Short Cuts

Tom White: A Bridge across the Humber, 4 December 2025

... bridge eventually opened in 1981, it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world. Margaret Thatcher had been in office for two years. Rather than an important component in a long-term regional plan, it was now clear that the bridge was the only component in that plan. For much of the 1980s, it was seen by critics as a white elephant. It ...

Burnham’s Political Economy

William Davies, 9 July 2026

... has been on the wrong path for forty years,’ a reference to the neoliberal model established by Margaret Thatcher. His tendency to make fiscal pledges on the hoof depending on what his audience wants to hear – whether farmers wanting inheritance tax cuts, women pensioners wanting compensation for the raising of their retirement age (a commitment he ...

Whig Dreams

Margaret Anne Doody, 27 February 1992

A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain 
by Daniel Defoe, edited by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens.
Yale, 423 pp., £19.95, July 1991, 0 300 04980 3
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James Thomson: A Life 
by James Sambrook.
Oxford, 332 pp., £40, October 1991, 0 19 811788 4
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... Whigs. It is of course fitting that his Tour should come into prominence again now, for Margaret Thatcher has taught us to ‘think Whig’, and the present so-called Tory Party is really a throwback Whig (not Liberal) party, with a fringe of puzzled Tories. However, this presentation of Defoe combs away much of the ...

Questionably Virtuous

Stuart Middleton: Harold Wilson, 8 September 2016

Harold Wilson: The Unprincipled Prime Minister? Reappraising Harold Wilson 
edited by Andrew Crines and Kevin Hickson.
Biteback, 319 pp., £20, March 2016, 978 1 78590 031 0
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... first through the maverick figure of Keith Joseph and then the apparently more mainstream one of Margaret Thatcher. Their antagonism towards ‘the new Establishment’ exploited the suggestion, which Wilson’s rhetoric promoted, that the centre of political power in Britain had fundamentally shifted and implied that it was being exercised in the ...

Lady Thatcher’s Bastards

Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992

Class War: A Decade of Disorder 
edited by Ian Bone, Alan Pullen and Tim Scargill.
Verso, 113 pp., £7.95, November 1991, 0 86091 558 1
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... riot, at about the time when the class whose anguish they unilaterally exploited was busy voting Margaret Thatcher, madonna of bother, into everlasting power. In brisk response to market forces, the movement began to publish and distribute a paper under the same Class War label. These propaganda sheets, as is the way of the world, were then collected in ...

Lying abroad

Fred Halliday, 21 July 1994

Diplomacy 
by Henry Kissinger.
Simon and Schuster, 912 pp., £25, May 1994, 9780671659912
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True Brits: Inside the Foreign Office 
by Ruth Dudley Edwards.
BBC, 256 pp., £16.99, April 1994, 0 563 36955 8
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Mandarin: The Diaries of Nicholas Henderson 
by Nicholas Henderson.
Weidenfeld, 517 pp., £20, May 1994, 0 297 81433 8
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... that it helps governments to foresee and manage change – appears especially thin. In the Thatcher years there was a semblance of diplomatic success amid the triumphalism: in retrospect, it is evident how many events were incompetently managed. Two wars, over the Falklands and Kuwait, could have been prevented if those responsible for judging the ...

My Millbank

Seumas Milne, 18 April 1996

The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? 
by Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle.
Faber, 274 pp., £7.99, February 1996, 0 571 17818 9
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... Their explicit starting point is Thatcherism, their strategy to ‘move forward from where Margaret Thatcher left off’. Their culprits are the stock-in-trade of the New Right’s spear-carriers of the Seventies and Eighties: the ‘left-wing chattering classes’, ‘teacher unions’, ‘educational egalitarians’, ‘trade-union restrictive ...

Aldermanic Depression

Andrew Saint: London is good for you, 4 February 1999

London: A History 
by Francis Sheppard.
Oxford, 442 pp., £25, November 1998, 0 19 822922 4
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London: More by Fortune than Design 
by Michael Hebbert.
Wiley, 50 pp., £17.99, April 1998, 0 471 97399 8
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... insurrection in London and all is lost,’ epitomised the sage Lord Liverpool. We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain ...

The Killing of Blair Peach

David Renton, 22 May 2014

... on 23 April 1979, midway through the general election campaign that would end with the victory of Margaret Thatcher. The report contained footage of police officers arresting middle-aged men in turbans, women sitting down in the road and demonstrators with their heads swaddled in bandages. The final images showed around twenty NF supporters, all ...

Diary

Richard Gott: Víctor Jara’s Chile, 17 September 1998

... journalists present in Santiago that month, it was a less than glorious moment to be British. Only Margaret Anstee, a British UN representative in the city, emerged with credit – she unilaterally extended diplomatic immunity to those taken into the homes of UN personnel. The Estadio Chile was still forbidden territory when I arrived in Santiago, but I went ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... years is reaching the point of crisis. The party in power, whose late 20th-century figurehead, Margaret Thatcher, did so much to create the problem, is responding by separating off the economically least powerful and squeezing them into the smallest, meanest, most insecure possible living space. In effect, if not in explicit intention, it is a ...

An Address to the Nation

Clive James, 17 December 1981

... welfare cheque spells doom For any spark of spiritual agility. She sounds, in other words, like Margaret Thatcher – Though words are just where Thatcher couldn’t match her. It’s easy for the Yanks to preach self-help: There’s so much protein they can help themselves. In Britain we’d be feeding children kelp ...

All Together Now

John Lloyd: The British Trade Union, 19 October 2000

British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics. Vol. I: The Postwar Compromise, 1945-64 
edited by John McIlroy and Nina Fishman et al.
Ashgate, 335 pp., £35, January 2000, 0 7546 0018 1
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British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics. Vol. II: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964-79 
edited by John McIlroy and Nina Fishman et al.
Ashgate, 389 pp., £35, January 2000, 0 7546 0018 1
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The TUC: From the General Strike to New Unionism 
by Robert Taylor.
Palgrave, 299 pp., £45, September 2000, 0 333 93066 5
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... to departmental officials and ministers more regularly and co-operatively than at any time in the Thatcher-Major period. But they do so on an issue by issue basis. They have almost no representative presence in the British state. There is no longer a National Economic Development Council – flaccid beast though it was – on which they could have equal ...

A Babylonian Touch

Susan Pedersen: Weimar in Britain, 6 November 2008

‘We Danced All Night’: A Social History of Britain between the Wars 
by Martin Pugh.
Bodley Head, 495 pp., £20, July 2008, 978 0 224 07698 2
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... of it in the interwar period (as we can indeed in the 1880s or the 1760s), it was forged more by Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch than it was by Lloyd George and Sir John Reith. In this world – our world – ‘class’ has become a dirty word, one not even Labour politicians can speak without being labelled sectarians or romantics. So let me be ...

Her Guns

Jeremy Harding, 8 March 1990

The View from the Ground 
by Martha Gellhorn.
Granta, 459 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 14 014200 2
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Towards Asmara 
by Thomas Keneally.
Hodder, 320 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 340 41517 7
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... capitalist state; from a bestiary of bad or indifferent leaders – Franco, Hitler, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher – comes the bully. Finally there is the figure of technology, the only abstract on display, which has haunted Gellhorn ever since she saw the effects of German armaments in Spain and which remains for her an instrument used by the ...