'Scary but enlightening' - Christopher Stone
Margaret Thatcher remains one of the United Kingdom's most polarising prime ministers. This provocative investigation sheds light on the secret, internal 'cold war' that she waged against 'the enemy within'; everyone she could not see eye to eye with. It was a campaign fuelled by paranoia on both the left and right of the political spectrum and fought with corruption, black propaganda, dirty tricks and even murder.
Expertly juxtaposing notable events with today's political arena, this new and updated edition of Thatcher's Secret War surmises that although Thatcher's ideals seem to have vanished, one remains: the power and importance of the extra parliamentary state and its surveillance methods and hidden powers in a new age of terrorism.
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; protestors 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 'col 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.