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 […]

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 […]

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) […]

Britannia Unchained, by Kwasi Kwarteng , Elizabeth Truss et al

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] per hour grew faster than France, Germany and even the United States. (pp. 8/9) What, things were better under John Major and Tony Blair than during the Thatcher years? You might think this would give our authors pause, but it doesn’t. It all seemed very different at the turn of the millennium. At the […]

When the Lights Went Out, and, Strange Days Indeed

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

The Lexit delusion

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] parties such as the Referendum Party and United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), found increasing support within the Conservative Party, especially once it was taken up by Margaret Thatcher. She came to see the EU as a threat to everything her governments had achieved between 1979 and 1990. The result was a series of arguments […]

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