[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 […]
[…] condolence book for Smith at show that Harold was held in high regard by Nigerians. * Revolutionary defeatism A piece in the Guardian (19 March 2011), ‘ Thatcher papers reveal how she stoked rightwing rebellion in war against “wets”’, notes that Thatcher’s private secretary, Ian Gow MP, met with Labour MP Neville Sandelson, six […]
1976 and all that: the IMF event Robin Ramsay I still buy a daily paper, The Times. One of its regular columnists is Daniel Finkelstein. Lord Finkelstein, as he is now, has been around the upper reaches of the centre and latterly the centre–right of British politics for 40 years and is thus one of […]
[PDF file]: […] to reality as the revolutionary left’s ideas. But along with the delusions of the true believers, the ideologists, there has been politics, as usual. Those around Mrs Thatcher and Keith Joseph in the mid 1970s adopted socalled monetarism2 (a) because it gave them a stick with which to beat the (Keynesian) Heathites who had […]
[PDF file]: […] listen to polls and focus groups for their professed views, I find myself unable to suppress the thought: I wonder what they are really thinking? Take Margaret Thatcher: what did she really think she was doing when she fronted the creation of the grossly unequal society we now have? Frank Field MP gave us […]
[PDF file]: […] reoccurs elsewhere in the book. We’re told that, during the Cold War, leaks from heroic defectors and double agents helped preserve peace. For instance, they helped convince Thatcher that Mikhail Gorbachev was serious about reforming the Soviet Union. Norton-Taylor also gives honourable mentions to politicians like Robin Cook, Tam Dalyell and Menzies Campbell for […]
