[…] 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 […]
[…] period is entirely inadequate – evasive essentially – there is this little snippet on p. 610. Robert Armstrong, after guidance from the Prime Minister (Callaghan), saw Mrs Thatcher at Scotney Castle and then in Chelsea on 9 and 11 August 1977. On these occasions, she expressed ‘misgivings’ about Harold Wilson’s ‘reliability’ although her evidence […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] capital emerging from the supply of consumer wants (including guns, sex, labour, drugs, untaxed goods and unregulated financial services), the lifting of capital controls by the Reagan- Thatcher generation also meant the globalisation of criminality in all its forms. What happened between the mid-1990s (when the great debate on post-Soviet security took place) and […]
[…] an informal action committee, without reporting to the Council.’ (3) Parallel to the Freedom Association, with Stephen Hastings MP, Crozier formed the Shield Committee to brief Mrs Thatcher while Leader of the Opposition, on the ‘subversive menace’. He claims Mrs Thatcher ‘was listening …. because was telling her things nobody had yet mentioned to […]
