[…] Frank Portnoy, Fiasco: blood in the water on Wall Street (London: Profile Books, 1997) On the wider British issues, the connections between the current situation and the Thatcher years’ obsession with the market and the City, see Peter Wilby, ‘All of us live by the logic of finance’ at . Dan Hind’s ‘Jump You […]
[…] ones it lost. As in that other mythical election, 1979, the one where millions of former Labour voters were so disgusted with the Left they switched to Thatcher, somehow leaving Labour’s national vote higher than in 1974, the Tory increase was caused by ex-Liberals (30 of Labour’s 40 net losses were caused by tactical […]
[…] National Union of Mineworkers in the Morning Star of 2 August 2002 ‘It gave me enormous pleasure that, after the 1984-5 miners strike, the Tories threw out Thatcher as Prime Minister and the miners reelected Arthur as their president.’ I like that use of ‘after’ and its implied causality. So it was the miners’ […]
[…] suitcase, which a local farmer says was full of heroin, and had a name-tag which did not correspond with any names on the passenger list? Bush tells Thatcher to cool it Even more significantly, why did George Bush ring Margaret Thatcher in mid-March 1989 to ask her to soft pedal on Lockerbie? This gem […]
Neil Cooper I. B. Tauris, London, 1997, £39.50 This is an analysis of the arms business in the UK, chiefly about the MOD’s procurement system. Not a subject I knew much about, I approached the book expecting little. Discovering it had begun as a PhD reduced my expectations even further. In fact it is a … Read more
[…] and not by military and industrial power (neither of which Britain has any more). Newsinger’s thesis about the psycho-political uses to which the SAS was put under Thatcher, is undoubtedly correct, it’s just that he has underplayed the extent to which it was built on an older theme in our society. That quibble aside, […]
[…] look. Since 1997 house prices have tripled and private debt topped a trillion pounds in July.(5) Thatcherism continued Brown-Balls have simply continued the economic policies of the Thatcher government. Like them they have no exchange rate policy: get inflation under control, they believe, and everything else will follow. Indeed, Brown has warned of the […]
[…] electoral reform, none of which came to fruition. etc. At the other end of the spectrum Blair was anxious to be seen to take advice from Margaret Thatcher in the early years of his premiership. No such involvement was offered to previous senior Labour Party figures. The point is tellingly made that Blair is […]
[…] Hindsight and Truth But hindsight is a wonderful thing. After the invasion of Poland, Suez, the intervention of the IMF in the 1970s, the arrival of Maggie Thatcher, the Falklands War, the Iraq War, there are always those who see an inevitability that may never have been there in the first place. So it […]
[…] year (the Gibraltar shootings followed by killings at two funerals, ‘Death on the Rock’, Lisburn, Ballygawley and other bombs) had led, only a month previously, to Mrs Thatcher appealing to the British media to withhold publicity from IRA sympathisers. A spokesman for the IBA said, ‘The fact that After Dark is a live programme […]
