The crisis: an historical perspective

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014) FREE

[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) FREE

[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 86 (2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] 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 20 Details at . In Lobster 81 at or . 21 Precisely […]

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) FREE

[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

[…] politicians to get real. But politicians can’t ‘get real’ just yet. No mainstream British politician is willing to say that Britain is run down because (a) the Thatcher and New Labour administrations abandoned the manufacturing sector of the economy, and (b) the prosperous haven’t paid enough taxes for 40 years. For a while longer […]

Apocryphilia

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016) FREE

[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) FREE

[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 by Andy Beckett and Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE

[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 […]

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