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It’s already happened

James Meek: The NHS Goes Private, 22 September 2011

... Player argue that, having failed to persuade the public and the medical establishment under Margaret Thatcher that the NHS should be turned into a European-style national insurance programme, the advocates of a competitive health market gave up trying to convince the big audience and focused on infiltrating Whitehall’s policymaking centres and ...

The End of British Farming

Andrew O’Hagan: British farming, 22 March 2001

... in. Staring into the fire, he waggled his stocking-soled feet, and blew out his lips. ‘I think Margaret Thatcher saw those guaranteed prices farmers were getting and just hated it,’ he said, ‘and now, though it kills me, we may have to face something: there are too many sheep in the economy. Farmers go down to the market every other week and sell ...
... affecting the climate or impoverishing us. But as a result of actions taken a generation ago by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives – a party whose nationalist programme promised independence from Europe – the decisions aren’t Britain’s alone. Thatcher promised less state involvement in industry but the ...

Seeing yourself dead

Nicolas Tredell, 21 February 1991

Love in a Life 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 62 pp., £11.99, March 1991, 0 571 16101 4
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Three Variations on the Theme of Harm: Selected Poetry and Prose 
by Douglas Oliver.
Paladin, 255 pp., £6.99, November 1990, 0 586 08962 4
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Spoils of War 
by John Eppel.
Carrefour Press, 48 pp., August 1989, 0 620 13315 5
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Music for Brass 
by Brian Waltham.
Peterloo, 64 pp., £5.95, November 1990, 1 871471 20 6
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Lapidary 
by Rosamund Stanhope.
Peterloo, 64 pp., £5.95, November 1990, 1 871471 19 2
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... on the rhythmic and allegorical resources of Medieval poetry to present a poetic critique of the Thatcher era, of a country ‘where Margaret / ruled without Rosine, true mercy’. It works poetically because it mobilises rhythm and metaphor to conjure up those collective fantasies and desire whose importance in our ...

Costa del Pym

Nicholas Spice, 4 July 1985

Crampton Hodnet 
by Barbara Pym.
Macmillan, 216 pp., £8.95, June 1985, 0 333 39129 2
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Foreign Land 
by Jonathan Raban.
Harvill, 352 pp., £9.50, June 1985, 0 00 222918 8
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Black Marina 
by Emma Tennant.
Faber, 157 pp., £8.95, June 1985, 9780571134670
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... pastime, an excuse for gossip and the indulgence of forbidden fantasies. No one, not even Margaret Cleveland, his wife, the only character whose interest in her husband’s behaviour is more than merely idle (though not much more), ever imagines that Francis has any freedom actually to do anything about his passion. As Miss Maude Doggett, his ...

Violence

Edmund Leach, 23 October 1986

The Anthropology of Violence 
edited by David Riches.
Blackwell, 232 pp., £25, September 1986, 0 631 14788 8
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Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process 
by Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning.
Blackwell, 313 pp., £19.50, August 1986, 0 631 14654 7
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Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain 
by John Hargreaves.
Polity, 258 pp., £25, September 1986, 0 7456 0153 7
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At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression and the State 
by Eli Sagan.
Faber, 420 pp., £17.50, April 1986, 0 571 13822 5
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... that there is nothing new about rowdy football, but with the media getting support from Mrs Thatcher on the need to preserve law and order, the publishers (Blackwell’s in both cases) must feel that they are onto a good thing. The individual essays in the Elias/Dunning volume were designed for widely different audiences, but on their central theme of ...

Nationalising English

Patrick Parrinder, 28 January 1993

The Great Betrayal: Memoirs of a Life in Education 
by Brian Cox.
Chapmans, 386 pp., £17.99, September 1992, 1 85592 605 9
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... to be undertaken in the first place. The NCC’s chairman, David Pascall, is a former member of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. The former head of the Policy Unit, Lord Griffiths, now chairs the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) which will soon be merged with NCC. It just so happens that Lord Griffiths also chairs the ...

Superman Falls to Earth

Ferdinand Mount: Boris Johnson’s First Year, 2 July 2020

... a sliver of that loss from council tax, which the Tory government also decided to cap.*Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s capping of the domestic rates in 1984 (something I had a small but culpable hand in at the Number Ten Policy Unit) and the abolition of the Metropolitan Counties and the Greater London Council in 1986, Tory governments have shown a ...

I only want to keep my hand in

Owen Bennett-Jones: Gerry Adams, 16 November 2017

Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life 
by Malachi O’Doherty.
Faber, 356 pp., £14.99, September 2017, 978 0 571 31595 6
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... for talks at a house in Cheyne Walk with Willie Whitelaw, the then home secretary. In 1988 Mrs Thatcher banned his voice from being broadcast but a decade later Tony Blair negotiated with him as a key participant in the peace process. Today he has easy access to the top British leadership. But Adams has not been entirely rehabilitated. In 2013 the police ...

Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

G. Cabrera Infante, 4 June 1981

... have been better if he didn’t. One bit of learned advice to the British reader: if you hear Margaret Thatcher or her successor Big Benn speaking in the Commons on the state of the box-office in the West End, you’d better brace yourself because an English version of Dr Goebbels is surely limping his way down Whitehall – to take care of the ...

You haven’t got your sister pregnant, have you?

Jacqueline Rose and Sam Frears: No Secrets in Albert Square, 23 June 2022

... neglect but from a major head injury: someone has assaulted him.It is 1985, two years after Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory, the beginning of the end of the welfare state in which Lou, like so many in the postwar country, had invested her dreams. Perhaps, EastEnders suggests, this might be the real reason things are going ...

Feasting on Power

John Upton: David Blunkett’s Criminal Justice Bill, 10 July 2003

... the power of the state. So how could a centre-left party dream up a piece of legislation that the Thatcher Administration would have considered too extreme? The meandering path through the intellectual foothills of communitarianism taken by Blunkett in his book Politics and Progress* helps to explain the thinking behind the Bill. Even in this paean to ...

From the Motorcoach

Stefan Collini: J.B. Priestley, 19 November 2009

English Journey 
by J.B. Priestley.
Great Northern Books, 351 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 1 905080 47 2
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... from a number of prefatory pages by current admirers of Priestley such as Beryl Bainbridge and Margaret Drabble, the chief novelty of this edition is that it has been printed in large coffee-table format to accommodate the numerous photographs that have been interspersed through the text. The addition of these photos, a curious mixture of unidentified ...

Lost Mother

Michael Dobson, 17 February 2000

In My End Is My Beginning: A Life of Mary Queen of Scots 
by James Mackay.
Mainstream, 320 pp., £20, March 1999, 1 84018 058 7
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Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation 
by Jayne Elizabeth Lewis.
Routledge, 259 pp., £14.99, October 1998, 0 415 11481 0
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Ancestry and Narrative in 19th-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy 
by Sophie Gilmartin.
Cambridge, 281 pp., £37.50, February 1999, 0 521 56094 2
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... poster for Madame Tussaud’s which, above a nightmarishly grinning close-up of the waxwork Mrs Thatcher flanked by an old and unamused Queen Victoria and an equally unsmiling Elizabeth I, bore the slogan: ‘Baker Street Madam Offers Domination, Correction and Discipline.’ According to the logic of this advertisement, the commercial basis of the waxworks ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Madness: The Movie, 9 February 1995

... pigeon feather caught on his nose) as the coaches wheel about the yard and Janine Duvitski as Margaret Nicholson rather shyly tries to assassinate the King. Afterwards I wander down the immaculately preserved High Street. Here is Coutts Bank and some smart tailor’s, established in the 18th century, there’s a grand photographer’s established around ...

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