[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]: […] 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 […]
[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 […]
[PDF file]: […] like to be transgender two generations ago. But most of all it is a stunning indictment of the lawless, literally murderous, unaccountable British secret state in the Thatcher years. Olivia’s experience shows that MI5 committed arson, falsely imprisoned people, manipulated the National Insurance system, the passport office, the prison service, the criminal justice system, […]
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 […]
[…] 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]: 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 […]
[PDF file]: […] detail he gives on the Maze Prison ‘dirty protests’. Nor how the Brighton bomb affected the UK government’s public stance – including the reinforced ‘obduracy’ of Margaret Thatcher. Nor Taylor’s take on the Miami Showband killings which, I have to say, he gets very wrong. He bizarrely states that: The fact that Crozier and […]
[…] the bridge Robin Ramsay The right madness I was flipping through Richard Cockett’s Thinking the Unthinkable (Fontana, 1995) about the influence of the ‘think tanks’ on the Thatcher revolution, and noticed a quote from a 1968 Fabian pamphlet on the then politically insignificant ‘New Right’ – essentially the Institute for Economic Affairs – and […]
