was one such patriot. When leader of the Opposition, she took the various allegations about Harold Wilson seriously enough to try to get the Cabinet Secretary […]

The crisis: an historical perspective

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] lost control of events. The fallout cost Labour the 1979 General Election and let in Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives. This is where the great change really started. The Thatcher governments, in power from 1979-1990, were increasingly dominated by disciples of Hayek and Friedman. Leading Cabinet Ministers such as Chancellors Sir Geoffrey Howe (1979-83) and Nigel […]

Lob86ViewfromBridgepdf

Lobster Issue

[…] believed the conspiracy theory of ‘the enemy within’. This said that the Soviet Union ran the CPGB, which ran the unions, which ran the Labour Party. Mrs Thatcher was one such patriot. When leader of the Opposition, she took the various allegations about Harold Wilson seriously enough to try to get the Cabinet Secretary […]

Kincora: abuse and the British state

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] activities of the RUC, the Army and of the Security Services and he had not done so.’ In terms of the file which I sent to Mrs Thatcher personally in November 1984, for onward transmission to the Hughes Inquiry, Sir John Blelloch wrote: ‘Judge Hughes feels that the terms of Lord Trefgarne’s letter of […]

Is there a ‘political class’?

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] public reception of this document – it was massively favourable and stimulated real interest and activity throughout ‘Big Society’. Yet it was shelved, indeed marginalised by Mrs Thatcher, who, along with President Reagan, successfully pushed the advanced industrial states to take the free market rather than the Keynesian approach to global development advocated by […]

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