[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]: […] the (theoretical) risk of prosecution. Today it wouldn’t. What has changed? Then it seemed worthwhile to stick two fingers up to the British state, headed by Margaret Thatcher, by revealing (minor) state secrets. Today we have Cameron and Clegg, imitations of Tony Blair, Thatcher’s successor, who hardly matter. Then, influenced by research on the […]
[PDF file]: […] Gaitskellites. In the late 1960s and 70s it gathered round Roy Jenkins and eventually split Labour to form the SDP – a move which ensured that Mrs Thatcher won the 1983 general election. After which, job done, the SDP faded away. After the Labour election defeat of 1987 its leadership, Kinnock and Hattersley, set […]
[…] the (theoretical) risk of prosecution. Today it wouldn’t. What has changed? Then it seemed worthwhile to stick two fingers up to the British state, headed by Margaret Thatcher, by revealing (minor) state secrets. Today we have Cameron and Clegg, imitations of Tony Blair, Thatcher’s successor, who hardly matter. Then, influenced by research on the […]
[PDF file]: […] are not Socratic dialogues; for the most part they are the necessary pantomimes to rubberstamp decisions taken in Whitehall. On the other hand, this was 1984: the Thatcher regime was still being challenged by the left; the Labour Party had not then embraced the ‘Washington consensus’; the American banks had not completed their take-over […]
[PDF file]: […] situation with the Old Corruption of the eighteenth century. (p. 3) The political and social order that has been coming into existence in this country since the Thatcher years can be quite accurately described as the New Corruption. Thatcher began the process, Blair consolidated it in place and Cameron saved it from collapse after […]
[PDF file]: […] However, since 1970 (Edward Heath – 46% of the votes cast) neither Labour nor Conservatives have polled above 45% of the votes cast in a general election. Thatcher didn’t get above 44%, Blair peaked at 43% and 1 This adversarial mindset even extends to the architecture of the House of Commons: two narrow rows […]
[PDF file]: […] of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), told its annual conference that they had to ‘to take the gloves off and have a bare-knuckle fight’ with the Thatcher government.35 But no such fight ensued, Beckett resigned and in the following decade while the City boomed, British manufacturing shrank by about 20%. The focus these […]
[PDF file]: Tottenham burning: the minor practitioners of Soros’ “open society” Dr T. P. Wilkinson Mr David Cameron, the Etonian prefect of Her Majesty’s Britannic government, was quoted responding to the unrest in London and other cities: ‘We needed a fightback and a fightback is under way. We will not put up with this in our country. […]
[PDF file]: […] for the Conservative Right, who of course didn’t mind any of this. There were ‘rumours’ – only – that he ‘was engaged as a trouble-shooter for the Thatcher government’ in the early 1980s. Most damaging to his reputation, however, may be the fact revealed here that when the Argylls marched into Crater – ostensibly […]
