[PDF file]: […] in his Eye column’. (p. 264) ‘told that he wished to be sufficiently well briefed to be able to counter “some of the rather extreme advice” Mrs Thatcher had received.’ That advice had been coming from Crozier and his colleagues.7 A cautious, tiresomely bureaucratic MI5 is how David Shayler saw the organisation in 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]: […] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[PDF file]: […] the year he won the Nobel Prize for Economics. His belief in the centrality of controlling the economy’s money supply was adopted by the Tory right around Thatcher, who had rejected Keynesian notions of the state managing the economy. Previous to this, in 1972 when they were faced with rising unemployment, Edward Heath’s government […]
[PDF file]: […] I acquired Atkinson’s obscure booklet from eBay. The first is the following assertion (p. 14): ‘Because Fleet Street expressed pre-Falklands doubts 3 7 as to whether Margaret Thatcher could deliver a second Tory Government, the possibility of a new pro-European Democratic Alliance was explored immediately following Labour’s defeat in 1979 – indeed talks did […]
[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 […]
