[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]: […] 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 […]
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]: Haters, Baiters and Would-be Dictators Anti-Semitism and UK Far Right Nick Toczek London: Routledge, 2016; £24.99, p/b This is a very detailed account of the British anti-semites of the first half of the twentieth century, the hard-core handful who believed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion really was a blueprint for Jewish domination […]
Contents Political life in Britain Talking to a Brick Wall: How New Labour stopped listening to the voter and why we need a new politics Deborah Mattinson London: Biteback, 2010, £17.99 People, Politics and Pressure Groups: Memoirs of a lobbyist Arthur Butler Hove: Picnic Publishing, £12.99, 2010 Bonfire of the Liberties: New Labour, Human Rights […]
[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]: […] fleeting shadow of an MI5 officer. alumnus of the far-right Murdoch-funded Campaign for a Free Britain, in which Hart tried to cajole Wyatt (a friend of Mrs Thatcher and the Queen Mother) into recommending Crozier to Thatcher for a knighthood. It really is a small world in the British Establishment. Speaking of which….. Coulson […]
[PDF file]: […] ‘given by the Prince of Wales in honour of Wafic Said and his charitable work, and to mark his eightieth birthday’. This wonderful man had given Margaret Thatcher ‘the 4 run of a lovely country house in Oxfordshire’ during her final years. (pp. 483, 535) Wafic Said, it is worth remembering, was involved in […]
[PDF file]: How New Labour stopped listening to the voter and why we need a new politics Deborah Mattinson London: Biteback, 2010, £17.99 People, Politics and Pressure Groups: Memoirs of a lobbyist Arthur Butler Hove: Picnic Publishing, £12.99, 2010 Tom Easton Deborah Mattinson is just one of the many early enthusiasts for what became New Labour to […]
[PDF file]: Contents Lobster 58 Laissez faire as religion Robert Henderson The enemy of rationality is ideology. By an ideology I mean a mental construct which consists of a menu of tenets which the adherent applies without regard to their utility or truth. The observance of the ideology becomes an end in itself. All ideologies are inadequate […]
