Misleading Parliament – Appendices

Lobster Issue 86 (2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] had said to Mr Higgins – i.e. that I had only one ‘job description’. That was also made clear in a report by MI5 in 1975 (see attached extract). Some of the Govt Departments, such as the MoD, would have known that what Mrs Thatcher said in her letter to Terence Higgins MP was untrue.

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

A Hack’s Progress by Phillip Knightley

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[PDF file]: […] in explaining Soviet policy and thinking just at the point when the Soviet Union was cracking up, thus smoothing to way for the Gorbachev relationship first with Thatcher and then with the Americans. ‘Decisive’ – maybe not; but not insignificant. The cry that intelligence services are useless is a variation on the more specific […]

Book reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] the tough world of NUM politics, largely keeping from public view his disagreements with Mick McGahey and Arthur Scargill and others while facing the venom of Margaret Thatcher and the 190 Summer 2010 power of the state.1 1 This is an insider’s view of the 1984/85 miners’ strike, the subsequent closures and the working […]

The Richer, The Poorer, by Stewart Lansley

Lobster Issue 86 (2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] shallow and temporary. (pp. 2/3) The author traces this well-footnoted and indexed history with academic rigour and journalistic anecdote. He shows how the free-market evangelists of the Thatcher and Reagan era repeated the myth that the great prize for a widening gap would be faster growth and a new economic dynamism that would raise […]

Nixon’s Nuclear Specter by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] and writer. His most recent book, on the Kennedy assassination, 1 There is one possible caveat here. It has been reported that during the Falklands/Malvinas war Mrs Thatcher threatened to use nuclear weapons against Argentina unless the French state gave the British the codes to disable the electronics of the French-manufactured Exocet missiles which […]

Angles Morts

Lobster Issue 88 (2024) FREE

[PDF file]: […] nearly thirty years, she started trying to tell her story in 2003, apparently motivated by disgust at the covert sale of arms to Saddam Hussein under Margaret Thatcher and by utter despair at the aggressive foreign policy of Ariel Sharon and the Likud regime in Israel. Sharon’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon killed her lover. […]

The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update

Lobster Issue 88 (2024) FREE

[PDF file]: […] that book’s exploration of role of the spooks in British politics, with an interest in the history of the Tory right triggered by the arrival of Mrs Thatcher. And I was interested in Labour Party history. (I was a member in the 80s and 90s.) I haven’t methodically revisited CC since but relevant odds […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

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