[…] may turn out to be more interesting than it first appears. And let’s hope that McCoy, now living in Australia, is working on that material . RR Thatcher and Friends: The Anatomy of the Tory Party Ian Ross (London 1983) This might have been a very good book, but inclusion in Pluto’s ‘Arguments for […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] based on the Wills family tobacco fortune.(3) Grant-seekers must apply to a panel of high-powered Conservatives. Trustees listed for 1994 include Lord Carrington, Foreign Secretary under Mrs Thatcher and currently Chair of the Bilderberg organisation; Lord Gowrie, former arts minister and chair of the Arts Council; and John Kemp-Wallace, former chair of the Stock […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] under an NF regime would ‘find themselves in police cells so quickly they won’t know what hit them’ — closing off space to the Left just as Thatcher had drawn off support from the Right. (27) In this period there were allegations of collusion with the repressive apparatus of the state, centred around Martin […]
[…] Larkin thinks that the ‘collusion’ can be traced back to the ‘quiet coup’ run in the UK in the 1970s which led to the election of Mrs Thatcher. This chapter, the one which he has written from other published sources, without the kind of detailed research he conducted in Northern Ireland, is the weakest […]
[…] the spooks is money wasted. For much of the past twenty years none of this mattered much, for the intelligence services had one major fan – Mrs Thatcher. If no-one else took their reports seriously, she did, taking them home in the evenings; and under her the spooks’ budgets more than doubled. This isn’t […]
[…] didn’t get this to read yet another account of post-war British politics. I got it because in Lobster 39 (p. 21) I noted comments made by Mrs Thatcher to Robert Armstrong, MI5 liaison at the Home Office, in the mid 1970s on her ‘misgivings’ about the presence of Goodman in the Labour government. There […]
Kevin Coogan is the author of the study of the American fascist Francis Parker Yockey, Dreamer of the Day, reviewed in Lobster 39. He sent me an essay primarily about the American far-right group the Defenders of the American Constitution. The essay, while fascinating, is too big (about 20 pages) for these columns. However within […]
[…] that they were going to be pro-American, pro-NATO, pro-business, anti-union and media conscious. What we did not know then was just how completely they had internalised the Thatcher ethos, how hostile they were going to be the public sector and, as a result, what a complete bunch of schmucks they were going to be […]
