Thatcher’s Secret War: Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90

Description

This book, which begins with what many believe to be a political killing, is an alternative history of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. It looks at the secret campaign that Mrs Thatcher and her government waged before and after the Falklands War against 'subversives': anti-nuclear, new age and ecology campaigners; poll tax protesters; trade unionists at GCHQ and Wapping; Greenham Common women; Scottish nationalists; Ken Livingstone and the GLC; Derek Hatton and the city councillors of Liverpool; protesters and rioters in Brixton, Toxteth and Broadwater Farm; the far right; the Europe Union; and the Irish Republican Army. The central argument of the book is that there was not only a secret, internal ‘cold war’ fought throughout the 1980s (a war that had started in the 1970s), but that the consequences of those years have huge implications for the importance and role of the state as it evolved beyond into the twenty-first century outside parliamentary control. It is in these years that the state becomes a direct arm of government policy, but undeclared and unexamined in parliament, which led to it actually metamorphosing into the real and uncontrolled hidden political power in Britain; a power no longer decided by parliamentary process. Longlisted for the 'Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing' in 2016.