[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Stephen Marshall (Guerilla News Network, $13.22. Available from and ) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein, (London: Allen Lane, £25.00) ‘When new (forms of capitalism) emerged in the past …they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production of […]
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
[…] In the last issue I discussed the research by Giles Scott-Smith on the US State Department’s funding of a big freebie trip to the US for Mrs Thatcher in 1967, after the US embassy in London had spotted her as a possible future prime minister. Scott-Smith has more information on the Net. His ‘Searching […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
