[…] consultancies rocketed: At the time of the 1979 general election in the United Kingdom, the government was spending about £6 million on consulting services annually; when Margaret Thatcher stepped down as prime minister eleven years later, the amount was more than 40 times greater at £246 million.8 Where the Iron Lady failed, Reeves’ ‘Iron […]
[PDF file]: […] Conservative MP Matthew Parris and Gerard Baker, former editor of The Wall Street Journal. They devoted their columns in The Times to bemoaning the decline of the Thatcher legacy (Baker, 17 October) and yearning for someone like Mrs Thatcher to sort things out (Parris, 20 October). The difficulty most of us have in changing […]
[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]: […] journalism at home and abroad, I’d become the head of external affairs at the National Union of Teachers in the early 1980s to take on such choice Thatcher or 1 2 This is detailed at great length in Paul Holden’s The Fraud (London: OR Books, 2025). It is summarised here or . 3 1 […]
[…] as chief executive of the Tax Payers’ Alliance and Williams was the CBI’s chief economic adviser. 2 1 Type to enter text bemoaning the decline of the Thatcher legacy (Baker, 17 October) and yearning for someone like Mrs Thatcher to sort things out (Parris, 20 October). The difficulty most of us have in changing […]
[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 […]
[…] 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]: […] 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 […]
[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 […]
