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Miles Taylor: Tony Benn, 25 September 2003

Free at Last: Diaries 1991-2001 
by Tony Benn.
Hutchinson, 738 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 09 179352 1
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Free Radical: New Century Essays 
by Tony Benn.
Continuum, 246 pp., £9.95, May 2003, 9780826465962
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... Bennite Left under New Labour underlines the point: stalwarts from the early 1980s – Tony Banks, Margaret Beckett, Jeremy Corbyn, Michael Meacher, Clare Short, Gavin Strang – have been given only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their ...

The Garden, the Park and the Meadow

David Runciman: After the Nation State, 6 June 2002

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History 
by Philip Bobbitt.
Allen Lane, 960 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7139 9616 1
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Reordering the World: The Long-Term Implications of 11 September 
edited by Mark Leonard.
Foreign Policy Centre, 124 pp., £9.95, March 2002, 1 903558 10 7
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... interests; it is a meeting of minds between types of statesman or stateswoman. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were self-consciously the last great leaders in the nation-state tradition, even though it was their regimes that broke the link between the state and welfare. George W. Bush and Tony Blair are ‘among the first market-state political ...

Honey, I forgot to duck

Jackson Lears: Reagan’s Make-Believe, 23 January 2025

Reagan: His Life and Legend 
by Max Boot.
Liveright, 836 pp., £35, October 2024, 978 0 87140 944 7
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... and must never be fought.’Reagan’s​ overall legacy is more problematic. Along with his pal Margaret Thatcher, he played a central role in implementing a corrosive neoliberal agenda that privatised much of the public sector and dismantled the welfare state. We have yet to recover from the damage done, as societies on both sides of the Atlantic grow ...

Diary

R.W. Johnson: Major Wins the Losership, 3 August 1995

... elective leadership has successively elevated meritocratic, professional politicians – Heath, Thatcher and Major – who could never have ‘emerged’ from the old pre-elective system, and such politicians, lacking anything else to fall back on, do not quit gracefully. This means that every leadership election is an attempted regicide; and so the Tory ...

Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0
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... too old to run for the job (55 was the limit).Journalists and other commentators have focused on Thatcher and Scargill when writing about Britain’s late coal age; Robert Gildea’s Backbone of the Nation is more interested in the experience of the miners: working underground; feeding and clothing a household; and, most of all, organising the dispute and ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
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In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
by Percy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
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Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited by Warren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
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The Hong Kong Advantage 
by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
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... end of an empire was obviated by Deng Xiaoping, who unveiled his radical sounding solution to Margaret Thatcher, on her visit to Beijing in September 1982: ‘one country, two systems, for at least fifty years.’ Mrs Thatcher later called it ‘an ingenious idea’. Deng Xiaoping claimed it as an improbable mix of ...

Binarisms

John Sutherland, 18 November 1993

Complicity 
by Iain Banks.
Little, Brown, 313 pp., £15.99, September 1993, 0 316 90688 3
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Against a Dark Background 
by Iain M. Banks.
Orbit, 496 pp., £8.99, January 1994, 1 85723 185 6
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... TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video nasty. Young male novelists routinely seek to give maximum offence. Martin Amis did so in 1975 by calling a novel Dead Babies. In The Wasp Factory Banks recounted acts of child-on-child sadism ...

Short Cuts

David Runciman: Tony and Jeremy, 20 April 2017

... Kinnock for the party leadership, despite the opposition of some members of the group, including Margaret Beckett and Chris Mullin. Benn describes himself as ‘peaceful in my own mind’ about this outcome because it had been a collective decision, not an act of personal vanity. Corbyn’s chairmanship of the group helped salve his conscience. Benn was less ...

Big G and Little G

Paul Laity, 6 February 1997

The British Electricity Experiment 
edited by John Surrey.
Earthscan, 329 pp., £40, July 1996, 1 85383 370 3
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... was introduced after the flotation of telephones, gas and water because it was, according to Thatcher, ‘the most technically and politically difficult privatisation’. The Government’s audacity in embarking on the electricity sell-off should not be underemphasised: this kind of project had not been tried in any other major industrialised ...
Sleaze: Politicians, Private Interests and Public Reaction 
edited by F.F. Ridley and Alan Doig.
Oxford, 222 pp., £10.99, April 1996, 0 19 922273 8
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Changing Trains: The Autobiography of Steven Norris 
Hutchinson, 273 pp., £16.99, October 1996, 0 09 180212 1Show More
The Quango Debate 
edited by F.F. Ridley and David Wilson.
Oxford, 188 pp., £10.99, September 1995, 9780199222384
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... a breach of Parliamentary privilege. Hamilton untied that knot at once. Supported by Lady Thatcher, Lord Archer and the entire Parliamentary Tory Party, he conspired to force through Parliament an amendment to the Defamation Act which allows MPs to waive their privilege in order to sue for libel. Backed by his new law, Hamilton charged back into court ...

Shock Cities

Susan Pedersen: The Fate of Social Democracy, 2 January 2020

Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town 
by Guy Ortolano.
Cambridge, 301 pp., £29.99, June 2019, 978 1 108 48266 0
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Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Postwar England 
by Jon Lawrence.
Oxford, 327 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 0 19 877953 7
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... the postwar order offer some clues. (I should say that I know both the authors.) Guy Ortolano’s Thatcher’s Progress tracks the passage ‘from social democracy to market liberalism’ through the history of Milton Keynes, the last and largest of Britain’s postwar ‘new towns’. Ortolano calls the new towns the ‘spatial dimension’ of the postwar ...

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

... me with the machinery of my investigation and informed me of the name of my natural mother – Margaret Walsh – which my adoptive mother had only ever hazarded or garbled. But after a few days in the Family Records Centre in London, it was clear that there’d be work to do: the number of Margaret Walshes qualifying as ...

Mr Straight and Mr Good

Paul Foot: Gordon Brown, 19 February 1998

Gordon Brown: The Biography 
by Paul Routledge.
Simon and Schuster, 358 pp., £17.99, February 1998, 0 684 81954 6
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... Labour offered in the past,’ he writes ‘was not appropriate for 1992 and beyond ... The Thatcher years had made people more self-reliant and that “dimension” must be accommodated in Labour’s approach.’ As usual, there is no attempt to prove this. Who precisely was made ‘more self-reliant’ during the ‘...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Back to School, 30 April 2009

... devices. The classroom freedom we had in the most difficult state schools was exactly what both Thatcher and New Labour set out to eradicate with quantification. There were no league tables of schools, or SATs to see how teachers and pupils were doing, just CSEs (as they were then), for which in my school expectations were tragically low. There was a small ...

Short Cuts

James Meek: Thames Water, 9 May 2024

... new bathroom – a deep overhaul of their broken-down old water supply and sewer system – it was Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government that made the call. They couldn’t have got it more wrong. Eight out of ten people opposed water privatisation, but Thatcher privatised it anyway. In the ...

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