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 […]

Brexit Revisited: Europe Didn’t Work, and, Brexit Unfolded

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] the grip of German bankers intent on preaching protestant rectitude to ill-disciplined countries – which amounted to every country apart from itself, and even itself at times. Thatcher, Blair and Brown The policy choices that the UK made and then induced the EU to follow, were promoting globalisation and reducing protectionism through Thatcherism, and […]

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 […]

ViewfromtheBridge

Lobster Issue

[…] on p. 403 without dating it. From the context it is the early 1950s. 22 5 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 about Harold Wilson seriously enough to try to get the Cabinet Secretary […]

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) […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] May) making the striking claim that ‘Trump’s hundred days have been a triumph. The swamp is being drained’. It was by Nile Gardiner, Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC.1 This organisation bearing the Blessed Margaret’s name is not to be confused with the Margaret Thatcher […]

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 […]

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 […]

Accessibility Toolbar