[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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
[PDF file]: […] that have no tradition of Common Law or Habeas Corpus and where secret justice has been the norm and not the exception. But with the rise of Thatcher and the great show trials of the early nineties related to the clandestine Anglo-American arming of Iraq – Euromac,5 Ordtec, Matrix Churchill, Elizabeth Forsyth, Asil Nadir […]
[PDF file]: […] well positioned will be disappointed, as they will be in seeking any sharp observations on British politics. Those who remember the Callaghan government and the rise of Thatcher may recall Williams and other Labour right-wing ministers vociferously rushing to the defence of one of their number, Reg Prentice, faced with deselection. Prentice subsequently switched […]
[…] 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 […]
[PDF file]: […] what we need. Remind you of anyone? And does all this presage an attempt to revive the SAS as the right-wing cultural phenomenon it became during the Thatcher years? In the aftermath of the SAS storming of the Iranian Embassy in May 1980 and then the retaking of the Falklands in 1982, the Regiment […]
[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 […]
