Bilderberg People: elite power and consensus in world affairs by Ian N. Richardson et al

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] the transnational elite network.’ (p. 13) I also noted a retelling of the story, originally recounted by Jon Ronson in the Guardian in 1999, of how Mrs Thatcher was invited to the 1975 meeting and wowed a number of Americans who were there, which led to her being taken seriously and promoted in the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Soros and the Rockefellers. Now there’s a list for the conspiracy theorists to play with! Politics, dear boy, politics. Thus Charles Moore, the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher: ‘At the time of the 2008/9 financial crisis, I remember Mervyn King, then Governor of the Bank of England, telling me with bitter perceptiveness, “The trouble […]

View from Bridge 88 copy

Lobster Issue

[…] on bankers’ bonuses? 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 […]

When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett and Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] Party election victories in 1970 and 1979, heralding a return to the market: the half-hearted version under Heath, ‘Selsdon man’, and then the real thing with Mrs Thatcher. As the delusions of the free marketeers crumble, so the history of the years in which these notions were dominant will be re-examined. And as the […]

Gordon Brown: in the country of the blind…

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] deplores how ‘out of touch’ Labour were with ‘ordinary people’ 33 Winter 2010 in the 80s (which may have been true at that point), without demonstrating that Thatcher and the Tory right were ever more ‘in touch’ or commanded a consensus of views (they didn’t), or that Thatcher would have won so easily without […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] or 30 9 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 […]

Apocryphilia

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] be a secret communist, and Edward Heath, deemed to be a closet socialist and also supposedly homosexual) and replace them with a much more satisfactory individual: Margaret Thatcher. If Raikes and Courtney originated the material, and assuming they believed in it at face value, then they were essentially conspiracy theorists: searching for (and finding) […]

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