One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. … Read more
[…] Special Branch, SAS and MI5. By the 1990s the British government was seeking an accommodation with Sinn Fein and counter-terror was passing out of favour. Whereas under Thatcher, the SAS (‘her boys’) had what amounted to a license to kill PIRA volunteers, under John Major the license was revoked. After 1990 the Chief Constable […]
[…] with, she tells us, through her ‘employment law work’. This is a complete travesty. The strike was deliberately provoked by Murdoch, with the full support of the Thatcher government, in order to deny the workers their redundancy payments. She must have known this at the time through, as she puts it, her ‘employment law […]
[…] of Sinn Fein/IRA politicians, gunmen, bombers, supporters and sympathisers by the UDA, aided and abetted by British Military Intelligence, was known about by MI5, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and a few senior government ministers and civil servants (p. 160). There is no ‘smoking gun’ in the form of a document authorising British co-operation with […]
[…] it is that the technological nation of the 1950s and 60s he describes had so little influence that it was unable to prevent both the Heath and Thatcher governments from deregulating the City of London — and wrecking the manufacturing economy. Or, more interestingly perhaps, how it was that the Tories persuaded the manufacturing […]
[…] US to sign anti-terror co-operation deal’, Madrid, 20 September. 8 ‘Spain “secretly backed coup by sending warships”‘, The Times, 27 August, 2004 9 ‘US was told of Thatcher “coup plot”‘, The Sunday Times 29 August 2004, where there is reference to a proposed ‘carbon copy’ of the arrest of General Pinochet. However, this report […]
[…] research in marketing), The Mayfair Set (about a section of the British right in London in the 1970s considered as a microcosm of and forerunner to the Thatcher era) and, most recently, The Trap. I didn’t think much of The Trap’s thesis and thought its version of the concept of freedom contrived and philosophically […]
[…] of trying to suppress chapter in OECD report on the economy which states that unemployment causes poverty. We kid you not! Guardian 16 June Material on Mrs Thatcher and her links with the Oman business and Trafalgar House removed from World in Action programme by IBA. This is the result of recent changes in […]
[…] that Garnett’s book, another rattling good read, traces the story from the mid-1970s to now, while Mr Turner begins in 1970 and calls a halt when Mrs Thatcher takes office in May 1979. Mr Garnett is unafraid to interpose his opinions into his own narrative, as when he declares that private medicine and education […]
[…] to those tracking them over the years: ‘modernism’ must be reclaimed from the reactionary forces of the anti-technology left that was emerging from the period of the Thatcher Junta. On the streets of Britain the left was reforming. From the Battle of the Beanfield in 1983 to Twyford Down, the heroic fight against the […]
