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) […]

lob86View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] call) Thatcherism and thus the person chiefly responsible for the creation of today’s Broken-down Britain. Of the triumvirate in charge of the economic policy in the first Thatcher government, he was the one who knew what he was doing. Geoffrey Howe and Thatcher merely had some free market clichés in their brains 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) FREE

[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 […]

Climbing the Bookshelves

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

‘Nobody told us we could do this’

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Rob Wilson MP points out that Clegg had – apparently – been a member of the Conservative Association at Cambridge University, and that he later worked for Thatcher cabinet member Sir Leon Brittain when Brittain was an EU Commissioner. It was clear, then, that Clegg might be more inclined than his predecessors to talk […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] the 1980s which were released in late December, was one concerning the Peter Wright book Spycatcher. The Guardian reported that on one of these documents prime minister Thatcher wrote in October 1986: ‘I am utterly shattered by the revelations in the book. The consequences of publication would be enormous.’ 8 Obviously she didn’t have […]

View from Bridge copo

Lobster Issue

[…] call) Thatcherism and thus the person chiefly responsible for the creation of today’s Broken-down Britain. Of the triumvirate in charge of the economic policy in the first Thatcher government, he was the one who knew what he was doing. Geoffrey Howe and Thatcher merely had some free market clichés in their brains at the […]

Off Message, and, Standing for Something

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Commons in 1997, looking forward to a long period of Labour government that would ‘buttress parliamentary power, entrench historic civil liberties which had been threatened by the Thatcher administration and address the twin problems of poverty and inequality’. He was, in his own words, a ‘poor innocent fool’. What went wrong? He fixes most […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 88 (2024) FREE

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

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