[PDF file]: […] credible industrial strategy to get the UK back on its feet’.18 Well, well, well: ‘Industrial strategy’ and ‘the establishment’ is the language (and thought) of the pre- Thatcher era. Curious that he’s a City commentator because few in the City give a dull fuck about an industrial strategy – or the nation, for that […]
[PDF file]: […] history of bribery in Britain’s arms trade Nicholas Gilby London: Pluto Press, 2015, p/b, £14.00 This is very good: clearly written, massively documented1 and carefully done. Mark Thatcher, for example, some of whose wealth is widely believed to come from BAE’s 1985 Al Yamamah deal with the Saudis, isn’t mentioned. What might be sayable […]
[PDF file]: […] for creating a recession – which they did. Recessions reduce inflation. (Creating more poor people, you reduce demand in the economy, which inhibits price increases.) Like Mrs Thatcher, Peter Jay had been persuaded that there was no alternative. It is not difficult to understand why: in 1976 no-one had ever seen ‘Keynesian’ policies deal […]
[PDF file]: […] like to be transgender two generations ago. But most of all it is a stunning indictment of the lawless, literally murderous, unaccountable British secret state in the Thatcher years. Olivia’s experience shows that MI5 committed arson, falsely imprisoned people, manipulated the National Insurance system, the passport office, the prison service, the criminal justice system, […]
[PDF file]: […] you really want to change things and you want to get listened to, that’s the place to be.’ 1 On the other hand, Norman Lamont wrote: ‘Margaret Thatcher certainly knew when to disregard market research. In the 1980s, opinion polls regularly showed that voters preferred public spending to tax cuts. Mrs Thatcher insisted on […]
[…] on the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) as being essentially about economic ideas: the clash between the ‘new’ (but old, pre-WW2) free market ideas of the City/ Thatcher faction, and the ‘old’ (but post-WW2) ideas of the welfare state and social democracy. Lauria’s first omission is the substantial political underpinning to the government’s assault […]
[PDF file]: Ten Years Hard Labour Chris Williamson Lola Books, 2022, £19.00 ISBN 978-3-944203-48-5 John Booth This is a revealing and powerful book by a Labour MP who vocally supported the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and paid the price by losing his career. It’s an angry book because he says that this loyalty was not reciprocated when […]
[PDF file]: […] BBC TV veteran also followed him into membership of the British American Project (BAP), the informal network of aspiring Brits and Americans set up during the Reagan- Thatcher years to revive what the White House and No. 10 feared was a weakening ‘special relationship’ between the two countries. Paxman was recruited into the BAP […]
[PDF file]: […] telling management exactly what it wanted to hear….McKinsey has, indeed, provided the cover an executive needed to carry out distasteful dismissals, restructurings, downsizings’.3 Most 2 Simon Jenkins, Thatcher & Sons, (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 277 3 James O’Shea and Charles Madigan, Dangerous Company, (London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 1999), pp. 256, 261-262 infamously, they advised […]
[PDF file]: Colin Wallace and the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry The Kincora cover-up continues Robin Ramsay Back story T his journal has been reporting on the Colin Wallace story since 1986.1 Among the many striking things Wallace has spoken and written about over the years was the situation in the Kincora boys’ home in Belfast in the […]
